When customers ‘gang up’ are you ready?

The role of social media as a machine for allowing groups of people to be in a state of perpetual outrage is a trend which shows no signs of abating. Love it or loathe it, what should you do about it? Is responding to organised online campaigning a reasonable reaction to the Voice of the Customer or are you just caving into cyber-bullying?

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Universal Credit: customer experience without compassion

BBC Radio 4’s ‘Money Box’ isn’t often where you go for a scoop with political ramifications but today’s announcement by the programme that families on Universal Credit will miss out on payments over the festive period adds some excitement to what’s often a ‘worthy but dull’ feature in the Saturday schedule.

Leaving aside the politics for a bit, this is a story about service design that’s anything but customer-centric.

And if you’re on a low income, it sucks.

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Did Dove behave like bad boys? Don’t forget: customers drive your reputation!

Do you remember how Dove not only shot themselves in the foot but then carried on and removed a couple of toes for good measure?

To many it was always going to be a controversial Facebook ad. A soap brand showing a black woman ‘changing’ to a white, then Asian one as she removes her t-shirt appears to be the result of a thoroughly misinformed piece of decision-making.

Dove’s subsequent ‘apology’, claiming that they had ‘missed the mark’ struck many as less then wholehearted. This apparently compounded the initial error, created more column inches and debate across social media than any non-controversial advertisement could ever hope to achieve.

Misinformed mistake or deliberate strategy?

However, as commentator Richard J Hillgrove suggests in Drum, this could just be part of a cynical strategy by Unilever to propel their brand to the forefront of people’s attention.

If you go back to a comment made by Jennifer Bremner, director of marketing for Dove back in March 2016 who said at the time “We want to rally one of the most digitally savvy and socially conscious audiences to join the conversation.” She went on: “Body shaming has sadly become a normal part of today’s online interactions, but sometimes we do not realize the role we are playing in that conversation.”

Perhaps there is a bit more to this than first appears.

Unilever who owns the Dove brand does not seem to have suffered either with their share price rising 5% over the time the furore was going on. The market does not seem to be judging this too harshly when you compare to other viral interventions such as the ill-fated “United breaks Guitars” which wiped 185 million USD off the company’s value in a matter of days. Other airlines such as Delta have stumbled similarly when “doing wrong” for the customer has got into the public eye.

Back to Dove: think about it. How often do you discuss skincare brands in the course of a normal week? Exactly, so all publicity is good publicity, yes?

There are two ways to look at this

One perspective suggests that ‘bad boys’ are running the show and, whilst we might not like what they do, we go back and buy their products because, at the end of the day, they’re cheaper and/or better than other products. (And we’ve forgotten those products anyway because they weren’t in the news).

There’s definitely mileage in an edgy brand that has an element of ‘rebel’ about it – in the brewing industry, Brewdog has been successfully occupying this territory for a number of years (having some reasonable beers in their portfolio helps). Whether Dove thought a touch of rebel was worth pissing off thousands of women and men of colour for is a question worth asking though.

It’s not just Dove that falls into this category, Ryanair has been occupying the territory with a ‘man-you-love-to-hate’ (Michael O’Leary) in the driving seat. Like Dove, Ryanair can shoot itself in the foot – in this case by screwing up pilot rosters – but still stands a chance of posting great results because, if sufficient customers want to endure the many indignities and inconveniences of low-cost flying, then they will continue to do so.

The difference between Dove and Ryanair though is that it’s unlikely that Ryanair made some cynical calculation about the amount of publicity that would ensue from a mistake on pilot rostering.

The second, more constructive, approach to reputation is to place the customer at the centre of all decision-making. It’s hard to imagine that the customer was front of mind in whatever process led to the Facebook ad at Dove. In a genuinely customer-driven company, all relevant customer segments should be ‘present’ when key decisions are made, either by including actual customers or a sufficiently diverse panel of staff who can act as the voice.

In this environment, cynical decisions don’t get made, since the anticipated feelings of customers drive the process. And with social media acting as instant judge, jury and executioner of reputation, it’s worth paying a bit more attention to how any decision will play out in the court of public opinion.

image of an airliner landing

Ryanair has a customer-centric approach, but it’s not what you think

I recently co-wrote a report on customer-centric strategy for NextTen that included Ryanair as a (positive) case study. The recent problems with pilot scheduling might cause me to make a hasty edit – but I think not: Ryanair is thoroughly customer-focused, but their low-cost approach illustrates the challenges of maintaining such a strategy when things go wrong. In fact, pursuing this strategy appears to be more likely to cause these problems.

Boo-boo

Ryanair reported record earnings earlier this year, attributing this uptick to a  increased focus on customer experience. However, what was described by CEO Michael O’Leary as a ‘boo-boo’ (may not have been his exact words) on pilot schedules caused the cancellation of 2,000 flights and has unleashed a storm of criticism from customers, staff and commentators.

So, what’s gone wrong? Leaving aside the technicalities of pilot rostering, the issue that’s surfaced shows that, when your customer proposition is low-cost, you walk a tightrope between delivering against that proposition and driving the model too hard with no slack for when cock-ups happen. Ryanair’s been an acknowledged leader in driving down costs in an industry where being perceived by your customers as lowest cost represents an enviable position to occupy. O’Leary’s acknowledged that their crew costs are about €5 per passenger (versus an alleged €9 by Easyjet) and this gives little room for manoeuvre when you ask your pilots to go the extra mile and forgo some leave, even when there is a financial reward. Ryanair is raising pilot pay in some centres, but whether this is enough to stop the defection to other airlines remains to be seen.

Hello schadenfreude

For those who like to indulge in schadenfreude, the travails of Ryanair are a boon, and rivals such as Lufthansa have lost no time in capitalising on their misfortune. Meanwhile it’s provided the humorous end of the commentariat with another opportunity to sneer and roll out the old jokes about Ryanair’s destination airports’ distance from the actual destination, surly staff and so on. But none of this is likely to matter in the long term: Ryanair will continue to have a reputation for low-cost travel and customers will continue to put up with some inconvenience in their search for a bargain.

That said, some of the customer experiences when their flights were cancelled were not a shining example of customer care. I heard many accounts in the media of long-planned special trips that were not happening and, whilst Ryanair are offering standard compensation, this will probably not be sufficient for those whose desired outcome was more than ‘get me from A to B for least cost’.

Maintaining a laser-like focus on its core, low-cost customer proposition is what Ryanair does very well and if that focus has blurred a little in recent weeks with a consequent impact on share price, it’s unlikely to dent their performance in the long term. I see no need to change my view that Ryanair remains thoroughly customer-centric.

4 questions to check… are you exploiting your complaints goldmine?

Have you got PPI? Do you think you might have had PPI? I’ve lost count of the times that some click-bait ad has popped up to ask me that question or, on some occasions, I’ve had to take a phone call from someone aggressively selling me PPI claims services I don’t need. Well, now the Financial Conduct Authority has got in on the act and enrolled none other than the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in an advert to urge people to get their claims in before 29th August 2019.

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