Will customer experience survive Brexit?

The UK’s Brexit crisis means more investment in CX not less

I write this article from a country under siege. For months the UK has been in the grip of what appears to be a never-ending debate on a topic that around 97% of the population have lost interest in. Today (Tuesday 29th January) is the day when the UK Parliament is alleged to be “taking back control” and debating which version of not-being-part-of-the-EU enough people can be persuaded to agree on – although this has for a long time now resembled the spectacle of two bald men fighting over a comb.

But enough griping: I have discovered an issue that’s had scant attention so far and, to me, it’s absolutely critical: what will be the effect of Brexit on customer experience?

I don’t offer this as a solution to the Irish border question, trade tariffs, customs union or the free movement of people or any of the myriad of variously important issues that come under the Brexit banner because it’s more important than any of them.

Yes, that’s right, an issue more important than Brexit itself: what will our experience as customers be like and what can companies do to address it?

I have picked two that are top of mind at the moment.

Disaster looms

The worst-case scenarios being put forward, particularly in the event of a “no-deal” Brexit which would see Britain trading on World Trade Organisation (WTO) tariffs, see businesses experiencing delays at ports, disruption to their supply chains and a consequent lack of product on shelves. Stockpiling of all kinds of foods and medicines is increasingly becoming a way for people to spend their leisure time but it’s a critical preparation that businesses need to make too, to avoid one of the fundamentals of a good customer experience – i.e. the stuff I want to buy is in the shop/on the website – being severely impacted.

Licence to be a jerk?

Non-availability of products and late deliveries are the stuff of customer complaints and, sadly, likely to tip an already stressed customer into bad behaviour. It’s understandable if not forgivable that this can occur, and we’ve offered advice about this elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the toxic climate around Brexit produces extreme behaviour that businesses should be mindful of. One story that struck me in the last few days was that of a London restaurateur whose anti-Brexit messages that he’d added to his bills had resulted in death threats. Your first reaction may be that he might have been better to avoid the subject, but using your business to promote a point of view on the topic is not unknown: Tim Martin, the boss of pub chain Wetherspoon’s has been touring his venues and hosting discussions on the topic recently.

That brings us to the nub of the issue: from the point of view of many who voted to leave the EU, the issue isn’t about trade deals, it’s about the identity of the country they live in. We have an evolutionary preference for living in tribal groups so some people might feel uncomfortable with those who are not from their “tribe”. The sad thing about Brexit is that it’s surfaced these feelings in a thoroughly toxic way with a rise in racist attacks reported since the referendum in 2016.

From a CX point of view this is worrying for any business with front-line staff who are “not from round here” – in this day and age that would be most businesses – and action needs to be taken to minimise the risk of threatening behaviour from customers.

What can you do?

I’m the recipient of regular emails from organisations telling me I should do something about Brexit, usually involving emailing my MP, but the key question is what should companies do to ensure that customer experience isn’t impacted? Nearly 60% of UK companies have some sort of Brexit programme in place, and I suspect that in organisations where customer experience (CX) heads are struggling to get airtime or investment for their initiatives this will only be made more difficult by the management of the looming crisis. But here’s the thing: Brexit programmes need CX and CX needs its own Brexit strategy.

I offer the following recommendations:

1) Keep going

In the spirit of Winston Churchill – “if you’re going through hell, keep going” – any current investment in CX should be continued and ramped up to take on board the implications of low stocks, increased customer stress and complaints.

2) Foster and celebrate diversity

Anyone’s workforce will have people with a variety of social/ethnic backgrounds and lifestyles. Companies that want to get the best out of their people celebrate this diversity. In the face of divisive and abusive behaviour the best defence is to provide support to those who might face it on a day-to-day basis. Not to do so is to cave in to a small minority of people with unpleasant attitudes – and who wants their business to do that?

3) Increase expenditure on CX training

If you’re keeping going and successfully lobbying for an increase in CX investment, the best area to spend it on is staff training, particularly where it deals with handling difficult customers.

Are you affected by Brexit? What plans is your organisation making and to what extent do they include customer experience? We’re keen to hear your views.

Is democracy all it’s cracked up to be?

The UK’s Brexit debate is about democracy as much as its relationship with Europe. It’s an important debate for workplaces too

If you were trying to get around central London last Saturday, you’d most likely have found 700,000 people getting in your way blocking the route from Park Lane to Parliament Square. The issue that caused this unprecedented turnout was Brexit – an inescapable one if you live in the UK and turn on the news or open a newspaper – and specifically the desire for a second referendum to approve or reject any deal negotiated with the European Union.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Winston Churchill, 1947

The debate on Brexit has split the country, and it feels that, as much we are debating whether we should be part of the EU or not, we are also debating what democracy means, with specific questions such as:

  • Does a slim majority (52% in favour of leaving versus 48% remaining) mean the matter is settled, once and for all?
  • Did people know what they were voting for and should they have another go now that they are more informed?

and, more importantly…

  • What on earth has this got to do with customer-centricity?

