27/09/2018 NickB

When statistics hide the truth about customer complaints

Ofgem’s complaints report shows the problem – and the opportunities

The trouble with being a customer experience-obsessive is that as soon as you hear an item on the news about complaints reports, your carefully-planned day is ruined as you have to follow it up out of curiosity, weird as that may sound. Thus, today, the news that UK’s energy regulator Ofgem had published its review of complaints was pure catnip for me. And as someone committed to helping organisations (NextTen’s not currently working in the energy sector but that doesn’t prevent me from having an interest – and of course we’re open to offers!) I’m interested in what these reports say about the state of complaint handling – the “Cinderella” of customer experience, as I’ve said many times before.

On the naughty step

Although the survey of over 3,000 complainants found that satisfaction with complaint handling had improved by 5% since the last survey in 2016, the proportion of customers who are dissatisfied (57%) remains much higher than those satisfied with how their complaint had been dealt with.

The main contributors to high levels of dissatisfaction were the length of time taken to resolve the issue, not being kept up to date with the progress of the complaint and suppliers not providing complainants with a clear view of how long the resolution will take

Ofgem’s statement gives the impression of a regulator who’s had enough of energy companies’ lackadaisical approach, having put three of the smaller outfits – First Utility, Ovo Energy and Utilita – under compliance investigation and requiring all the others to share their improvement plans. This is admirable, as in other regulated industries the relevant bodies don’t always give the impression of being on the side of great customer experience.

I know from my experience of working in banking, another regulated industry, that mention of any investigation or referral to the FCA is enough to galvanise action, so this will generate some useful action, although there’s a risk that the effort spent in responding to the regulator and justifying action would be better spent on the actual improvement work.

Some of the responses by energy companies – as reported on BBC Radio’s “You and Yours” consumer programme later in the day – were already edging towards the defensive. Utilita said that the report was looking at complaints up to November 2017 and since then it had reduced the number of complaints. Indeed, the overall number of complaints has halved since 2014 so, superficially, it sounds like an industry moving in the right direction.

Lies, damn lies…

Taking a look at Utilita’s data – available on their website – is revealing. Overall, complaints have dropped between Q2 2017 and Q2 2018. But whilst the last quarter shows a drop-off in overall complaints, the numbers resolved at +1 day and after 8 weeks had dropped, suggesting that there’s a rump of really difficult complaints that are tough to resolve.

And that’s where the problem lies both for external observers like me, and insiders. If you can find a statistic that shows – even “proves” – that you’re doing the right thing, you will certainly want to use it. But the old adage “There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies – and statistics” applies here – the statistics you don’t share are the ones that are much more revealing.

Whilst it’s interesting that Utilita’s time to resolve is increasing I’m more interested in the stories that underpin the data. I can’t tell what the specific issues are from the data, but I’d hope that any recurrent and intractable underlying causes were being dealt with.

…and tweets

You and Yours helpfully quoted some social media comments – about energy companies in general it should be said – which I found much more illuminating. Most referred to the difficulty in contacting customer service to complain or to switch or just to talk to a human being. Again, that’s just a non-representative sample to support a news story, but if it were me even one of these complaints would be too many.

And that’s the problem: statistics will tell you that you’re broadly improving, but customer stories will pin-point the pain. And focusing on the really painful experiences will drive fundamental improvements in broken processes that, when fixed, will provide a platform for overall improvements in customer experience.

Balancing act

As a head of customer experience or complaints, you have the challenge of making the case for improvement, so you have to balance powerful anecdotal evidence of dissatisfaction with trend data to make the case for funding customer experience improvements in preference to other important projects. It’s a problem we see all the time at NextTen and over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing ideas on how you can make a robust case for powerful customer experience. It’s far too important to wait for a regulator to kick you into action.

18/09/2018 NickB

Time to junk the satisfaction survey

Why your customer strategy should focus on complaints

I was half listening to the news the other day when I heard a story about a couple who were selling their new-build house at less than they paid for it “because it was sh*t”. Apparently, the poor people had got so fed up with the number of things wrong that they had wearied of their constant complaints to the builders and decided that to put it on the market. Presumably they’d felt that the loss they’d realise on the sale would be less than the stress of continuing to live there.

I can’t find the reference to the story – there’s only so many times you can type four-letter words into Google – so I don’t know who the builders in question were, although they did issue a statement to say that the customers had received compensation and repairs in line with the contract they had signed. Whoever they were though they have missed a massive opportunity. In fact, they should have paid the couple handsomely for taking the time to complain, because

complaints are the best customer feedback you can get.

So wrong, it’s right

Most companies I know invest time and money in finding out what their customers think of them. The problem with this “voice of the customer” approach is that, when applied to all your customers, it just produces an average view – i.e. what keeps most of them satisfied. Even the sainted Net Promoter Score approach frequently fails to ask the net promoters why they are so enthusiastic about the company.

