customer experience

NickB

Build a community and you won’t need customers

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

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

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

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

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

The show must go on…

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

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

Onwards and upwards

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

But that’s missing the point.

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

Book swapping in action

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

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

Train of thought

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

NickB

‘App-y holidays still require the personal touch

The hand-held holiday is almost here

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

Senza cattivi

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

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

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

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

Eroi dei clienti

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

‘App-y ending?

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

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

 

NickB

Why tech help is a no-go area for AI

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

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

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

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

Help! I need someone…

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

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

Ungenerous

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

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

Chat line

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

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

1) Tech help is outcome-focused

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

2) …a high skill level is required

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

3) Chat beats phone every time

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

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

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

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

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

NickB

Is offshoring worth it?

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

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

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

But there was a bigger so what to the story.

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

Why do we have a problem with offshore contact centres?

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

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

Prejudice or preference?

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

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

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

What sort of chat?

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

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

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

NickB

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

Time taken to establish a rapport with customers is not wasted

I don’t think the best way to celebrate the National Health Service’s 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.

NickB

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?

NickB

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.

 

NickB

There’s no place like Home(base)

Pretty soon, there may be no Homebase at all

My track record as a DIY-er is not all that great, but I’m thinking I could have done a lot less of a botched job than Australian company Wesfarmers did when they acquired UK DIY retail chain Homebase back in 2016.

The analysts’ views could not have been more damning with GlobalData’s retail analyst, Patrick O’Brien referring to it as “undoubtedly the most disastrous retail acquisition in the UK ever.  I can’t think of a worse one that has made these kinds of losses so quickly.

According to reports in the Guardian, up to 40 UK stores could close with a possibility that the parent company could exit the UK altogether as Wesfarmers recovers from a £454m write-down due to the acquisition.

My use of the term “botched job” is not a management consultant’s know all “post-disaster” arrogance but the term used by Rob Scott, Wesfarmers’ managing director, who stated the problems with Homebase were largely of their own making – a slightly diplomatic way of saying “we just shot ourselves in the foot with a gun we already knew was loaded. The number one – and probably most critical – mistake was to remove the entire management team plus 160 middle managers as soon as the takeover was concluded.

If you want big change, do it fast but beware of the risks

There’s a school of thought that suggests that if you are going to implement big change then do it quickly and do it early. The catch of course is that these have to be sensible changes and if you haven’t assessed the strategic landscape effectively then hitting fast and quick can make the acquirers look like drunken rhinos in an overpacked china shop.

Moving fast was not the mistake. Streamlining is an obvious first move but arguably they went too far. Including the people who effectively ensure at least short term smooth running – the middle managers – in the first tranche shake-up was too great a risk. All the knowledge about what worked in the stores and what did not – gathered over years of trial and error also walked out of the door at the same time.

Don’t change what’s already working

Homebase had already achieved some success attracting more female shoppers with an emphasis on top-end soft furnishings from Laura Ashley and Habitat which created  a differentiator over other brands. Based on the experience of their Bunnings chain in Australia, however, Wesfarmers decided that a different approach was needed and opted for a purer DIY warehouse, providing customers with a no-frills (or chintz) experience.

Judging from customer feedback and our own research the previous approach seemed to be working. And, subjectively, our experience of the post-acquisition Homebase has not been that great – product facing is poor, and it seems harder to find what you want with too many options and price-points in some categories.

The lesson here is don’t change what’s already working and expect feedback from customer segments in one country to be replicated in another without sufficient research. History has shown time and time again that this approach does not work.

Ignore middle managers at your peril

Middle managers get a bad rap: the term suggests a lack of ambition and a degree of mediocrity, so they’re a target for easy downsizing. But middle managers hold a lot of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t and, whilst you can argue that companies would be more effective if they codified and shared that knowledge better, it seems a rather crude piece of change management to cut it out just like that.

Home or away?

Homebase’s problems are challenging – a £1bn rent obligation prevents Wesfarmers from walking away completely. The UK retail market is depressed, and the outlook remains uncertain for the short to medium term. The new Homebase have clearly not listened enough to their customers (or their voices in the company). They might want to think more about what their customers – male and female – want from their outlets before wielding the axe further.

