Customer Innovation

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

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

Whose clock are you on?

Customer journey designs ignore the customer clock at their peril

Unless you’re afflicted by a particular neurosis you probably don’t spend every minute of the day counting down the time to your demise and wondering how you’re going to spend it. Yet time-efficiency and utilisation are beloved of management consultants, personal growth coaches, line managers and productivity experts the world over.

But often we’re using the wrong clock.

In the last week I’ve had two very personal examples of whose clock I’m on. Regular readers will know I’ve been a customer of St George’s Hospital in south-west London for more times than I would prefer to have been this year. Most of the time I’ve had some great experiences – under the circumstances – but my most recent visit caused me to reflect, not on mortality as much as time-efficiency.

Oh doctor, I’m in trouble

Following a routine day surgery procedure to correct a cardiac arrhythmia problem, I awoke in the middle of the night a few days later with a severe pain in my chest. Not, I was glad to notice, anywhere near my heart, but causing me some breathing difficulties. Following a few hours snatched sleep I embarked on a customer journey that went something like this:

08:00 Book same-day GP appointment online

09:15 GP appointment

10:00 Ambulance to hospital

10:20 Accident and emergency department – blood tests and electrocardiograms

11:50 Chest x-ray

12:05 moved to acute medicine unit

14:00 First meeting with doctor

15:30 Meeting with doctor and consultant – diagnosis and treatment

16:00 More tests

17:15 Medication delivered by pharmacist

18:00 Travel home

18:45 In my sick-bed!

A journey that lasted over 10 hours to diagnose and commence treatment of what appears to be a lung infection, most likely picked up on my first visit.

Every touch point in the journey was excellent – there were many others not documented that were also very good – but there was a lot of time in between them.

Always crashing in the same car?

Experience number two: I’m lying in bed the following afternoon when my wife phones to tell me she’s damaged the car – and two others – in a car park about two miles from our house and it can’t be driven. Another – longer – customer journey kicks off:

Friday

14:30 My wife calls our insurers and speaks to a very helpful and reassuring person on the other end of the phone at Admiral

15:15 My wife returns home – a lift from one of the other drivers, proving that the world is full of kind people, even if you scrape their cars

16:15 Call from recovery firm to confirm details for picking up the car

16:40 Call from recovery driver to ask where the car key is

16:50 Taxi to car with key

Saturday

08:30 I call the repair workshop – would it be possible to pick up a courtesy car? Apparently, the car hadn’t yet been delivered by the recovery firm and would most likely be on Monday and a courtesy car couldn’t be made available until the damage had been assessed.

Monday

14:00 I call the workshop again.

“Yes, the car was delivered about 40 minutes ago so they’re doing the assessment”

“So, can I come over and pick up a courtesy car?”

“It takes about 48 hours to submit the assessment and have it approved, then we can let you have a courtesy car.”

14:15 I call the insurers to make the point that this is stretching the definition of courtesy a little bit but also, since I’m an accommodating sort of person, to say that we can manage without a car until Wednesday morning so if they could compress the 48 hours that would help. They call the garage who agree to provide the estimate by Tuesday p.m. All happy(ish) – for now.

Clocking off

There are two clocks in operation in my examples: a customer clock, representing my preferred time for the journey and a supplier clock representing when I’m not in control of the time the journey takes. In my healthcare journey, once I had made my booking and arrived at the doctor’s surgery I had pretty much ceded control to the various suppliers. In my car insurance example, we were in control of some elements (getting the key back to the car) but the overall – and rather unsatisfactory – timing of at least 4 days to become mobile again is predominantly dictated by the other actors in the process.

Any customer of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is accustomed to delays: in my case I had written off the day (and a few following it as it turned out) so although the waiting was tedious, I was aware that there were other higher priority cases using the resources. (This, incidentally, is one of the characteristics of a service owned by the public: you feel a bit of “we’re all in this together” and make allowances.)

Customers of insurance companies could, however, get a much better service. I have made a note of the difference between a hire care (provided by the insurer and available immediately on some policies) and a courtesy car (provided by the repairer and only after establishing that the car isn’t a write-off). Next time around I will pay more attention to this fine detail when selecting an insurer.