I think you could just junk most customer satisfaction surveys as the surefire way to get meaningful feedback is to make it easy for the customer to provide you with it, positive or negative.

Think about it: customers who love you or who have just had amazing service will want to tell you about it and those who haven’t will also do the same.

“That’s all very well” I hear you say, “but what about the ones who don’t complain and just leave.”

To which my reply is: too bad – you probably didn’t act on the feedback from your complainers earlier – and those middling-dissatisfied customers would be unlikely to respond to your customer-wide survey.

Inconvenient truths

I’ve noticed that organisations generally don’t give as much attention to complaints and negative feedback as they should do, and I think the reasons for this is that there’s a bias – reassuringly it’s a human trait – towards good news. We’re hard-wired to create a story around the way we want things to be rather than how they actually are, or indeed, how they appear to someone else.

Customers who fail to fully appreciate the products and services we’ve spent a massive effort perfecting are an inconvenience, a distraction from the narrative we’re trying to create, even when their lack of appreciation is down to something we’ve failed to deliver.

Our bias, therefore, is towards those customers who fit the norm. Unfortunately, they are not the source of innovation and improvement.

Just about managing

Dealing with customers who don’t fit the norm – i.e. the massively dissatisfied ones – is the domain of complaints management which is a frequently neglected and under-resourced area. The overriding attitude is to get the complaint dealt with as efficiently as possible, making sure the customer isn’t over-compensated along the way. Sure, you need to provide redress and to put things right, but the opportunity is often missed to find out what the customer’s desired outcome was and to do what you could to deliver that outcome, not just the initial product service.

For example, the hapless couple in the new-build house probably wanted something more than a non-leaking roof over their heads (although apparently even this was beyond their builder’s capability), they wanted a home. And whilst this isn’t an unusual outcome, I bet the building firm didn’t have the nous to sit down with their customers and find out what it was about a home that they wanted – their unspoken needs if you like. Finding and delivering against these, rather than ineptly repairing an initial botched job, would have created delighted customers.

Complaints at the core

Building a customer strategy around complaints is the efficient, if counter-intuitive, route to increasing the number of delighted customers. The elements of such a strategy should answer the following questions:

How easy do we make it for customers to provide feedback? (Answer: it should be very easy, and through multiple channels, including social media.)
How do we resource those channels?
How far do we empower front line people to sort out complaints focusing on customer outcomes?
How do we learn from feedback?
How do we use the learning to be able to anticipate and deal with complaints before they happen?
Who is responsible for driving through the improvements that result from root cause analysis?

Focus your strategy on answering these questions and you can drop your customer satisfaction surveys.

22/08/2018 NickB

Ten tell-tale signs that show you’re not that customer-centric

It’s not what you say, it’s what you do (or don’t)

Are you customer-focused, customer-driven or customer-centric? If you’re any of those things that’s probably why you’re reading this, but does the organisation you work for feel the same way?

In our work with CX leads we come across a real tension between what companies say they care about and what they actually do. Very often, the tension is so great that it’s a real disconnect. The result? Wasted effort on customer initiatives that don’t have sufficient momentum and under-realise potential benefits.

So, what can you do about this? It’s best to start with what the organisation does: a good reflection of the environment within which a culture of customer obsession can grow. Here’s my take on the tell-tale signs that will tell you that – unless addressed – getting genuine customer focus to take root will be tough.

1. Customers don’t figure in strategy

This is the obvious one, so let’s get it out of the way first. But before I do, I should say that there is no hard-and-fast rule that says you must have customer focus to have business success. You can build a company that successfully prioritises other things: being faster and/or cheaper than the competition, creating innovative products. And in most cases, you’ll need enough customers to buy your super-cheap or fabulously innovative products so obviously that’s part of any business strategy. But if caring for customers, creating a superior service experience, enabling employees to make customers happy, including customers in your community or other words like that don’t feature in your strategy – and even more critically in the plans and budget allocations that follow – then it’s a good bet that your company is driven by something else.

And that’s fine, but just don’t expect a long CX career there.

2. No-one is curious about customers

One characteristic of successful customer-driven companies is that everyone – from the CEO to the front-line – is interested in what customers think, what they want and what they aspire to. That shows up in a number of ways: senior execs don’t go “back to the floor” once a year, they talk to customers and the people whose day job is to provide a service to them on a weekly or even daily basis.

When you have people in your organisation who are curious about customers, you get ideas and you get genuine conversations about customer outcomes that help you build killer propositions. The converse is that if you don’t come across this quality on a regular basis, your organisation is almost certainly focused elsewhere.

