Article

NickB

Are you an inspirational customer?

Customers should be better at providing meaningful feedback
– and service providers should make it easier for them to do so

Another caffeinated customer experience gave me a new perspective on feedback. I was in a local chain coffee shop, taking advantage of a freebie courtesy of my mobile provider and the productivity benefits that seem to accrue from being surrounded by a general buzz of conversation. I noticed that both the coffees I drank seemed to be particularly good – better than usual – and both were courtesy of a “trainee barista” (according to her t-shirt). I passed by her on the way out and congratulated her on her exceptionally good coffee – clearly the training was working well – but she looked slightly non-plussed.

This made me think: are we, as customers, bad at giving feedback?

I think we are. And the trend towards surveying every inch of our experience doesn’t help.

Hi guys, how’s your food?

If I’m in a restaurant I think it’s nice if someone takes the trouble to ask if you are enjoying your food. But how many times has that enquiry been made when I have just started eating and not in a position to offer any feedback? Moreover – and this may just be British reticence – how often have I or people with me said it’s OK when some aspect of the food isn’t quite up to standard?

It’s the equivalent of the “How are you?” enquiry on greeting someone – we don’t usually respond with a list of current ailments or life situations – polite but meaningless.

Anti-social media

Back to my coffee chain. It has an app for payment and collecting loyalty points which is great and, if I’m being brutally honest, almost certainly does encourage me to spend more with them than with other brands. Every time I use it a little window pops up: “how was your last visit?” Are you spotting a problem here? At this point I’m thinking about my current visit and – since I’m in the process of paying for my coffee – can’t be doing with providing feedback on any visit.

I just checked my app: there’s no opportunity for me to provide more reflective feedback on my last visit so that I can’t more permanently record my verbal feedback to the barista.

Give us feedback – and your organs

And so it continues… a friend with a donated kidney posts a link to the NHS organ donation site. Although an opt-out approach will be adopted in England next year, it seems simple enough to register and it proves to be. And there is the inevitable feedback tab at the bottom of this screen – how can we improve the site? Well to be quite honest it does the job perfectly, so I leave a very satisfied rating and a comment to that effect, adding “you’re doing a great job” as the web team have implemented a nice clean website that helps you register quickly and, moreover, the outcome of their work is saved lives. I’m faintly surprised they didn’t ask for a Net Promoter Score as, in this case, I would recommend the site to friends, family and total strangers – if you’re in England, please do register!

But, actually, what is the point of feedback now? For all I know it may have been terrible to start with and customer feedback improved it but at this point it’s just creating work for people. This illustrates a tendency I have noticed in organisations:

Once we start collecting data, we get stuck in a rut and it has the potential to be wasted effort.

Get inspiration: get meaningful feedback

So, let’s be clear, there’s nothing wrong with collecting data on customer behaviour and feedback: technologies are available to allow you to collect and manipulate ever-increasing amounts of data from all touch points. But it’s getting meaningful data that allows you to turn data into insight and insight into action that’s important.

In my view it’s qualitative feedback that gets you that insight, whereas quantitative data will give you trends and aid segmentation. We can cover quantitative data in another article but for now let’s look at five ways to get meaningful feedback from your customers to inspire you to improve.

1) Always provide a qualitative channel to capture feedback

My coffee chain is a good example of how not to do this: there’s nowhere on the app to provide ad hoc feedback which suggests they’re not that interested. Even the Feedback tab on their website is broken but there is a link to email channel, so I’ll be sharing my feedback with them soon.

2) Get feedback at the right point in the customer journey

Whilst you need an always-on channel for ad hoc feedback, it’s important to identify the points in the customer’s journey where it makes sense from their point of view to provide you with feedback. Most companies, to be fair, put this at the end of a transaction but there are still a significant number who don’t or who launch a feedback pop-up on their website before you have even done anything.

3) Ask the right questions – and the right number of questions

You should always add on a qualitative text input field to allow customers to explain why they gave a particular quantitative rating but do this sparingly: there’s nothing more annoying than having to justify every score you’ve given. And always have a general text input field at the end – some people like to save their comments for a single message.

4) Recognise negative feedback as inspiration

This is tough: I have long maintained that complaints are an under-used source of feedback but treating them as inspiration is a bit of an ask. It’s a question of mindset: if you have repeated complaints about some aspect of your products, services or experience then this is a great opportunity to turn that around. Genuinely customer-centric companies will have this mindset.

5) Follow up and reward

Whether grumpy or inspirational, your customers are devoting their time to improving your company, which should generate plenty of business value, so it seems right to offer some form of reward. My favourite is the pizza chain that sends you a voucher for free dough-balls for every time you feed back. The incremental cost of this is negligible but it encourages customers to provide feedback and – I have experienced – they do follow up with further discussion if appropriate.

Do let me have feedback both on this article on your experiences with customer feedback.

NickB

Wake up and smell the cologne… how are you inspiring your customers?