Takt and discretion

The idea of a customer clock isn’t a new one. In Lean manufacturing approaches the idea of “takt time” – literally the “beat” of the customers’ demands for products – is a key one in establishing how a manufacturer’s production line should be optimised. This works if you have customers with reasonably predictable patterns of behaviour like, say, an insurance company, less so if you’re a busy general hospital with a vast range of customers and conditions to service as well as specialised resources responding to multiple demands.

The key thing for suppliers is that, whilst they may have their own timings for the stages in their customer journeys, optimising these may end up sub-optimal for the customer. The tendency is to optimise the delivery of a service, but customers want the delivery of outcomes. In my hospital journey my desired outcome was wellness, or at least a signpost towards it, and whilst the time spent was longer than it could have been (in a world with less demand) it was delivered.

In my insurance example the outcome is “get me mobile again!” and the time taken to deliver it is at least 4 days longer than it could have been. I’ll be making a mental note to check out Direct Line when renewal comes around as their positioning shows them as problem solvers not just insurers.

The closer you can get to understanding the customer’s clock as well as your own, the more likely you are to attract and retain customers.

Footnote:

Six days after the ambulance episode I headed back to the hospital for a check up and was delighted to get through initial checks, x-ray and consultation with the doctor in less than 45 minutes. I barely had time to draw breath – now much easier – between appointments, so proof that when all goes according to plan, the NHS can approach customer time.

NickB

Making purpose part of customer experience

One retailer’s principled stand shows an intrinsic understanding of customer outcomes

Aren’t orang-utans cute? Would you like one in your home? Well, now you can if you shop at Iceland, who, on the back of their recent thwarted TV campaign are offering cuddly monkeys for a mere £5 with the profits going to an animal rescue charity

Frozen out

UK food retailer Iceland is cashing in on what must be the most successful TV advertising campaign to have not actually screened on TV. UK readers will almost certainly be aware that Iceland wanted to screen an advert featuring a cute animated orang-utan to emphasise its commitment to removing palm oil from all its own-brand products. (The cute critters’ habitats are under threat from deforestation in the interests of satisfying our appetite for everything from shower gel to instant noodles – the lipid gets into 50% of supermarket products apparently.) Clearcast, the UK’s advertising clearance watchdog, deemed the advert could not be screened as it contravened the code on political advertising. Possibly the animation being originally made by environmental campaigners Greenpeace tipped the balance against Iceland. Possibly it was just an overload of cute.

Anyway, the outcry generated by the non-screening of the advert – and the resultant viral sharing of the YouTube version has not done the retailer too much harm in the run-up to Christmas. And an online petition to reverse the decision has attracted a million signatures. Clearly they have tapped into something.

So, is this a cynical cash-in or does it point to something more important?

It’s clear that this is a perfect confluence of a company acting with integrity and, moreover, a clear purpose and, mischievously or not, creating a media storm around their actions.

A look at Iceland’s website puts their concerns front and centre, making them distinct from other retailers whose efforts in environmentally-sensitive efforts have been sporadic at best (just count the number of foods in your shopping bag wrapped in single-use plastic for example). It’s a bold, innovative move, but apes don’t do much shopping so what has this to do with customers and customer experience?

Everything. But perhaps not the way you might think.

Virtue signalling

I’m not going to use this article to argue the pros and cons of environmentalism or global warming, although it does seem a bit irresponsible to be gobbling up rainforest at the rate of 146 football pitches a day – in Indonesia alone – just so we can shower in comfort or enjoy a pot noodle (this may be a contradiction in terms). What interests me though is something that Colin Shaw in a recent LinkedIn article made me realise: status is a vital part of understanding customer outcomes.

What I call the “status outcome” is more easily associated with luxury goods – Colin’s example is a Mont Blanc pen – where the branding is usually a luxury one and buying such a brand says something about the purchaser.

But it made me realise that the status outcome is a strong motivator for a lot of customer behaviour even if you profess to be largely uninterested in the luxury goods market. In the case of environmental issues such as the ones championed by Iceland, if I decide to shop there or buy one of their cuddly toys I am signalling to the other members of my “tribe” (these behaviours are all built into our genes) that I care about issues such as saving the planet and this statement may confer on me a certain status.