3. One measure is pursued relentlessly

As fellow contributors have argued (here and here) it’s senseless to focus all your efforts on measure of customer satisfaction or customer success when customer behaviour is such a complex thing.

It’s one of the subtler symptoms of a lack of customer focus that a focus on one measure of success – yes, Net Promoter Score I’m talking about you – means that an organisation can kid itself that it’s customer-focused when in fact it’s paying lip-service to customers with one simplistic measure. And when you relentlessly pursue the one measure, people get rewarded on it and then start to influence the measure rather than what the measure tells you.

Life, and customers, are much more complex than that, and your measures should reflect that.

4. Complaints are seen as a problem

Does your organisation have a well-resourced complaints department that deals with customer feedback in a prompt and positive manner? Or is the prevailing view that complaints originate from a few awkward customers who probably weren’t in your target market anyway? If it’s the former then you’re mining the rich seam of customer feedback for some customer-driven improvement but if it’s the latter then that’s another sign that something else is the focus, and it isn’t the customer.

5. Difficult or vulnerable customers are shut out or marginalised

Well, no-one would have this as an explicit strategy but it’s a symptom of having an idealised view of the customer rather than reflecting the messy reality that people find themselves in. One way of testing this is to look at your organisation’s policy for vulnerable customers: does it exist, and if so, is it translated into action that means that customers who don’t fit the “norm” are catered for and treated equivalently? Being customer-centric means being focused on all your potential customers.

6. Social media is not understood

I’m often staggered by the ineptitude of media campaigns generally, particularly where the brand takes a bit of a battering as a result of poor service performance. In these situations, social media appears deaf to customer feedback. So, if you see your organisation failing to respond constructively to grumpy tweets or fractious Facebook posts then there’s a good chance that customer-centricity has failed to take root in your marketing department.

7. Cost-cutting hits the contact centre first

Where a business allocates its budgets is a good indicator of what its priorities are. So, if your contact centre is under pressure to cut costs that’s a sign that customers might not be a priority. But again, this is a subtle sign: spending more on contact centres could mean that your organisation can’t stop customers calling who’d rather not have to sit in a call queue for ages. But if the focus is to cut costs first and then ask why customers are contacting you, it’s a sure sign that cost-saving comes before customer experience.

8. Digital streamlining is everything

Of course, the reason for cutting contact centre costs is usually to direct people online where the chances are that they will receive a slicker, more streamlined service. That’s absolutely the right thing to do. But if your streamlined service is at the expense of human contact to handle exceptions, queries or special assistance then you’re digitally excluding part of your customer base.

9. Silos are indestructible

Despite the protestations of management theorists, organisations today look much like they did 30 or more years ago, with Sales, Marketing, Operations and Finance all with a seat at the top table. I’m not advocating a different way of organising as an essential part of being customer-centric: as far as I’m concerned, we’ll need those functions and disciplines for at least the next 30 years. But if the functions turn into indestructible silos, with no genuine co-operation between them, then customer-driven efficiencies from cross-functional processes are going to be hard to generate.

10. Jerks get promoted

In this article I’ve not focused that much on the creation of a positive, customer-focused culture, possibly because you can’t be that prescriptive about what works. It’s easier to focus on what doesn’t help and I have argued elsewhere that the prevalence of assholes in an organisation can have negative consequences for performance. So, if you’re in an organisation that promotes people despite their negative, self-centred or bullying behaviour then you’re in an organisation that it not committed to employees’ happiness and, without that, customer happiness is likely to be in short supply.

Look on the bright side

Customer-centricity isn’t the only game in town, but if you’re in a role that espouses it whilst your organisation shows signs – as illustrated above – that it’s got different priorities then you could be in for a stressful time.

On the positive side, if it’s genuinely committed to becoming more customer-focused, then any of those ten tell-tale signs will be a great place to start your change initiative.

15/08/2018 NickB

Build a community and you won’t need customers

Instead, you’ll have committed fans who’ll go the extra mile for you

Here’s a heart-warming story from my recent holiday – and I promise it’s the last for now – that has a lesson for organisations who are serious about genuine and deep customer relationships.

Thursday afternoon in Tuscany – another beautiful day is unfolding and, in the main square of Anghiari, the town we’re staying in, seats and staging have been erected for the evening’s concert by Southbank Sinfonia and a specially-recruited chorus of local singers and visitors, mostly from the UK.

The festival’s been going for nearly a week and, in glorious weather, around the old town and nearby locations we’ve enjoyed some sublime music. Can anything spoil our perfect musical holiday?

As if to prove a point, the sky darkens, it gets colder, and then without too much warning, pours down with rain. We retreat inside the pizzeria we’ve been lunching at, and shelter from torrential rain and, at one point, what appears to be a mini-cyclone that leaves a trail of upturned chairs and busted parasols in its wake. As the storm subsides, we make a break for the hotel, returning to the square for the concert a couple of hours later. The concert was great, but we missed the best part.

