Customer Experience Design

They can't be trusted ...

The company that I work for has just decided to block all staff access to social networking sites like Facebook. Here’s the important part of the note.

This week, we will be advising employees that from 15 October 2007, they will no longer be able to access social networking websites, such as Facebook, from their work computers. Any employee who has a valid business reason to access such sites needs to talk to their line manager and then contact their IT Service Desk to ensure they are not blocked. From 15 October, access will only be reinstated if there is a valid business case, backed by line managers.

Now I have no doubt that somewhere there’s a report which shows that X number of staff have spent Y amount of time on sites like Facebook in ‘work time’ and using work computers. Multiply X by Y and suddenly you’ve got a problem.

Maybe it happened something like this.

Manager 1 – ‘Hey we’re paying these people to work. Not to spend valuable time messing about on social sites’.

Manager 2 – ‘Yeah, we’ve gotta do something about this’. Can’t we just put a firewall in place and block access for everyone’.

Manager 1 – Yeah, that would do it. Let’s just stop them from being able to visit the site.

Manager 2 - OK, I’ll get right on it.

I’ll give the people involved (almost certainly more than two) credit for asking aloud the question of whether this was the right solution, and was it really wise to create such a sweeping decision. But the fact that they’ve decided that it is the right solution really worries me.

Now if you’re part of a brutal military regime or an unelected dictatorship such as exist in Burma, North Korea or China then such a policy can probably be justified. Hey, if I was a brutal dictator then I’d probably think that it made perfect sense to prevent the masses from having unrestricted access to the internet. Can’t have any of this free will nonsense getting in the way can we?

But in a UK based financial services company this type of approach feels a little heavy handed.

Here’s how I would deal with it.

Find out how many staff are spending how much time on Facebook.

Find out which members of staff are spending lots of time on Facebook. Now ‘lots of time’ is a bit vague – so use common sense. I’d probably go for something like anything over 30 minutes a day to begin with

Remind staff that the internet is made available to them as part of a suite of tools provided to help them do their jobs effectively.

Remind them that the right of access shouldn’t be abused – and that spending large amounts of time on social networking sites would count as abuse (unless of course their role is to trawl social networking sites in order to find out what’s being said about the company).

Contact anyone via email who has high usage of these sites and remind them of the policy in a more direct way. A kind of ‘hey we know what you’re doing, here’s the evidence. Now stop’.

Monitor their usage after this warning – along with everyone else’s. And if they don’t abuse it again then job done. If they do continue to abuse it then take appropriate disciplinary action ranging from removal of internet privileges through to dismissal, depending on the seriousness of the abuse.

What you shouldn’t do is tar everyone with the same brush and treat them like school kids who can’t be trusted. And ask them to provide a business case as to why they should be treated like adults.

Just funny

Brand

One of my colleagues has spent a chunk of time lately trying to get some post-cards produced for staff to send to customers. The basic idea is that it’s a way for people inside the company to connect in a human way with customers outside the company. Staff can send the postcards to whoever they like – customers who they’ve really enjoyed talking to on the telephone; customers who we’ve let down for some reason and just want to say sorry to; customers who are just having a bad day.

The point is that it’s designed to show that we’re not a faceless bureaucracy and that we want to connect with our customers.

In its own small way it’s a great idea.

But it’s not going to happen.

The brand police have stepped in and objected to the draft postcard design because it’s a cartoon image. Apparently cartoon images are not consistent with our brand image. They’ve suggested that we involve our local marketing agency and ask them to source some imagery and design the card. Estimated cost for this not including printing is £3,000.

Because we don’t have £3,000 of the company’s money just sitting around doing nothing, my colleague found a different image. It’s the one at the top of this post. Personally I think that it’s pretty cool. It’s colourful. It has personality. It’s entirely appropriate to the idea of recognising other human beings.

But the brand police have rejected this image as well. Apparently it too is inconsistent with the brand.

I must be really thick.

I thought our brand was the experience that customers have of doing business with us.

I thought that our brand was how customers perceive us and think about us

I thought our brand was how our staff treats our customers

But apparently not. Apparently it’s an arbitrary judgement of whether an image is allowed to be used or not.

Man, we’re a company going places.