This behaviour is dismissively referred to by some as “virtue signalling” – as if those making the accusation have never done something similar or would prefer vice-or-iniquity-signalling as somehow more worthy – but I think that, from a customer experience point of view, understanding virtue signalling/status outcomes is a vital component: if the experience of my product or brand reinforces the customer’s status and aligns with my corporate purpose then this is a virtuous circle that companies would do well to identify and maximise.

Y=y

Iceland would no doubt think the above is so much blather – their wonderfully candid website has a cruel but entirely fair pop at management consultants – but I stand by my analysis. It’s also part of a trend towards purpose-driven marketing: something that captures customers’ hearts as well as their wallets and extends way beyond the product.

I have a simple equation that I use to describe this:

Y=y

What I mean by this is that if there is a degree of equivalence between Y, which is your company’s “why” – its purpose beyond generating a profit – and y, which is your customer’s “why” – something they care passionately about, then – bingo! – you have attracted a community of customers who share something bigger than a love of frozen food or whatever.

Purpose can also be a great motivator for staff, which in turn drives better customer experience, so I’m surprised more companies don’t devote more time and effort to identifying their purpose. If you’re in that category you know what to do…

Go ape.

NickB

Are you making CX too much of a hard sell?

Make it easy for your stakeholders and your job will become easier too

Selling sand to Saudis? Carrying coals to Newcastle? Or just trying to convince your senior stakeholders to focus the attentions of the company on the people who pay their salaries – the customers – and providing a much better experience for them?

Sometimes being in customer experience (CX) feels like a hard sell, but it doesn’t need to be that way.

Why so hard?

It’s one thing to persuade the board of the advantages of investing in a ritzy new system to streamline accounting, raise productivity in the back office or make you compliant with the latest regulatory requirement. These are all things that have an immediately attractive requirement where the benefits – cost saving, keeping directors out of jail and so forth – don’t require a massive feat of the imagination to get a handle on.

And they don’t require anyone to change.

That’s the problem with customer experience, particularly if you want to get significant benefits out of it. It requires a change in behaviour at the top level of the organisation as much as it does at the front line: executives who’ve been happily building a career in their organisational silos will suddenly need to work cross-functionally to find out how to identify customers’ real needs (outcomes) and then provide excellent experiences with streamlined processes to deliver them.

That’s not something people take to naturally so making the case for customer-centricity can be hard.

But sometimes we make things too hard for ourselves.

Changes

I’ve had a couple of conversations in the last few days that changed my views on how we present customer-centricity at board level.

I delivered a webinar on Bringing Customer Experience into the Boardroom for InTouch Networks to a couple of hundred aspiring consultants and non-executive directors. There were some really interesting questions at the end, including one from someone who asked how I would deal with the sensitivities of boardrooms around outcome-focused, trajectory-driven ways of working (two topics I had introduced in the session)? A great question and I was reminded of hard times I had had earlier in my career when I attempted to convince senior stakeholders of the “rightness” of my position without taking their sensitivities into consideration. It’s easy to fall into the trap with anything customer-related that it must self-evidently be a good thing to do because it benefits the customer. Senior executives won’t see it that way though because they haven’t been through the same arguments that you have to get to your point of view – and often you don’t have time to take them through the same learning process that you went on, so the simplistic “moral” argument is one you fall back on.

I found a similar parallel when talking to Danny Witter, co-founder of Work for Good. Work for Good encourages businesses to make donations to charities by connecting businesses with charities on their website. Only 2% of charitable donations are made by companies so there’s an opportunity to increase that level massively. But, like customer-centricity, it’s not an easy sell – despite being a self-evidently good thing to do.