The show must go on…

While we were lazing at the hotel a group of local people and visitors banded together with the orchestra to reassemble the seating and dry it off. When we returned it was like the storm had never happened.

It was a great example of how, when you’re united by a common purpose, the barriers between service providers (the town, the orchestra) and customers (the visitors) disappear. A group of people went the proverbial extra mile to make the concert happen, and a little bit of the world was a happier place as a result.

Onwards and upwards

You could argue that that’s a special set of circumstances: the Southbank Sinfonia is a training orchestra that takes the cream of the crop from music colleges around the world and gives them the experience of being a great ensemble player and, as a result, it has a lot of enthusiastic supporters – it’s a charity – that are all drawn to the festival each year because that’s what they feel passionate about. So, a bit of extra effort to make the show go on is hardly surprising.

But that’s missing the point.

Within any group of customers there will be people who want to feel part of something bigger than simply consuming the product or service provided. Here’s another example from my recent commute.

When I head down to one of my clients, I travel via Wimbledon station. On the platform where I catch my train there’s a waiting room with a rather tatty bookshelf in the corner. Over a few days, I noticed that the bookshelf’s contents seemed to vary considerably. Curious, I took a closer look and discovered that it was a book-swapping arrangement. It’s been going since 2009, which is quite something, and shows that

someone cared enough to start it
people care enough to bring along books to keep it going.

Train of thought

Now I’m not about to suggest that Surrey-bound commuters on Wimbledon station are united by a common love for, er, Southwestern Rail (not the worst of the rail companies in the UK, but that’s not saying much), making them go the extra mile to make waiting for a train a bit more interesting and spreading the love to their fellow humans via second-hand books. But the point is that your customers do care about things and if you want to stand a chance of turning your customers from grudging recipients of your products into raving fans who’ll help you deliver a better service then you need to start finding out a lot more about what they really care about.

06/08/2018 NickB

‘App-y holidays still require the personal touch

The hand-held holiday is almost here

My wife and I are in the basement of an apartment hotel on a sweltering July afternoon in a town east of Milan. It’s the reception, although it would be more appropriate to describe it as a basement with a desk. After a while the manager appears, and we give our names. Our Italian just about amounts to saying we have a reservation so when the manager asks for money, we’re a bit stuck to explain that we had already paid via booking.com. We resort to waving the relevant email in front of her which I had printed off before we set off on our long-awaited rail holiday in France and Italy and then with a bit of action on her side she finally confirmed that she’d been paid, and we could have our room.

Senza cattivi

In truth that was one of only a few glitches on a glorious fortnight spent travelling via train to and from a music festival in Tuscany so it doesn’t give me any villains to add to Don Hales’ catalogue of customer catastrophes. But I did realise that something had changed since the last time we made a trip out of the UK about three years ago: this was the first holiday that could have been transacted almost entirely on a hand-held device – an iPhone in my case.

The only parts of the trip that had to be on paper were passport control (although that now has an electronic element) and our Interrail passes, which remain quaintly paper-based. The rest of our holiday was fulfilled using the following apps:

Interrail – the pass may be on paper but the app was invaluable in helping us plan outward and return journeys and work out whether we needed to reserve seats (a complicating factor in the otherwise carefree world of Interrail-ing)
com – we’ll come on to a failing of the service later, but we booked all our hotels through the app without major problems
Google Translate – we found this late in the day, but it helped with a bit of menu and official notice-translation
Google Maps – despite the voice’s determination to pronounce all Italian street names with a defiantly British accent (we concluded that the “Google lady” was a Brexiteer) we were safely navigated around Tuscany.
SNCF and Italiarail apps/sites to manage seat reservations – with no need to print off tickets.
Google – for just about everything else, particularly restaurant reviews.

None of the above is particularly innovative, but the combination of apps helped things go smoothly, and if the passport becomes digital it would be possible to have a “hand-held holiday”.

Eroi dei clienti

But even with plentiful Wi-Fi, data roaming and so on, the hand-held holiday can be subject to human error. On booking a hotel in Turin we inadvertently entered the wrong month and didn’t realise until the pay-in-advance booking had gone through. Booking.com was not exactly unhelpful but didn’t go out of its way to add value, simply passing a message on to the hotel in question. Shortly afterwards the hotel called and said they would be happy to transfer the booking to our intended date. In effect this meant cancelling the booking from their end and booking us directly. The hotel itself turned out to be charming and very comfortable, with a great breakfast in the morning and, as a result they turn out to be my Customer Hero of the holiday.

‘App-y ending?