“Magic moments” are not the be-all and end-all of customer experience – but they are important 

Wednesday in Wimbledon – I’d say wet if I was seeking an alliterative effect but in the interests of veracity it was a fine day – and I had an hour’s “office time” before a meeting. I went to an independent coffee shop on Wimbledon’s main drag – once apparently the high street with the most chains in the UK – not because it was an indie but because I knew it would be quiet, got my coffee and my WiFi code and logged on.

The welcome screen was not what I was expecting. Instead of the usual MSN collation of news items there was a poem (see below).

Now whilst I don’t read a lot of poetry and my limited abilities as a literary critic are safely confined to my book club, I’d say that the author’s efforts were a bit overwrought. Nonetheless I loved the idea of the coffee beans’ “cologne” and this little poetic pause set me up in a good frame of mind for the next 60 minutes.

And it made me think: how often do businesses go out of their way to inspire their customers?

In my experience – not very often.

At which point, if you’re in the business of providing customers with a service on behalf of your company you might be thinking “hang on Nick, isn’t it enough that we provide a great service day in, day out? That’s hard as it is without expecting our agents to be inspirational poets!”

Up to a point

Well, you may have a point: broken processes, malfunctioning systems and a back office that’s still in the 20th century may be some of the daily challenges your front-line people successfully manage every day to deliver a great service. In which case any further requests to create moments of magic will fall on deaf ears.

Note that in my example the magic moment didn’t require any human intervention – in fact, the coffee service was pleasant but unremarkable – but someone had taken the time to think about what might make the experience a little bit special.

Your call is important, so here’s something that’s not muzak 

Of course, the effect can wear off. For example, my bank, First Direct, have a different approach to hold music, playing some ambient street sounds while you wait to speak to someone. As I have been repeatedly calling FD with regard to a foreign payment that’s gone astray (that’s a CX epic that will find its way onto this site soon), this is now as grating as listening to 16 bars of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on a loop. Any element of surprise wore off about 30 seconds into my first hold.

Maybe First Direct think they’re being smart and different but it’s part of what’s become, for me, an increasingly frustrating customer journey so it’s having a negative effect.

That old black magic

The quest for “magic”, inspiration and out-of-the-ordinary elements of a customer journey is important, but it’s not the only thing that’s important. One organisation I came across liked to devote considerable management time to deciding whether a customers’ experience could be classified as a “magic moment”. If it was deemed to contain insufficient pixie-dust to make it magic, it was deemed a “brilliant basic”. Both were rather aspirational terms as exceptional customer experience hadn’t exactly become the norm and there were plenty of basics that were far from brilliant. In my view they were well-intentioned but probably should have been a bit more rigorous about identifying and fixing process breaks and then empowering front line staff to create magic themselves.

Having a commitment to inspiring customers is a worthy ambition and it’s something that’s etched into NextTen’s DNA. We challenge ourselves to present material and ideas to our customers that inspires them to think differently about their businesses to deliver better results. Whether or not we succeed is something only our customers can judge. We haven’t yet employed seaside sounds or poetry to help us, but who knows what the future holds…

Meanwhile, what are you doing to inspire your customers?

NickB

Are you building the skills for success in 2030?

A report into consulting skills for the next decade has lessons for all kinds of organisation

The Centre for Management Consulting Excellence, a pro bono organisation set up in 2017 to foster excellence in consulting through greater links with research, launched a report into Consulting Skills for 2030 this week. Drawing on interviews and surveys with consultants and “non-consultants” – i.e. potential buyers of consulting services (or if you’re being cynical, people with “real jobs”) the report comes to some interesting conclusions about what we will all be focusing on in 10 years’ time.

Cyberpunked?

Respondents were asked to rank various skill/technology areas according to their likely impact, from very significant down to negligible. Perhaps surprisingly, Cyber Security emerged as the area that most respondents rated as very significant or significant, with AI – which is what the report writers had originally expected to be the most impactful – beaten into second place and Robotics ranked lowest, just below the Internet of Things.

Report cover featuring a robot

Cyber Security is the biggest risk faced by organisations now and survey respondents felt that knowledge about the topic in most organisations is inadequate, with a poor understanding of risks and potential solutions. It’s thus a massive roadblock on the way to a productive digital future.

In terms of skillsets required, technical knowledge is almost certainly not sufficient as Cyber Security experts need to be able to combine a deep insight into the area with an ability to “sell” these ideas into the C-Suite and generate an understanding of and commitment to the security strategies as well as the complex regulatory and legislative environment that will prevail.

AI – who knows?

Although it came second in terms of impact, Artificial (or Augmented) Intelligence produced a huge polarisation of views from respondents, with a number thinking that the impact would be later than 2030 and others thinking that there would be considerable competition and impact for large and medium-sized firms in the period 2020-2030, as these firms would be investing in the area.

