NickB

Customer service basics can make all the difference (part 1)

In focusing on customer experience, CX professionals can be guilty of forgetting that very often it’s the basics of customer service that can make the difference between customer loyalty and customer loathing. Some recent personal experiences as diverse as passport renewal, bed buying, a birthday celebration and a free cup of coffee have reminded me of a fundamental customer experience equation:

  • Get everything right and I’ll be more than 80% likely to recommend to friends and family

BUT…

  • Fail to deliver on the basics and I’ll be 100% sure to tell friends, family and if you’re me, my “world-wide media audience”, how you didn’t measure up. (If you’re not me, then TripAdvisor or any other opportunity to leave a point of view.)

And if you’re the kind of business where this isn’t important, you’re either getting by without loyal customers or you’re deliberately pursuing mediocrity as a goal.

Here is my take on the basics that you must get right:

1) Communicate

This is so basic that you’d think it didn’t need stating but I was pleasantly surprised when UK passport agency Her Majesty’s Passport Office (HMPO) showed me what good practice looks like, and therefore, by comparison, how this is so rarely achieved in both public and private sectors.

I took advantage of a bit of post-Christmas quiet time to get around to renewing my passport. It’s an intimidating process, with plenty of opportunity to make a mistake, so a degree of obsessive-compulsive checking meant I missed the last post before the New Year bank holiday weekend. I had provided my mobile number to receive SMS messages regarding progress but was still astonished to receive a text from HMPO the day after the application arrived setting my expectation I would receive the new passport in around three weeks. Later that day I had another text re-setting my expectation that it would arrive in a few days. The following day I was woken up early by a text from DX Delivery saying it would be delivered by the following day. Later that day the shiny new passport dropped through my door. From posting to receipt in less than a week – by public sector standards, positively supersonic!

2) Manage the customer’s expectations

Customer experience management is a misnomer, as the experience is personal to the customer and all you can do as a business is manage the conditions that create that experience. Setting expectations is one of the conditions you can definitely manage though: my passport experience is a great example: the initial communication was in line with the 2-3-week, non-urgent timescale set by HMPO on their website, but then when it shortened I was kept informed. And, crucially, the expectation set was exceeded by my experience. (It may be stating the obvious but this only works one way round!)

And so to bed…

Similarly, the prospect of a bargain in the January sales sent me shopping for a new bed and, since we bought one from Warren Evans over 30 years ago, their nearby store was first port of call. The range and quality of their products has certainly improved in three decades but whilst this, and the in-store experience, was impressive, what I really liked was the on-time fulfilment of my order.

It was this simple:

  • We chose a bed frame and mattress
  • We placed the order in the store
  • We were given a delivery date and a promise that the ‘window’ for delivery would be confirmed no less than three days before the date
  • This was confirmed in an email
  • An email duly arrived five days beforehand with a confirmation of a 9-12 window and a promise that the driver would call one hour beforehand with a more precise time
  • On the day, the driver called at 8.30, arrived at 9.30, assembled the bed and left at 10.30, leaving one satisfied customer looking forward to a good night’s sleep.

When it goes right, it really is that simple.

Don’t get shirty

Contrast this with a clothing retailer with whom I recently placed an order for collection at one of their stores. Two days after the email informing me that the order could be collected I turn up, but the order’s not there. I was told to give it a couple of days as it may have been delayed. A couple of days later I return, but still no shirt. A call was promised to let me know what had happened. Four days later and no call, so I call back: customer services was not available (it was Saturday) according to the assistant I spoke to, but I received a promise to call me back on Monday. This time – a mere 8 days after the alleged delivery of the shirt – I get a call from the assistant who informed me that the shirt had arrived, along with some other stock that had been promised. He had raised this issue with head office for investigation and to be fair, it sounds like a blip in their supply chain, but the number of unfulfilled promises does not make for a happy customer. In the light of my happy fulfilment experience with the more involved transactions with HMPO and Warren Evans, particularly annoying.