It’s true that the apps helped us have a great holiday, but they didn’t make it memorable. If my outcome had just been “get me from A to B with some accommodation” then they would have delivered a 98% OK customer experience. But my outcome was to have a memorable and enjoyable break – and that depends on human software (the charming hotel staff in most of the places we stayed in, wait staff who tolerated our faltering language skills with grace and humour, the people we met at the music festival) more than the app software you find in a hand-held device.

If you’re on the path to seamless, frictionless customer experience, you need to make sure you have enough support – ideally from humans – when things don’t go entirely to plan.

27/07/2018 NickB

Are you ignoring your vulnerable customers?

Stop pursuing the myth of the “ideal” customer

Do you have a strategy for vulnerable customers? If not, then you could be missing out on an opportunity to create a little bit of WOW for customers who need it more than most. It is often a neglected component of genuine customer centricity.

I’ve been working with organisations on their approach to what are – misleadingly – termed “vulnerable customers” and have become a bit frustrated by the terminology as it tends to marginalise groups of customers. This can be a serious mistake – as I will illustrate.

So, what do we mean by a vulnerable customer?

Put simply, it’s a customer whose life circumstances or abilities are compromised in some way and, as a result, run the risk of not being treated in the same way as those customers without such disadvantages.

Vulnerabilities can cover physical impairments such as mobility, sight or hearing as well as less visible ones such as mental capacity or learning difficulties. Life events (stuff that happens) can create vulnerability which may be short or long term: think of the effects of bereavement, for example, which can stretch for a year or more and may impair a customer’s ability to make decisions about, say, a financial product.

Companies should have strategies in place to accommodate the needs of vulnerable customers – in the UK and there are already existing legislative requirements around disability (the Disability Discrimination Act) and in the financial services area it looks like it will soon become a regulatory requirement.

This is all well and good but treating this as a box-ticking compliance exercise is the wrong approach. The right approach is to stop talking about vulnerable customers completely.

Forget vulnerable customers

A quick look at some statistics tells you that vulnerable customers occupy a much larger section of any market than you might think. For example:

There are currently 850,000 people with dementia in the UK, with numbers set to rise to over 1 million by 2025 and 2 million by 2051. One in six people over the age of 80 have dementia. (Alzheimer’s Society.)
One in every two adults has the arithmetic capability of an average 11-year-old or younger and one in three adults cannot work out the change from a shopping trip.
One in four people in the UK will experience a mental health problem each year and in England, 1 in 6 people report experiencing a common mental health problem (such as anxiety and depression) in any given week according to the charity Mind.
In England, 7% of adults in England regularly drink over the low-risk guidelines and there are around 600,000 dependent drinkers – of which the majority do not seek treatment (figures from Alcohol Concern) – more than 1% of the population.

Put simply, your customers are quite likely to have problems that could affect their ability to make decisions about buying or using the products and services you provide. But marketing departments and product developers continue to develop products that are aimed around an idealised view of a customer untroubled by the hand that life has dealt them.

Calling a group of customers “vulnerable” exacerbates the problem as it implies that there are a small number who we can adapt products and services for and then the rest who we can blithely leave to get on with enjoying our products in the way they were designed.

This is the wrong approach!

In genuinely customer-centric organisations, products and services should be designed from the customer’s point of view, which means designing and testing – co-creating – with a range of customers not just the ideal ones.

Once that becomes a norm you can find yourself well on the way to genuine customer-centricity.

10/07/2018 NickB

Why tech help is a no-go area for AI

The one area where AI and bots are most needed will be one of the last to be automated

How do you handle a tech crisis? Pretend it’s not happening? Shout and scream at the malfunctioning system? Break things? All of the above?

If you’re a self-sufficient person who thinks they still understand how computers work you may be tempted to crowdsource a view from the many helpful pages on the web. However, the minutes tick by while you’re reading this stuff and the minutes then become hours. Before you know it you’re in danger of making no progress with half a day already gone.

Who can help me? you wonder, suddenly realising that, if you look hard enough on your suppliers’ sites you can find a helpline number.

Help! I need someone…

I’m pretty much describing my day the other week when I found my laptop with the hard disk equivalent of a tachycardia: disk drive whirring away like crazy with near 100% disk activity. Defeated by many similar-but-not-quite scenarios on various help forums – and having fruitlessly re-set my Windows 10 installation (here’s my one bit of tech advice: do not do this unless you have no alternative) – I decided to become a case for my hardware (Dell) and software (Microsoft) suppliers to sort out.

The Dell experience was passable with a hardware expert guiding me through a diagnostic process to determine that the hard disk was functioning normally, but it left me with a bad taste in my mouth: the PC was (just!) out of warranty and extending it to cover software support for a further two years would be almost 50% of the cost of the original system last year.