One potential impact is on the traditional “pyramid” model where large firms generate revenue from deploying relatively large numbers of lower-paid consultants on more routine jobs such a data and business analysis. These would be eroded by the increased adoption of AI technologies to automate these jobs – an impact likely to be felt in all types of businesses, not just consulting.

T-time

Whilst most of the skill areas highlighted in the report point to a deepening level of technical knowledge, the impact of, and need for “timeless” skills such as stakeholder management, project and change management was felt to be very significant by the majority of respondents. The subject matter will evolve over time, but these “softer” skills will be just as critical.

Construction workers
Building T-shaped skills can be a challenge

The classic consultant skill set is often described as “T-shaped” which is to say that you have a deep area of expertise and then a broad set of skills that you use and grow over time. Typically, these will be the softer, change and stakeholder management skills. The challenge organisations face is that there are an increasing number of areas that require deep skills and the people who possess them are “I-shaped” – deep technical specialists with fewer of the broad skills that will help them get their deep knowledge across. This is a challenge not only for consultancy firms but for the companies that buy their services or develop them in house.

The client knows best

One final point from the report is worth emphasising: those respondents from non-consulting organisations estimated that the impact from the new areas would be more significant than the consultants did. This suggests that consultants are confident in their ability to absorb new areas of knowledge (not as someone at the launch event on 20th March suggested, in the taxi on the way to the client), whereas the buyers of consultancy are perhaps a little more sceptical.

Predicting the future is a notoriously unreliable sport: no-one foresaw the rise of the likes of Uber and similar models when mapping apps were starting to be developed, so apprehension about areas of new technology may be justified. It’s the unknown quantity: people who can develop innovative capabilities on the back of these technologies that represents the greatest threat.

The consultancies that can successfully ride the waves of change that new technologies bring will be those that learn and adapt the fastest and pass that insight on to their clients.

Perhaps the question businesses should be asking of their consultants is not “tell me what you know, and what it means for my business” but “tell me how you learn, and how you can help me learn”.

NickB

Will customer experience survive Brexit?

The UK’s Brexit crisis means more investment in CX not less

I write this article from a country under siege. For months the UK has been in the grip of what appears to be a never-ending debate on a topic that around 97% of the population have lost interest in. Today (Tuesday 29th January) is the day when the UK Parliament is alleged to be “taking back control” and debating which version of not-being-part-of-the-EU enough people can be persuaded to agree on – although this has for a long time now resembled the spectacle of two bald men fighting over a comb.

But enough griping: I have discovered an issue that’s had scant attention so far and, to me, it’s absolutely critical: what will be the effect of Brexit on customer experience?

I don’t offer this as a solution to the Irish border question, trade tariffs, customs union or the free movement of people or any of the myriad of variously important issues that come under the Brexit banner because it’s more important than any of them.

Yes, that’s right, an issue more important than Brexit itself: what will our experience as customers be like and what can companies do to address it?

I have picked two that are top of mind at the moment.

Disaster looms

The worst-case scenarios being put forward, particularly in the event of a “no-deal” Brexit which would see Britain trading on World Trade Organisation (WTO) tariffs, see businesses experiencing delays at ports, disruption to their supply chains and a consequent lack of product on shelves. Stockpiling of all kinds of foods and medicines is increasingly becoming a way for people to spend their leisure time but it’s a critical preparation that businesses need to make too, to avoid one of the fundamentals of a good customer experience – i.e. the stuff I want to buy is in the shop/on the website – being severely impacted.

Licence to be a jerk?

Non-availability of products and late deliveries are the stuff of customer complaints and, sadly, likely to tip an already stressed customer into bad behaviour. It’s understandable if not forgivable that this can occur, and we’ve offered advice about this elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the toxic climate around Brexit produces extreme behaviour that businesses should be mindful of. One story that struck me in the last few days was that of a London restaurateur whose anti-Brexit messages that he’d added to his bills had resulted in death threats. Your first reaction may be that he might have been better to avoid the subject, but using your business to promote a point of view on the topic is not unknown: Tim Martin, the boss of pub chain Wetherspoon’s has been touring his venues and hosting discussions on the topic recently.

That brings us to the nub of the issue: from the point of view of many who voted to leave the EU, the issue isn’t about trade deals, it’s about the identity of the country they live in. We have an evolutionary preference for living in tribal groups so some people might feel uncomfortable with those who are not from their “tribe”. The sad thing about Brexit is that it’s surfaced these feelings in a thoroughly toxic way with a rise in racist attacks reported since the referendum in 2016.

From a CX point of view this is worrying for any business with front-line staff who are “not from round here” – in this day and age that would be most businesses – and action needs to be taken to minimise the risk of threatening behaviour from customers.

What can you do?