Winston Churchill famously said that “democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” but I feel that in the workplace most bosses only heard the first part of that sentence.

There’s an immense gain to be had from having a workforce that turns up to work feeling that what they do makes a difference and that translates directly into happier customers.

So why is it that most companies are run like tinpot dictatorships?

Disengaged

According to Gallup’s 2017 global workplace survey, “85% of employees are not engaged or actively disengaged at work” with an estimated impact or $7 trillion in lost productivity. So, the business impact should be clear even if we don’t consider customer satisfaction, which would add even more benefits on top of the productivity gains.

But if the economic argument is so blindingly obvious we’re clearly not buying it.

Why?

Control freak

Somewhere in our genetic make-up we’re hardwired to be selfish: sharing what you have achieved by hard work, guile or luck with people outside your family/tribal boundaries doesn’t come naturally to us. Business leaders and founders who have built something successful have an innate reluctance to share the fruits of their labours out of fear that others might spoil what they have created.

It takes a maverick to achieve something that goes against the grain. Enter Ricardo Semler, the archetypal maverick leader whose Brazilian engineering group Semco is one of the relatively few companies to be organised on principles of active worker participation and self-determination. With its flat hierarchy, self-determination, and peer-set salaries it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there’s no denying it works: Semco is still in business and has evolved in the 25 years since Semler’s account of his approach “Maverick” was published – its evolution potentially attributable to its flexible, bottom-up approach.

More equal than others

Increased worker participation doesn’t automatically mean businesses should turn into workers’ cooperatives, but it wouldn’t do too much harm to adopt some of the principles to improve engagement. The John Lewis Partnership is hardly a bastion of socialism, but because the workforce consists of partners, everyone has a share in the success of the business. And it’s no coincidence that John Lewis has high levels of customer satisfaction and advocacy.

If you want to get your people more engaged, there are three things you need in place to increase the level of participation:

1. Articulate a compelling purpose

I can’t overstate the importance of a compelling purpose – your organisation’s why – to unite the organisation and give people a framework in which operate.

2. Change the conversation around leadership

This sounds like a big task but as a leader you can start to shift people’s perception of what being a leader means. If the history of the organisation means that a top-down, objective-driven style is prevalent, you’ll need to actively demonstrate and model a more participative approach and encourage those leaders elsewhere in the organisation who do the same.

3. Provide avenues for people to participate and bring more of themselves to work

We’ve outlined the Framework of Champions elsewhere on The Next Ten Years – once you introduce that you’re instantly raising the level of participation

Protest and survive

Dissenting workers (or members of the public) don’t tend to take to the streets until all other avenues have been exhausted. It’s blindingly obvious that social media now provides a platform for all and sundry to vent their opinions and whilst the manner in which people express those opinions may leave much to be desired, it doesn’t negate the importance of those views.

The challenge for leaders is to detect the conversations: I’m aware of many groups on Facebook for example where disgruntled private groups can express opinions about “the management”. Discovering these might require a degree of detective work – also known as talking to your employees – but, just as companies need to take seriously the feedback from customers on social media, the issues raised by employees are also important. Relying on the annual employee survey just won’t cut it in this day and age.

When people protest about something, it means they care deeply about it, so those who complain about their company aren’t just whingeing, they’re usually doing it because they have a view on something the company is or isn’t doing – and that view is important.

Keeping your ear to the ground and encouraging – polite – debate is as healthy for workplaces as it is for countries.

What to do if your customer’s a jerk

Zero tolerance is the only option

I’ve focused recently on the toxic effect that people who behave badly at work have on overall morale and performance. The behaviour of these jerks or assholes should be dealt with to minimise its effect on their immediate colleagues and the longer-term impact on employee engagement.

But this week a distressing news story made me realise that whilst jerks can exist anywhere in the workplace, they can also be present on the customer side.

On a flight from Barcelona to London Stansted on Friday, a white man was filmed shouting at a black woman to get her to move seats (he has a reserved one apparently) while the passengers were boarding the plane. The woman is disabled so can’t move quickly but Mr Jerk seems oblivious to this and seems to think it’s OK to heap a volley of racist abuse at the woman. I’m not going to dignify his appalling behaviour by quoting it here, but you can check it on YouTube (warning: contains offensive language).

What’s just as shocking as his behaviour is the response of the Ryanair crew. They do intervene to get him to calm down – although the action of the passenger in the seat behind is more proactive – but frankly that’s not good enough: he should have been taken off the flight. In fact, towards the end of the video they appear to be more interested in him than the abused woman.

