How will we look back on 2020 in years to come? I’m quite sure that we won’t be calling it the time when everything went more or less right. The failure of countries to get on top of coronavirus, with the prospect of a second spike in infections means that right now it’s tempting to view everything through the lens of failure.
I’m not going to line up behind MP Jacob Rees-Mogg’s remarks about people’s “constant carping” – I’m all for a good old carp if it represents criticism and concern over something that’s plainly not working (in this case the UK’s test and trace system) – but I am going to take the opportunity to celebrate a few things that did work for me this summer. In no particular order:
When you think of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) then excellent customer relationship management is probably not the thing that springs to mind. Talk to any UK citizen and for all the genuine positive feeling about the NHS – witness the recent “Clap for Carers” and happy 72nd birthday celebration – there will be a good sprinkling of people with awful tales of long wait times, misdiagnoses and all manner of poor interpersonal reactions.
I’m maybe lucky in that most of my interactions – and as we’ll see, there have been quite a few – have been positive, but I’d like to highlight one series that has much to teach the commercial sector about customer relationships.
It was the rock critic Jon Landau who almost blighted Bruce Springsteen’s career in 1974 by declaring him the future of rock and roll so I hesitate to say that I might have seen the post-pandemic future of live performance after attending an app-enhanced online gig by Dutch jazz trio Tin Men & the Telephone last week.
I’m also in danger of sounding a bit like your ageing relative who’s just caught up with new technology – “hey kids, have you discovered Instagram?” – as the app in question has been around for at least a couple of years and the band has been around for quite a bit longer.
I was in conversation with a fellow consultant recently where
she described her horrendous experience returning a sofa she had bought. You’d
think this would be a straightforward exercise – these days I find it’s straightforward
to return unworn or undamaged products to suppliers and get a refund – but not
so. In this case the sofa had been covered with a fabric that, after a few
weeks, had stretched significantly, making the whole thing look worn and unattractive.
My friend’s initial attempt to sort out a return was
rebuffed but she was undeterred and sought out help from a fabric expert, who
confirmed that the fabric used was too stretchy and therefore unsuitable for
use as a sofa covering, and a lawyer friend who obliged her with a suitably
stiff letter.
A non-toxic theatre visit ticks all the right boxes
If you’re lucky enough to get a ticket to a popular West End
show – and in my case even luckier to get one fairly cheaply (thanks to TodayTix) – your elation can be
followed by a sudden lowering of expectations: the venue will be crowded and
the business of getting to your seat can be a major stress point.
If your companion has mobility challenges, this stress can
be compounded, but a visit to the Old Vic last week proved to be a pleasant
surprise. I’d been warned that there was construction work going on at the
theatre, so my expectations of easy access were even lower than normal, but
here’s the pleasant surprise: plenty of people on hand to help. Having
been directed to the other side of the theatre to some temporary outside loos –
the works on the building seem to limit internal access at the moment – we
encountered an incredibly helpful member of the front-of-house team who
insisted on showing us to our seats at the back of the stalls just to make sure
they could be accessed.
The play – A Very
Expensive Poison – was excellent. However, the point of this is not to
recount a very enjoyable (also inexpensive and non-toxic) evening but to
reflect on why such experiences are still relatively rare. Many West End
theatres – and other businesses in central London – face structural problems, namely
old-fashioned pokey buildings, high rents and therefore ticket prices, and
these can mitigate against a good customer experience. However, this means that
businesses should invest in the relatively inexpensive assets that can turn an
enjoyable theatre visit into a memorable one: namely the people customers encounter
during the visit.
What’s frustrating is that there is nothing new or rocket-science
about any of this: you simply recruit people who want to serve customers well
and train them to make sure they have the necessary skills and knowledge to do
so. Staff at the Old Vic were all pleasant and friendly but that’s still a
rarity: it’s not that people are openly hostile, but too often I encounter
indifferent service staff who are “going through the motions” rather than
recognising it’s their job to make their customers feel better, however
fleeting that interaction might be.
Organisations – in the arts sector and beyond – that recognise
the central importance of this stand a greater chance of repeat business (I’m
looking forward to my next Old Vic visit) and the financial success that comes
with it.
Nick Bush fills up with hospitality, but wants more
Having grown up in a hotel and then a restaurant I am, more
than most people I suspect, obsessed with the hospitality industry. But a recent
experience made me realise that hospitality businesses rarely offer hospitality
that feels genuine – like a good evening spent having dinner at a friend’s
house, say.
