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 70th 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.

Could you care more? Avoiding the Guaranteed Formula for Failure

Leading with compassion makes you a better leader

How many times have you said “I couldn’t care less what they think” in relation to a work or personal matter?

It feels good doesn’t it? You can stand alone, proud of your own position and invincible point of view?

Unfortunately, it’s also the most corrosive attitude you can take in the modern workplace.

Here’s why: I call it the Guaranteed Formula for Failure (GaFF, if you prefer).

We’ve spent years reinventing the way that organisations are structured: streamlined and automated to deliver better, faster and/or cheaper than the competition. We’ve got smarter and smarter people working in these organisations: we hire the best we can get and get them to perform to help make us even better, faster or cheaper. Those who don’t perform don’t rise to the top and may be encouraged, gently or otherwise, to work elsewhere. A bit of constructive stress keeps everyone on their toes and striving to be better and what they do, every day.

A guaranteed formula for success, right?

Wrong.

The formula I outline above is an idealised one if your workforce consists of machines and, since that day’s a long way off, organisations need to realise that they are made up of human beings who, whatever you may like to think, turn up each day with their own set of quirks, grievances, stresses and strains. Managing that diversity constructively is the hallmark of truly effective leadership. And that requires one quality that’s not often talked about: compassion.

Café society

These thoughts came to mind after a highly stimulating “Knowledge Café”, organised by knowledge management expert David Gurteen. David’s been running these for last 16 years after realising that at the typical PowerPoint-slide-and-speaker-based conference, the most interesting parts were the conversations that occurred in the coffee breaks – often between strangers. He designed the cafés to stimulate active and engaging conversation amongst attendees.

At a recent event, Mark Coles, from the NHS London Leadership Academy introduced the topic of “Paying Attention to Attentiveness” – essentially how we can care more for each other in the business environment, or perhaps whether that was asking too much in an increasingly pressured workplace.

Through Mark Coles’ introductory talk and the ensuing discussion groups taking the topic as a start point, I found a few themes starting to emerge:

  • Pressures on organisations particularly when running at full capacity (a problem the NHS is experiencing in spades right now) mitigates against what might be called “compassionate leadership” – leaders are challenged to find the time and space for their teams to share what’s bothering them. But if you’re not listening to conversations, how can you be aware of the challenges your people face?
  • Leaders and managers may not recognise that they have a “duty of care” to their teams, although this is the basis of genuine employee engagement.
  • “Listening cleanly” or authentic listening (listening without layering on your own prejudices and opinions) is a skill that leaders may need to practice.
  • Line managers are growers of talent and the much-maligned middle manager has a key role as motivator of change. This is true even in “holacratic” organisations such as Zappo’s that still have middle managers even if they may not be referred to as such.

Against therapy

The above list might suggest that businesses need to turn themselves into massive therapy groups but that’s a massive misconception: therapy has its place but only for those who genuinely need it. However, what the discussions in the Knowledge Café recognised is that the effective leaders created space to manage the conflicting opinions, stresses and strains that are an inevitable by-product of any workplace.

Some structures and techniques were suggested that people had found to work: I was particularly struck by one software team leader who used an “escalation unicorn” as a means for her team members to raise issues. The unicorn (a toy one, obviously) was held by the member dealing with a critical issue that threatened the team’s progress, as a means of signalling that they were working on it. The team leader had created an environment where working on the hard stuff – and having hold of the unicorn – was seen as a motivator: dealing with difficult issues was therefore positively encouraged.

Another technique that was cited was originated by KM doyen Dave Snowden and is known as “ritual dissent”. This involves teams or groups offering criticism or support to members while the recipient’s back is turned. This both depersonalises and legitimises constructive criticism and is particularly effective in validating new ideas.

I’m not advocating either of these as magic bullet solutions to the challenge of managing diverse groups of individuals, but it is important leaders create “psychological safety” to allow dissent. As I pointed out in relation to the recent – indeed ongoingdebacle with TSB’s IT systems, it’s those dissenting voices that may point out the truth of the situation.

Passion and compassion

Compassion is a word that crops up mostly in relation to situations outside of the workplace: it’s what we feel when something awful happens to someone – whether that’s someone we know, or someone affected by a disaster on the other side of the world. It stirs us to action, helping us to do something, even if that’s donating to a relief effort or lending an ear to a friend who’s going through a hard time.