But let’s not blame the crew: they’re under a lot of pressure to get flights off the ground – like any low-cost operator they depend on the schedule and that will have driven their behaviour. The downside is that not only is the whole flight stuck with Toxic Racist for the whole journey, but Ryanair’s reputation takes another knock.

Too hard

At NextTen we try very hard to love Ryanair: they prove our point that if you have a clear focus on customer outcomes (low cost holidays) then you don’t need magic moments or even a particularly friendly approach to your customers to have a successful business model. But they’re clearly driving this model too hard: strikes by staff have dented profits and it looks like they may be having to cut fares too much to keep customers.

Ryanair have reported the incident to Essex police, although this is definitely too little, too late. With the investigation requiring cooperation with Spanish police it’s possible no prosecution will be made.

The customer is not always right

Sadly, customers behaving badly are a constant for any business and transport is one of the areas where people can find themselves under stress and staff can be on the receiving end of complaints about late running, overcrowding or any of the things likely to affect the business of getting from A to B. But sometimes it’s more subtle: a few years ago I was told a story by one central London bank branch I was visiting about a local business owner who thought it was quite OK to park up on the double yellow line outside while he deposited money. He expected staff to keep an eye out for any traffic wardens and woe betide them if he got a ticket! To me this was quite unacceptable behaviour but as he was a good customer it was tolerated.

These extreme examples show the extent to which companies have a genuine customer focus that is driven by respectful treatment of everybody, customers and employees alike. In the case of the bank, the staff should have felt that if they challenged the customer about his selfish behaviour they would have been backed up by management. In the case of Ryanair, we can infer that other priorities were at play and/or staff might have not felt they would be backed up by management.

Jerk-proofing

Companies should do more to make it clear what customer behaviour they consider to be unacceptable. Of course, most companies – particularly in high-stress areas like transport, healthcare and public services – do, rightly, exhibit the “abuse of our staff will not be tolerated” warnings but more subtle examples need guidance and policies. And staff need to be supported in exercising judgment about action to take when it happens.

But when your customer’s being a racist jerk, don’t think twice, get rid of them. Zero tolerance is the only way to go.

Jerks at work – now running a country near you!

You need industrial strength processes to ensure bullies get the boot

Hearing the phrase “a damning report” on the one o’clock news is usually enough to get me to prick up my ears, but when it’s a damning report on a culture of bullying and intimidation in the UK’s House of Commons, I’m definitely interested. It’s not out of some prurient interest in the suffering of workers but because I’m interested in when organisations have a cultural failure and what they do to put it right.

In the case of Parliament, it looks like a massive failure and an insufficient response.

The report by Dame Laura Cox QC into bullying and sexual harassment cases followed an investigation by the BBC’s Newsnight programme into complaints about a number of MPs. Her findings make depressing reading for anyone who likes to think that the “mother of parliaments” might be reflecting the social mores of the 21st Century. Sadly not, as Dame Laura details alleged sexual harassment by MPs with women reporting abuse in “vulgar, gender-related terms” and being “repeatedly propositioned”, along with accounts of “inappropriate touching”.

Others reported regular instances of shouting, swearing, belittling behaviour or staff being routinely overbearing or confrontational towards their colleagues.

Yes, jerks at work are alive and well in the organisation that’s charged with running the country.

Due process

Most worrying is the criticism of the decision by a Commons working group to implement a new code of conduct before the inquiry was complete. The complaints procedure this would include was based on a 2014 policy which – clearly from the evidence in the report – was discredited and distrusted.

And this is the key point: in order to root out this kind of behaviour you need credible and robust processes to allow affected staff to complain and have those complaints taken seriously. It isn’t just unpleasant for the recipients of harassment but makes bad business sense, since the “stifling of potential, the blighting of careers and the loss of talented and dedicated employees, many of them women” as the report says, carries an economic cost as well as a psychological one.

Leadership fail

The Cox report highlights a massive failure of leadership in the organisation: it takes courage and principles to get rid of toxic members of staff and these are sorely lacking at present. In fact she goes as far to say that the continued presence of some senior leaders – the terms of reference of the report mean they must remain anonymous – means that “Some individuals will want to think very carefully about whether they are the right people to press the reset button and to do what is required to deliver that change in the best interests of the house”.

Leaving individuals to think doesn’t sound like an industrial strength process, but it’s a start.

When there is evidence of widespread assholery in another organisation it’s tempting to point the finger and feel a sense of moral superiority – criticising politicians is a close to a national sport in most countries and the UK is no exception – but we should also ask ourselves how much bad behaviour we tacitly accept in our own workplaces.

If you’re not part of the solution – i.e. actively working to ensure all forms of harassment are dealt with root and branch – then you’re definitely part of the problem.