Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Customer Experience

Co-creation
February 17, 2022

Co-creation

I heard part of an interesting ‘teach-out’ yesterday.

In the old days, students were ‘members’ of the University – they were part of it, and contributed to its purpose, which was to create public good.   Now they are expected to be merely consumers of the ‘student experience’ it offers them.

The interesting thing is that despite the fees they pay, and the debt they incur to get to university, students don’t want to be passive consumers.  They want to participate.  They want to help co-create the public good.

The same is true of many other people.   Your clients and customers included.   Witness the enthusiasm with which people volunteer to help deliver the Olympics, support the vulnerable in a pandemic, carry out scientific research in their spare time, have their gardens dug up for archaeology.

How can you help them co-create the public good(s) you both desire?

Blame
February 15, 2022

Blame

What should you do when an important piece of data about a customer has been ‘lost’?

You tell them its their fault of course.

You send them a letter threatening them with loss of the service unless they rectify the mistake.

And since you’ve lost the same piece of data for thousands of customers, you make sure there are no extra people to answer the phone number you’ve given them.

I wonder how many customers they’ll lose as a result?

I know I’m cynical, but could ditching clients actually be the point?

It seems a pretty good way to go about it.

Universal vs One Size Fits All
February 4, 2022

Universal vs One Size Fits All

‘One size fits all’ is not the same as ‘universal’.

One size fits all actually fits nobody.  Universal adjusts to fit anyone.

One size fits all starts from the perspective of its maker.   Universal starts from the perspective of its end-user.

When you design your business as a system for making and keeping promises, universal is what you’re aiming for.

Almost by definition that means it has to be human.

Smarter than we thought
February 1, 2022

Smarter than we thought

It’s long been assumed that people find it harder to compare between high-value options than between low-value ones.  To put it concretely, we’re supposed to find it harder to compare a £350,000 house and a £355,000 house, than to compare a £90,000 house and a £95,000 one.

The idea is that although the size of the difference in value might be the same in both cases, as the proportion of the difference shrinks, comparison becomes harder.

It turns out this assumption is wrong.  In a recent study, researchers found that not only are we more accurate in our selections, when more value is at stake, we can also be fast.  And when we are given context – in other words, we know there’s a lot at stake – we consciously slow down to make our decision better.

This has some implications for pricing.   You can’t take a ‘nobody will notice the extra £xxx’ attitude.  People will expect to see higher value for a higher price, and they can tell the difference.

Perhaps more interesting are the implications for delegation.  We’re smarter than we thought.

You can trust your people with bigger decisions than you might have assumed.  Especially if you give them the context to make them in.

Early learning
January 31, 2022

Early learning

In the olden days, there was only one button you could use to request the bus driver to stop, and in the outskirts of Newcastle, where I grew up, only one person could press it – the bus conductor.

No exceptions.

There were other rules too.   There was a special school bus, which only allowed children on board.   And where there was a school bus, children weren’t allowed on the normal (rush-hour) buses.

No exceptions.

Until my first day at primary school.

My mum wanted to take me on my first day.   It was a fair way to go, so she thought we’d get the bus.

But I wasn’t allowed on the ordinary bus.  She wasn’t allowed on the school bus.

No exceptions.

My mum argued:

“It’s her first day, I want to take her myself.“

No exceptions.

“It’s just for the first day”

No exceptions.

“Surely you’ve had this happen before?”

No exceptions

It wasn’t just stubbornness on her part.  She realised that it wasn’t just her, it was every mum that missed out.*

She staged a 1-mum sit in until she got her way.

In theory, having separate buses during rush-hour was a great idea.   But the people who designed it hadn’t thought of the human aspect – that most mums would want to accompany their child to their first day at school.  If they had thought of it, it could have been easily accommodated, with an extra bus on the first day of a new school year, and exceptions allowed in between.

Instead they made the whole experience stressful for everyone.

I don’t know if my mum changed anything permanently, but at least she tried.

We were late for school, but I learned something useful that morning.

If you think something is wrong, don’t just put up with it, do something.

 

*I should mention that my mum had form. At her school, she’d successfully negotiated a permanent change of uniform for 16 – 18 year old girls – away from St Trinan-style gymslips to a more comfortable and becoming blouse and skirt ensemble.

Take back control
January 14, 2022

Take back control

One of the things that puts business owners off growing, is the fear of losing control.   They’ve handcrafted a customer experience that works well.  They have built up a clientele that loves what they do and the way that they do it.  They are concerned about diluting that.