There’s no reason why such a basic human quality should be excluded from the workplace. In fact, it makes workplaces much more effective: it means that leaders and managers, far from losing their focus on the hard performance criteria their teams have to deliver, recognise that these are not simple diktats that have to be obeyed, but negotiated to allow each team member to deliver according to their skills and development needs.

It’s a quality that underpins NextTen’s approach to customer success, using the F.A.S.T. principles originated by Gordon Tredgold. As customer experience makes the evolution from “nice-to-have” to business essential, there will be many tough conversations to be had.

Those firms that hold them in a compassionate and caring environment will be the ones that achieve real success.

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.

Source: Policy Bristol

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 third 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.

 

AI: are you being duped by Google’s Duplex?

Getting a realistic view on the rise of the machines means being aware of the hype cycle

Film buffs will know that this year marks the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – a film that consistently ranks in my personal top 10 favourites. Its plot included that great sci-fi trope, the Malign Artificial Intelligence (AI), in the shape of HAL, the on-board computer who attempts to kill the two astronauts and then take over the Jupiter mission that forms the main portion of the film.

Well, the year 2001 has come and gone and the only Jupiter missions we’re making are unmanned so, once again, the rate of technology development and innovation relative to its fictional counterparts has let us down. The tech-prediction industry is subject to massive distortion and hugely unreliable: whether it’s in fiction or building on current innovation it’s an act of imagination after all.

So how much weight should we give to the current hype around AI?

Duped

Google demonstrated a pretty impressive new piece of tech the other week. Dubbed Google Duplex this piece of Benign AI can do some things that a PA might do like book hair appointments or get you a table to meet clients, even book a conference room. On first view, the tech is impressive. The software has the ability to imitate a human’s natural foibles in speech – even the umms and ahs. It is impressive in that it appears so natural. That said, the range of functions it can perform is still pretty limited and to be honest, the amount of time saved is not going to be huge – who finds booking a hair appointment a problem? And it also raises ethical issues about whether you disclose that it’s a machine who’s talking to you.

I’m not going to second-guess Google’s future plans, but Duplex, as impressive as it sounds in demonstration is not particularly revolutionary, at least not in the outcome it creates. It’s not a “game changer”. At least not yet.

My question is “does this advance in technology create any new opportunities for improving things for my customers?”

Answering this question involves steering a way between hype and thinking creatively about the possible outcomes. I can see the cost-saving implications over time as this sort of technology becomes more available, cheaper and smarter, but consistently great customer experience is a challenge even for highly talented human beings so can a machine seriously contribute?

Robot wars

It’s not too much of a stretch of the imagination to picture a situation where Google’s Duplex assistant can be the recipient of calls. Indeed, it’s easy for the sensationalist journalist to produce headlines such as “Rise of robots threatens to terminate the UK call-centre workforce” – as was recently reported in the Guardian.

The cost-saving potential alone shows it’s a threat to existing ways of managing customer queries. But customers are notoriously fickle. Some will have no issue with an all-knowing virtual call centre assistant without the almost obligatory wait whilst others will be less impressed with the lack of genuine human interaction. Does automated response increase customer experience or reduce it?

For quite a long time, anything other than a simple interaction will require hand-off to a trained human service representative. People who are not clear communicators may find the experience frustrating even though technology’s ability to understand a wide variety of communication styles is improving.

Whilst it’s not a dramatic rise-of-the-machines Terminator-style threat just yet, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan for it.

Keep thinking

And by plan, I mean imaginative, creative planning that continually tracks and assesses customer outcomes in the context of what developments are underway. In meetings last week with potential contributors to The Next Ten Years – with a deep interest in AI-driven innovation – we examined possibilities created in different markets.

In banking, it’s easy to picture an extension to services like Monzo’s which allows customers to keep tabs on spending across various categories with automated proactive review on past spending patterns, income etc to provide a more holistic view of your finances and spending possibilities. I can imagine the app being extended from money management into lifestyle management (which from a consumer customer perspective is the business banking should be in) tut-tutting at you if you buy an extra round of drinks and immobilising the car if you don’t blow into a tube before attempting to drive home etc etc. It might also tell you the planned holiday in the sun is going to be 2% more expensive now because it’s linked your planned spending patterns to alternative providers giving you a stream of alternative options whilst you make your decision.