In the next part of this article, I’ll go on to consider other elementary aspects of service that my recent experiences threw up. These should always be got right – but very often aren’t:

3) Don’t hassle the customer

4) Pay attention to unspoken needs

5) Deal brilliantly with complaints

6) Don’t be content with average

to be continued…

NickB

Drink like a girl? 1.25 billion bottles later…

Thanks to a post on LinkedIn by Tom Goodwin I got a real taste of how innovation happens. In this case the taste is cream, chocolate and more than a hint of Irish whiskey – in other words that favourite tipple of your grandmother/auntie/father-in-law (in my case): Baileys Irish Cream.

In an excerpt from his book, the wonderfully-titled “That Sh*t Will Never Sell!” published in the Irish Times last year, product development expert David Gluckman describes the birth of Baileys, that “girly” drink we all pretend we’re far too sophisticated to like. (Actually, I love it, but I grew up drinking Babycham, so maybe my palate is ruined forever.)

It’s a long-ish read but worth spending some time on, since it illustrates the key truths of innovation:

  • The idea for a new product can happen in an instant
  • Getting the product to market requires persistence, particularly when it doesn’t fit into any previous categories
  • The idea may be a winner, but it may sleep for a while first.

According to Gluckman, the initial though behind Baileys “took about 30 seconds. In another 45 minutes the idea was formed.” Gluckman wasn’t a novice who got lucky with his first go: he’d got 10 years’ experience of product development to draw on to know it had potential when his partner suggested mixing Irish whiskey and cream in response to a brief from International Distillers and Vintners (IDV) to develop a new alcoholic drinks brand. A quick trip to a nearby supermarket provided a rough-and-ready prototype with cream, whiskey and – the magic touch – drinking chocolate. The “mucky brown” result was taken to an initial group of IDV executives and product developers and met with some enthusiasm: enough to recognise that it had the potential to create a new and different brand.

Gluckman describes a nervous moment when the product was tested with a men’s focus group in Ireland when one of the men described it as “a girl’s drink” (this was 1973, remember) – although every one of them drained their glasses. And the women’s focus group compared it to anti-diarrhoea treatment kaolin and morphine (they had a point – they look and taste quite similar). So, the results of that and a test behind a local bar were not that encouraging and in fact this “market research” never saw the light of day.

The product was launched to IDV without the backing of extensive market research, just the belief of David Gluckman and his business partner Hugh Reade Seymour-Davies that the unusual liqueur could find a market. After the product reached the shelves in 1974 it took three years before it really took off, helped by a US advertising campaign with the slogan “The Impossible Cream”.

Decades later, over 1.25 billion bottles of Baileys have been sold and, presumably, drunk so Gluckman and Seymour-Davies’ hunch and belief paid off – although it didn’t make them rich: they were just paid for the initial product development.

As you pour yourself a glass from that bottle that Grandma didn’t quite finish off over Christmas, take a while to reflect on how creative ideas get treated in your own organisation: do you allow people to run with an idea if they just believe it’s unusual enough to create a market or do you require “proof” in the form of exhaustive market research? Far too often it’s the latter approach that holds sway – and we’re all the poorer for it.

Cheers!

NickB

Pick-n-Mix – how to use role models to drive innovation

We’ve all done it – when our company fails to reach the high standards of performance that we’d like, we find ourselves thinking “couldn’t we be more like X?”, where X is anyone from Amazon to Zappos.

In other words, the oft-cited exemplars of operational excellence, customer-centricity or employee engagement.

But we need role models such as these to motivate and inspire us, right?

Actually, wrong, or at least wrong if you don’t know why you need role models or how to use them.

I use an approach that I like to call “Pick-n-Mix”. In much the same way that, as a kid, I’d raid the candy counter in my local Woolworths to create a varied bag of sweets that would keep me quiet for the afternoon, this approach allows you to find the right mix of role models to keep you innovating and challenging the status quo.