Come again?
My immediate reaction to a restaurant offering “vegan soul
food” is “run that past me again?” – I have no objection to food not involving
animal products but it’s the “soul food” bit that mystifies me. Sufficiently so
that I didn’t rush to eat at the nearby Amrutha
Lounge when it opened last year but when I visited last week I realised what
a mistake that had been. Not only is the food delicious but the serving staff make
you feel genuinely welcome with an informality that stays the right side of the
“hi guys!” fake cheeriness cliché of most casual dining venue.
The feeling you get is that they want to feed you – and feed you well. If you order a selection menu, which we mainly did out of laziness, there is an “unlimited top-up” approach so that you can order more of anything that you like. In practice the food supplied was more than enough, but I couldn’t resist the waitress’s eagerness for me to have just a little bit more. I’m much the same when I get invited to dinner somewhere: I find good food very difficult to refuse!
Not the most compelling exterior even without the roadworks
So, it was this aspect that was the clincher for me – a restaurant
where people genuinely want you to enjoy yourself. It’s quite surprising when
you think about it – the vast majority of places I visit are transactional: you
order food, it gets delivered, you eat, pay the bill and depart. If you get
personable wait staff and a nice welcome/farewell that’s a bonus but it often
feels like it’s tacked on to the eating experience.
Philosophy
In the case of Amrutha Lounge I think the reason the
experience feels different is that it’s part of an underlying philosophy about
feeding people well. For example, they have a feature called “no man goes hungry”
where you can exchange labour in the restaurant for food if you can’t afford
it. (It’s a comedy cliché that if you can’t pay you end up washing the dishes,
but it’s the first time I’ve seen it as part of the offer.) I don’t know how
many people take it up, but it doesn’t really matter, it’s a statement of
intent: what comes first is the offer of food.
And this is where so many businesses get it wrong on
customer experience whether in hospitality or elsewhere. Too often, CX
initiatives are built on top of existing poor processes and reward systems with
little to change fundamental behaviours. As a consequence, effort is wasted,
and results don’t justify the investment: CX is seen as a waste and nothing to
do with the core business.
Actually, I would say forget customer experience and focus on
what your core business does for the customer and how you want them to feel as
a result: CX initiatives should grow out of that rather than be something that’s
layered on as an afterthought.
You could say that customer experience has to come from the gut, but in the case of businesses like Amrutha Lounge, that’s the start – and the destination.
Dystopian visions send Nick Bush a warning about the future of customer experience
I misread a message from a colleague yesterday telling me that Gordon Tredgold’s article on 15 things teams hate about you was on LinkedIn. I clearly hadn’t woken up as I thought the article was 15 things you hate about LinkedIn. To which my initial reaction was “only 15?” – harsh maybe but I then realised I had a beef with most of the social media I use. (OK, I know LinkedIn doesn’t really class itself as a social media app but you get my drift.)
But that doesn’t stop me from spending considerable chunks
of my day on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram (I went cold turkey on Twitter a
while back and feel much better as a result)…
And then I read an excellent, if slightly depressing post
from Chris Skinner entitled “We are the
robots” which asked the question “Is technology making us slaves” and in
which he gives an account of a ride from an airport in a driverless car to an
automated check-in his hotel. No human contact at all.
Welcome to the future… a bit like science fiction but without
the jetpacks and flying cars.
Now that’s what I call dystopia
Back at home I’m being entertained, if that’s the word, by a
great TV drama series, “Years and Years”, a family drama set against the
backdrop of social, political and technological turmoil in an imagined future
UK. It contains some brilliant writing and some great actors but what strikes
me most is that its speculative future is entirely believable, being based on
issues that concern us today: migration, climate change, populism and the
unstoppable rise of technology.
With The Handmaid’s
Tale getting into its third season and Black Mirror tempting as a Netflix
binge, dystopian drama is back on my agenda.
But are these dire warnings couched as entertainment making
a difference?
My use of technology – Twitter aside – has not reduced a bit
since I can get the following benefits from that little device in the palm of
my hand:
News from various sources.
Music and live radio.
Connections with friends and family via Facebook
and WhatsApp.
Emails whilst on the move.
Work connections via LinkedIn.
Optimal navigation of the roads and transport networks
Instagram (I still haven’t worked that one out
fully as a trip to my page
will show).
…and being a Brit, the weather app is a constant source of info
– and a source of disappointment as another British summer fails to appear.