Ungenerous

I declined their ungenerous offer, figuring that Microsoft may well be the culprits since I had noticed that a regular Windows update was not loading and, from a diagnostic process that we can call “gazing forlornly at the control screen”, I deduced that it was stuck in a loop of repeatedly downloading the update and failing to install it.

I came to this conclusion during the long breaks waiting for the first Microsoft techie to help me out, not aided by the remote-control software he was using to take control of my screen failing to load at his end. As the breaks in our conversation got longer and longer I suspected he was juggling several customers at once and, after a fruitless 90 minutes, rang off, had a cup of tea, and had another go.

Chat line

This time I went for the chat option. This proved to be a more effective approach and Microsoft could even pick up the earlier case given the reference number (I shouldn’t really be surprised at this simple piece of cross-channel working but I was – I’m sad that way). Whilst the earlier remote-control software still wasn’t working the agent used a different one, did a lot of techie things relatively quickly (that’s relative to me and the previous agent) using some old-style MS-DOS commands and – hey presto – update installed and disk access back to a healthier level.

So, what did I learn from this tale of woe?

1) Tech help is outcome-focused

No one asked me what I was trying to achieve when the error occurred, and this is probably one area where, as a service provider, you don’t need to understand this as it’s blindingly obvious: my desired outcome is nothing more than getting back to where I was i.e. a working PC.

2) …a high skill level is required

The problems that arrive at a Windows tech help desk are many and varied as you can tell by the profusion of solutions offered on the web for many similar-but-not-quite problems. Each implementation of Windows seems to have its own quirks, so a high level of intuition and knowledge is required to get to the root of the problem.

3) Chat beats phone every time

I have come to this conclusion following some interactions with other providers. Chat gives the process of technical help more structure and allows you to get on with something at the same time (also true for the agent). Phone demands more of your attention and is particularly frustrating in a multi-tasking agent environment.

4) AI could help, but it’s a long way off providing a substitute for the human factor

Given the multiplicity of problems and solutions it’s possible to envisage a time when machine learning could supplement a human agent, analysing possible solutions from a range of previous problems. But I doubt you’d get as rapid a response to the problem as I got (albeit on the second attempt).

Maybe a better use of deep, machine learning would be in the design and testing of Microsoft’s Windows updates to make sure they don’t cause the problem in the first place.

After all, the best way to improve technical help is to reduce the number of reasons a customer has to contact them in the first place.

10/07/2018 NickB

Is offshoring worth it?

Locating your contact centres offshore means being very clear about what they’re good at – but doesn’t mean ignoring soft skills

Right in the middle of a day of technical stress caused by a delinquent version of Windows 10, I get a phonecall from BT, purveyor of a broadband service with a habit of dropping out at key moments. My normal empathy for anyone making a cold call from a contact centre vanished for a moment, and when the caller announced he was from BT I told him I’d been waiting for them to call, so I could complain about the quality of my broadband. Undeterred, the sales agent told me that what he was calling about could solve the problem. I did not believe him so I put him off to the following day on the assumption that I would be unlikely to hear from him again.

Somewhat to my surprise I got a call the next day, and BT’s offer of an upgrade to my broadband capacity for a small extra cost, which I accepted. It does seem to have reduced to zero the cries of “****ing broadband” echoing around the house on a regular basis.

But there was a bigger so what to the story.

As Kelvin from BT was running through his sales script for the upgrade, he mentioned that from now on I would be dealing only with UK-based contact centres. I was aware of this and so it wasn’t a surprise, but it did make me ask a more basic question…

Why do we have a problem with offshore contact centres?

I’d spent the best part of a day in contact with various centres which, although it wasn’t stated at any time, were most likely to have been non-UK operations. I’m deducing this from the names of the advisors I dealt with and the trace accents that came across. However, none of this affected the most good quality of service I received. Although a day is a long time to spend dealing with a contact centre, rebuilding a faulty Windows installation is a time-consuming process so that would have been an issue whoever I had been talking to.

In the end I had a great service from the second Microsoft person I dealt with, via a text chat and remote control of my laptop which fixed the problem, so I’m left wondering why BT would feel it was so important to stress UK-only operation when it’s possible to provide a good service – presumably at lower cost – independent of geography.

Prejudice or preference?

There’s a fine line between customers having a preference for certain types of voices on the end of the phone and a prejudice against “foreigners” (it’s something that, sadly, seems to be more prevalent in the UK these days, but that’s a different topic for a different publication). And maybe BT took a view that customer feedback told them that publicising the UK-centricity of their call centres might have positive benefits – I’m only guessing at the details.

There are circumstances when a friendly voice is what you need – for example I had a great experience from Admiral recently, talking to a Swansea-based advisor who was doing his utmost to get me the best price on renewing my car insurance. His manner throughout was both friendly and professional. We had established a rapport and, since that’s a common factor in my dealings with both Admiral and their sister company Bell, I put my business with them.