Why have a role model? Don’t settle for just the one…

The biggest problem with many role models and case studies is that they tend to focus on what the whole organisation does. This is not surprising. Since we are usually talking about successful companies, people will want to understand every bit of what makes them successful.

The real problem is that the more we understand about another company, the less likely it is that our own company measures up.  Why? It’s obvious if you think about it. We are different organisations.

The role-model company will have probably taken many years to hone its organisation, processes and technology to achieve its high-performing status. Trying to copy and adopt all these changes, even if we could know what they are, would be an impossible task. Why would we want to want to try that anyhow? The chances are the vision, strategies, customers, structures and processes are all different. A model that works brilliantly for their specific situation is not going to be a one size fits all – and work in every other scenario. In fact, its success in fact may be only true for a very specific situation.

The Pick-n-Mix approach has two aspects:

  • Picking role models to illustrate specific areas of good practice.
  • Using role models to re-think the way things could be done.

Be more (Brew)Dog?

Let’s illustrate the first point, using the independent craft beer company BrewDog as an example. It has reported stellar growth rates over the last few years. In terms of role-modelling, their company culture is an excellent example of “supercompany” practice.

According to their website, Martin Dickie and James Watt formed the company with one mission: “to make other people as passionate about great craft beer as we are. And that is still our biggest mission today.” This passion gets communicated consistently to every part of the business. They are really explicit about building a culture with “a killer workforce where no one is carried; every person plays an integral part in the business. Everyone acts as business owners. Everyone performs at an exceptional level. We have a high-performance culture… and the people that are truly right for our business are consistently uncompromising and relentless in their efforts.”

BUT…

You can’t copy this culture lock, stock and beer-barrel – even though you may totally support the underlying sentiment. What you can learn from is those aspects of it that would help if your own culture needs a bit of a boost. For example, ownership and involvement is vital for most organisations but engagement is traditionally still woefully low.

Brewdog are explicit about this right from the start of the interview process as part of its differentiating DNA. If you don’t think you’d like it, you won’t apply to work there, and they don’t want you to.

Too many organisations treat their culture like a mystical religion to be gradually revealed to the novice entrant during their onboarding. Try the BrewDog approach, but make it your own. What would business ownership mean in your organisation? Is this about taking more responsibility for your own actions or does that mean wider and deeper collaboration for the good of company, people and customers? What does uncompromising and unrelenting in efforts really mean? Is there a de-stabilisation risk if you do it as they infer?

This is what we mean by taking an idea and then making it your own.

Re-think, re-model

Having dismissed the idea of a single aspirational role-model as rather unrealistic there is one sense in which it can be useful to compare your organisation with another and that’s as a useful jolt of creativity. Thinking “what would Amazon/Zappo’s do” in a particular situation is a helpful approach as it forces you to take an external perspective on the problem in hand.

Developing this leads to further powerful questions such as “what outcomes do my customers want from my company and how might <role-model company> deliver them?”

Codifying what supercompanies do is what The Next Ten Years is all about. We are committed to seeking out actionable insights from the case studies and examples cited on this website. The Pick-n-Mix approach means that there’s no single magic ingredient from our candy stall but instead gives you an opportunity to work out a “mix” that works for you.

Enjoy!

NickB

Ooh, Uber – look behind you!

At this time of year, at least in the UK, we love a pantomime villain that we can hiss and boo at every time they step on stage. With impeccable timing the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has delivered everybody’s favourite panto baddie, Uber, a slap in the face.  They declared what everyone already knew: that it is in fact a transport provider not an information exchange.

We have an example of what we might call ‘outcome-based justice’. In this case, if a business delivers customers’ desired outcome of ‘getting me conveniently from A to B’ it’s probably got something to do with vehicles that go from A to B rather than the provision of information. Except Uber never wanted to be positioned like that – and the reasons have become very clear!

The big benefit is that it nibbles away at those smug statements that consultants make to the effect that Uber is a taxi company that doesn’t own any cars – still true, but somewhat less paradigm-busting that it might appear.

