Yearly Archives: 2012

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Migrating to a Better Customer Experience: Four Stages

Trying to sort through all the messaging, tactics, and analytics around Customer Experience (CX) can be daunting. Where do you start trying to create a better customer journey?

  • Do you look at beefing up customer service?
  • Do you fix what’s broken?
  • Do you build on what works?
  • Do you implement new systems?

The answer to any and all of the above is: Maybe.

There are certainly numerous pathways that can take a company from where they are today to a better envisioned customer experience tomorrow but allow me to suggest four stages of development that will help not only chart those paths to success but, in the end, make them shorter as well.

Stage 1: Assessment
This first stage is where you map out your current customer journey as it exists today. You capture all the touch points a customer has with your company. You capture all the places and ways data is stored. You determine what life looks like from the perspective of the person outside your company doing business with you and from the perspective of the person inside your company trying to know something about the customer.

The assessment stage is where you start to get to some understanding of where you’ve got gaps and holes in the customer journey, of where things get clunky in dealing with you and in your dealing with them.

Stage 2: Strategy
This is the one that jazzes ME most because I am a strategy guy. After you’ve assessed the current state of affairs you begin the strategy stage by defining a better envisioned future. This not NOT, “We will fix this gap or that hole.” rather it is a statement about what the customer experience will look and feel like when you’ve created the next generation.

The strategy stage next looks at how to get from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow, or later this afternoon…we all want it faster don’t we? This includes both near and mid-term milestones and measures of success. You’re creating YOUR map to better CX.

Stage 3: Implementation
In this third stage you’re starting to implement process changes and, in some cases, system or infrastructure changes. You’re targeting the long term goal and measuring against your strategic milestones.

It is important to understand that this may be the longest of the three stages thus far. There will no doubt be immediate, near term, middle term, and longer term pieces of a implementation plan and so patience here is the key. Implementation may also result in the modification of some of those milestones you’ve created as assumptions are challenged or confirmed. You do NOT, however, want to start with implementation or it will go on forever.

Be patient, stick to the plan.

Stage 4: Change Management
If I love strategy I hate change management. It is always so tactical, practical, and nit-pickingly bothersome, but hear me in this: It is absolutely necessary.

When you start making large organization wide changes it is easy for communication as to the “why” to get lost. It’s been said that “Vision Leaks” and this is certainly true in any sort of company wide process or system change. The constancy of a good change management stage is what keeps everyone aligned with the strategic vision and marching in the same direction.

In truth change management works through all four stages but it leaps even more prominently to the forefront when you’re implementing changes that effect everyone.

Which stage have you found the most difficult when it comes to making big organizational changes?

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Curtisofletcher.com four years on

It seems strange to me that tomorrow marks the four year anniversary of this blog. In honor of this auspicious marker and in tribute to the tenacity that it has taken to sustain the effort for four years I’d like to re-post a bit of what I was thinking on election day 2008:

I woke up this morning with the full understanding that today is going to be one of those historic milestone days. We’ll all, no doubt, be glad to be rid of the election campaign messaging whether we’re glad with the outcome of the actual election or not.
It struck me this morning that the overwhelming majority of people I have heard comment on the election “on the street” have all had an underlying theme to their comments…

They’re all voting against something rather than for something.

Most of those I’ve heard in support of Senator Obama have said they’re voting for “change”. One of the major thrusts of his campaign has been that voting for the Republican candidate, no matter who it would have turned out to be, would be a vote for what we have now and thus a vote for “change” is a vote AGAINST what we have now.

In the same way many of the folks I have heard in support of Senator McCain have said that they could never vote in favor of the “socialist agendas” or the “more government” policies of the Dems. Thus, they too are choosing to vote AGAINST something.

Neither conversation have had much to say about what they LIKE about the party or person they’re voting for but a LOT to say about what they DON’T like about the opposition.

Doesn’t this start to feel like our only option is to choose the “lesser of two evils”?

