Customer Experience Design

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.

Where egos, we go

Apologies for the awful play on words in the title. Tracy pointed out yesterday that I was being particularly juvenile and I guess it's still working  it's way through my system.

Anyway, the subject of this post is ego. A rare serious post by Scott Adams on the effect that ego can have on our decision making made me think about the effect that other people's egos can have on us.

How many times has a colleague or your bosses let their ego make a decision which has been bad news for you? And if you multiply the potential impact of ego up through the chain of command it's easy to see how an ego driven decision by a chief exec can have really big repercussions for everyone in a business. Sometimes the big boss can find that he gets the worst outcome. Just witness what's happened to Conrad Black.

But most of the time they seem to get away with little damage, or even some reward. And leave all the little people to pick up the pieces.

Thinking not included

I bought a sandwich for lunch today. The cost was £2.40. I gave the young girl at the till two £2 coins. I was expecting to get £1.60 back.

She did a little bit of a double-take after she'd rung up the amount, and then she handed me £4.60 in change. It comprised one £2 coin, two £2 coins, a fifty pence coin, and a ten pence coin.

I smiled and said that it was too much. She smiled back and said that it was the right amount. She even turned the display on her till so that I could see it. It said £4.60.

I pointed out that she had given me back more money than I'd given her. Plus I still had my sandwich.

She said that yes it was a bit weird, but her computer clearly showed that the change I was entitled to was £4.60. And she'd been told to trust the computer.

I asked her what £4 minus £2.40 was. She said £1.60. I told here that this is how much change she should give me. She told me she couldn't because it would mess up the till.

We talked for a little more. Eventually she gave me the right money.

It made me think. How often do employees do really stupid things to customers because of some process or system? How often do employees simply fail to turn their brains on in order to challenge an instruction to do something that is plainly wrong or ridiculous? How often do companies and their employees simply follow the dotted lines in terms of how they service their customers?

The reward of happy exhaustion

"Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's when you've had everything to do, and you've done it."

Margaret Thatcher

How do you change the game inside your company?

When most companies plan their sales and revenue targets for the next year they tend to look back on  past performance as a guide to how they'll do in the future. If they have some growth aspirations in mind they'll then typically raise their targets by say 5 - 10% in order to create some stretch objectives.

And if by the end of the following year they've managed to hit this increased target then they'll pat themselves on the back and say it was a job well done.  Plus they might load the next years targets by a little bit more in order to try and continue the trend.

The basic limitation with this strategy is that it doesn't fundamentally change either the company or the market it operates in. It supports whatever business model the industry is used to. It drives complacency around an assumption that slow progress is the way ahead and is the key to long term business success or survival.

But what is someone did things differently? What if instead of increasing sales targets by 10 %, they were increased by 100%? Or 1000%? And what if they set these new targets with no or little additional budget in place than was available to previous year? And what if these targets were planned to increase by just as much again the following year? And the year after that?

Now traditional marketing via mail shots, press adverts, and cross sell phone calls can often be tweaked to generate a small increase in sales in the short-term. Price can be flexed to make the product more attractive. But such tactics don't create long term value. They just drive commoditisation, switching, and ever more frantic attempts at interruption marketing.

And there's no way that tweaking these traditional marketing tools could produce a ten-fold increase in sales. So the company would have to do something completely different. It would have to come up with some really creative ideas of how to connect with customers. Of how to deliver something that has genuine and sustainable value for them.

The chances are that the company would have to undergo some pretty radical changes in order to build the kind of capabilities needed to support all this. And in doing so there's a pretty good chance that it would also change the market in which it operates. The old model would become irrelevant. This would create opportunities to capture much larger market share and to open new value opportunities which previously did not exist.

And all because they gave themselves some targets which may have seemed impossible.

Ask people to do the possible and they'll usually just do it how they've done it in the past.

Ask them to do the impossible and you could be astonished by what they achieve.

What masks do you wear?

People wear lots of masks. We all do it.

• We pretend to be happy when we're sad.
• We pretend to be upset when we're happy.
• We pretend to like something when we don't.
• We pretend we do or don't care.

People like pretending

This happens just as much in the work place.

Lots of people put on masks to try and appear to be something they're not.

Like the middle manager who pretends that he's really focused on delivering first class customer service, and who then gives the game away by creating and enforcing dozens of petty bureaucracies which stop his staff from delivering on what he's says is important.

Like the senior manager who says she wants her business unit to lead in the way in customer centricity, and who then spends almost no time developing and implementing policies which will help her customers.
Like the team manager who says that he's a people person, and who knows almost nothing about the individuals in his team and would be sacked in a second by his team if they had the ability to do it.

The problem with many of the masks that we wear is that they slip. They crack. They don't hold up under close scrutiny. They crack under pressure.  But often when we see this, we put on a mask of our own. The mask that ignores what we see. Or which lacks the courage to say what needs to be said. Or which simply longs for the quite life.

But to change things we need to discard the masks. We need to see things for what they are and we need to challenge things when they're not as they should be or as they have been promised . It's called integrity and moral courage.

How much better does it have to be before customers start to talk about it?