Uber may have to face the inevitable. Its reaction to this, and other rulings, suggests it may be starting to do so, despite fighting it tooth and nail over the last year. It’s gained its growth precisely through focusing on what customers needed, then having the ability to think creatively about how that might be delivered.

The downside is that its pricing model (also a customer outcome – we like convenience, but we also like cheaper) which is a direct result of its low operating cost means that it has limited competition from other, differently-regulated providers. This lack of competition is bad for consumers in the long run.

Until there’s a reliable teleportation technology available, we humans are stuck with vehicles to get us around at a faster-than-walking pace. It will be interesting to see if a more level playing field will allow other transport providers to innovate. We are already seeing route planning app CityMapper experimenting with on-demand bus services in London – this time an information service operating in partnership with a transport provider (Transport for London).

Perhaps the famous pantomime audience shout of ‘look behind you’ should be directed at Uber to see who’s competing innovatively for the never-ending customer requirement of being moved around.

The ECJ’s ruling may not be good for Uber but it will be better for customers in the long run.

NickB

Putting compassion into customer experience

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

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

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

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

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

Well it all depends on what your perspective is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s another word for this quality: compassion.

NickB

When customers ‘gang up’ – how to handle it

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

The recent withdrawal by stationery and greetings card chain Paperchase from a Christmas wrapping paper promotion with the Daily Mail raises just these questions.

Paperchase said it was responding to feedback from hundreds of its customers who complained about their promotion or endorsement of the newspaper, owing to its coverage of the LGBT community and other minority groups. This was orchestrated by the Stop Funding Hate campaign which aims to persuade advertisers to shun papers that carry articles ‘demonising foreigners and minorities’.

There’s a debate to be had about the legitimacy of this approach. On the one hand it could be argued that much of the material produced by the Mail and other publications of a similar persuasion does help to foster a climate of ignorance and prejudice. On the other, there’s an argument about freedom of speech and where lines need to be drawn between different viewpoints and those that are classified as ‘hate speech’ – a meaningless and pejorative term that, in my opinion, muddies the waters even further.

However, if you’re in the business of getting customers to buy your products, organised online campaigning is something you should be concerned about, irrespective of whether it’s wrong or right. And getting it right means a customer-centric approach that requires two simultaneous balancing acts.

Voice of the Customer vs Voice of Reason

First up, you need to determine whether the campaign is significant or not. According to an article in Drum, 14% of the company’s customers are likely to read the Daily Mail they are more likely to read broadsheet newspapers than the public average (27% against 15%, source YouGov). According to Amelia Brophy, head of data products at YouGov, “it’s unlikely that Paperchase’s customers would have left the brand in any case as our brand tracking data indicates that it is a company with solid consumer perception.”

If that’s the case, you could accuse Paperchase of over-reacting to the Voice of the Customer rather than taking a cool look at the data.

But that neglects a more amorphous but equally important consideration…

What we believe vs what we do

Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of this particular issue, it’s given Paperchase an opportunity to state something about its principles. I’d like to have been a fly on the wall when the company took the decision to cancel its promotion: debates on what a company stands for are not that frequent, usually because those values and beliefs are woven into the fabric of everything it does, so they have a depth that discussions on, say, sales figures don’t.

In this case, Paperchase concluded that, effectively, they didn’t want to be associated with the values promulgated by the Daily Mail and I applaud them for taking a stand on this and making their views clear – even though commercially it could be wrong-headed.

There isn’t an absolute right or wrong in these situations, although the opinionated keyboard warriors at all points on the political spectrum would have you believe otherwise. Ultimately it’s a test of what you as a business stand for, and if enough of your customers salute you for it and continue to do business with you, it’s the ‘right’ one.

NickB

People not process will turn your complainers into raving fans

Complaints are a customer feedback goldmine and one that companies ignore at their peril. But how you handle the complaint is even more important: it’s a moment of truth that can turn a disgruntled customer into a raving fan – or drive them raving mad.

