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Customer Experience says: If I leave, don’t slam the door. Leave it open so I can come back.

Funny things, relationships.

For most organisations, that “relationship” has the same attributes, strengths and challenges as our own personal liaisons.   There is of course a mutual benefit, but put a customer’s hat on and while the basic requirements of trust, respect, empathy and support are still there, the relationship becomes more of a convenient association.

Customer Experience Management (CEM) accepts that from time-to-time, for whatever reason and for however long, we switch to try out what a competitor has to offer.  Any loyalty is to our wallets and our own agenda first.  Yet organisations easily mistake inertia for loyalty.

So if for some reason the relationship gets broken, the organisation is not going to help itself by reacting like a moody teenager who thinks they’ve been jilted for an alien slime-ball, shouting “Well, I never valued you anyway!”.  To mix metaphors, throwing dolls out of the pram will put the skids under the relationship quicker than a dog on wet lino.

But that’s what it can feel like as a customer.  A case in point, as experienced by your erstwhile correspondent very recently.  Mobile phone contract due for renewal in two months.  After 6 years with one supplier, the decision is to change.  Proof, if it was needed, that even those who give high customer satisfaction scores can switch.

The instructions on how to back out of a contract are hard to find (a coincidence?) but eventually it’s just a matter of giving 30 days’ notice.  Fine.  Email sent and confirmation of the PAC number comes back with final date.  Then the current supplier calls but because the smooth “Please don’t go, we really value you” patter doesn’t change things, the conversation turns sour.

It’s pointed out that the ‘how to leave’ section of the website was virtually undetectable.  “What did you expect?” comes the incredulous reply.  Ok, so now we know where we stand.  Any thought that I would happily consider them next time were fading fast.  And that was just the beginning.

They didn’t offer a reminder that the bank payment details need changing.  On the day the contract expired, they didn’t send an SMS giving me an hour’s notice that the connection will disappear. They didn’t say that the handset would be locked, preventing any other supplier’s SIM card working.  They therefore also kept hidden the fact that to unlock the handset needed someone in-store to send an email to someone at head office who would email the unlocking instructions – they couldn’t do it themselves – with an SLA of 48 hours.  “So, my phone is dead and you knew that would happen all along?”,  “Er, yeah”. (Arghh!).

And until then, it was all going so well.  But because they showed a complete lack of respect, empathy and support it will be of no surprise that whatever “relationship” we had is now over.  I know how important it is to stop customers leaving, I get that, but those unnecessarily high barriers, both emotional and physical, were just too much.

We’re an item no more – after that experience we never will be.  And that’s a shame.  It didn’t have to end that way.

Jerry Angrave
Customer Experience Consulting
www.customerexperience.uk.com
[email protected]
+44 (0) 7917 718072

Customer Experience: in-house teams must lead by example

The first rule of Customer Experience?  Understand what it’s really like to be a customer. Really understand.

Not just “What is your score for customer satisfaction?” but more along the lines of “How did what we do make you feel and how will that affect what you do next time?” or “What will you say about your experience over dinner tonight?”.  All good – and the right – insight to create better results for everyone concerned.

But when was the last time the in-house Customer Experience team, or those who are taking CE under their wing, were mapping a journey of what it’s like to be one of their own, internal stakeholders?  After all, even with all the most perceptive insight in the world, if it’s going to be used to change things, it will take willing co-operation from all corners of the organisation.  And how well do those in the team keep up with latest trends, best practice and benchmarking of their own competencies?

The understandable day-to-day focus is on what’s happening out there on the front-line.  However, for in-house Customer Experience teams and customer “champions”, they need the confidence and leadership to follow their own advice – hold up that mirror and find out what it’s really like to work with them within the organisation;  how do they make stakeholders feel and therefore behave.  What’s their internal ‘brand’ reputation?  Are they credible in their own right or able to call the shots just because the CEO is on-side?  Can they prove the economic benefits or are they seen as a fluffy side of Marketing?