Sure it winds up being painted up much prettier than that but that’s what it boils down to in the end. And, in the end, that is sad.
Sad that there are large numbers of folks voting today to make sure the “other guy” or the “other way of thinking” doesn’t get in.
Sad because it will serve to only further the divide between competing ideologies.
Sad because there will be those who are happy that the others are sad.

If it is true that “a house divided against itself cannot stand” then how much longer have we got as a nation?

No matter what your political persuasion is…
No matter how you voted today…
No matter what your core beliefs…
I like to challenge you to become an agent of change by bringing about reconciliation, community, and relationship.
Cheesy? perhaps…
..perhaps not.

Four years later on I’m not sure we’re doing much better.

Change won’t happen at the political level.

It will only happen at the individual level.

What are YOU doing to help bring about positive change?

How can we each build personal bridges to slow the political rift that is widening in our nation?

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3 Prerequisites for Creating Better Customer Experience

Many companies are starting to come to grips with the reality that providing better customer experiences can be incredible differentiators.

That leaves them wondering where to start. Do they look at customer service metrics? Do they give away freebies to their loyal customers? Do they invest in new information systems?

All or any of the above may be required but allow me to suggest three prerequisites, three places to start before you start investing largely in reinventing CX in your organization.

1. Examine Your Processes
It is all too often the case that the connection points between sellers and buyers are owned by siloed departments within larger organizations.

Before you start budgeting for new CX systems you need to examine your end to end processes, including all the places where customers have a touch point with you. You’re looking for consistent voice, consistent messaging, and consistent knowledge of the customer.

Imagine you attend a networking event where you engage in deep conversation with someone you believe will be a potentially great business partner in the future. You spend nearly two hours talking about mutual interests, past experiences, and possible future endeavors. You make plans to meet for lunch the following week.

What would it be like if you met for lunch and this promising new connection had no recollection of your previous conversation? What if they found everything you had talked about at lunch fascinatingly new even though you had shared it all before?

Examining your processes allows you a way to discover if your customers are having an experience similar to that lunch meeting.

2. Explore Your Purpose
It’s not just processes that need to be looked at in a new light. In most organizations the purpose of the marketing group is to fill up the pipeline, the purpose of  the sales group is to bring in customers, the purpose of the support group is to keep them happy.

What would change if the purpose of all three groups was to create customers who advocated on behalf of your product? What if the objective was to create every customer as a positive reference from the first time they ever heard about your product or service?

Creating end goals that are larger than departmental goals continues the process of breaking down silos and lays the groundwork for better customer experience.

3. Empower Your People
Have you ever found yourself talking to a customer service agent who just doesn’t seem to be able to fix something simple only to find out that when they pass you to their manager the problem gets cleared up straight away?

What would happen if that front line person was empowered to solve the problem themselves rather than having to pass the call to a manager?

By empowering your people to solve problems for the customer you not only streamline process but you create an environment in which every person who connects with a customer feels like they can impact the business positively.

Taken all together it becomes apparent that customer experience starts as a cultural imperative. No matter what systems are put in place, no matter what practices are changed if the corporate cultural doesn’t support the idea of creating amazing experiences for your customers any efforts to change won’t last.

If you were to start today to look for ways to increase customer satisfaction and psotivie experience where do you think you’d encounter the biggest challenges?

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Why All the Changes?

For those who have been following my blog for awhile the changes may seem to have come out of left field. Over the last few months I have had the chance to speak to audiences literally across the country about creating better customer experiences.

In support of those conversations I’ve decided to update the ol’ blog a bit and give it a tighter more professional feel. The object here is that while it is still a personal blog it can now better serve a corporate audience as well.

Perhaps the most significant operational change is that I now can provide a way for you to subscribe to either the entire content set OR to just a specific category. I appreciate those who’ve been following over the years and look forward to continuing to provide interesting thought fodder.

 

 

 

 

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What is CX?

Customer Experience, or CX for short, is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services, over the duration of their relationship with that entity: from awareness, discovery, attraction, interaction, purchase, use, cultivation and advocacy.

While most organizations now how to find, acquire, service or retain customers they rarely take the time to create an organization wide story around the look and feel of a customer’s entire life cycle.