The individual apps to accomplish most of these things are mostly available now, but the potential sifting through of alternatives that can be done automatically without human intervention is the next development that will help identify critical information in relation to your needs.

The possibilities are endless but the distortion , false information and misaligned results  are not only ever present but increasing difficult to manage as the information world continues to explode with endless alternatives.

Think outcomes

Even in my made-up example I’ve moved from the customer outcome that Monzo current delivers which could be phrased as “keep tabs on my spending” to “help me stay on track financially, now and in future” or “help me manage my lifestyle”.

The deep understanding and alignment to customer outcomes is where the opportunity lies. Sure, advances in robotics will change the nature of the call centre in the next few years (very likely within three to five) but viewing these as cost and efficiency improvements with a same or slightly improved experience is to miss the wider opportunity.

A view on Customer Success i.e. the delivery of desired outcomes and enhanced experiences will be absolutely critical to maximising the impact of any new technology. Starting with the customer, looking beyond the immediate hype and taking a realistic view of technology progress will help – as futurist Roy Amara put it:

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

Or as Michael Hammer observed:

 “We need to prepare for a world that cannot be predicted.”

Actually, the nearest we can come to prediction is the needs, wants and preferences of our customers. We need to place considerably greater focus on that to help harness the sheer potential that AI offers.

Keeping focused on customer outcomes will keep you focused on the long run. It’s possibly the only predictor that you can rely on!

Net Promoter Score – what’s the point?

It all depends on the context

An unwanted set of medical visits last week resulted in an equally unwanted set of follow-up texts.

My local hospital trust “would like me to think about your recent experience in the Emergency Department. How likely are you to recommend us to your friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment? Reply 1 for Extremely likely, 2 for Likely, 3 for Neither likely nor unlikely, 4 for Extremely unlikely or 6 for Don’t know. Please reply today, your feedback is anonymous and important to us and helps us to improve our service…”

There was no follow up question in their survey – clearly they were just wanting a number.

My GP’s surgery then did exactly the same.

Yes, the much-touted and widely-discussed Net Promoter Score (NPS) was at work again!

Well, actually the experience and the care in both cases were great but I didn’t reply, but because the context of the experience means that I think NPS has no significance in isolation. If I had responded with 8 but with no opportunity for follow-on comment how can they react? If the hospital looks at their scores how can they do anything meaningful unless they have some view of what aspect of my experience is not great in the my opinion.

No choice

It got me thinking what do people use NPS for? Picture the scene if you can: someone close to you is suddenly taken ill. The LAST thing you are going to do is say “Hmm, let’s take you to XYZ Hospital, they have a really great patient experience and I’d heartily recommend it!”

If you lived in my neck of the woods you would only have one choice in an emergency, assuming it didn’t require an ambulance: the nearest hospital. And that’s in London – an area not short of “competitor” hospitals; elsewhere you most likely wouldn’t have a choice.

Similarly, signing up for a GP is not like having a bank account or a phone service: you tend to sign up long-term and don’t like to switch unless you move house. You might recommend individual doctors within a practice to your nearest and dearest depending on your experience but that’s not the question.

I asked a GP friend of mine who’d moved from my surgery to another practice whether they were using a similar measure. “Oh yes” she said, “we do the scoring as specified and then we have to send the results to the Department of Health.” As far as I can tell there is no follow-up or any expectation to do anything differently. The score was being used little more than a traffic light to gauge the surgery was performing above a minimum threshold.

So, what’s the point of NPS?

Despite its misapplication in parts of the National Health Service, the measure is partially useful, but it does not deliver quite the impact it claims:

  • If I have a great experience from supplier A where various competitors are readily available, I’ll form an emotional attachment to the supplier that provided it. I might quite like Supplier A but part of the attachment is based on confidence they can do the job and trust that this will happen consistently.
  • I’ll be more much likely to tell someone that I recommend supplier A and much of the time I will give them a 9 or 10. In this scenario NPS accuracy is working.
  • I might be using NPS after a visit to a retailer. If I got what I wanted, and the assistant had smiled at me nicely then I would be more than happy to give a nice round 10. Then I would most likely forget I had ever been there and I never raise it in conversation again. The scoring system is not working so well.