I’m the recipient of regular emails from organisations telling me I should do something about Brexit, usually involving emailing my MP, but the key question is what should companies do to ensure that customer experience isn’t impacted? Nearly 60% of UK companies have some sort of Brexit programme in place, and I suspect that in organisations where customer experience (CX) heads are struggling to get airtime or investment for their initiatives this will only be made more difficult by the management of the looming crisis. But here’s the thing: Brexit programmes need CX and CX needs its own Brexit strategy.

I offer the following recommendations:

1) Keep going

In the spirit of Winston Churchill – “if you’re going through hell, keep going” – any current investment in CX should be continued and ramped up to take on board the implications of low stocks, increased customer stress and complaints.

2) Foster and celebrate diversity

Anyone’s workforce will have people with a variety of social/ethnic backgrounds and lifestyles. Companies that want to get the best out of their people celebrate this diversity. In the face of divisive and abusive behaviour the best defence is to provide support to those who might face it on a day-to-day basis. Not to do so is to cave in to a small minority of people with unpleasant attitudes – and who wants their business to do that?

3) Increase expenditure on CX training

If you’re keeping going and successfully lobbying for an increase in CX investment, the best area to spend it on is staff training, particularly where it deals with handling difficult customers.

Are you affected by Brexit? What plans is your organisation making and to what extent do they include customer experience? We’re keen to hear your views.

NickB

Good news for Blue Monday: the High Street’s not dead – yet

(2 minute read)

Customer-centricity is the way forward

It’s that time of year when we have a succession of variously-coloured days: Black Friday pre-Christmas and Blue Monday today, allegedly the time of year when people are most depressed. To add to the spectrum there was a super blood wolf moon visible in the middle of the night for those Britons whose anticipation of the Monday blues was already giving them insomnia.

For beleaguered UK high street retailers and customers, the gloom continues. HMV the music retailer seeking a rescue package, has come under the radar of Mike Ashley, whose strategy seems to be to buy up any retailer heading for the rocks. For non-UK readers, Mr Ashley has built up a highly successful business – Sports Direct – selling cut-price sports gear to the public in the classic, low-cost, pile-em-high-and-sell-em-cheap model.

It takes a particular skill, in my view, to offer a poor in-store experience – confusing layout, multiple occurrences of similar products – and still achieve commercial success. This doesn’t bode well for HMV though: if the same strategy is applied, I don’t think it would succeed, since the competition for music/video content (these days a digital commodity) is different from that for clothing, a physical one, so no matter how high or cheap your piles of CDs are people have moved on.

I’m sure Mike Ashley realises this, but if he needs some further ideas he’d do well to take a look at the companies covered in a recent Marketing Week article who are bucking the trend by taking a customer-centric approach.

I’m glad to see Greggs included in this as I particularly liked their introduction of a vegan sausage roll to capitalise on the trend for “Veganuary”. In particular I liked their canny use of social media, when breakfast TV host and self-opinionated uber-bore Piers Morgan took exception to their “PC” behaviour. “Oh hello Piers, we’ve been expecting you” has to be one of the best (polite) put-downs of 2019. It’s possible to do low-cost with style and Greggs manage this as well as responding to customer preferences in a creative way.

Focusing on the experience is the way forward for arts and craft superstore chain Hobbycraft who at first sight would appear to be in danger of undercutting by the likes of Amazon. However, their stores provide workshops and how-to content online recognising that their customers outcomes extend beyond simply buying products. Customers want to feel part of a tribe (hobbyists, bakers etc) and acquire skills: playing to these outcomes moves the business away from being a commodity provider.

It’s this preparedness to think differently about the nature of a store that will distinguish winners and losers in the difficult times ahead.

For more thoughts about successful customer-centred practice sign up for our Inner Circle newsletter or, for more about outcome-based thinking. see our article The concept that will change your view of Customer Experience forever.

NickB

How strong is your “Alt-CV”?

Paying attention to the things not on a CV can be just as important as the things that are on it

Like most people I like to keep my CV and LinkedIn profile up-to-date. I think my CV and profile do a pretty good job of representing the “work me” – the qualities and experience that you might want to hire me or my company for.

But there’s another side that’s not revealed in the standard CV: it’s what I call my “Alt-CV” – the alternative CV that contains things that rarely, if ever, make it onto a regular CV.

It’s all about me

As I’ve got older, I’ve noticed that some of my contemporaries’ LinkedIn profiles have started to including straplines such as “lady of leisure at retired” and “golf course tester at taking some time out”. With that in mind I decided my headline/summary on my Alt-CV should include things like:

  • Part-time barista – I make a pretty good cappuccino
  • Baker – I’ve started baking my own bread and have to say the results are pretty good
  • Regular contributor to BBC Radio 3 – I regularly email their Essential Classics show in the morning with “playlist suggestions” and occasionally get a shout-out (although for a classical music show that’s probably the wrong term)
  • Guitar collector – I own a total of six guitars and occasionally play them

These are deliberately light-hearted but, whilst they won’t get me hired – although I have deployed an acoustic guitar on a couple of occasions in a work context – they represent some of the things that are important to me.   