Take it easy

What struck me, talking to Danny, is that Work for Good has done a number of things that CX leads can learn from. I’ve covered some of the return on investment considerations that CX involves elsewhere but this conversation yielded some additional insights. Here’s what Work for Good do that helps make the leap into the world of philanthropy more appealing for hard-nosed business leaders:

  • Provide advice
    The Work for Good site is a great source of advice and information for businesses considering introducing charitable giving into their commercial model. There are also tools to help you get employees on board as well.
  • Reduce legal risks
    One thing I learnt about giving from my conversation with Danny is that there’s a legal requirement for businesses to set up something called a commercial participation agreement (CPA) if they encourage the purchase of goods or services on the basis that some of the proceeds will go to charity, or that a donation will be made. Doing this can make business giving quite a cumbersome administrative task by Work for Good take away the hassle: if you sign up for the service that’s done for you.
  • Reduce admin hassle
    As you might expect from a web-based business you can be up and running in a few clicks – and it’s easy for charities to register with the site as well.
  • Play to self-interest
    Some people might argue that charitable giving should be done anonymously – certainly traditional British attitudes favour discretion over publicly promoting one’s generosity – and this might well apply to personal donations. For commercial giving Work for Good take the opposite view and emphasises the marketing and branding benefits of having their paperclip logo and other information displayed on your website.

Papa, don’t preach

In short, Work for Good – and my thoughts about the question asked on my webinar – provide some useful lessons for those tasked with selling CX to seniors. If that’s your challenge, try asking yourself the following questions:

  • Am I automatically assuming I am “right”?
    Does your zeal for improving CX mean you’re in danger of steamrollering objections or assuming that your stakeholders just lack your unique insight into the obvious benefits of CX? Are you preaching to the unconverted rather than listening to what they want?
  • Am I helping people understand?
    There’s no short cut for educating the board, but don’t send them links to a CX webinar (not even mine) hoping they’ll have the time to educate themselves. Instead, take the time to gather stories of current customers and why they’re not happy (tip: complaints are a goldmine for this).
  • Have I reduced or eliminated risks?
    Have you adequately considered any compliance of regulatory risks in what you’re proposing – particularly if greater front-line empowerment is part of the proposal – and have you taken steps to minimise this.
  • Have I reduced hassle?
    What’s the easiest part of your proposal that you could set up as a pilot or proof of concept implementation?
  • How does the proposed change play to stakeholders’ self-interest?
    Possibly the hardest question to answer – and one that we’ll explore further in future papers – but how can moving to a customer-centric culture with the attendant breaking down of barriers and perceived threats to personal empires be turned into something that furthers the company’s objectives?

Being “good” or being right isn’t enough. Thinking – like the best sales people do – about what’s in the customer or client’s interests is the way to succeed.

NickB

Why bother with customer journey mapping?

It’s a powerful technique, but only under certain conditions

Be honest now: if I were to ask you where your customer journey maps are kept, could you – hand on heart – tell me exactly where they are on your company’s intranet?

You can? Great! Now, can you tell me the last time they were used, in anger, to design or improve something that had a direct impact on your business’s bottom line?

If your answer is sometime within the last three months or so, then you can probably skip this article (or go to the comments and let everyone know what a bang-up job you’re doing). If you’re hesitating a little, then read on: I’m going to tell you how this powerful technique can really add value, not just to the customer experience but to the bottom line.

Travelling hopefully

Customer journey mapping is one of those things that you immediately associate with the work of the customer experience (CX) function, along with customer satisfaction/NPS reports, focus groups and surveys and all the competences such a department should possess.

In summary, a customer journey map lays out the elements of the customer journey which, as survey firm SurveyMonkey reminds us, is:

“the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with your company and brand. Instead of looking at just a part of a transaction or experience, the customer journey documents the full experience of being a customer.”

And this, to me, encapsulates the problem with journey mapping: it’s an all-encompassing approach, but the positioning of customer experience within a lot of businesses doesn’t always enable such an approach to be taken.

When CX is relegated to a department then customer journey mapping will be the technique used by that department. Problem is, other departments with their own commendable desire to improve what they do will adopt a different technique – lean six sigma or process re-engineering for example – and the goal of a comprehensive approach becomes that much harder to achieve.

The problem is that customer journeys are seen as existing only on the customer-facing parts of the organisation, with all the process/back-office elements being someone else’s problem.

This is a big mistake.

When you think about it, the things that go wrong in a customer’s experience are a result of disconnects between front and back office. Simple example: if you order something in a restaurant and it turns up as a cold, congealed mess then chances are there’s a problem in the kitchen’s order handling and communication process, not with the front-of-house staff and the visible parts of the journey. Your “end-to-end customer journey” is definitely affected though.

