February 11, 2021
Promises, promises
On Tuesday I received an email from Royal Mail letting me know that a parcel I was expecting would be … Read More “Promises, promises”
Category: Customer Experience
February 10, 2021
Emotional labour
Recently I’ve been thinking about (and remembering) why being ‘The Boss’ is no fun. Or at least not for me.
It’s not the hard graft, or the long hours, or the uncertainty of income. Nor is it the responsibility to clients, or the need to exceed expectations. We knew this was part of starting a business, it’s actually what we wanted – the possibility to get more out of work than the means to live.
Being your own boss is fine. It’s being boss of others, directly or indirectly, that’s difficult. Because although you can now share the physical or mental work involved in delivery, you’ve at least doubled the emotional labour, and emotional labour is harder to share out.
The first step is to recognise that it’s a big part of what gets done. Probably the most important part too.
The next step is to make it explicit, and cover it in the manual.
January 28, 2021
Here’s your welcome treat
“Here’s your welcome treat” says the email. Inside, a code for a 10% discount on my first purchase, as a reward for signing up to the mailing list. Lovely.
Except that I’ve already made my first (hefty) purchase, which is how I signed up to the mailing list in the first place.
Now I’ve been given a discount code I’m unlikely to use. I don’t feel special, or welcomed, I feel cheated.
If you have more than one way for people to end up on your mailing list, make sure the reward for doing so works properly in every case.
It’s not rocket science. Just meaning it.
January 18, 2021
Self-determination
I’ve spent the whole of the day re-setting and rebuilding my computer. Windows simply refused to restart. No reason was given, no error messages, no hint of what might have caused it, just an escalating series of interventions that culminated in a factory reset.
That’s my day gone. I don’t have a choice. My laptop is infrastructure. I need it to work.
Imagine if corporations like Microsoft decided to do that to us on purpose.
It’s easy to miss where power really lies.
January 12, 2021
Meeting Spec
Specifications highlight the difference between value creators and value extractors brilliantly.
Value creators treat specifications as minima. They’re always looking to see far they can go above and beyond, within the time and financial constraints they face. For them the spec is a starting point.
Value extractors, on the other hand, view specs as maxima. They’re always looking to see how little they can get away with, how much they can bend the definitions, while still being able to say they’ve met the specification. For them the spec is the bar, and they’re always trying to lower it.
Extractors win in the short term. But the future belongs to the creators. Especially if they collaborate with each other.
The picture is 2 days worth of lunches for a Finnish schoolchild during lockdown last year.
December 11, 2020
She changes
“Good Services” principle number 13: “A good service should respond to change quickly”
The key here is ‘respond to’. This is about reflecting relevant changes in the user and understanding the implications of those changes for the user.
A simple example: I’ve just had a call from my insurance broker. They wanted to speak to my husband about renewing his car insurance. He was insured with them, until he got rid of the car a couple of years ago. Somewhere that change has not been propagated through the system. Of course that doesn’t mean that they should never call him – he may have bought a new car since – but it would be a different, more appropriate call, that doesn’t start with “We see your renewal is coming up…”.
Automatic propagation isn’t always appropriate of course, so the best option might be to let the user notify a change then let them also specify where it should propagate to, perhaps with the least contentious options pre-checked to make the ‘usual route’ easier.
This could have an interesting side-effect of making people more conscious of where their data is held and for what purposes, putting them even more in control.
Giving back control – there’s a thought.
December 9, 2020
Them and Us
Here’s a scary set of statistics from “Good Services” :
A 2014 study found that up to 60% of the cost of UK government services arose from calls and casework. Not that surprising perhaps, until you delve deeper and find that of those calls, 43% were chasing the status of a case, 52% were ‘how-to’ questions, 5% were complaints, and only 2% were to do with complex cases that needed human intervention.
In other words, at least 95% of all calls received were unnecessary – should have been unnecessary, either for the caller to make or the responder to handle
That’s a lot of wasted effort, that could have been better spent designing systems that helped people get what they needed.
Designing and implementing good services is not rocket science or cutting-edge, or even particularly expensive. All it takes is empathy and care.
Putting yourself on the side of ‘them’ instead of ‘us’.
December 8, 2020
Prompts
Every year my insurance broker calls me up to remind me that I need to renew. This is good. I … Read More “Prompts”
December 4, 2020
Contexts
One of the many things I like about Lou Downe’s book “Good Services”, is that it goes beyond the boundaries of the service, even of the business. For example, as part of principle number 12: “A good service encourages the right behaviours from staff and users.”, this comes up:
“A good service is good for everyone
Users
Staff
Your organisation
The world”
Here’s a useful tool for judging how your business is doing with that:
Check out the Doughnut Economics Action Lab for more useful tools and ideas on this. Including how ‘the doughnut’ varies across countries and the world – opening up some astonishing opportunities for business as a force for good.
Do you remember writing your name out as a child? Locating your intensely individual self inside progressively larger contexts until you reached ‘The Universe’?
When did we forget how to do that?
It’s a game worth repeating now and then.
December 3, 2020
What gets measured, gets done.
“Good Services” principle number 12 is “A good service encourages the right behaviours from staff and users.”
The “right behaviours” are up to you. They are the behaviours that live up to the Promise you have made to prospects and clients. You can encourage them to happen by building in reminders of why an Activity or Process gets done, and by making sure the right things are measured and rewarded – or more importantly, that the wrong things aren’t.
An old example: A Chinese emperor offered a financial reward for dead rats. The intention was to reduce the population of rats plaguing the country. The outcome was that people started breeding rats to get the reward.
A recent example: Under Tony Blair, GPs were given a target of no more than 48 hours waiting time for an appointment. The intention was to have GP practices create more capacity. The outcome was that it became impossible to book an appoint more than 48 hours in advance, and almost impossible to get an appointment at all.
A financial example: CEOs of listed companies are often rewarded through share options. The intention is that by prudent management and investment, the business generates more value for shareholders. The outcome is often a slow decline followed by a sudden collapse of the business, as CEOs find ‘easier’ ways to raise the share price that actually damage the viability of the business.
We humans are lazy AND ingenious. If you want people to do ‘the right thing’, you have to make that the easiest and most rewarding option. You have to build processes that go with the grain.
Designing those processes takes thought and effort. It means cycling through some difficult questions:
- What do I really want people to do? How do I really want them to behave?
- If I want them to do that, how do I measure it? Is that easy to capture or does it make more work?
- If I use this as the measure, what else might be done to achieve it? Do I want that?
…and back again to the beginning.
It’s hard work, that requires going against the grain. But the payoff is well worth it, for everyone.