Monkey business

A few years ago, I had my first one to one with a member of my new team. I suggested that if we were to discuss development and career progression it should be in the context of what she wanted to do with her life. The result surprised me: “I’d really like to work with wild animals” she said. Barely suppressing a quip that some sales managers in the company were pretty untamed, I said that I couldn’t directly advise on that career path but if that was a personal objective, she ought to see how she could work towards it. Following a reorganisation shortly afterwards I moved to a new team, so my career development advice was apparently short-lived. However, I got an invitation about a year later to the team member’s leaving drinks as she was about to take a three-month sabbatical. At the event she thanked me publicly for giving her the nudge to pursue her ambition: she was about to spend her time volunteering in three different animal sanctuaries in the Far East…

I’d like to be able to say she went on to run a ground-breaking conservation charity but, in fact, she came back after her trip and decided that, whilst it had been immensely enjoyable, she had decided that she didn’t want to pursue that as a life goal after all and went back to her previous job. The last I heard she was still there and considering weekend volunteering at a wildlife centre near her home.

Champions

Whilst I don’t claim my career advice in the above example was especially innovative or unique, I was implicitly acknowledging that my colleague had a life outside of work and that that was just as important as her life at work. Allowing people to bring their “whole self” to work is key in helping them feel more fulfilled and engaged and results in better performance, with a knock-on beneficial effect on customers and the bottom line.

NextTen’s Richard Horner has turned this into an approach – the Framework of Champions – that provides a systematic method of helping employees align their own personal purpose with that of the organisation. Companies that have adopted this have reported dramatic improvements in growth rates, financial performance and engagement with some areas showing results inside a month.

Whilst you’ll always find high-performing people who want to keep their work and personal lives entirely separate, there’s much to be gained as a leader and a team-member from having a strong “Alt-CV” and making it visible.

NickB

The death of high street retail? Bring it on!

The survivors of “retail hell” will be those that are prepared to change the way they think about customer experience

Reports of the death of the high street may have been exaggerated in the past but the decline in shop sales versus the increase in online sales reported over the Christmas period suggests that retail as we know it could well be in its death throes.

After my experience in the January sales in London I can only say the sooner the better.

What I learnt in a brief – but not as brief as it could have been – trip to Oxford Street last Sunday and a spot of grocery shopping on New Year’s Eve was that our tolerance of poor physical retail experiences is lessening, particularly when the online version is so much better.

What’s wrong with shopping?

Where do I begin? Let’s start with everyone’s favourite department store, John Lewis, on a Sunday afternoon. At the height of the sale season we were pleased to snap up a new mattress as a clearance bargain. We’d originally gone in to try out a Simba Sleep mattress – which you can buy online and return if not happy: now a standard with the new entrants (see also Casper, Eve and others) – but ended up with a different make at a clearance price which was more comfortable, albeit not covered by any guarantee should our in-store test proved to have been inadequate.

I get a bargain and a try-before-you-buy stage in the customer journey so what’s wrong? Well not that much if I’m honest, although I got a definite sense from the store assistant that he’d rather have been able to upsell to one of the many more expensive items on display (he could have helped me feel a bit happier about picking up a bargain instead). The trouble really started when we descended to the kitchen shop in the basement in search of a new pair of kitchen scales. As a keen cook and a bit of a kitchen gadget fan, I’ve previously spent happy times ambling through John Lewis kitchen shops, but something has changed since the last time I went to the Oxford Street “flagship” store. It proved tricky to find the right area and, when we did, the shelves were in such a mess that it took quite some time to work out what scales were available and how much they were.

On the basis of this second experience, online would have been much better – although it still took me a while to find the kitchen scales section on John Lewis’s website – and I could have bought my new mattress online as well, albeit at a non-clearance price.

Food, glorious food

Most of the time we shop online for food, via Ocado – it saves time and petrol cost – but it requires advance planning. In preparing for a New Year’s Eve dinner I needed to go to a local mall and that other bastion of British middle-class grocery shopping, Waitrose (part of the John Lewis Partnership). One missing ingredient required a trip to Sainsbury’s supermarket a short walk away. I found my missing spice but then had to wait in line whilst what appeared to be a large section of south-west London queued to pay at the self-service tills. There’s no way these are going to give you the kind of pleasant interaction on a standard check-out aisle that I’d had pre-Christmas in the same store – “unexpected item in bagging area” is hardly the basis for a great customer relationship. Most of the time I end up having to wait while a harassed assistant confirms that I am over 18 and can legally buy alcohol. My New Year’s Eve purchase was relatively smooth but the overall experience – albeit at peak time – was stressful.

Back to the Future?

There was a time when a trip to the shops was a relatively unhurried affair. Growing up in a small town over half a century ago I remember getting most of our food from a short trip to local shops. It wasn’t something full of magic moments as I recall but nor was it particularly stressful even when the local supermarket was involved. And my mother, who I was usually accompanying, would stop and chat to friends, neighbours and shopkeepers in the course of her expedition.