Charged with leading the agenda of what is a relatively new discipline they need the rest of the organisation to “get it”, to be enthused and motivated to change things that may not be in their own personal scorecard.

Internal stakeholders and suppliers are to the in-house team what customers are to the business.  One won’t work without the other.  Customers don’t want you to turn up late because you’d stopped on the way to pick up a coffee, nor do your internal customers.

Against a backdrop of a commercial world that is still largely governed by short-term sales targets, margin protection and cost reduction, the in-house teams need to have the right leadership skills to bring cross-functional teams – previously worlds apart – together.  They need to be able to navigate the politics of crashing other agendas, influencing investment decisions and resource allocation.  They need to dispel the myths around Customer Experience.  They need to get metric-driven organisations to start thinking about customer emotions; easier said than done for sure, but it can be done.

Most importantly, they need everyone on board.  Not just the Product, Marketing, Operational and Sales teams but Finance, IT and HR too.

As Albert Schweitzer once said: “Example is not the main thing in influencing others; it is the only thing”.

Of all the ‘customer’ journeys to manage this is both one of the most important and, happily, one over which they have most design control.  Know how to lead by example and turn stakeholders into real advocates for Customer Experience.

Jerry Angrave
Customer Experience Consulting
www.customerexperience.uk.com
[email protected]
+44 (0) 7917 718072

Customer Experience: listen to the silence of the customer

If ever there was a statistic to make us sit up and take notice, for me this is that stat:  “96% of customers who are unhappy don’t complain“.  96%! Frightening.  And it gets worse.  “Of those, 90% will just walk away and not come back”.

When businesses set out to build a branded, differentiated customer experience they will often search for the silver bullet; that single, elusive crowning glory that will set them apart from everyone else for ever.  True, such aspirations are good at galvanizing an organisation behind a common goal but the reality is that the starting point needs to be a broad and strong foundation of many smaller experiences that just get the basics right.

Understandably, most of the information for what to get right comes from the root cause analysis of complaints and operational data.  Investment and resources are directed accordingly and all being well, the number of complaints starts falling.

But just fixing the underlying causes of complaints doesn’t have as big an impact on customer numbers and their value as it might.  That’s because, generally, the things that are complained about get prioritised.  If fixing complaints are the foundation blocks for a Customer Experience programme, then addressing this potentially destructive layer of niggles and frustrations is the bedrock on which those foundations should sit.

So, we have a rich seam of things that don’t go as customers would want, which are significant enough to make them try elsewhere next time but not so significant as to warrant putting fingers to keyboards and to complain.  It might be about phone calls to a service centre that doesn’t answer the phone.  It might be a shop assistant who doesn’t smile.  Surprise at the final cost.  Things that are easily fixed but that have a big emotional impact on customers.  That in turn drives their behaviour next time. The silent customers then, voting with their feet and loyal only to their wallet. Gone.

And yet those problems are unintentionally left to fester because people are complaining about other things.  What we need to know is what our customers from today say to each other when they sit down for dinner tonight.  When they tell the tale of what is was really like to be a customer, is that story the one we want and expect them to tell?

Customer insight about what it's really like to be on the receiving end of our service

Wanted: to know what our customers tell each other that they don’t tell us

Tracking down that level of qualitative information isn’t without challenge but it is well worth the effort.  Research that asks customers what they want will give the proposition teams ideas for bells and whistles.  But knowing what niggles customers will show where finite resources need to focus on in the short-term to improve experiences, loyalty and therefore revenue streams.

To complain takes effort and many feel companies don’t deserve to be helped if they can’t get such basics right.  In today’s world where the customer is in control, and whose bar of expectations is rising all the time, customers are rightly less tolerant to anyone who shows them a lack of respect by not “bothering” to reach a minimum standard.

They might be the small, sometimes “fluffy” things and not the single shiny silver bullet – that will come in time – but left unchecked these corrosive issues may as well be bullets being shot in the brand’s own feet.

Jerry Angrave

Customer Experience Consultant

+44 (0) 7917 718 072
www.customerexperience.uk.com
[email protected]