On a road to nowhere?

But where is this journey heading? The definition quoted above is wider than many organisations use in practice: it’s easier to bite off a more transactional journey. In my restaurant example the transactional journey – where my desired customer outcome might “feed me satisfactorily” is OK in a fast food outlet, but in a more up-market establishment it is more likely to be “provide me with a great evening out/relaxed lunch with friends” or something similar.

In the latter example, the journey requires many elements to be combined, some of which may be out of the restaurant’s direct control e.g. travel to and from the restaurant but will still have an impact on the customer outcome.

The key thing in understanding the journey – whether it’s the delivery of a five-star meal or a four-wheel drive car – is that all the elements in the journey need to be represented when any improvement work is done.

The route to better mapping

This cross-functional view is one of the key elements of any customer-centric change endeavour and therefore is needed to make journey mapping a success. There are some other success factors that you also need to adopt to avoid it becoming a redundant exercise in creating wallpaper for the customer experience department’s offices.

1. Get meaningful input

It follows from the above point that most important thing that you can do in starting a journey mapping exercise is to get input from all elements in the journey – front and back office – but for that to be meaningful there has to be a shared understanding and commitment that the way the current journey works is sub-optimal and that in redesigning it, some of the unnecessary elements, process bottlenecks and so on, will become redundant.

2. Drive from customer outcomes

One of the main dangers in journey mapping is that it links customer touch points and then improves those touch points in the hope that they turn into “magic moments”. This is like putting lipstick on a pig – it may be more attractive but it’s still a pig – if the underlying processes don’t get improved as well. The best way to focus the cross-functional effort required to drive this improvement is to have a clear sense of customer outcomes. It’s essential to do this work first, otherwise you will be designing the journey based on assumptions rather than real insight into customer needs.

Once you have a clear view of customer outcomes, the journey design question should be “what’s the best way we can deliver the customer’s desired outcome” which produces a much more radical approach to processes. (One good example of this is the UK car insurance firm Direct Line who design their customer’s journeys around their outcome of getting to their destination if the customer’s car is involved in an accident, not around having an efficient claims handling process.)

Outcomes also drive the digitisation of the customer journey, not by assuming that digital technology will be the cost-saving panacea (usually by the lazy option of pushing effort out to the customer under the guise of self-service) but by looking for the opportunities to rethink the journey with digital as an enabler.

3. Recognise that journeys and processes are the same thing

If the customer journey is seen as something that exists on the surface of a process, it won’t be designed in an all-encompassing way.

One way of thinking about it is to consider the underlying back-office process as having customers – this way of thinking has been around in quality improvement thinking for many years – and, yes, those customers have feelings too, so the emotional aspect of journey design is important here as well.

4. Use a common technique

This is so obvious it shouldn’t need saying but I witnessed one large organisation that managed to have two different approaches to journey mapping running in the same division – a classic symptom of an organisation where customer experience is relegated to a function rather than being part of a common culture.

I don’t have a favourite technique – whether you use brown paper and post-it notes or the latest process mapping tools the key thing is that everyone should have a common language for describing the journey.

5. Make sure you link mapping to the drivers of RoI

I’ve described how customer experience can overcome the perception that it’s a nice-to-have by linking improvements to the benefits that drive a real return on investment (RoI). I’d go even further to say that if your journey maps don’t flush out real opportunities to eliminate wasted cost and drive up revenue you’re doing them wrong and they’re in danger of becoming an overhead your organisation doesn’t need.

6. Embed in a culture of continuous improvement

“Continuous improvement” is one of those dull, unsexy terms for what is the core competence of all successful businesses. You can term it “cultivating a relentless discomfort with the status quo” or “waging war on mediocrity” if you like but the fact is that once you’ve redesigned your customer journey that’s the start not the beginning. Making sure you capture metrics on performance goes hand in hand with this and enabling people in the organisation to make improvements is essential – and brings the added benefit of greater employee engagement.

So, answering my question at the beginning, if your maps are gathering dust somewhere (OK that doesn’t literally apply if they’re on the intranet) checking back against the above conditions might help you make them relevant and a major factor in your journey towards customer-centricity.