Of course, there was no competition from any other shopping channel in those days, just the choice between a few local shops so you can’t really compare it with our price-driven online interactions. However, leaving wistful reminiscence aside, the past has some lessons for the future of physical retail: shopping in those days was friendlier and less hurried. But if online can take away the need to stand in crowded shops or searching in vain for unavailable items what’s left on the High Street?

Café society

The answer is to forget about selling – at least in the same quantities as online – but to view the online and offline worlds as complementary rather than competing. Let’s look at a couple of retailers under threat from online competition: bookseller Waterstone’s (thriving) and music/video retailer HMV (filing for administration). I’m a customer of both, but in ways that illustrate this shift.

I spent a couple of hours in Waterstone’s Piccadilly branch at the weekend where I combined coffee, book shopping and a pre-dinner cocktail. The branch has three food/drink outlets and several floors of books and I based myself on the top floor café/bar with occasional forays to the book departments. So, my visit to the store is more about an overall leisure experience than a targeted piece of book shopping (which I could have done via Amazon or other online retailers). Waterstone’s still hasn’t integrated the online world very smoothly: one of the books wasn’t in stock and I declined the offer of ordering it as I figured I could do it online. However, I bought other books in the store so there’s no reason why the order couldn’t have been linked to my other purchases and offer a discount, securing more of my expenditure versus Amazon.

At HMV the threats are more extreme – we still like physical books for reading (versus eBooks) but are less enamoured of CDs and DVDs for audio/visual product – but the response has been less adventurous. My local HMV store also contains a branch of independent cinema chain Curzon. The cinema is one of the best in the area – a good choice of films, comfy seats, great sound and a good café/bar – but the degree of integration between the two is non-existent despite branding the venue as hmvcurzon. On the other two floors of the shop the offering is a traditional retail one: racks of CDs, vinyl and DVDs with various add-on products such as t-shirts.

Curzon is, as far as I can tell, thriving: the cinema experience is good and, as a distributor of independent films, it also offers a streaming service. Like many other cinemas it also offers live broadcasts of concerts, theatre etc. This move towards content and experience appears to have passed HMV by. Just as bands now make money from gigs rather than record sales it doesn’t require too much imagination to think how HMV might have evolved into a live experience provider – with links to related merchandise and streamed content – rather than remaining as a shop selling stuff that fewer and fewer people have a need for.

Entertaining outcomes

I’m not going to make any predictions for the future of high street retail other than to say that a better understanding of customer outcomes is required. If you view your customer’s outcome as “buy some stuff at an acceptable cost/convenience level” then you’re operating within the traditional retail paradigm. With online taking up an increasing proportion of shopping, that cost/convenience offer will need to be pretty compelling to cover the cost of high street property.

But if you view the customer’s outcome as “feel part of the community” (my experience of 50 years ago) or “have a great time with friends/family” (my recent Waterstone’s/Curzon experiences) then you might view the proposition you offer quite differently. In my little corner of south-west London, the number of coffee shops – both independent and chain – has doubled over the past 12 months and they are all busy: that points to a need that people have to get out into their community (even if it’s to sit hunched over a laptop with headphones on).

I’m not saying all shops should have a café attached. Retailer WHSmith provides a dire in-store experience (occasionally including a coffee vending machine) but it doesn’t prevent them achieving high performance, particularly given a focus on travel-related outlets (where leisurely browsing isn’t part of the experience). However, for most retailers, asking what’s missing from their customers’ experience and taking action to reinvent their outlets accordingly is the best hope to keep the high street alive.

It’s also a highly complex area and different solutions will apply in different localities – what might work in Wimbledon may not play so well in Warrington or Wigan. We’ll be returning to this theme in subsequent articles and inviting other people to contribute. If you’ve got direct experience in this area we’d love to hear your views.

NickB

Most strategies don’t work! Here’s how to have one that does

Most organisations have a strategy, and many devote some of the best and smartest brains in the organisation to developing and implementing it. Almost all of this falls short in some way or other. So, is strategy failing to deliver?

In their new book “Beyond Default: Setting Your Organization on a Trajectory to an Improved Future” change strategists David Trafford and Peter Boggis pinpoint what’s wrong with most business strategies: the failure to realise what trajectory you are on – and why – and where it’s taking you.

I had the pleasure of working with both David and Peter when we were all at CSC Index, the consultancy that gave birth to business reengineering, back in the 1990s.

I recently caught up with David and asked him some questions about the compelling and practical ideas the book contains.

NB: The idea of an organisation being on a trajectory is a compelling one, but I’ve not seen it articulated in this way before. Has anyone else defined strategy in a similar way before?

