Customer Experience – Page 10 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

October 21, 2022

Why it’s good to have people on trains

My Great Western Railway train to Penzance was delayed by half an hour. Someone had been taken ill on a train in front of us. The tannoy kept us informed, and let us know that we would be able to claim compensation via the train operator’s website.

So far, so standard.

But here’s the difference a real-life, flesh and blood human made:

Knowing that some of the passengers would have missed their connection to Newquay, the train manager asked them to identify themselves as he walked through the train, so he could arrange alternative transport. Having worked out what their actual needs were, a bus was arranged to pick most of them up from St Austell, while for one person, a taxi was booked to get them to Newquay airport in time to make their plane. All at no extra cost.

Because the train manager saw their job as getting people to their desired destination as near on time as possible, not merely to carry them from A to B.

How very different from ‘rebel’ brand Virgin, who will happily chuck passengers off a train well short of their destination, to avoid the costs of further delays down the line, leaving them to scramble onwards as best they can.

I’ve supported the rail strikes since the beginning. I support them even more enthusistically now. Even though my Penzance trip was a day later than booked because of them.

These people aren’t just fighting for their jobs, they’re fighting for the kind of service I for one want to receive. A human one.

September 26, 2022

The grandmother of invention

I finished this book over the weekend. I thoroughly recommend it.

If I had to sum it up: “Whatever your problem, there’s a very good chance it’s been solved before, several times, both by other people and in nature. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but research is the grandmother.”

As usual, it’s given me more threads to follow – for example, a Russian called Genrcih Altshuller codified a Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) back in the 1940s. But I bet you’ve never heard of him.

And I learned that the most interesting problems are contradictions, such as “How do I ensure a consistent Customer Experience without losing the opportunity to delight?”; and that really inventive solutions resolve them.

September 22, 2022

Magical thinking

This book, ‘Alchemy’ was recommended to me by the talented Andrea Horgan, (along with ‘Evolutionary Ideas‘) so of course I had to interrupt my current reading for it.

It’s a useful and entertaining read, and so far I’d sum up the findings thus:

Businesses that put their clients first do well.
Businesses that think about their clients as human beings rather than economical or mathematical abstractions, and then put them first, do exceptionally well.

I’d add:

Businesses that build that thinking into everything they do, do exceptionally well for a very long time. Even after the founder is long gone.

It’s not magic, it’s simply focusing on the human. But not many people do that.

September 14, 2022

Ordinary

Over recent months we’ve seen some extraordinary behaviour from big institutions. Employers knowingly break the law. Airlines and holiday companies sell flights they know they can’t deliver. Energy retailers bill small business customers amounts they know are impossible to pay. Policemen murder women. Or shoot first and ask questions later. A holiday park is prepared to evict its guests to observe a bank holiday. Politicians no longer pretend to tell the truth or even talk sense. Journalists publish easily verifiable lies to create false outrage.

Thankfully, ordinary people are not like this. Ordinary people rush to help when someone collapses in the street, or asks for help on Twitter. Ordinary people go out of their way to keep a promise they’ve made. Ordinary business owners agonise over having to lose people. Ordinary business owners pay their suppliers on time and almost always over-deliver for their customers.

That’s because ordinary people operate in what you could call the ‘natural economy’. We know the world doesn’t run on money, but on the promises we make to each other. We know that even money is really just a promise.

Let’s celebrate and cherish the ordinary. That’s where a better future lies.

September 6, 2022

An opportunity

Yesterday brought home to me just how ageist our banks have become.

My husband helps to run a small non-profit organisation. Just over a year ago, they were told their account wasn’t active enough and would be closed.

13 months later they are still trying to open a replacement.

Doing anything face-to-face is out of the question – the banks simply won’t countenance that. Everything has to be done as a combination of phone calls with a bank contact and online.

First of all, the bank contacts are obviously overloaded. It took months to speak to anyone, and months for them to get back with a decision.

But the online part is the pits.

Because the non-profit does things properly, several signatories are involved. And as with many small, local non-profits, all of them are over 60, some well over 60 – because that’s how they have the time to devote to these causes.

They don’t all have mobile phones, and if they do, they don’t carry them around all the time. So a simple thing like 2-factor identification becomes a real difficulty.

Then, when they get things wrong, the error messages coming back are unhelpful, for example being told you have entered the wrong email address via an an email sent to that address (!!). So they get worried about getting things wrong, and do what seems sensible. They write things down, take things slowly.

But their fingers aren’t as fast as they used to be, so they get logged out of screens before they’ve had time to type things in.

And so they get frustrated, and have to spend more time getting together to try and sort things out.