As a piece in the Economist reports, over
50% of the world is now online so my experience – my addiction you might
say – is by no means unique. But I worry that with the many advantages of technological
connectedness come the disadvantages of social isolation and a lack of human
connectedness.
Customer experience to the rescue?
The drive to automate customer experience continues with a recent
Gartner survey showing the over half of respondents expected AI to have the
biggest impact on CX with chatbots and virtual assistants coming second. I’ve
no doubt that automation can improve and streamline customer experience but
increasingly I wonder what the cost will be, particularly where the needs of
vulnerable customers are concerned. Increasing automation still requires the
customer to do most of the work and if there are elements in process that the
customer doesn’t understand or if something breaks the streamlined flow, bots
are unlikely to help.
I’d like to see CX maintain a focus on human-centred interactions which may mean kicking against the trend for mass automation and focusing instead on the emotional capital that customers invest in your organisation. Customer journeys that pay attention to this and voice of the customer programmes that go deep enough to understand it will make sure that even if our phones become more and more integrated with our daily lives (a character in Years and Years has her tech integrated with her body) we won’t lose what makes us human, and ultimately what makes life worth living.
Customer loyalty may
be overrated, but achieving it is still a challenge
Residents of my little pocket of south London are lucky to
have a wide choice of coffee outlets to sit and socialise or work in. When I’m working
at home and need a change of scene, I often take myself off to one of them to
jolt my brain, not just with caffeine, but with a different working environment.
Lately I have favoured an independent outlet with a bright
airy back room and a damn fine
cappuccino but my last couple of visits haven’t quite hit the spot for me. I’ve
been analysing this as, whilst I am a frequent visitor to my nearest coffee
house (a chain, with adequate coffee), I want to support independent local
businesses as well. Without spending too much time (metaphorically) on my own
psychiatrist’s couch I have concluded that something in the experience must
have changed as the product – the coffee – is as good as it’s always been.
What’s going on
Part of the reason I go to my independent is that the
ambience suits 30-60 minutes of pondering and writing (that’s my creative
process in a nutshell – if I wanted to sound pretentious I’d call it thought
leadership) even if I’m surrounded by chatting mums (it’s invariably mums on a
weekday), noisy babies and background music that’s not too obtrusive. The
service has usually been pleasant enough, but something has changed: the last
couple of times I have been there’s been less of a buzz and the service has
seemed just a little offhand.
These are all tiny changes – was I being hyper-sensitive?
(It does come with the territory of being a customer experience-obsessive…)
Or was I starting to become a more fickle consumer?
No, something in my
gut was telling me this wasn’t the creative crucible that I had been
getting used to…
Hello, lazy brain
Obviously, it’s not my gut telling me this, it’s my brain.
As behavioural scientists have observed, our brains are inherently lazy and want
repeatable, dependable experiences. My lazy brain got the idea pretty quickly that
my local independent coffee shop could fulfil the following equation:
Great coffee + nice ambience + OK service = productive hour’s writing
So, my immediate reaction when thinking “where can I go for
a break” was to choose the independent over the nearer chain.
This theme is explored in A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin’s
HBR paper “Customer
Loyalty is Overrated” where they challenge the accepted notion that
consumers make conscious purchasing choices and therefore companies are required
to come up with ever-improving, fresher propositions. Behavioural psychology research
suggests the opposite: our brains are not always analytical; instead they take
incomplete information and fill in the missing bits based on past experience.
The more often we do this in relation to an experience the more “fluent” we
become. When we make a decision that just “feels right” the processing that
leads to it has been fluent.
I’ll always buy some brands because I associate them with the outcomes they deliver and don’t give the choice a second thought: in this case those brands make things easy for me by providing repeatable outcomes.
This is tough for companies where service is an integral
part of the experience. A product can be manufactured, packaged and priced consistently
for repeatable outcomes, but add service – typically with some form of human
factor involved – and the outcome is less repeatable. Coffee shops in
particular try to get around this by offering monetary incentives via loyalty
cards to get you to come back. It’s not an influencer though: both my chain and
my independent have equivalent loyalty schemes but that’s part of my conscious choice so not part of the
repeatable experience that plays to my subconscious.
The product element in a coffee shop is easily repeatable. The
equally critical ambience and service factors are less so, but they can be addressed. A market leader such as Disney puts a enormous
effort into ensuring that – given the potential for massive variation – it offers
an overall great experience for its resort customers, through focusing on staff
(sorry, cast) selection, training and development and continuous improvement of
all elements of the customers’ experience.