Because it’s focused on measuring my reaction to specific events NPS is not a complete picture. The experience I have had needs to be part of a journey towards a particular outcome. To use my recent healthcare example, that journey won’t be complete until I have had a follow-up appointment and further treatment, if needed, a process involving referral and booking into the appropriate clinic. My satisfaction (not likelihood to recommend) won’t be determined until my desired outcome – good health, reassurance about future health concerns – is achieved.

And it still won’t involve me recommending any form of medical treatment, no matter how great the experience is.

Building on success

At NextTen we find it’s much more helpful to talk about customer success which we define as a combination of fulfilling the customer’s desired outcome and providing a good experience. Using these two dimensions we can build a customer advocacy matrix. High advocacy companies combine a great customer experience with a great outcome delivery, although it’s possible to achieve business success with an OK or even below-average experience as long as you deliver the customers’ desired outcomes as low-cost airlines continue to prove.

  • Ryanair and Spirit: poor customer experience but great profitability.
  • Kingfisher Airlines: great experience but went bust!

Context is everything

NPS can certainly tell you if you’re in the high advocacy quadrant of the matrix, but you’ll need additional qualitative data to understand why you’re there, or if you’re not, where you need to improve. And if your market context isn’t one where high levels of customer choice or switching occur then you would be better off measuring something meaningful like the number of and reasons for customer complaints.

Why the Sainsbury’s/Asda merger is short-termist and simply dumb

The old retail model is dying – consolidation merely postpones the inevitable

The news that UK supermarket Sainsbury’s and Walmart subsidiary Asda plan to merge may have been judged a great move by many analysts but it’s not. It’s short-termist. It panders mainly to the immediate shareholder value issues and, as so often happens, the customer – who holds the key to long term value and success – is insufficiently considered.

Sainsbury’s Chairman, David Tyler, has claimed this consolidation as the most “historic and pivotal move” they can make. History will judge this a short-sighted manoeuvre based on preserving a predominantly bricks-and-mortar player in an industry that’s dying on its feet – unless it changes significantly.

Vote with your clicks

If you’re a customer in a town where your supermarket options are Asda or Sainsbury’s ability get exactly what you want with minimised household spend (part of their model) will be limited. In addition, the time, effort, inconvenience and – in my case – sheer boredom involved will encourage me to search for other options. If you’re a customer in cyberspace you have more shopping options than you know what to do with. Its arguable that having 20 choices of grade, size, price and expiration date of a cherry tomato might add layers of complication and the illusion of control.

It might be simplistic to say that online will replace “offline” – the current low penetration of Amazon Fresh suggests that it will take time – because some elements of shopping remain resistant to online. This of course will surely change and as it does rapidly accelerate. Do you honestly see the bricks-and-mortar model being the same in 2025 as it is now? People who extrapolate based on prior behaviour might argue differently on the basis that the experience is not much different from 2011 but extrapolation arguments in a world of customer innovation opportunity are often TOTALLY wrong!

Yes, we’ve had online shopping for a decade or so and we still have plenty of physical spaces to go and buy stuff in so why panic? The trend extrapolators might have a point? Reality check: we’re already seeing the death of many high street retailers as they lose out to online operations so although the death of the high street has been a long time coming, it looks like it’s not only here but accelerating. The high street actually has a big part to play but not in its current guise. This is where customer success, experience and exposure to innovation plays a critical role.

Focusing on what I term customer success which consists of customer outcomes and related experiences (outcome and experience are different things) gets us away from this sterile “bricks v clicks” debate and opens up innovative new areas for growth.

My personal outcome for food shopping is to have my chosen fresh foodstuffs, delivered not only to my house but placed exactly where I want them in my kitchen. I don’t want to have to repeat my eggs, milk and bread order every time, but I do want the option to adapt it if I expect visitors. I don’t want to worry about being in the house when there is delivery, but I also want to ensure my property remains secure.

