The newsreader Justin Webb told an amusing story on BBC Radio 4 recently (starts 5 minutes in). He had apparently been brought up by his mother to believe that if you were to ask for anything in The Ritz in a suitably polite manner then – whether you were a guest or not – they would do it for you. One evening he was on his way to a corporate function, suitably smartly dressed, when he realised his top shirt button had come off. Not wishing to arrive looking unkempt he realised he was near the hotel and so went in and asked if it would be possible to replace the missing button. The hotel staff duly obliged and he was ushered into a side room where the shirt was swiftly restored to its former neatness.
Another day, another trip to my doctor for a blood test… yep, getting old requires taking my aging body in for maintenance with what seems like increasing frequency. But my day was brightened by an excellent interaction with the practice nurse extracting another armful. Here’s what made it great:
A cheerful greeting.
She acknowledged that this was the second test in a few days.
We had a conversation about singing with choirs and performing on stage – two of my favourite topics.
Let’s unpack this because although the whole thing took less than 5 minutes and seems quite inconsequential, it carries important messages about great customer experience.
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.
“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?