In my case, I may have been unlucky, and some of the factors
I value were just missing on a couple of occasions. But the damage has been done:
my lazy brain now has to do a lot more work to find a conscious reason to go there.
Cup half full
What bugs me about corporate attitudes to customer
experience is that it’s seen as expendable and something to be cut when the
going gets tough. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of making it as
efficient as possible – transforming underlying processes, removing friction
and augmenting the experience though new technology but too often it’s a discretionary
element that can be cut according to the other demands of the business. If you
were running an airline you wouldn’t knowingly send faulty planes in the sky or
not provide enough fuel for the journey so why take a different attitude to
service?
Good coffee in my neck of the woods is easy to come by but a consistent experience that plays to my unconscious, lazy brain is a lot harder.
Customers should be better at providing meaningful feedback – and service providers should make it easier for them to do so
Another caffeinated customer experience gave me a new perspective on feedback. I was in a local chain coffee shop, taking advantage of a freebie courtesy of my mobile provider and the productivity benefits that seem to accrue from being surrounded by a general buzz of conversation. I noticed that both the coffees I drank seemed to be particularly good – better than usual – and both were courtesy of a “trainee barista” (according to her t-shirt). I passed by her on the way out and congratulated her on her exceptionally good coffee – clearly the training was working well – but she looked slightly non-plussed.
This made me think: are we, as customers, bad at giving
feedback?
I think we are. And the trend towards surveying every inch of our experience doesn’t help.
Hi guys, how’s your food?
If I’m in a restaurant I think it’s nice if someone takes the trouble to ask if you are enjoying your food. But how many times has that enquiry been made when I have just started eating and not in a position to offer any feedback? Moreover – and this may just be British reticence – how often have I or people with me said it’s OK when some aspect of the food isn’t quite up to standard?
It’s the equivalent of the “How are you?” enquiry on greeting someone – we don’t usually respond with a list of current ailments or life situations – polite but meaningless.
Anti-social media
Back to my coffee chain. It has an app for payment and
collecting loyalty points which is great and, if I’m being brutally honest, almost
certainly does encourage me to spend
more with them than with other brands. Every time I use it a little window pops
up: “how was your last visit?” Are you spotting a problem here? At this point I’m
thinking about my current visit and –
since I’m in the process of paying for my coffee – can’t be doing with
providing feedback on any visit.
I just checked my app: there’s no opportunity for me to
provide more reflective feedback on my last visit so that I can’t more
permanently record my verbal feedback to the barista.
Give us feedback – and your organs
And so it continues… a friend with a donated kidney posts a link to the NHS organ donation site. Although an opt-out approach will be adopted in England next year, it seems simple enough to register and it proves to be. And there is the inevitable feedback tab at the bottom of this screen – how can we improve the site? Well to be quite honest it does the job perfectly, so I leave a very satisfied rating and a comment to that effect, adding “you’re doing a great job” as the web team have implemented a nice clean website that helps you register quickly and, moreover, the outcome of their work is saved lives. I’m faintly surprised they didn’t ask for a Net Promoter Score as, in this case, I would recommend the site to friends, family and total strangers – if you’re in England, please do register!
But, actually, what is the point of feedback now? For all I know it may have been
terrible to start with and customer feedback improved it but at this point it’s
just creating work for people. This illustrates a tendency I have noticed in
organisations:
Once we start collecting
data, we get stuck in a rut and it has the potential to be wasted effort.
Get inspiration: get meaningful feedback
So, let’s be clear, there’s nothing wrong with collecting
data on customer behaviour and feedback: technologies are available to allow
you to collect and manipulate ever-increasing amounts of data from all touch
points. But it’s getting meaningful
data that allows you to turn data into insight and insight into action that’s
important.
In my view it’s qualitative feedback that gets you that
insight, whereas quantitative data will give you trends and aid segmentation.
We can cover quantitative data in another article but for now let’s look at five
ways to get meaningful feedback from your customers to inspire you to improve.
1) Always provide a qualitative channel to capture feedback
My coffee chain is a good example of how not to do this:
there’s nowhere on the app to provide ad hoc feedback which suggests they’re not
that interested. Even the Feedback tab on their website is broken but there is
a link to email channel, so I’ll be sharing my feedback with them soon.