As a Customer Success expert, I know that there are many people who would want exactly the same, but I also know that there are a large number of variants – because we have levels of uniqueness which we expect to be actively considered. I am also aware that the distribution model for this type of shopping whilst lower cost than traditional bricks and mortar is still more expensive than say “click and collect”. For a few pounds reduction I might opt for a model which places my shopping in the boot of my car at a click and collect location such as a local petrol station.

Brick it

Does this mean the current bricks and mortar is redundant? Time will tell but I think that it does not have to be the case.

If I now live in a heady world where I don’t need to walk up and down an aisle why would I go to the “bricks and mortar” and spend?

What experiences around food would make you get of the house? Certainly, interacting with people and companies online will make many crave getting away from a screen – so what sort of experiences would make you move? Maybe it would be to experience something specific. Maybe it would be to learn something. Maybe it would be to better understand new ideas around nutrition. Maybe it would be meet your friends and do something. I certainly would not meet my friends to do a weekly shop, but I might go if a celebrity chef was doing a workshop which you could join in. Is that workable? Not sure, but I do know that a commodity process such as basic shopping will not be the domain of the high street but companies that offer the customer something different most certainly will.

You can start to think differently about the outcome and ask questions like:

  • How does the arrival of more intelligent devices change the ability to predict my demand for specific goods on specific days?
  • Could we use my social network to pick up shopping for me and automatically recompense them? (note that this could be of real benefit to people with mobility constraints)
  • What other delivery mechanisms might work? How can the principal online provider integrate with other local providers to optimise deliveries?

This is only a starter list – if I took a walk to the shops I might even think up some more…

Customer-centric strategy?

As Charles Bennett noted recently, building customer-centric companies is difficult, usually because customer-centric change must have a business case that stands up to scrutiny alongside other more concrete initiatives. When you get to the level of big strategic moves with tangible benefits (in Sainsbury’s case, assuming 73 stores can be offloaded, and other economies of scale realised) you realise just how far strategic thinking has to go to put the customer genuinely at the centre.

I’m hoping that somewhere in Sainsbury’s there’s a someone taking a creative view of what the future of retail might look like from a customer perspective and how the company might respond to it, but I’m not convinced. I think it’s more likely that the company will lurch, albeit elegantly, from one defensive manoeuvre to another – we’ve fended off the lower cost supermarkets (Aldi/Lidl) and we’re staying ahead of Amazon (for now, by removing one UK acquisition target from the game) – keeping analysts happy and, in the case of one senior executive, apparently staying “in the money”.

But it’s not the best outcome for customers and, ultimately, not the best one for the company.

Want to get results? Stop being results-driven!

Remove the obvious and focus on the meaningful

Look through any selection of LinkedIn profiles and you’ll find the usual array of chest-beating descriptions of people’s skills and attributes. I’m not knocking this – it’s a marketplace; you’re there to sell yourself – but there’s one descriptor that’s really come to irk me lately: “results-driven”.

Results-driven – what does it actually mean?

Think about it, it’s semantic nonsense: results are what happen as an outcome when you do something. Do it badly and you’ll get a bad result; do it brilliantly and you’ll get a better one.

OK, I realise that, in the world of business jargon, results-driven is a shorthand for “look at me, I have a track record of getting great results, so hire me” but what the statement omits is much more important: what kind of results do I get motivated by and what kind of results do I expect and encourage from the people who work with me?

As Gordon Tredgold argues in his book FAST, transparency is one of the keys to successful leadership, so it’s a shame that we hide who we are behind meaningless clichés. But if transparency – in this case, sharing what kind of results get us out of bed in the morning – is something to be encouraged, there’s a problem that we face. It’s this:

We often don’t know what results we want

And this is compounded by a further problem: we don’t spend enough time talking about them. Particularly when we might find that we want different things.

Find the why

Simon Sinek gets to the root of things with his work on “finding your ‘why’”, but it’s a sad fact that not many people have a clear view of their “why” – their core purpose – and businesses have even less of one.

I’ve found that senior executives are more than comfortable talking about what they are doing or plan to do and how it might be done, but rarely stop to examine why they are doing it. It’s understandable – it’s not an easy conversation as it involves each person triangulating different results:

  • The results I’m judged on by those outside my team – e.g. sales, customer satisfaction, share price
  • The results my team and/or peers expect from me – a mix of behaviours and measurable outcomes
  • The results I want for myself, which could be anything to meet a range of material emotional and spiritual needs.