You don’t have to dig too far to find some pretty incredible evidence for the efficacy of excellent customer experience. By way of example:

In order to find out more about how to create customer experiences that can drive satisfaction, increase attraction, and convert customers into advocates subscribe to the customer experience feed and get regular blog posts on building a better customer experience.

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International Cycling Union: 3 EPIC Failures

This week the International Cycling Union stripped Lance Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles as a result of their investigation into his use of performance enhancing drugs.

While I am sure they feel quite good about their pursuit of “justice” allow me to point out the ways in which this is an epic, epic failure.

1. The failed their Purpose
Professional sports organizations are in the entertainment industry. They may indeed promote healthy exercise and provide competitive outlets for a small group of elite folks but at the very core of what they do they are there to entertain. Bicycle racing is a fringe sport at best, not nearly the following of the three biggies, football, baseball and basketball, not any where close to international sports like Soccer, not even approaching NASCAR in terms of popularity, mind-share, or revenue.

The biggest thing that has happened in the world of cycling in the last decade was Lance Armstrong. He put them on the map of sport. He brought them a larger audience. He added entertainment value beyond what they could have hoped.

And this is the thanks they give him.

When you fail at your purpose you risk becoming irrelevant.

2. They failed at Parity
Of course there is an argument that says we don’t want cheaters to win. That has been the argument that has fueled the pursuit of Armstrong even though he passed all the required drug tests when he was competing. So let me ask this:

What if they found out that EVERYONE in the races was taking performance enhancing drugs? Is it really cheating then?

In an article in the New York Times, Travis Tygart, chief exec of the US anti-doping agency said, there was still more to do to clean up cycling because there were “many more details of doping that are hidden, many more doping doctors, and corrupt team directors, and the omerta has not yet been fully broken.”

If that is the admitted case why aren’t they still looking at ALL the competitor’s blood samples? You can’t hide behind fairness and parity when you only go after a select few people. There are probably hundreds of competitors who will remain on the record as Tour finishers who cheated just as badly but didn’t win.

When you fail to adhere to your own trumpeted standards you risk becoming irrelevant.

3. They failed their Patrons
I may be alone in this but as a member of the viewing public I am not happily cheering for the pursuit of pushing doping out of cycling. I only got interested in it the entertainment value of the sport because of Lance’s pursuits. I don’t care that they’ve finally “proven” he used drugs.

They’ve lost me as a customer.

Not because of the scandal’s, not because of any supposed taint on fairness, but because they taken the guy who made them all the money and tossed him under the bus in some sort of holier-than-thou crusade. They’ve put the sport ahead of the consumer. They’ve tried to reconfigure their “product” right out there in the eyes of the viewing public and in my humble opinion they’ve screwed up the product as a result.

When you fail at understanding the customer you run the risk of becoming irrelevant.

Simply put, for me as a customer, the world of professional cycling has become irrelevant once again. Lance brought them to my attention and I watched even after he finished competing but this latest round of circus performances has turned me off completely and I doubt they’ll get me back.

Where has you seen other businesses fall prey to these kinds of failures?

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Customer Communications: Where to Start

How many time have you looked at the front page of a company web site and read something almost exactly like this:

The market leader in providing innovative solutions that transform businesses. Serving more than 67% of the fortune 500.

Drives me nuts.

Too often the starting point for customer communications start with the question, “What do we want to say?”

When you start there you suddenly find yourself with all kinds of due diligence facts, historical anecdotes, feature, functions and benefits…and so do all of your competitors. As a result everyone starts sounding very much the same.

The game changes though when you start from the position of asking, “What do we want the customer to do?”

Yes, it seems quite simple, particularly if you think the answer is, we want the customer to buy. But do you really just want them to buy? Aren’t you really MORE interested in them “succeeding”?

Typically we don’t just want customers, we want satisfied customers. So the answer to the question” what do we want them to do” is, “we want them to use our product or service to solve their problem.”

Of course in order to be able to start communicating from the perspective of solving the customers problem we have to now what the problem is and how your product or service solves it. THEN you have to let the customer know that you understand the problem.