DT: Not that we’re aware of. The thinking emerged over many years of consulting to and advising companies and it really accelerated over the last eight years since we set up our own company (Formicio). We kept hearing language like “This organisation is hard-wired, it will never change” and CEOs would say the organisation won’t change or people tell me what they think I want to hear but nothing changes. And when you talked to non-execs they would say we need a change of direction – but the only lever they’ve got is to change the CEO. Companies were spending millions of pounds on transformation programmes, but they weren’t delivering. We figured something more fundamental must be going on.

As we thought about it we started to use the term “default future”, we were then approached by a publisher who had seen some of the ideas on our website and thought they would make a good book. When we suggested a title for it, which was too long and complicated, the publisher suggested it was really about taking organisations beyond their default, hence the title of the book.

Then we started to use the term trajectory rather than “path” and the more we worked on it, the clearer it became. In 2016 we concluded that our default future was that the book wouldn’t get finished if we just continued to talk about it. So we sat down to write it: once we’d articulated the default future it became easier to take action to change our own trajectory.

NB: The idea of a trajectory makes sense to me because anything you plan to do is a bit like shooting an arrow long distance, you have to set it off on a path and hope it gets somewhere near the target.

DT: When we launched the book an old colleague of mine – who’s an engineer by training – asked why we were using the term trajectory. He didn’t get it initially but then after a while he came back to me and said it’s like crossing a river – if you want to get to the other side, you have to take the current into account.

NB: The first half of the book makes for tough reading if you’ve spent part of your career working on strategy as it sounds like we’ve been wasting our time defining things that can’t be implemented! Is it the strategy that’s wrong – not taking account of those internal and external forces? Or just poor execution? Or are people just over-optimistic about the chances of success?

DT: All of these things: When CEOs think of the future, they think of the future they want to have, not the one that they’re going to get, so they falsely assume they can change the trajectory of the organisation and also that they’ve got more power to change it than they really have. So they say “We’re going to become X”, but don’t articulate X very well. Often there’s a small group involved in developing the strategy but that doesn’t mean everyone outside that group understands it. Very often strategy is poorly communicated or is based on false assumptions.

I’ve seen many strategies but often I just don’t get it. I find myself thinking, is it so sophisticated that a simple person like me doesn’t get it or is it just nonsense? I usually then ask: “help me to understand how by doing this you achieve that?” This simple question often triggers a rethink.

So, there are three things that are often wrong: 1) a false assumption that you can get the future you want, 2) it’s poorly articulated and 3) it’s poorly executed

NB: Particularly if it involves IT?

Absolutely! Take customer experience: it’s easy to say: “we’re going to give our customers a compelling digital experience”, but you have to consider your legacy infrastructure. It doesn’t mean to say you can’t start doing it but it’s more of a directional thing than an end state – you need to be cognisant of the limitations. A number of digital transformations have started but then failed. People underestimate the money and effort required to re-platform.

NB: And often the solution is just to put more and more effort into building that platform…

DT: It’s a false assumption that organisations are capable of delivering digital. One Insurance CEO we spoke to realised that their IT capabilities were wrong so went externally (to Silicon Roundabout – London’s digital agency hub) and brought it in. Another CEO in a different sector bought a pureplay digital company – then had the challenge not to destroy its successful culture.

NB: Is there an optimum size or shape where it’s easier to articulate the default and desired futures? Some businesses are complicated so there will be lots of different trajectories?

DT: It’s a combination of size, complexity and legacy thinking. The optimum size is where it’s perceivable by the CEO – i.e. it can be retained it in the head all at the same time. For example, a mobile digital bank is fairly straightforward, but for a global bank with many lines of business in different geographies, you can’t easily do that. The divisions can but then the challenge is to align the different trajectories.

What I see is the CEO delegating accountability to the divisions and this translates into individual strategies but with no overarching trajectory or synergies. So, a new group CEO can say the focus is on delivering end to end digital CX, but legacy thinking leads to doing things in the same way. When the overarching strategic intent is translated into the divisions, something gets lost along the way, for example, how does the US division align with international? Executives do different things according to their accountabilities and incentives. Silo organisations are, in themselves, a powerful navigating force that keeps the organisation on a certain trajectory.

NB: Silos will always exist though and – as articulated in your book and through our own experience – operating principles can be a powerful tool to help link across the silos.

Absolutely right – operating principles are a powerful way of making strategy meaningful to those people who were not engaged in developing the strategy. When we articulate principles we’re effectively saying do it this way not that way – a principle always implies a conscious choice.

Many organisations confuse principles and policies – but if you articulate principles there are implications, and this is what needs to be managed. You can’t just declare them, you have to manage the implications (which in turn will shape your policies and procedures).

You can then translate operating principles into design principles for different facets of the organisation, for example IT systems, processes and organisational structure.  These in turn will have implications that need to be managed. It requires joined-up thinking, which actually is quite rare.

NB: So you’re making conscious choices about the culture you want to create – but I didn’t spot the word ‘culture’ anywhere in the book. Was this a conscious choice?