When you start to examine your own responses to those three sets of results you begin to realise that unpacking what being results-driven means is massively complex and, quite possibly, if you were to be fully “results-driven” you would never get anything done as you would be constantly working out which set of results you were trying to drive.

Keep it simple

Better to adopt an approach taken by John Maeda in his book The Laws of Simplicity, which states that simplicity is “subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful”. Taking this approach means not fretting about the obvious results – increased sales, better satisfaction etc – but focusing on the meaningful – how do those results support the purpose of the organisation?

That’s a conversation that’s well worth having.

Focus: a recipe for customer success

Sometimes you just need to stick to one thing and do it really well

Back in January I had a celebratory meal that illustrated the good and bad aspects of complaint management and so it was with some trepidation that we embarked on another celebration recently – but this time at a different restaurant. Fortunately the experience could not have been more different, and the key to success this time was the restaurant’s single-minded focus.

Le Relais de Venise is a small, international chain of restaurants that offers you a choice of one thing: steak-frites. And it’s great.

To be specific, there is some choice: you can have your steak (only one type of cut) cooked in one of four ways – well done, medium, rare or bleu (no sitting on the fence with medium-rare) and there’s a good range of wines and a choice of desserts, mostly variations on the combination of ice-cream, cream, cake and chocolate.

But if you’re averse to red meat for any reason then the message is clear: this place is not for you.

I’m happy to say that for this unrepentant carnivore, the proposition is bang on the money, so let’s unpack it and find out why it works.

Firstly, and most importantly, did it deliver my desired outcome which was a great evening out to celebrate my wife’s birthday? It did, because all the elements were in place:

  • A great product – beautifully cooked, tender steak with plentiful French fries and, oh joy! actual “secret sauce”, which we spent a few minutes trying to figure out the ingredients of (probably cream, anchovies, parmesan – who cares? It was excellent).
  • Friendly service – despite the stern “no medium-rare” warning – and even though we were in the Soho branch on a busy Friday evening, it was relaxed and unhurried.
  • Reasonable prices – portion sizes (you get your steak in two servings, so it doesn’t get cold) are generous so it feels like value for money.

Core competence

Of course, if you can do one thing really well, it’s tempting to think you could expand your product line to include non-red meat options and thereby capturing more potential customers. But actually, why bother? In the case of Le Relais they would lose their distinctiveness if they expanded beyond their core competence of steak frites even though I am sure their chefs could knock up a pretty good sole meuniere or Poulet frites if asked.

I don’t know if, in these vegan-friendly, clean-eating times the market for a narrow slice of classic French cooking is big enough to sustain or even grow their operation – in the UK at least times are tough for the restaurant trade, but I hope so, since I am keen to return in future.

Focus and grow

But having a narrow focus doesn’t mean you have to stay where you are. Remember that Amazon started out as an online book retailer but soon built on their underlying core competence in distribution to offer almost anything, with a wide variety of delivery options.

Finding out what you should focus on and making sure you deliver it brilliantly is a fundamental business challenge. I believe having a clear idea of what customer success looks like – a combination of customer outcomes and customer experience – is fundamental. The rest is down to execution – as our regular contributor Gordon Tredgold often puts it: “the right job, done well”.

Or, putting it another way: what’s your equivalent of steak-frites?

How much do you really understand your customers’ needs?

When it comes to customers with any form of impairment the answer is most likely not enough

As my previous articles on accessibility have shown, the experience for a customer who doesn’t fit the “norm” of being a walking, intelligent person in possession of all five senses is typically a lot worse than it is for those who do. A conversation the other day made me realise that businesses don’t make sufficient effort to understand the needs of all their customers and therefore there is a significant business opportunity for those who do.

Say again?

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that around 466 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss and that by 2050 over 900 million people will have disabling hearing loss – one in ten of the world’s population. That’s a cause for concern, particularly as much of it is preventable but, whatever the cause, it doesn’t take away the fact that this is going to be an increasing challenge for up to 10% of any business’s customers.

I was pleased to discover that one specialist company – SigncodeUK – has developed a simple-to-use product that has the potential to make life easier for the profoundly deaf. With Signcode, messages can be conveyed via video: all the customer has to do is scan a QR code showing the SigncodeUK logo and a video appears on the customer’s phone with the message relayed in British Sign Language (BSL).