Mistakes may have been made and recovery will be tough, with a degree of downsizing appearing all but inevitable. But in a crowded market, customers will shop around and loyalties can change. Homebase has every chance of recovery if a customer first philosophy is adopted and aligned to every aspect of the organisation. Time will tell whether the new owners have learned from their mistakes.

NickB

Travelling hopefully: the problems of accessibility

When customer journeys are actual journeys it’s hard to get a joined-up solution

I love a challenge and this one seemed quite straightforward: two elderly people – my in-laws – are travelling by train this weekend to Paddington station in London. I need to get them from there to my home with a minimum of walking.

Little do I realise that planning this simple piece of travel will send me on an information hunt lasting well over an hour and requiring almost Sherlock Holmes-like detection skills.

I start with mobility assistance at Paddington. I call the accessibility helpline shown for Paddington on the National Rail website. I’m put through to Ruth, who suggests a buggy to pick them up from the train, although they’ll need to phone the booking line to arrange this “owing to data protection”.

“That’s great” I say, “now where can the buggy take them?”

“I’ll just check” says Ruth – a few seconds pass then “there’s a drop-off at the taxi rank above platform 12.”

“OK, is that a pick-up point as well?”

“I’ll just check”.

At this point it dawns on me that she is looking at the same information that I am which, as it wasn’t much help, is why I called the helpline in the first place. We draw a blank.

“I’ll try putting you through to customer relations at Paddington.”

I’m then put through to Carl at GWR. Carl is also willing to be helpful but after describing the situation we seem to be treading much the same ground as before.

“I don’t have a physical view of the station” he says. “I’ll tell you what, why don’t you phone the helpline.”

He then gives me the same National Rail helpline that I dialled to start with.

Loopy

After a fruitless Google search to see if there is a way of breaking out of this loop I dial the accessibility line again.

This time Jamie at National Rail confirms that if my in-laws ask to be taken to the taxi drop-off area I can pick them up. We then conduct a joint mission to decode the information available on the website and Google satellite view and deduce that the drop-off point is signposted from the access road in Praed Street. I decide that I’m not going to get any further and thank him for his efforts.

Image (c) Google Maps

A quick check on Google StreetView suggests that the Praed Street access road might not be that accessible, but I am now in the frame of mind that this whole exercise will be an adventure or quest that I will have to get some fun out of. The prize is clearly going to be some valuable and scarce information.

But this is too high-risk. Knowing the routes around the station, I know that a wrong turning could leave my in-laws standing around while I navigate the various one-way and no-right-turn roads in the area.

I have a brainwave – call the station and ask the simple question “how do you reach the drop-off point?” I type “paddington station number” into Google and dial the 0345 number that comes up. My heart sinks somewhat to discover that it’s another Network Rail number with an options menu. I repeat the question to the helpful woman but as I suspect, she’s in a Network Rail call centre so doesn’t have the information – but she does have the actual number of Paddington Station.

I speak to someone at Paddington Station reception, who confirms that the drop-off point can be accessed from Bishop’s Bridge Road – this is at the other end of the station from Praed Street – but crucially advises me not to go into the taxi queue on the left but to go into the right-hand lane, then turn in. This is the crucial piece of information that I have been after, so I can now plan the pick-up with almost-military precision.

Problem solved for now, but why does it have to be so difficult?

Silo thinking

The various actors in this journey are all operating in silos and, to make matters worse, they are remote silos: all the people I spoke to were operating in a remote call centre providing only the same information that I had already got on Google. They were all professional, courteous and helpful but their help couldn’t reach as far as joining up the bits of my customer journey: in other words, they weren’t outcome focused, since my outcome is “get my in-laws to my house with the minimum amount of walking”. I only managed to piece together the information because I’ve had many years’ experience of picking up and dropping off at Paddington as its been through several improvements and modifications. Anyone without that level of knowledge – or access to Google Maps – would have most likely been given the wrong information.

It could have been worse

This lack of joining up and thinking end to end was highlighted in a more high-profile case at the weekend when BBC defence correspondent Frank Gardner who uses a wheelchair since being shot in 2004 was stranded on a BA flight for 100 minutes on arrival at Heathrow. It’s common practice to stow wheelchairs in the hold and clearly mark them with a label to take them to plane door on landing. Clearly this didn’t happen and according to Gardner it’s not the first time either.