These are intelligent, kind, generous people who are just trying to help their community. All they are looking for is somewhere safe to keep the money people have trusted them with; somewhere that will give them an audit trail for the few transactions they need to carry out.

Tough. Because banks have clearly decided that people don’t matter. And what could have taken a day to set up in-branch has taken 13 months – so far.

There’s a massive opportunity here for someone prepared to offer a no-frills, human service. Perhaps not for long, since the baby-boomer bump will be over in a decade or so, but for long enough to do decent business.

I wonder if anyone will take it.

August 4, 2022

How much value you create

One of my favourite stories from business school was this one:

A sheet steel manufacturer was looking to sell their steel at a premium.

They looked carefully at who their customers were, and the process they went through to get their job done.

Their main customers were white goods manufacturers. Now, steel doesn’t come out of the mill white, so these customers needed a paint shop where they sprayed the shaped steel casings of their products white. There’s a reason they’re called ‘white goods’. Offering other colours would mean adding another paint shop or creating an expensive change-over process for your single paint shop.

The steel manufacturer worked out that by adding a small cost to their own production process, they could save their customers a large cost and enable them to offer their goods at a premium. It’s easier to paint sheet steel when it’s flat, at the end of your production process. So that’s what the steel manufacturer did.

“Buy steel from us and you can have any colour you like. And de-commoditise your products to boot”.

You don’t have to ask your clients intrusive questions about their finances to measure – or at least estimate – the value you create for them. You just have to understand something about how their business works.

Some things to think about:

If you save them money, how much? What does that add up to over time?
If you save them time, how much? What was that time costing them before you? What does it cost them now?
If you save them effort, how much? What was that costing them before you? What does it cost them now?
If you enable them to get more from the same level of resources, how much? How much does that add up to over time?
Does any of this enable them to sell more, or to sell at a higher price? How much more? How much higher? That’s part of the value you add too.

Measuring how much value you create for clients isn’t easy. It is possible.

If you put your mind to understanding your clients first.

August 3, 2022

How people feel about how you do it

Finding out how people feel about how you do what you do is a bit harder to do than working out costs, because you can’t automate clients.

But if you stick to the idea of making it part of the process, you increase your chances of getting good feedback when you need it.

Remember those events you’re interested in? When a prospect makes an enquiry; when a prospect becomes a client; when you welcome a client onboard, when the particular promise you made to this client has been kept.

You probably already send an email in response to those events, possibly even several emails along the way. Why not include a simple satisfaction survey as appropriate?

The important thing here is to keep it really simple – no typing required, just clicks, and no taking the client off to some tedious questionnaire.

Keep the format to a prompt on a dimension that matters to them followed by a simple ‘It’s all good’/’It’s not good’, plus an option to explain if moved to do so. If people have strong feelings about how you do what you do, they will want to share them. It’s good customer care to enable that. Even better, an option to have someone call them to find out more. Keep the number of prompts down to 2 or 3 if you can.

One more thing. ‘People’ doesn’t have to just mean clients. Your team are people, your suppliers are people, your neighbours are people. Some of your shareholders are people. Finding out how they feel about how you do what you do might prompt some really interesting improvements.

A little bit of Discipline makes Caring possible.

July 28, 2022

A thought…

What is it exactly that the people you serve are trying to achieve? What’s the job they are trying to get done? (Hint: it’s not ‘buy your product or service’).

How do they go about getting that job done? What’s the process they follow to achieve it? What difficulties do they encounter in that process? How can you remove those difficulties for them? How can you make the process simpler/easier/cheaper/safer/more effective?

What if you organised your business around these things, instead of around your own job to be done? (Hint: that’s probably ‘sell my products/services’)

Just a thought.

July 25, 2022

That Question

What question do you get asked over and over again about your product or service?

What could you do to save people having to ask it?

What could your people do with the time they spend answering it?

July 14, 2022

‘Sorry’ is never enough

Corporations, being founded on a theory of Homo Economicus, naturally believe that when someone complains, they are merely seeking personal redress.

That’s true, but it isn’t the whole story.

Most often people want recognition of their own case AND to make sure it doesn’t happen to someone else. Sometimes people just want to make sure the mistake isn’t repeated.

That means “Sorry” is never enough, even when accompanied by compensation. What people really want to see is evidence that the mistake is being rectified. That systems and process are changed to ensure it can’t be repeated.

Otherwise, the only conclusion to be drawn is that it wasn’t a mistake, but policy. And compensation a bribe to keep your mouth shut.

Check out this Twitter thread from George Monbiot to see what I mean.

And this thread for the complaint that started it.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Category: Customer Experience