Courtesy of SigncodeUK

Now you may be thinking “that’s all well and good, but surely most people can read the information anyway?” – good question but missing the point. For people who are profoundly deaf, BSL is their first language – not surprising if you think about how a young deaf child will learn to communicate (they won’t learn to read English first).

When Signcode’s Jeff Earl told me this I was surprised – but then I had a flashback to a scene from years back where I noticed two teenage girls on the street laughing like mad with each other but not saying anything. I then noticed they were rapidly signing to each other, and I remember thinking that it of course was obvious that that’s how deaf people would tell each other jokes – it was something that I’d never had to think about.

You may now be thinking “that’s never occurred to me either, but how many people do you think this affects?” The answer is that, in the UK around 50,000 people have BSL as their first language – less than 0.1% of population, although about the same number who speak Gaelic and not much less than the c130,000 who speak Welsh as a first language at home. In fact, as Jeff Earl points out, the number of deaf people may be under-recorded  as health organisations (hospitals, GPs and Adult Services etc) did not have to register deaf people unless they ticked the disabled box. This has led to the numbers looking on the low side as the majority of deaf people (culturally and linguistically deaf ) do not consider themselves disabled.

A tiny percentage of anyone’s customer base then. So why bother?

Health warning: the following section may be offensive to statisticians

Whether we succeeded at mastering maths at school or still remain baffled by the simplest equation, we are bombarded with statistics every day, typically to tell us things like, flying is incredibly safe or that you are more likely to die from a collapsing sandcastle than a shark attack.

We’re conditioned to accept the idea of “the norm”, the middle of the Bell Curve (“normal distribution” for the statisticians amongst us) and I think this permeates our idea of customer service and customer experience where we tend to design around an idealised view of the customer – how we would like them to be rather than how they actually are.

Now, I’m not arguing that anyone’s customer base doesn’t have a normal or typical customer – it makes sense to design your products and services around what most people would do – but I’m more interested in what you do for those in the margins, as that’s where competitive advantage lies.

The bell curve below shows, conveniently, that 0.1% of your customer population lies 3 standard deviations from the norm so in a customer population measured for hearing ability, that’s where you would find your BSL first language population. So why cater for such a small sample?

Source: Chris53516 at English Wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The answer is that what you do for a small percentage has a knock-on effect on the whole customer population because it shows the 99.9% of your customers that don’t use BSL that you want to be inclusive, that you’re taking pains to customise your offering to those customers who do.

Extra miles (or inches)

I don’t much care for the expression “going the extra mile” in relation to customer service – sometimes an extra inch or two may be enough – but providing inclusive services will distinguish your business from the competition.

The good news is that there’s plenty of opportunity to do this and cater for people who lie closer to the centre of the bell curve – the 2% of the population with some form of dementia for example.

In my experience of implementing strategies to improve services for these “vulnerable” customers, the key to success is to embed the level of awareness in the organisation’s culture. You don’t need to dig too deep in any group of people to find individuals who – often with a passion born of personal experience – want to step up and lead the way in spreading awareness and improving services to all customers.

Very often those people aren’t in senior roles but they’re the ones who, day in and day out, make great service happen. Allowing those people to flourish is the hallmark of great customer service leaders.

OmniServ: customer care in action

Treat customers as humans and operational challenges will reduce

When BBC correspondent Frank Gardner recently publicised his 100-minute wait for his wheelchair to arrive from the hold to the gate at Heathrow Airport he illustrated a fact not often discussed in the mainstream media: travel – of any kind – when your mobility is restricted can be a massive challenge.

I was glad, therefore, to meet with Samantha Berry who is a passionate advocate of better customer experience in general and accessibility solutions in particular. In her day job as the Heathrow-based Head of Innovation and Regulatory Compliance at airport services company OmniServ, she is responsible for ensuring that people like Frank Gardner get the assistance they need to get through an airport which, she describes as potentially disabling given its sheer size and scale.