The answer, as every composer knows, is to take the music that is in your head, and write it down, so that others can play it.  Put the control into a score, not a person.

That way, your customer experience lives on through others, not in spite of them.

At first, you will have to conduct this music yourself.  But after a while, your people won’t even need that.  With a good score, they can conduct themselves.

And that removes the real limit to growth – you.

The stories we tell others
January 12, 2022

The stories we tell others

If you visit a National Trust property, every person you meet is likely to be a volunteer.   An individual providing this service in their spare time, for nothing.  Yet the experience is remarkably similar across hundreds of houses and thousands of volunteers.

How do they achieve this?  There are no scripts.  Nothing is prescribed, apart from some simple Covid-19 distancing notices.  Every volunteer performance is unique.

What every National Trust building does have is a story.  The story of the building and the people associated with it – usually the famous one who commissioned it, built it or lived in it.

Every volunteer (whether they are a room guide, a shop assistant or a gardener) is expected to know this story, to research around it and to tell it.  But they can do all of that in their own way, including details and providing context as they see fit, tailored to the visitors in front of them, in their own personal style.

The most basic ‘customer experience score’ is the story everyone can tell.  For a business it’s the story of how you make and keep your promise to the client.

What’s your story?

Can everyone in your business tell it?

How do you help new people learn it?

What is innovation for?
January 11, 2022

What is innovation for?

I’ve been through a lot of hoovers in my life, from a massive ‘wet and dry’ suitable for builders through Dyson and any number of supposedly ‘handy’ machines.  Many of which have not lasted long.

The GTech AirRam I inherited from my mum is the only one that’s made hoovering almost enjoyable, and yesterday, it looked like it was about to turn into another relic.

Fortunately, I found on the support site that I can replace virtually every part individually.

That means that unlike every other hoover I’ve owned, I can keep most of this one going indefinitely.

For a long time, hoover innovation was simply about creating new demand – ‘new’ models that superseded the old, so you had to buy all over again if you wanted the status of having the latest.

The trouble with that was that with a proliferation of models, a consumer was just as likely to buy someone else’s new model as yours.

Now it seems that innovation is about creating brand loyalty by making it easier to repair the existing.   Allowing the consumer to preserve their original investment (in my case emotional rather than financial), and send less material to landfill.

What all this tells me is that the purpose of innovation is to change behaviour.

We’re going to need a lot of that to cope with what’s coming.

Get your thinking hats on.

Bullshit Jobs
December 16, 2021

Bullshit Jobs

This week, I’ve mostly been re-reading this book by David Graeber, published what seems like a lifetime ago in 2018.

In 2015, YouGov published a poll, showing that when asked whether their job “makes a meaningful contribution to the world?” 37% of respondents said ‘no’, and 13% of people said they didn’t know.  That’s a terrible waste of human potential.

Until recently many of those 37% or 13% will have been furloughed, while many of the other 50% weren’t – their jobs (care workers, nurses, shop workers, bus-drivers etc) were simply too ‘key’ to allow that, or they were self-employed.

I wonder whether furlough gave some of the 37% time to re-think what they wanted from work?   Is that what’s behind ‘The Great Resignation”?

What seems to be fairly clear from my re-reading of this book, is where most of those ‘bullshit jobs’ are.   They’re in corporates, or privatised government agencies.

Where they aren’t is in small businesses.

One more reason why I believe bigger small businesses are the future.

Not worth a candle
December 14, 2021

Not worth a candle

As usual ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ will be on TV this Christmas.  I’ll be watching it, again.

And noting, again, that nothing that makes the protagonist’s life worth living has anything to do with scented candles, Amazon orders, or objects of any kind.

Of course not.  We are not what we own, but who we know.   We are the sum and product of our connections with others.

Which makes me even angrier that more than a dozen people died last weekend in Kentucky because a manufacturing or fulfillment target counted for more.

This isn’t ‘legendary customer service’ – I don’t believe any customer would value on-time delivery of their order over the life of the person making or packing it.

In fact it shows that the customer isn’t really important either.  It would have been so easy to let people know ‘We’re sorry, but a storm is on it’s way, and we daren’t risk our people’s lives.  We’ll make arrangements to get your goods to you another way, but they may be later than you expected’.

As you know, I believe a business should be built around making and keeping promises to its customers and clients, but when you can’t, or shouldn’t, due to forces outside your control, say so and do the right thing.  The people you serve will love you more for it, not less.