2) Get feedback at the right point in the customer journey
Whilst you need an always-on channel for ad hoc feedback, it’s
important to identify the points in the customer’s journey where it makes sense
from their point of view to provide
you with feedback. Most companies, to be fair, put this at the end of a transaction
but there are still a significant number who don’t or who launch a feedback
pop-up on their website before you have even done anything.
3) Ask the right questions – and the right number of questions
You should always add on a qualitative text input field to
allow customers to explain why they gave a particular quantitative rating but
do this sparingly: there’s nothing more annoying than having to justify every
score you’ve given. And always have a general text input field at the end –
some people like to save their comments for a single message.
4) Recognise negative feedback as inspiration
This is tough: I have long maintained that complaints are an under-used source of feedback but treating them as inspiration is a bit of an ask. It’s a question of mindset: if you have repeated complaints about some aspect of your products, services or experience then this is a great opportunity to turn that around. Genuinely customer-centric companies will have this mindset.
5) Follow up and reward
Whether grumpy or inspirational, your customers are devoting
their time to improving your company, which should generate plenty of business
value, so it seems right to offer some form of reward. My favourite is the
pizza chain that sends you a voucher for free dough-balls for every time you
feed back. The incremental cost of this is negligible but it encourages
customers to provide feedback and – I have experienced – they do follow up with
further discussion if appropriate.
Do let me have feedback both on this article on your experiences with customer feedback.
“Magic moments” are not
the be-all and end-all of customer experience – but they are important
Wednesday in Wimbledon – I’d say wet if I was seeking an alliterative effect but in the interests of veracity it was a fine day – and I had an hour’s “office time” before a meeting. I went to an independent coffee shop on Wimbledon’s main drag – once apparently the high street with the most chains in the UK – not because it was an indie but because I knew it would be quiet, got my coffee and my WiFi code and logged on.
The welcome screen was not what I was expecting. Instead of the usual MSN collation of news items there was a poem (see below).
Now whilst I don’t read a lot of poetry and my limited
abilities as a literary critic are safely confined to my book club, I’d say
that the author’s efforts were a bit overwrought. Nonetheless I loved the idea
of the coffee beans’ “cologne” and this little poetic pause set me up in a good
frame of mind for the next 60 minutes.
And it made me think: how often do businesses go out of
their way to inspire their customers?
In my experience –
not very often.
At which point, if you’re in the business of providing
customers with a service on behalf of your company you might be thinking “hang
on Nick, isn’t it enough that we provide a great service day in, day out?
That’s hard as it is without expecting our agents to be inspirational poets!”
Up to a point
Well, you may have a point: broken processes, malfunctioning
systems and a back office that’s still in the 20th century may be some of the
daily challenges your front-line people successfully manage every day to
deliver a great service. In which case any further requests to create moments
of magic will fall on deaf ears.
Note that in my example the magic moment didn’t require any
human intervention – in fact, the coffee service was pleasant but unremarkable –
but someone had taken the time to think about what might make the experience a
little bit special.
Your call is important, so here’s something that’s not muzak
Of course, the effect can wear off. For example, my bank,
First Direct, have a different approach to hold music, playing some ambient
street sounds while you wait to speak to someone. As I have been repeatedly
calling FD with regard to a foreign payment that’s gone astray (that’s a CX epic
that will find its way onto this site soon), this is now as grating as
listening to 16 bars of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on a loop. Any element of
surprise wore off about 30 seconds into my first hold.
Maybe First Direct think they’re being smart and different
but it’s part of what’s become, for me, an increasingly frustrating customer
journey so it’s having a negative effect.
That old black magic
The quest for “magic”, inspiration and out-of-the-ordinary
elements of a customer journey is important, but it’s not the only thing that’s
important. One organisation I came across liked to devote considerable management
time to deciding whether a customers’ experience could be classified as a “magic
moment”. If it was deemed to contain insufficient pixie-dust to make it magic,
it was deemed a “brilliant basic”. Both were rather aspirational terms as exceptional
customer experience hadn’t exactly become the norm and there were plenty of
basics that were far from brilliant. In my view they were well-intentioned but
probably should have been a bit more rigorous about identifying and fixing process
breaks and then empowering front line staff to create magic themselves.
Having a commitment to inspiring customers is a worthy ambition and it’s something that’s etched into NextTen’s DNA. We challenge ourselves to present material and ideas to our customers that inspires them to think differently about their businesses to deliver better results. Whether or not we succeed is something only our customers can judge. We haven’t yet employed seaside sounds or poetry to help us, but who knows what the future holds…
Meanwhile, what are you doing to inspire your customers?