The magic bullet of marketing is strong word of mouth recommendation from existing customers.

So how do you create good word of mouth marketing, and at what point does it begin to gain momentum and take on a life of it's own?

Most companies view the challenges to be about improving customer satisfaction across the board. But that's clearly going to be impossible for complex offerings of the type delivered by financial service companies. So typically they'll reduce their focus to a number of key moments of truth when they're looking to drive improvement. They identify say half a dozen key interactions which are disproportionately important and work on these. For something like motor insurance they might be:

Starting well

Quote / buy

Claim notification

Communication

Renewal

Finishing well

So they'll try to improve the experience in these areas and hope that levels of customer satisfaction will rise as a result, and that customers will begin to talk more about them, and in a positive way.

But here's the problem. At what point do customers start to talk more? If you increase customer satisfaction by 1 % then do customers talk more positively about you by 1 % more as well?  Or is there some kind of limit to be reached before customers begin to say good things. Do you need to increase customer satisfaction by 5 % or 10 % or 20 % before the effect kicks in?

The relationship between increasing satisfaction and increased word of mouth is not linear. You probably do need to see a big chunk of improvement before any noticeable extra word of mouth recommendation feeds through. And such delays, and the inexact science (or black art) behind them often creates enormous difficulty for those trying to drive through the change because it can be hard to create organisational momentum for such things. After all, just how does a customer discuss a 5 % better experience?

There might be another tool that can be used to help loosen resistance though.

People talk about unexpected things. Stuff they just weren't expecting and which makes them stop and think. And often when people are surprised by something it creates an emotional response. And emotional responses are what human being tend to talk about to one another.

So, if you can build just one or two unexpected things into your offerings, then you'll have customers attentions. On it's own of course it won't succeed. An unexpected surprise and a crap service won't make your business successful. But a surprise built around improvements to key interactions will begin to ramp up the volume of conversation about you. People will become interested by the surprise, and therefore more interested to see what sits behind it.

And it can have the bonus of removing some of the organisational blockages that exist in order to achive your bigger change aims. Positive noise and interest around your company created by the unexpected event is likely to see more people within the company throw their weight behind you.   

What if they're right (and we're wrong)?

This is one of the cliffhanging questions of our time. There are loads of situations in which it might apply. But here are two biggies.

Global Warming - Hey guys, you're screwing up the planet. It's the only one we've got. You've gotta change how you live your lives before it's too late. Otherwise millions will die and you could be one of them. The future you leave your children will be less certain - and much harder than any parent would want it to be.

Now you could be a fence sitter, or a rabid believer that '"global warning is the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the people". But think about this. Think about what the green brigade are saying. What if they're right

Customer experience - Hey guys, you've gotta get way better at delivering great customer experiences or you're gonna find yourselves without any business to run. This is the dinosaur scenario. Adapt quickly as conditions change or die and be replaced.

You could have a clearly marked out business strategy aimed at maximising the short-term profit you can get from your customers. Or you might be focused on creating a price based strategy to buy market share. But think about what the customer experience advocates say about such strategies. What if they're right?

My point is this. Sometimes the consequences of making the wrong choice are huge. Literally life or death in both human and corporate terms. So be really careful about what choices you do make.

Are you really sure, deep down in your gut that what you're doing is right?

Simply wonderful

Had a simply wonderful holiday in Corsica. I'd not been there before and was really impressed with the quality of the beaches and the stunning mountain scenery.

It's a beautiful place and I'd recommend it to anyone who is looking for a nearby European holiday venue. 

Offshoring

My own most recent experience was based on reporting a problem with my network drives to the IT support desk run by my company.

Three rings and the phone is answered. Then the automated voice kicks in. "Thanks you for calling Service Line. Calls may be recorded and monitored for our joint protection". What! Joint protection? Are they afraid of getting embroiled in some kind of mis-selling scandal. I work for the damn company. I just want someone to help me find my network drives.

Then the human element kicks in. And I can't understand a word the guy says. His voice is so strongly accented that  I have to ask him to repeat what he's said several times.  Eventually I work out that he's telling me to switch off my machine and reboot. No diagnosis. No fact finding. Just turn it off and reboot. and because my experience has been so rubbish to this point I can't be bothered to argue. It's just too painful.

Against what my instincts tell me, I reboot. Still no drives.

So here's where my head is at over this.

1. I have very right to expect the person at the other end of a help desk telephone to be able to understand me, and for me to be able to understand them. Frequently this is not the case in the interactions which occur with offshored employees.
2. I have every right to expect the other person to be  helpful and interested enough to actually try to find out the problem. Now this can fail in any country and in any culture. But how much more likely are people to throw in the towel if from the start there's an obvious communication difficulty?
3. I have every right to not dread calling a held desk.  But I do dread calling my company's IT help desk because my experiences of it have been so awful.

Someone, somewhere has seen a cost saving on a balance sheet as a result of outsourcing  this  help desk. It's a short term decision. The actual costs are  hidden, and measured in frustration,  failed interactions, timely and potential expensive workarounds,  multiple service calls to fix things that should have been fixed first time round, and  UK based employees who feel that  their lives just got a little harder and more complicated for no obvious reason.