Like many large organisations, the NHS has a Director of Customer Experience.
As if Customer Experience is somehow separate from Service Delivery. As if they aren’t two sides of the same coin.
Now, I might be wrong, but this feels like a bit of a bolt-on. Like the customer might actually the last person to be thought of in the whole mechanism.
In any business, what the customer experiences is your Service Delivery. Design that intentionally around what will truly serve and delight your customer. Then make sure it happens consistently and you can’t go far wrong.
That way you won’t need an expensive Director to convince people you are doing it.
I own a few thousand books, all of which I have read multiple times.
Why do I do this?
Because every time I read a book, I’ve changed since the last time I read it, so my interpretation of it changes. I see different things in it, notice different character traits, or different ways of using words than I did before.
I also own several editions of the same works.
Why do I do this?
Partly for practical reasons. Some editions fit more easily into a pocket than others. But mainly because the experience of the physical book is different in each case. Some have fine, almost transparent pages of thin, crisp paper. Others are thick, rough-textured. Some even have edges cut by the book’s first reader. Typefaces vary. The smell and heft of each edition is different.
You may think I’m weird (I know I am), but I bet you’ve re-read a book, or re-watched a film, or watched a remake of a favourite. You will have heard different versions of the same song, and sometimes preferred a cover to the original. I bet you’ve eaten the same dish at different restaurants, or at the same restaurant at different times. Not because you want it to be identical, but because ‘the same but different’ is interesting.
Repetition is comforting, reassuring. Repetition with variation is comforting, reassuring and enriching.
Something customer experience designers could learn from.
One reason why we can feel overwhelmed at work, is that we don’t use triage enough.
Simple triage for unexpected client phone calls and emails:
Every customer has top priority. That needs managing.
My friend Mary Jane Copps (aka The Phone Lady) sent out a brilliant tip for delighting prospects today. It got me thinking again about self-service.
When supermarkets first arrived, housewives were delighted. No more queueing at counters to be served, you could just pick and choose whatever you wanted from the shelves of one shop and check out. They could work to their own timetable. They were empowered.
The same is true of many online services. I can renew my passport, book train journeys, order print, buy tyres, whenever I want to. I’m no longer tied to someone else’s schedule – in some cases not even for physical delivery. I’m empowered in ways that I never dreamt of as a child.
There is however, one place where self-service really doesn’t work well, and that’s when things go wrong – when I make a mistake, or something doesn’t arrive on time, or I’m not sure what to type.
Cycling through frequently asked questions that aren’t my question, or being directed to a forum that shows hundreds of others with the same (un-addressed) problem is disempowering, and disenchanting. I want to follow my own schedule – I need help now. Forcing me to spend the first 60 seconds of a call to the helpline listening to instructions to visit the website is disrespectful.
Of course self-service reduces costs for the provider. If you make it obvious that’s the only reason for it, you’ll disgust your customer.
On the other hand, if you make sure it enables them to follow their own schedule in every scenario, you’ll delight them.
We all make mistakes. We misjudge, we make assumptions based on prejudice and false knowledge. We mis-time, we say the wrong thing, the wrong way. We forget the right things, remember the wrong things.
We are after all human animals, driven by hormones, emotion and primitive responses.
We are complex evolving systems, living inside complex evolving systems. There are bound to be mismatches. And mismatches are one way we learn to evolve further.
So mistakes are bound to happen. You can prevent many of them through process and a ‘golden rule’ that allows anyone to deal with unforeseen scenarios in line with your Promise, but you won’t prevent all of them.
Whether you like it or not, the way you deal with mistakes is part of your Promise. But there is a way to make errors work for you and actually strengthen your Promise.
Be human.
“A gimmick is a novel device or idea designed primarily to attract attention or increase appeal, often with little intrinsic value. When applied to retail marketing, it is a unique or quirky feature designed to make a product or service “stand out” from its competitors.”
It’s a great idea to aim to delight your clients by giving them more than they paid for.
But it takes careful thought to come up with the right kind of ‘extra’, because unless it is consistent with – comes from your Promise of Value, it will feel like a gimmick – a trick.
And appearing to be insincere is the last thing you want if you’re trying to keep your Promise and your customer.
On Tuesday, I found out from my dentist that it’s likely to be a fortnight before I get even a temporary fix for my missing front tooth. “I’ll try and speed things up though, so ring tomorrow and see what date I’ve been given by the lab.”
I rang. There was no news yet. I was expecting to be told to call back, but instead the receptionist said: “I’ll check the lab again on Monday, they should have a date then. Then I’ll call you to get you booked in as soon as you can.”
It doesn’t take much to engender loyalty in your clients. Make a promise, then generously exceed it.
Generosity isn’t expensive, mostly, it’s just remembering to be human.
About 20 years ago, when I bought my first mobile phone, it was compulsory to take out an insurance policy alongside.
I signed up of course.
15 years later, I was digging around, looking at direct debits going out of my bank account. It turned out I was still paying a monthly fee to insure a phone I’d long since ceased to own.
Unlike normal insurance, I got no reminders, no renewal letters, the direct debit never referenced what it was for. In fact when I checked with the bank, the company taking payment had ceased to trade (which did make me wonder where the money was going).
Being in it for the long run is a great mindset to have when signing up a client, but only when the value goes both ways.
The people you serve want to be enrolled, not press-ganged.
I spent Sunday with some of my family. My sister and I both read Seth Godin’s daily blog and were trying to explain why to her daughter.
At one point we both said, almost in unison “Some days its just like he’s got inside your head.”
I’m sure many of Seth’s readers say this every single day.
You can only do this if you know a) who it is you are trying to talk to; b) what’s likely to be going in inside their heads and c) where they are likely to go for inspiration, and the simple pleasure of being with ‘people like us’.
And the best way to know where the people you want to serve are at any one time, is to create a space and a community that does all these things just for them.
If there is one thing that human beings like better than making their own individual dent in the universe, it’s being part of something that promises to make an even bigger dent.
We crave purpose and meaning in our lives, and if we don’t get it from work, we look elsewhere for it.
‘Work’ becomes merely the means of achieving some of our ‘hygiene factors’ – a roof over our heads, food on the table – the things that enable us to pursue our purpose elsewhere. In which case, ‘work’ probably doesn’t get our full attention, or our best energy.
One response is to starve people into spending more and more time ‘in work’, in order to simply acquire the basics. That’s how you end up with a productivity paradox.
Much better, for everyone, to offer work with purpose.