 

NickB

What to do if your customer’s a jerk

Zero tolerance is the only option

I’ve focused recently on the toxic effect that people who behave badly at work have on overall morale and performance. The behaviour of these jerks or assholes should be dealt with to minimise its effect on their immediate colleagues and the longer-term impact on employee engagement.

But this week a distressing news story made me realise that whilst jerks can exist anywhere in the workplace, they can also be present on the customer side.

On a flight from Barcelona to London Stansted on Friday, a white man was filmed shouting at a black woman to get her to move seats (he has a reserved one apparently) while the passengers were boarding the plane. The woman is disabled so can’t move quickly but Mr Jerk seems oblivious to this and seems to think it’s OK to heap a volley of racist abuse at the woman. I’m not going to dignify his appalling behaviour by quoting it here, but you can check it on YouTube (warning: contains offensive language).

What’s just as shocking as his behaviour is the response of the Ryanair crew. They do intervene to get him to calm down – although the action of the passenger in the seat behind is more proactive – but frankly that’s not good enough: he should have been taken off the flight. In fact, towards the end of the video they appear to be more interested in him than the abused woman.

But let’s not blame the crew: they’re under a lot of pressure to get flights off the ground – like any low-cost operator they depend on the schedule and that will have driven their behaviour. The downside is that not only is the whole flight stuck with Toxic Racist for the whole journey, but Ryanair’s reputation takes another knock.

Too hard

At NextTen we try very hard to love Ryanair: they prove our point that if you have a clear focus on customer outcomes (low cost holidays) then you don’t need magic moments or even a particularly friendly approach to your customers to have a successful business model. But they’re clearly driving this model too hard: strikes by staff have dented profits and it looks like they may be having to cut fares too much to keep customers.

Ryanair have reported the incident to Essex police, although this is definitely too little, too late. With the investigation requiring cooperation with Spanish police it’s possible no prosecution will be made.

The customer is not always right

Sadly, customers behaving badly are a constant for any business and transport is one of the areas where people can find themselves under stress and staff can be on the receiving end of complaints about late running, overcrowding or any of the things likely to affect the business of getting from A to B. But sometimes it’s more subtle: a few years ago I was told a story by one central London bank branch I was visiting about a local business owner who thought it was quite OK to park up on the double yellow line outside while he deposited money. He expected staff to keep an eye out for any traffic wardens and woe betide them if he got a ticket! To me this was quite unacceptable behaviour but as he was a good customer it was tolerated.

These extreme examples show the extent to which companies have a genuine customer focus that is driven by respectful treatment of everybody, customers and employees alike. In the case of the bank, the staff should have felt that if they challenged the customer about his selfish behaviour they would have been backed up by management. In the case of Ryanair, we can infer that other priorities were at play and/or staff might have not felt they would be backed up by management.

Jerk-proofing

Companies should do more to make it clear what customer behaviour they consider to be unacceptable. Of course, most companies – particularly in high-stress areas like transport, healthcare and public services – do, rightly, exhibit the “abuse of our staff will not be tolerated” warnings but more subtle examples need guidance and policies. And staff need to be supported in exercising judgment about action to take when it happens.

But when your customer’s being a racist jerk, don’t think twice, get rid of them. Zero tolerance is the only way to go.

NickB

Can customers win the fight against global warming?

Responsible use of data can help

If there’s one thing that gets me going it’s being told I should change my behaviour in order to affect something of global significance. Don’t get me wrong, I recycle religiously, drive a small car and don’t eat a lot of meat but nevertheless my inner libertarian gets worked up when I hear that we should all “do our bit” to combat global warming by making lifestyle choices.

If only it were that simple.

The recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is as welcome as it is disturbing. I may not be around when a global temperature rise of 2% causes irreversible damage to the planet, but I’d like to think it could be averted or the effects lessened by limiting the rise to 1.5% as the report recommends.

But we won’t get there by suddenly converting to veganism: concerted effort is required at an international level to reduce CO2 emissions as well as shifting the demand towards goods that have a lower impact.