DT: Yes, we intended deliberately not to use it and chose instead to focus on ‘organisational capabilities’. In addition, I don’t think you’ll spot the word vision in there either – or mission.

NB: These are all terms that are well-used, and that people understand, but I’ve started to use “purpose” as this has a greater simplicity. This also connects to your personal purpose as you state at the end of the book.

I like the example of purpose. We didn’t use the language of vision or mission as they are based on a false assumption: it assumes we live in a static world. And it assumes that we can define a change programme to take us to our vision. But we live in a volatile and uncertain world, and by the time you get to your vision, you find you need to be somewhere else because the context has changed.

What we say in the book is that the future exists but it’s not evenly distributed. You have to be cognisant of the exogenous navigating forces that are continually changing your context and the strategic trajectories you could pursue.

NB: You did pick up on one well-used term: Operating Model – but in my experience it’s used differently and less powerfully that you intend.

You’re absolutely right: it’s a powerful idea that has been hijacked and corrupted. It has to be consciously designed and it’s multifaceted (processes, IT, organisation, roles and culture). Very often it looks like the organisation has been designed by accident!

NB: The other powerful idea is that of a “strategic signature” which I would simplify as “taking all the things that we’re doing and varying them”

DT: About three years ago we were working with company and the CEO and Board were having difficulty becoming aligned around the strategy. We helped them identified their different strategic axes – which represent their sources of value – and then facilitated a process where they decided if they were going to introduce new strategic axes or drop some existing ones.  They then decided where they where are you going to operate on each strategic axis.

And the resulting “signature” is unique, even between different players in the same industry, and when you identify current and future signatures this leads to a meaningful conversation about where you can “increase the volume” on some axes and turn it down on others. It’s a very simple tool that creates a meaningful dialogue and alignment of understanding.

NB: Can you cite organisations that have embraced this approach wholeheartedly?

It’s difficult to find one that’s done everything in the book and also some of our client examples are confidential, so we can’t quote them directly. What we’ve done is to cite organisations that are in the public domain who show evidence of doing, or have done, what we’re talking about – even if they don’t know it.

For example, that’s why we used Blockbuster, it’s well cited by anyone who can remember them. Nokia also follows the thinking exactly. And with GE, we talk about their strategic focus shifting to industrial products and the industrial internet and moving away from financial services. However, the cost of changing their trajectory is proving to be higher than they would have liked due to liabilities they retained when the divested their insurance businesses.

NB: What’s your advice to someone who’s not a CEO – how can they get started?

DT: Start by using the language.  I’ll give you an example: my son, who works in a large multinational organisation has been using the language of default future for some time and about a year ago he was in a meeting with his boss’s boss and other some senior people when his boss’s boss started to use the terms default future and trajectory to describe their strategy.  It’s now becoming more commonly used across the organisation. More recently he’s introduced the language of operating principles, so I would say just start using those ideas in conversations in your business.

More information on David and Peter’s book Beyond Default can be found at www.beyond-default.com

NickB

Putting compassion into customer experience

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, this is a story about service design that’s anything but customer-centric.

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

Because December happens to be a month with 5 weeks in it, anyone with an income paid weekly may go temporarily go over the threshold for paying the benefit. The Department of Work and Pensions helpfully informs you that this might happen and gives you instructions on what to do.

So, what’s the problem? Anyone with a grip on budgeting should be able to cope, yes?

Well it all depends on what your perspective is.

If you’re designing a service from a provider perspective, you tend to have an idealised view of how customers or service users might behave. In this case the ‘ideal customer’ will be a sensible, cool-headed type who can ‘do the math’ in order to make sure that a four or five weekly pay packets spread out nicely over a month. That sounds like a service designed by someone comfortably on a monthly salary, not by someone in a ‘hard-working family’ who’s ‘just about managing’ – take your pick from the pack of vacuous political clichés.

In fact, Universal Credit is a service that appears to be designed around a monthly income model. The problem is that, if you’re in a job that’s low paid, you’re likely to be weekly. And possibly with a highly variable pay packet if you’re enjoying the exciting world of zero hours contracts. The outcome you want is some degree of financial stability.

Genuinely customer-centric design would match benefit payment to weekly income, meaning that the claimant could have a reliable view of their income every week. (In a world where online payments are er, universal, this seems entirely appropriate.)

Genuinely customer-centric design would also not make people wait six weeks before getting paid or require them to wait up to 5 minutes to talk to a human being.

Genuinely customer-centric design wouldn’t have the Children’s Commissioner saying that the impact of universal credit had not been tested on families with children.

The intention of Universal Credit – a simplified benefit system that avoids people being better off not working than working – is fine. The implementation, however, seems to ignore the needs of those who it’s intended to benefit.

When you design a service, you need a profound understanding of how real customers behave and what their desired outcomes might be.

There’s another word for this quality: compassion.