Coincidentally, a couple of days earlier I had met with Samantha Berry, a passionate advocate of customer experience and accessibility for Omniserv, who provide mobility assistance at Heathrow. There will be more on that meeting in a future article, but my take-away from the Paddington experience – and the Frank Gardner incident – is that you need the following conditions in place to provide a joined-up solution:

  • An understanding of customer outcomes
  • Access to detailed local knowledge
  • The ability to act on that knowledge to deliver those outcomes.

It’s easy to state, but apparently quite hard to do.

Postscript – on the day

Here’s what actually happened…

Armed with the essential knowledge about the entrance to the drop off area, I set off in time to arrive about 3 minutes after the train was due in to the platform. Perfect timing but no sign off the in-laws. I wait 5 minutes. No in-laws. I try calling. No response. I repeat this process over the next 10-15 minutes. Eventually I notice a poster with a number to call.

I speak to a helpful person at Paddington station reception. He informs me that the mobility buggy didn’t pick up my in-laws because they weren’t there on Platform 1. Had they actually travelled on that train? Yes, because my mother-in-law had called me. I make one final attempt to locate the errant in-laws and get through to my mother-in-law who was wondering where the buggy was when the train had arrived at Platform 10. I call the reception number again with their precise whereabouts and the same helpful person jumped into a buggy and picked them up.

One small error of coordination cost me 20 minutes wait time (not a big problem) and two rather confused in-laws (slightly bigger problem). Clearly getting these elements to join up continues to be a challenge…

The return journey was all fine however: the buggy arrived at the drop-off point and off they went, happily seated on a GWR train although as there had been a number of cancellations they were in a minority. GWR’s lamentable performance however is another story.

NickB

Five Go Mad at GWR

Even a fictional character can have a bad customer experience

George was feeling a bit strange. Together with her cousins Dick, Julian and Anne – not forgetting her dog Timmy – The Famous Five, as they’d become known, had been revived for an advertising campaign by GWR so here they were, sitting on a brand-new electric train, heading down to Dorset for some jolly adventures, no doubt involving spies and some crude characterisations.

But being brought back in 2018 was making George feel uncomfortable. It wasn’t just that, as the most “woke” member of the Five, she was beginning to find her fellow adventurers’ attitudes more than distinctly outdated. It wasn’t that everyone was sitting on the train staring at their smartphones instead of chatting and sharing out bottles of ginger beer like in the good old days – George had got her own iPhone and was looking forward to discussing the manipulation of social media by foreign powers with her father the world-famous scientist later. No, it was that she was really actually, physically uncomfortable in her brand-new seat.

To take her mind off it, she flicked to the GWR page on Twitter. There was that rather annoying picture of the Five turning cartwheels on an imaginary picnic in an imaginary countryside with a brand new high-speed train running in the background. From some of the comments on Twitter it seemed like the train might be imaginary too, as quite a few seemed to be cancelled on a regular basis. That might explain why there were so many people crammed into her compartment.

Oh well, #GWRAdventures seemed like a jolly hashtag and, of course, was all part of a jolly campaign that The Famous Five were part of. Some customers didn’t seem to be keen on joining in the fun though, and a suggestion that they should tweet some lovely views seemed to produce pictures of broken seats, worn carpets and more overcrowding. Honestly, people could be really grumpy at times!

As she reflected further she realised her brand-new seat, whilst not broken, was really quite uncomfortable, even for an imaginary character in a children’s adventure story. Having become bored with the incessant trolling on Twitter she took look at Facebook. Goodness, people were even more grumpy on the GWR Facebook page than they were on Twitter! There was a lot of moaning about cancelled trains and, she was encouraged to read, some people found the new seats were jolly uncomfortable too.

Strangely though, there wasn’t much response from GWR to these complaints on either the Facebook page or the Twitter account. They seemed awfully keen to respond if someone said something nice but didn’t really engage with any negative comments at all other than to say that “people’s concerns would be recorded”. Really, thought George, that seemed rather impolite to say the least.

Although George liked being out of doors, solving crimes and rescuing her father from the clutches of evil villains, she thought if she ever grew up and had to settle down she’d like to be a head of customer complaints. You could really get things done if you listened to what the customers found most annoying, were honest with them about your shortcomings and then did something about it. That sounded like the kind of grown-up adventure she’d really enjoy.

But maybe for another company, not for GWR.