Do you speak fluent marketing

• How we say hello is marketing
• How we say listen to us is marketing
• How we say welcome is marketing
• How we say thank you is marketing
• How we say no is marketing
• How we say goodbye is marketing
• How we say sorry is marketing
• How we don’t say anything is marketing
• How we say things badly is marketing
• How we say things well is marketing
• How we say you is marketing
• How we say us is marketing

Everything we say is marketing.

The company I work for has recently launched a series of new television adverts. They are deigned to replace the one dimensional and completely commoditising 'Quote me Happy' campaign that NU ran for a couple of years.

The new campaign is centred around a promise to 'just make it easier'. The new adverts look fine - and in most peoples eyes are a big improvement on what we were previously running.

But here's the rub.

I was walking past a bunch of guys from marketing last week. I overhead a couple of them talk about how good the new adverts are (they'd been involved in helping to develop them) and 'how they had moved the brand on'. What! Moved the brand on? Who are you trying to kid?

Coming up with a new set of adverts doesn't move a brand on. Customers decide if a brand has moved on and they do this based on their experience of using it. Hmmmm... there's that experience word again.

As part of the internal communication about the new advertising there have been several statements about the progress that's been made in delivering better customer service. And there have been many improvements, especially across our claims areas. So in some senses it is getting easier for customers.

But the people in marketing who seem to think that brand experience is all about the advertising you do have not been involved in any of this improvement work. I doubt if more than a few of them could name any customer service improvements that have taken place in the last year. And the really sad and worrying thing is that some of the guys really don't seem to get the fact that advertising and marketing are two completely different things.

None of this is about food

Of course it doesn't. The fact that there's a menu implies that there are several options to choose from.

I guess that plenty of the time we pick the things that seem safe - either we've done them before or they are the expected thing to choose. Organisational culture and behaviours often drive the choices that people within it it make.

But what if you want something that isn't on the menu? What if your organisation needs to start making choices which are completely different from those that it's made in the past? What if the things you've picked are no longer good for you? What if they're actually killing you?

It's a massive challenge to get conversations going about things that should be on the new menu. To make others in the company buy into the new choices and what they provide. And to reject what they've had in the past. If you've always chosen the equivalent of organisational steak in the past, then why would you want to choose something different?

The bigger challenge though might be to try and do away with the menu altogether. It's a fixed device. And changing from one fixed device to another is hard. A constant diet of change management can be unsettling.

Better then to build the capability to build and create individual dishes as need and opportunity arises. To adapt them when it's appropriate. And to discard them altogether and make up something new when necessary.

Turning everyone into heroes ...

We've all seen the story.
   

The one where someone has gone out of their way to deliver an extraordinary service to a customer. My personal favourite is the RAC patrolman who stripped to his underwear before wading into waist high flood water in order to rescue three cars and their drivers. None of the drivers was even an RAC member - which is an even bigger testament to how wonderful this guy's behaviour was.

Most organisations have promoted stories of individual employees doing extraordinary things. They generally do it for three reasons.

• To publicly recognise exceptional service
• As marketing material for their customers so that they can shout about just how customer focused they really are
• In order to try and create internal tension so that other employees who may not perform to such a high standard can see real examples of the kinds of behaviour that the organisation would like to see them deliver.

The first reason is great. So long as the employee is happy for his or her actions to be made public then it's absolutely the right thing to do.

The other reasons are less convincing.

So your organisation (which may employ thousands of people) occasionally finds an extraordinary example of service. Is that really so unusual? And even more importantly, is it representative of what actually happens for the vast majority of interactions customers have with your company. Individual examples of what Jane did for this customer or what Jo did for that customer are almost certainly not representative. Even the most inept organisations probably manage to delight some customers some of the time.

The chances of the bulk of your staff changing their day to day customer behaviour is very low. It's much more likely that they'll just smile, shake their heads, and then get on with doing things the way they were doing them before they heard about the story.

A much more powerful and change driving approach might be to:

1. Recognise and reward the individual act of customer service heroism at a public level
2. Publicise it if the people involved have no objection (and in practical terms they may have no choice if the customers involved drive the publicity).
3. Study and analyse the customer experience in order to identify the key capabilities that made it happen in the way that it did. Often the nature of the person involved and their personal strengths is a key driver of this.
4. Recruit and nurture these capabilities in order to ensure that similar experiences happen more frequently. This is likely to require a major shift in thinking and approach to people recruitment, selection, training and management.
5. Fix things that get in the way of employees being able to act heroically such as systems and processes.
6. Improve your organisations ability to learn and recycle that learning into action which drives continuous improvement.