A company’s typical response to creating a great complaint handling process is to start with the process. This is a mistake.

The secret to great complaints handling is not process, it’s people. And, more specifically, the right people with the right set of skills and attitudes.

A recent example illustrates this…

My wife had a bad experience in a branch of Caffe Nero, having been served a panini with next to no filling in it. Since Caffe Nero encourages online feedback she duly complained online, even enclosing a photo of the sub-standard toastie. It took weeks for this complaint to turn into the promised compensation, with my wife – not overly bothered about the amount of redress, but now annoyed that she wasn’t being listened to – sending further emails to enquire as to what had happened. Compensation eventually arrived, admittedly with profound apologies for the poor response – clearly a less-than-perfect process in operation there.

A more customer-centric approach from Caffe Nero would have worked much better: if my wife had been encouraged to complain in the store or, even better, the staff had noticed an uneaten panini and asked if it anything was wrong with it, the matter could have been dealt with there and then.

But this requires people on the front line who

  • can detect a potential sub-standard offering
  • are empowered to sort it there and then
  • possess the judgement to offer appropriate redress
  • recognise that their obligation is to create raving fans

and provide feedback to the originators of the problem.

Put like this, it’s hardly rocket science, but it does require a people-focused approach as much as a customer-centric one. An approach where you recruit people with the right attitude and the train them up to refine their ‘soft’ skills to do the right thing by the customer when things go wrong.

NickB

“Customer Experience Day? That means eff-all to me!”

Did you have a good Customer Experience Day?

What? You didn’t realise it was happening? Strange! I thought it was up there with Pancake Day, Mothers’ Day, Fathers’ Day and the Eurovision Song Contest as a red-letter day in anyone’s calendar.

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a touch. The reaction – quoted verbatim above – when I mentioned to someone that it was, indeed, Customer Experience Day proved to me not that there had not only been a failure of publicity, but that the day itself didn’t have much of a point.

What did make me sit up was the realisation that we get far too obsessed with customer experience itself BUT lose the point of why it’s important!

This might seem an odd point of view for someone who spent a brilliant day as a judge at the UK Customer Experience Awards recently. It was genuinely inspiring to hear stories of great customer experience delivery by all kinds of organisations and my only regret was that I didn’t get to hear more. But, paradoxically, what happens at these kind of events is that CX practitioners and experts take a rare moment away from customers and become inward-looking: what did we do? What was the effect? What else could we have done?

Addressing these kind of questions is important because learning and feedback can drive improved performance and a desire to raise the game.

BUT and it’s a BIG B.U.T…

At the end of the day, the time we spend focusing on customer experience only has value when it translates into improved outcomes for customers.

This may sound harsh … customers don’t care about your job, they only care about the outcomes they can achieve.

I’ve got a term for this – it’s called Bush’s Universal Truth – B.U.T. (although given customers’ reactions I might have called it B.U.M – Blindingly Uninspiring Messaging).

I spent the best part of two decades, firstly in telecoms, then in banking. One thing I learnt from that experience was that whilst we would get very excited about products, propositions and new ways of delivering a service, great or otherwise, it was consistently surprising how unexcited our customers were about all of our great work!

It’s partly due to the nature of the products in both these industries. Customer simply do not find them that interesting, in fact many regard them not much more than utilities.

Hang on a second there is excitement here. It’s what you can do with the products – broadband for videos, games, voice communication; money for all kinds of things – that gets people excited. That’s exciting – not the product itself or the jobs of the people that deliver them.

So why don’t we stop it and focus on the things that is way more important. The outcomes. One of the most important things I do in my work is to get people to focus on customer outcomes – if these don’t get people excited or at least inspiring then you should probably not be doing them – or at least doing considerably more. Once you have got these right, you’re in a good place to identify the customer’s journey and their overall experience that will deliver those in the best way.