OmniServ provides a number of services to airports throughout the UK, including PRM (Persons with Restricted Mobility) assistance which, in essence, means ensuring that anyone who needs additional support to get from one part of the airport to another gets the assistance they need. Airports have a legal obligation to provide this service – some do it in-house and others outsource to OmniServ or one of the other three main providers in the UK marketplace. It’s a pressurised environment: airlines run on a tight schedule and turnaround time is critical so any hold-up in a departure, arrival or flight transfer for a passenger who is slow to board, disembark or connect can have negative consequences for on-time performance.

But behind the sterile acronym and the tight schedules lies a great experience for the customer, according to Samantha, OmniServ’s staff will potentially be spending more 1:1 time with the customer than the airline staff do. Getting the right kind of person in the job is critical and the old adage “recruit for attitude, train for skill” very much applies. Samantha sees the job as a vocation:

“I don’t use the term lightly – we have people whose purpose is to make their passengers journey as smooth as possible. We provide training – accredited by Disability Rights UK – which has moved away from talking about the process to focusing on caring as you assist the passenger, so behaviours are important. A large element of training covers the importance of listening to the customer. For example, sometimes it’s obvious that a customer will need a wheelchair, but only the customer is able to explain how they want to be lifted into the seat.

There’s much about the job that motivates people – “The airport is an exciting environment to be in and no day is the same. Everyone’s very operationally focused and they are driven by delivering a good on-time performance. No-one likes to be faced with a delay, but they like the challenge of a time constraint. Also, your job has a lot of time when you’re talking to the customer and building a relationship.”

End-to-end

As I found out in my recent experience with picking up my in-laws from a rail station, getting the various elements of the journey to link up is a constant challenge (in my case the seamless planning fell apart when the train arrived at a different platform from the one the mobility assistance service was expecting, leaving two people stranded for 20 minutes). Although serious complaints are rare, the loading and unloading of mobility equipment is outside of OmniServ’s control. Sam recalled an incident where she watched helplessly as an electric chair for a customer with motor neurone disease fell to the ramp. Such incidents, again, thankfully rare, can severely affect a passenger’s quality of life – in this case the passenger was bed-ridden for two weeks while the electric chair was repaired.

Balancing airlines’ demands for efficiency versus the cost of assisting less mobile customers is something Samantha sets about with a passion. She recalled a discussion with the head of planning for one airline where she pointed out that flights from some destinations – Malaga for example – would have a much higher proportion of PRM passengers than other more business-focused destinations such as Frankfurt and therefore scheduling should allow for the additional turnaround time required. Eventually the planner changed the schedule to reduce the pressure.

She spends a lot of time talking to the various groups across Heathrow and works with the OmniServ Disability Advocate who provides additional insight into customer needs and how issues can be resolved.

Although the tension between cost and service provision will never go away, Samantha made the point that if you get it right for the customer the challenge will solve itself as more people will choose to use an airport/airline who get accessibility right.

With the number of passengers requiring assistance is growing at a rate of 7% as opposed to 5% for those who don’t, it’s a demand that’s only going to increase.

Innovation

OmniServ is constantly seeking opportunities to improve the experience through new technology. In celebration of International Wheelchair in March they showcased the WHILL, a high-tech solution which has been dubbed “the world’s most futuristic-looking wheelchair“. Designed by a start-up company created by a team of engineers from Japanese companies Sony, Toyota, Olympus and Panasonic and when used in conjunction with beacon technology, mobile devices and other systems, these can be controlled using smartphones, can travel in convoy through an airport and, eventually, will be able to be programmed to move themselves to where they are needed, without passengers or attendants.

Reaction from representatives of disability charities and wheelchair users was positive and the device also attracted attention from able-bodied millennials who saw it as a cool way to move through the airport.

Such facilities will give customers increasing independence and have the potential to drive efficiencies, but the human touch is still very important. Samantha’s aim is to have people whose level of intuition is so great that they will be able to understand customers’ needs and simply ask “how can I make your journey better?”

The airline industry is a high-volume business, with considerable competition for the lower end of the market where margins are tight. In such a world it’s theoretically easier if passengers can all be treated as uniform entities conforming to a standard set of behaviours. In Samantha Berry’s world such a “one size fits all” approach is highly inappropriate and, in the long-term, counterproductive. She recognises that the foundation of a great customer experience is to treat customers like the unique human beings that they are and to provide a service accordingly.