But it’s also true that I had a sufficient rapport with the Microsoft adviser via text chat. The problem here was more technical and detailed than car insurance but his choice of words helped build confidence that my problem would eventually be sorted – and it was.

What sort of chat?

The simplistic view might be that you have your voice calls handled in the UK and text interactions by an offshore centre (maybe with an intelligent bot at the front end) but I think that’s missing an opportunity to handle calls offshore with the same degree of empathy that a well-run contact centre in the UK can have. The only problem with my offshore help-desk conversation when I first called Microsoft was that they were having technical difficulties with the remote control of my laptop and the advisor clearly had too much on his plate to get back to me in time.

My sense is that when offshoring decisions are made, cost has been, by far too much, the deciding factor. Performance in the essential soft skills has been neglected – it’s an old cliché that the “soft stuff is the hard stuff” – but allowing the bean-counters to dictate performance of offshore centres versus onshore means, ultimately, that you end up spending more on your operations than you might need to and find yourself pandering to the prejudices of your customers.

It’s a grey area though, so what are your views?

05/07/2018 NickB

Small changes can make a difference: a birthday present to the NHS

Time taken to establish a rapport with customers is not wasted

I don’t think the best way to celebrate the National Health Service’s 70^th birthday is by having an extended stay in an A&E department waiting room but that’s what happened to me the other day so I’m sharing it with you as it illustrated an important lesson in customer experience:

Establishing rapport is absolutely critical

When you enter any kind of customer journey, the first impression you get is crucial – how many times have you been left standing around on entering a restaurant or had difficulty distracting counter staff from their apparently more important conversation with their co-workers? Think about when it works well: a prompt and friendly greeting and offer of help puts you in a good frame of mind to enjoy the rest of the experience.

In this regard, accident and emergency departments are no different from restaurants, retail stores or your local bank branch: all interpersonal elements of the journey should be geared towards making you feel as good as possible, even though you might not be feeling that great to start with.

Observation

Last Monday night in my local A&E was not the best time to visit: when I arrived, the waiting room was packed, and I resigned myself to a slow journey through the various tests and investigations I was in for.

However, on the plus side I was able to observe a critical opportunity for improving patient experience that was missed on every occasion. Every time a medical practitioner from nurse to consultant called a patient they did the following:

Stand on the edge of the room and call the patient’s name (not all that clearly but the patients could just about hear).
Once the patient had started to get up, immediately start walking to their treatment/assessment room.

It’s this latter step that began to bug me: I’m pretty agile but at one point I “lost” the medic who had called me and had to find his room. Not, admittedly, a massive crisis, but consider if I had mobility issues or had limited mental capacity and became easily confused it wouldn’t be the best start to my treatment.

Without fail, the patients were left following in the medic’s wake and it struck me that in doing this – I think the assumption was that they needed to read the patient’s notes before they arrived in the treatment room – they were missing out on a crucial opportunity to greet the patient and escort them to the room. Typically, this step in the journey takes only a few seconds but it would create, I think, a significant difference in patient satisfaction if they were introduced and had a very short rapport-building chat on the way to the room.

I’m one satisfied customer despite this as, at each stage in the journey, I was treated with all the care and consideration you would want. Even though it was a busy night, and everyone could have been quite harassed or under pressure, it didn’t show.

Prescription

Not one to let a piece of ad hoc research go to waste, I have written to the hospital’s feedback line to offer them my advice. It’s hardly free consulting, but you could consider it my birthday present to the beloved institution as it celebrates its 70th birthday. I’ll be interested to hear if they think it’s worth a go but however much I love the NHS I’ll be happy if I don’t have to have first hand experience of any improvement that results any time soon.

30/05/2018 NickB

Is management consultancy a waste of money?

Not if you link it to performance outcomes

There’s an old management cliché that goes something like “50% of my marketing spend is wasted but the problem is I don’t know which 50%”. When it comes to spending on management consultants it could be that 100% of your spend is wasted if recent research into their value in the National Health Service (NHS) is to be believed.

The reality, however, is a little more complicated.

Headline-grabbing

A research project took place last year carried out by the University of Warwick Business School, Seville University and the University of Bristol to evaluate NHS health trusts’ spending on management consultancy. It was an open-minded investigation into the impact on overall efficiency but when the findings were published they made for another money-wasted-in-our-NHS story in some newspapers. The academics found – against their expectation it has to be said – that the more that health trusts spent on consulting the less efficient they were. It was said that the money – some £640m in 2014 – could have been better spent on more doctors and nurses.

The hackles of the management consulting industry were duly raised and the consultants’ own City Livery Company, the Worshipful Company of Management Consultants organised a debate in May with the researchers, the Chief Executive of the Management Consultancies Association (MCA) and a large number of company members (including me) who turned up to get to the bottom of this apparent slur on their competence.