Remember, remember, the 2nd October (2018)

Actually, despite what I said earlier, I think Customer Experience Day is a great idea. So why not make it a day where customers and employees meet, exchange views and ideas. Inspiring others to raise their game is part of everybody’s job in the organisation. Why not also involve some of the people who really count – the customers? They might even motivate your colleagues to do even more!

NickB

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

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

In my not-expert view it’s a crap advert, but it’s clearly been effective, as it’s resulted in over a million visits to the FCA website’s PPI pages. And this is actually good news because PPI mis-selling was an outrageous con perpetrated on banking customers – everyone who bought a policy without realising it should get their money back.

Despite its dubious qualities as an ad, I say hats off to the FCA for giving people an Arnie-sized shove to complain.

Because I don’t think as customers we complain enough.

And, moreover, I don’t think companies realise what a goldmine they are sitting on when customers do complain.

You heard it: complaints are a goldmine.

But they’re a goldmine that’s under-used.

Think about it: a customer who complains about a sub-standard product or service has taken the time to tell you how that product or service fell short of their expectations. And since you set those expectations, that’s direct feedback on product and service quality.

How does this valued resource get treated? I’d say, pretty poorly.

Try this simple test. Does your company:

  1. Reward people who provide feedback?
  2. Empower people in customer contact/complaints handling roles to provide redress or compensation when complaints are received?
  3. Keep the customer informed throughout the process of the complaint and ensure that they leave the process with a better opinion of you than when they started?
  4. Dedicate sufficient resource to understanding the nature of complaints, their root causes and any underlying systemic issues that make it tough to eradicate the root cause?

If you’ve answered yes to all four questions, you probably don’t need to be reading this article (but thanks for getting this far!) and I’m guessing your company enjoys an outstanding reputation for customer experience. If you answered no to any of those, then you’re not capitalising on that free or near-free resource, so here’s how to fix it:

1. Incentivise customers to provide feedback

It doesn’t have to be a big incentive – Pizza Express runs a ‘How Did We Dough’ (groan) service that provides customers with a voucher for a free portion of dough balls every time they feed back on a specific dining event. It’s kept me in additional dining out calories on quite a few occasions and must cost the restaurant chain next to nothing to administer.

2. Empower the front line

A great many customer satisfaction issues can be resolved at the time they occur, saving a vast amount in back office processing costs. But the problem is for many large organisations that there’s too much process and not enough trust. You have intelligent people in your company: time to start relying on them to do the right thing.

3. Make sure your complaint handling process delivers a great customer outcome

Too often, the outcome of a complaint handling process is to minimise or control the amount paid out in compensation rather than to focus getting the customer to be a raving fan of the company. When I worked on a remediation project for a major bank I was astonished to find that nobody bothered to ask customers what they thought of how their case had been handled and what they now thought of the company. I’m guessing that their opinions might not have been great, but if you don’t ask, you have no idea how well your process is working. Keeping the customer informed about progress is another way to keep customers dissatisfaction from worsening while you consider their grievance.

4. Invest in analysis and actioning the results

This is probably the hardest bit – or at least it seems to be, because I keep coming across root cause analysts who don’t have enough resource to do this highly necessary job. There are two reasons for this: firstly, the data’s usually rubbish – badly classified or with insufficient recording around the time of the incident (and that’s why PPI has taken so long to sort out and cost the banking industry so much), and secondly the job’s not a glamorous one – you’ll get more management attention for a customer experience improvement project that targets NPS scores than one that tells you why those scores are poor in the first place.

And that last point is worth re-iterating: because you’re mining data and customer experience for things that don’t work and need fixing, you’re going to be ‘underground’ dealing with inadequate processes and all the sad customer stories that result. It’s unglamorous, dirty work but, with the right resource, can deliver ‘gold’ not just in terms of customer satisfaction but in improvements to the company’s bottom line.

As Arnie would say: ‘Do it’.

NickB

Mattress-buying – a multi-hundred-million-dollar industry and a hotbed for dirty deals, snake oil, law suits and intrigue

Who can you trust these days? In an era of ‘fake news’ and everyone’s opinions masquerading as facts, it’s a relevant question.