Customers to the rescue

This isn’t a political publication so I’m not going to say anything about the willful ignorance of some administrations with regard to climate change and whether humans are the cause. Let’s assume that if you’ve got this far you think we could have something to do with it and leave it at that.

This is a customer experience piece though, so what can customers do, and how does customer experience figure in it?

I was heartened to read a piece in Marketing Week that revealed that grocery behemoth Tesco is using marketing data from its loyalty scheme to encourage people to eat more healthily. This is an important issue: obesity is on the rise and the consequences for healthcare – and the economic impacts – are significant. The various initiatives Tesco is undertaking – removing the sweet aisle from the checkout, handing our pieces of fruit to children – should help to nudge their customers towards a healthier choice.

Image: newsworks.org.uk

I particularly like their “helpful little swaps” initiative which compares the prices of healthier – and cheaper – alternatives to a customer’s bill. Anything that helps people take more control over their health seems like a good thing to me, even if – to be cynical for a moment – you suspect that the alternatives might make better economic sense for Tesco as well.

Again, this is data driven, as it allowed Tesco to see what worked and what didn’t and whether their customers understood what “healthy” meant in terms of their shopping basket. They could then adjust the mix of promotions accordingly. They have now partnered with TV chef Jamie Oliver, a noted campaigner against unhealthy food to develop exclusive recipe content.

Imagine there’s no future

What’s all this go to do with global warming? We may all be eating healthily but that matters not one jot if the earth is scorching beneath our feet. Exactly! We may hear the exhortations to eat healthily and act more sustainably but – in my view – that’s not enough to make a sufficiently large number of people act differently to significantly shift the dial on health measure or our carbon footprint. (Also, actions to improve personal health have a visible payback: if I eat well I generally look and feel better, so public health campaigns can have some effect. Combating global warming is too easily seen as someone else’s problem: it won’t affect me until it’s too late.)

It strikes me that persuading retailers – possibly working in some form of cooperative alliance – to act to promote goods with a lower carbon footprint would have a bigger impact than trying to dictate to the population at large. Tesco’s use of customer data shows how you can fine tune this type of campaign and use it to commercial advantage.

Enlightened commercial self-interest may just be the best way to keep the planet safe for the next generation.

 

NickB

RoI from CX: it’s (not) the numbers, stupid!

The process by which you get them is just as important

Are you frustrated at the lack of attention from senior management for your customer experience improvement programmes? Do you seethe with jealousy when other departments get investments to build a shiny new system and you can’t get enough people to analyse complaints data? Are you fed up with CX being seen as “intangible” or “nice to have”?

These are the messages we get all the time from our clients and contacts – and we can empathise with that because the paradox is that having a genuine customer focus offers massive benefits, but so few companies seem to be able to capitalise on it.

What’s going on?

To adapt a phrase associated with former US President Bill Clinton: it’s the numbers, stupid! Put simply, if you can’t get your CX investments to demonstrate an impact on the bottom line in the way that other investments do, you’ll be stuck in the “nice to have” category.

Problem is, if getting return on investment (RoI) numbers for CX were that simple, everyone would be doing it. But they’re not, for the simple but frustrating reason that CX does operate in the world of intangibles.

RoI for dummies

Throughout my career I’ve had to develop business cases for various things from marketing programmes to channel strategies and lean sigma projects. I frequently need to do something similar in my non-work life – two recent examples include:

  • Buying a new acoustic bass guitar to save my back from lugging an amplifier to music group practice.
  • Persuading my in-laws to invest in a new mattress so that we can visit them without subsequently needing physiotherapy to overcome the effects of a night in their somewhat uncomfortable spare bed.

These business cases are straightforward: there’s a cost (in the case of the bass, quite low) and a benefit – both relating to reduced back pain in these examples so that’s a very tangible outcome.

It’s definitely at the “RoI for dummies” level.

But we’re dealing with something a little bit harder – I’m not talking about mattresses now – with customer experience.

Some benefits are, or should be, straightforward to quantify. Let’s say we want to put more of the customer journey online: the cost saving from having fewer people in stores or call centres will be easy to calculate and match against the investment required. If we design the online system right then we won’t see a dip in satisfaction scores either, and it might be easier to up-sell or cross-sell related products through the customer’s journey, so we can measure a benefit from increased revenue per customer as well.