Numbers

The researchers – Professor Andrew Sturdy, University of Bristol, and Ian Kirkpatrick, University of Warwick, kicked off the debate with a summary of their approach. Andrew Sturdy has been focusing on evaluations of the value of consulting for a number of years, most of which has relied on qualitative evaluations of value, and therefore relished the opportunity to get some more quantitative data. The data was quite extensive and covered 120 hospital trusts’ consulting expenditure over a four-year period, correlating that with changes in each health trust’s financial performance.

And the numbers do not lie: apart from a minority of trusts where efficiency improved, amounting to one third of the top 25% of consultancy users, the impact on the overall population was negative. I won’t go into the statistics used in detail but, on face value, they don’t paint a great picture.

Alan Leaman, from the MCA, had the task of responding to these results. He pointed out that, even though the press release had equated consultancy expenditure with spending on doctors and nurses this was an inappropriate comparison – and much along the same lines as those campaigning for a leave vote in the Brexit referendum suggesting we would have £350m a week to spend on health after leaving the EU. His main objections, which the researchers did not dispute, covered three areas:

The data sources are quite crude, and the figures included the costs of interim staff, including Chief Executives
The outcomes from consultancy work were much wider than efficiency and included improvements in care quality, inventory management, procurement, IT and relationships. In some cases, consultants had identified areas of underspend that had been corrected.
No hospital is an island – the best work comes when hospitals are joined up with other care providers.

(We have also covered examples of joined-up approach in earlier articles on The Next Ten Year – see our article on Asheville for example.)

Punch-up

With questions open to the floor an introduction from the chair setting out what he described as “Queensberry Rules” the stage was set for some furious debate. However, anyone expecting a punch-up would have been disappointed – I’ve seen more argy-bargy at my local residents’ association meetings – as the contributions were considered and thoughtful.

Everyone agreed that more detail was needed to be able to highlight areas of good practice in procuring consultancy services and that data quality could be improved. It was also recognised that the NHS – subject as it is to a high degree of imposed change – may not provide the best conditions for effective consultancy. Imposed change tends to create resistance: imagine the level of resistance if the change team you are meeting with might result in your redundancy and appears to challenge your accepted ways of working. In this environment, good results are going to be scarce. One questioner asked whether consultancies should decline contracts that were set up not to achieve results – the temptation to take fees without accountability for the results being key here.

Poor work in some areas was certainly acknowledged, particularly where firms had deployed consultants with little knowledge of the sector or had used standardised approaches. It was also possible that the wrong types of consultants were employed in a number of cases. It was commented that there McKinsey seemed to be a surprisingly popular choice of consultant. Strategy consultants such as McKinsey are very different from more operational providers and there seemed to be a temptation to go for a prestige brand rather than a more considered outcome-driven appointment. Expensive, inappropriate and ineffective – in my mind a bit like buying a Ferrari to go off-roading.

Buying better – think F.A.S.T.

As a customer success specialist, NextTen has taken the opportunity to define how we can provide services differently – using our culture and leadership expert Gordon Tredgold’s F.A.S.T. approach (Focus, Accountability, Simplicity and Transparency) I offer some principles for engaging thi^rd party service companies better:

Review your own capability for change (transparency) – many of the NHS trusts in the study had their own change departments – many of which were quite effective. It might be a valuable, if challenging, piece of work to compare internal and external projects and the results they delivered. I have frequently found – once engaged on a project – that organisations already have highly expert people with an acute understanding of what needs to change and whose voices have sadly been ignored. (This is also increasingly the trend for Customer Experience.)
Start small with quick wins (simplicity)– a good discovery project can flush out areas of potential change with the potential to deliver a good return on investment and identify the capability of the organisation to deliver it themselves.
Invest in capability (focus) – rather than do the work for the client organisation, it’s much better to start education-centric and work out how the consultants will transfer and build capability so that you can manage the change after the consultants have left the building
Link to measurable results (accountability) – as was pointed out in the debate, it’s not beyond the capability of most buying organisations to have some form of performance-related clause in their contracts. The questions over performance data in aggregate in the NHS doesn’t mean it can’t sensibly be used in specific cases.

None of the above is rocket science: it’s good practice for any significant investment. What seems to cause the confusion and misapplication of consultancy is the apparently “intangible” nature of the benefit delivered. As a way of getting beyond this, the work of Professors Sturdy and Kirkpatrick is an important start to an essential debate.

On an individual project level, starting with critical customer outcomes is the most effective way of driving effective estimates of benefit. If these can’t be defined the project isn’t worth doing. Once they are, the principles above will ensure an effective use of whoever your service provider is.

In short, you can use consultants to add value. And still keep hold of your watch.