This is a long road to take - but it will help make sure that examples of heroism become more frequent and ultimately a core part of how your organisation does business. Imagine the goodwill that this will create for you. I bet that the three drivers rescued by Dave the RAC man are more likely to join the RAC now. And they'll tell their friends and family about it. 

The best examples really are important

  "We don't have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer, ... but to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation."

Steve Jobs. CEO Apple

I was talking with someone in work the other day about design and I mentioned Apple as an example of a company that understands design and uses it to achieve exceptional business success.   His response was that I couldn't use apple as an example because "they were different."

EXACTLY! That's my frickin' point. They are different. They're astonishingly successful. And one of the key drivers of this is because they're consistently great at design.

There aren't that many companies who are really great at design. If we  don't put these on a pedestal as examples of what can be achieved then we'll end up trying to look just like most of the companies that are already just like us. Which seems to be how most organisations actually approach this issue anyway.

Trying to mimic a company which is just as bland and  your own doesn't sound like much of a recipe for success to me.

Emergency responses that become standard

No-one reading this can possibly have missed the recent news about weather related flooding across much of the UK. Hundreds of thousands of families have been affected. And when this type of extreme event occurs insurers are often the lifeline that many people look to in order to get their lives back to normal.

I can't speak for other insurers, but the company I work for  has provided some of its most impressive customer service over the last few weeks. Task forces have been mobilised. Field staff have gone out in appalling conditions. Settlements have been agreed with customers in record time. Quick decisions and actions have been taken - cutting through or completely ignoring the usual bureaucracy and red tape which get in the way. Many customer have felt that their insurer really has delivered for them in their time of need. A huge amount of goodwill has been created.

But once things get back to normal then I fear that we'll revert to being the organisation we were before the floods. That's certainly the pattern over recent years and nothing has happened to suggest that this time it will be anything different.

Why is that?

When a major disaster occurs, it's a disaster for insurers as well. It's expensive for a start in terms of additional claims costs. It involves a massive increase in work load over a  short period of time. It represents a PR opportunity / threat  as the media spotlight is turned towards the disaster.  All of this means that there are several pressures and incentives for insurers to get their act together. Quick  service and settlements generally minimise cost. Goodwill can be created by responding sympathetically.

So of course the insurance industry often performs heroically and impressively.

But in the normal course of events outside of major disasters, such pressures don't exist in quite the same way. Insurers expect to get claims. and they have processes and arrangements to deal with them. but individually such claims don't amount to much for large financial organisations. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that for the people involved in a claim it can be a disaster for them. Whether this happens alongside thousands of their neighbours, or in isolation is often no different. A destroyed house or car is a destroyed house or car regardless of the cause.

Without the motivation of feeling like they too are caught up in a major disaster then insurers seem unable or unwilling to be heroic.

This feels like an issue around intent. If leaders and managers can cut through red tape and side-step complex processes quickly some of the time, then the challenge is for them to be able to do this all the time. They've got to feel that it's an emergency all the time.

Interesting interruptions...

Regular readers of the blog will know that I'm not a fan of interruption marketing. The shouty, desperate, invasive "pick me, pick me, pick me, OH PLEASE PICK ME!" kind of crap that most of the advertising industry bombards us with today through press adverts, radio, television, call calling, 'courtesy calls', posters etc.

But if you've got something new to sell or you're a new start up then you may have little choice but to rely on interruption marketing in order to build a customer base that you can begin to have a conversation with. But even in this situation, there's interruption marketing, and there's interruption marketing.

This picture is a good example of well thought out interruption marketing. It works with its environment. Its effect changes as the environment changes. Imagine the effect if the person behind the counter was a big hairy bloke? Careful placement at the counter and the clever design to make it work here and almost no-where else means it's almost guaranteed to be noticed.

And to raise a smile.

And for that reason alone, it will be remembered. And talked about. And it's almost guaranteed to sell copies of the magazine it's advertising.

Of course the magazine could be a load of rubbish, in which case it may not live past its first edition. This is where there has to be substance  beyond the interruption. But here at least it supports the point that things which stand out have much better chance of being noticed. And maybe bought.

Below is another poster used in the advertising campaign for the magazine. It's perfectly pitched at its target audience - most of whom will have paused and thought about it for at least a moment. I know I did.