But what if we want to invest in front-line staff capability through training or making more team leader time available for coaching? Unless your training is specifically to do the job faster (cost saving) or to up-sell or cross-sell (increasing revenue), then you are likely to be basing your case on improvements to customer satisfaction or advocacy – measurable, yes, but tangible, no.

RoI for humans

To get from intangible fluff to dollars and cents benefits, you need to recognise that business cases are a human process. In other words, it’s rarely a hard number, mechanical process of cause-and-effect. This doesn’t let CX off the hook but if means that rather than being just the numbers, it’s the process by which you get them that’s important.

So, is there a definitive process for doing this?

Short answer: no.

The process you use to establish the link between intangibles and measurable benefits will need to fit within the culture of your organisation – anything different will most likely be rejected – but it should have the following elements:

Agreement on purpose and priorities

Organisations that have a clear purpose – their “why” – find it much easier to set priorities. As Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez points out in a paper for HBR, organisations should define a hierarchy of purpose, where the organisation’s purpose or strategic vision cascades into a set of priorities – the things that are the most important over the next two to five years. Clarity on these enables different projects to be scored against these priorities.

Agreement needs to be genuinely cross-functional as well, grounded in a mature discussion about the strategy and owned by all areas.

Discussion of the forces affecting the business in future

The context within which the organisation sits has a direct impact on priorities. For example, a financial services company may see its purpose as enriching the lives of its current and future customers, but if the sector that they are operating in is being threatened by low-cost competitors, they may see the priorities for the next two years as lowering their cost base to compete or they may wish to differentiate themselves on other factors such as service.

If the organisation isn’t clear on these two strategic elements then projects will be prioritised on the basis of political influence, existing biases and so on. A CX improvement project may get the green light in such an environment but would most likely be cancelled if a new “pet project” arrived on the scene.

Establish dependency

Benefits management is a proven approach usually applied to technology deployment to establish some rigour around investment decisions. The key tool in this is the benefits dependency network. This links “features” to business drivers via objectives and expected benefits and organisational changes. (There’s a good article on this – again on HBR – which avoids much of the academic jargon that bedevils this area.

In my view, benefits dependency is far too useful to be left to enlightened techies as the key thing is that it involves a facilitated discussion between stakeholders about what’s important. This gets to the essence of the CX RoI problem: the process by which you discuss priorities, investments and predicted results is just as important as the management information you use to track it.

Let’s take my recent guitar purchase as a very simple example. Thinking about my decision, the benefits dependency network that informed it looks like this:

Obviously, a business example would be more complex but the important thing to bear in mind is that in thinking about the link between the simple features of my new guitar, I’m having to think about what’s important to me. In the same way, a discussion about the benefits of CX improvement yield important discussions about what’s important to the business.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t use a benefits dependency network; the important thing is to have the conversation.

Get the proof

The unavoidable truth is that once you have identified the link between improvements in customer experience and business benefits you will need to find evidence that supports the linkage.

This process is made easier if the quality of the conversation around benefits is good. In other words, if you come out of it with a linkage between say, spending more time talking to customers, customer satisfaction and increased sales that’s a working hypothesis that you can then gather data for. Of course, detractors may point to other ways to drive up sales but if the conversation is managed correctly, those “other ways” should be included in the benefits discussion.

A simple excerpt from a benefits dependency network in such a situation might therefore look like this:

In this example both sales training and CX training are agreed to have an impact on increased revenue. If the organisation is happy to invest in both, then the RoI case should include both. Detailed analysis of individual agent performance – satisfaction, time spent, sales achieved – may prove that one investment has more impact than the other.

And that’s the risk: going down this route may mean that you discover that your organisation does favour business outcomes that don’t require further investment in improving CX. Personally, I think that’s unlikely as once you start down the route of an open and honest discussion of what the organisation’s priorities are you’ll find you’re on a level playing field where the benefits can be evaluated alongside other initiatives.

I’ve had many years’ experience of these kind of conversations so if you’d like to discuss how to develop these ideas further in your own organisation then please get in touch with me.