I just read a great Fast Company article on the dodgy world of mattress-recommendation sites and it made me think that trust should be a key differentiator for all kinds of enterprises, whether they’re in the recommendation business or supplying products and services that someone else is recommending. The problem is all too often it is not

You snooze, you (don’t) lose

‘The War to Sell You a Mattress’ is a long-ish piece so if you’re time-poor, or would rather spend the time having a nap, here’s the gist:

  • There’s quite a few websites that provide reviews of mattresses. If you’re looking, then the article mentions Sleepopolis, Mattress Nerd, Sleep Sherpa, Mattress Clarity and Slumber Sage – particularly concentrating on those available from online-only suppliers.
  • Apparently they are a good source of free mattresses, since the reviewers get sent them by suppliers and the reviewers in turn pass them on to others (which is how the author got wind of the story)
  • The article reveals some dirty dealings or should I say cosy relationships with suppliers (in case we end up on the long list of companies getting sued). For the record these include Casper, Leesa, Tuft & Needle and GhostBed – where payments were alleged to have been made for favourable reviews
  • None of this seemed to be a problem for the owners of Sleepopolis – the main focus of the article – who sold their site to another company for an undisclosed sum.

So what? Leaving aside my faint astonishment that the world of mattress-reviewing was big enough or interesting enough to warrant so many competitors, this tale holds a lesson that applies to many industries – for both customers and those companies they forge a relationship with.

From a customer’s viewpoint the key question is

  • What do I trust this company to do for me?

The second key question is

  • How is that trust demonstrated?

In the mattress recommendation world and almost any other world where customers buy products which they only need to replace occasionally, the customers have an important need but also a significant weakness that all too often gets exploited.

Visitors to any review sites would reasonably expect the reviewers to provide an independent, objective, unbiased and informed view of the products they are reviewing. People mostly understand that like other forms of review (arts, restaurants etc), the preferences of the reviewer will influence their opinion. That’s OK as long as the reviewer has been diligent, informed etc and given a fair view.

My problem is this does not seem to have been the case.

Trust me, I’m a banker

For any provider of goods and services, establishing trust takes place even before anyone considers becoming a customer or even trying to understand real value.

Look at how you behave when you want to buy a new product but don’t have a lot of information about the alternatives. Scouring the web for opinions on companies you might want to buy from is now the precursor to even exploring capability, let alone buying their products. Most people trust what a customer has to say over what any marketing department will claim. That is not to say great entrepreneurial marketing is not important – it’s hugely important and highly beneficial when done well. It’s just very hard when we operate in a world when everybody claims they can build Rome in a day!

I had a good and instructive experience recently whilst looking for a new business bank account. Whilst looking at the options available, I came across an article that covered the main options in the country I wanted to set up the account in. The article was on TransferWise’s site. The article mentioned their Borderless account, but also covered the main operators, apparently in an entirely objective way. In my eyes this established their brand as open and honest – a similar approach is taken to their charges. I had quickly achieved something which others had not even though on paper they claimed more.

It was trust. 

I am now more likely to open an account with them rather than their competitors. In this case, ‘recommending’ a competitor’s products paid off, since I trust TransferWise to manage my money in a transparent and honest way. They gained my trust by acknowledging that other products were available and acknowledged that those may suit some customers better.

Are you brave enough to be honest to your customers about your company’s or your products foibles? Try it – you might end up doing much better.

Trust is that intangible commodity that is difficult to gain, easy to lose and all too often overlooked when companies strike up a relationship with their customers.

Watch this space

Now for a thoroughly biased recommendation… the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect in May 2018. My sense is that not enough companies are prepared and therefore the likelihood of non-compliance is high. Non-compliance means that customers asking the trust questions above might end up getting answers they don’t like and their relationship with that company will suffer.

I’d recommend talking to NextTen about this, but in an article dealing with bias in recommendation sites that would hardly be appropriate.