So instead of:

  • We have
  • We are
  • We provide

You start with

  • You want
  • You need
  • You can

Try this experiment:

Take any of the communications you currently use to describe what you do and set them aside. Start the piece over with a description of the problem you solve. Next throw in a few lines about how your solution is unique in terms of what it does for the customer. You only get to talk about the problem and the unique solution, NOT your organization.

Now go look at your competitors communications and see if you don’t recognize how this approach starts to make you stand out.

When was the last time you saw a company talk more about you as a customer than they do about themselves?

 

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Monday Night’s Last Call

If you’re reading this then you probably have some opinion on the last call of the Monday Night Football game between Seattle and Green Bay.

Here are some interesting tidbits I’ve been able to dig up from around the web:

  • The official who signaled the touchdown has three days training experience at a referee academy in Utah and has, until now, only refereed high school and junior college games.
  • The Packers were favored by four and a half points. As a result of the call they lost, had it gone the other way they would have won by five points. The estimated swing in betting revenues on that one call was $300 MILLION dollars.
  • The NFL’s statement defending the call has a six paragraph introduction and cites three different rules that come in to play.
  • And this provocative bit: The Lingerie Football League, yes there is such a thing, has issued a statement that some of the referees they have fired as being unfit to officiate their games are now officiating in the NFL as replacements.

Crazy eh? Outrageous! Something HAS to be done doesn’t it?

But why?

The National Football League is in the entertainment business and I can tell you that from the perspective of a vociferous Seattle Seahawks fan, my wife, there was nothing more entertaining than that last minute win. (I was pulling for Green Bay)

Doesn’t it make it more fun having go guess when your team will pull the whammy card and get an incredibly ridiculous call that changes the game? Ok, well what about if the opponent gets whammied?

Isn’t it entertaining to listen to the announcers fumble all over themselves to be incredulous, and professional, and confused all at the same time?

Isn’t it entertaining to wonder what is going on in those guys heads when they make such horrific calls?

No?

Ok, I know all about “the integrity of the game” and “player safety” and all that. I realize you could start to lose part of the fan base if the officiating becomes too farcical, not to mention the potential for corruption creeping in to officiating…if you get really bad calls every game it is easier to hide a corrupt official making them on purpose…but really it is about entertainment…and I’m still chuckling about the Monday night game two days later.

The bottom line is that the league, and in particular the commissioners office, are starting to look quite foolish no matter how you slice it. We have to place some blame on the owners too who have control over the purse strings.

But we’re the fans. In truth we hold the power.

What if, in every NFL stadium this coming Sunday, the seats were empty when the game started?  I’m not suggesting people kiss off the money they’ve spent on tickets, just that across the league people boycott the opening kickoff. Can you imagine the coverage?

  • Empty stadiums for the national anthem and probably most of the first series of plays.
  • HUGE crowds outside the stadium standing around waiting to to enter.
  • Fans filtering in throughout almost the entire first quarter.

My quick web research seems to indicate that NFL stadiums bring in about 1.2 million dollars in concession revenue per game. Divide that by four and you potentially impact a quarter of a million dollars per stadium. There are 13 Sunday games this week so you get close to three and a half million dollars in impacted concession revenues.

That ought to get someones attention don’t ya think?

Let’s see if we can get Mr. Hochuli and the rest of ’em back by flexing our power as consumers. Let’s boycott the opening kickoff!

What do you think? Would an opening kickoff boycott get the attention of the league? Perhaps more importantly…could it be pulled off?

 

 

 

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AT&T, iPhone 5, and What We’ve Got Here is a Failure to Communicate

The stats were in a week or so ago…iPhone 5 set a bunch of records for pre-order volume.

As I mentioned here only a few short weeks prior to that my trusted iPhone 3gs went for a swim so I duly made my way to the AT&T store to leverage my upgrade discount and order my iPhone on “opening day”.

Of course, because I hadn’t called at midnight the night before or waited in line on the sidewalk I didn’t get in to order my phone until the afternoon. By that time I was told that orders being taken were expected to ship within two weeks, rather than the anticipated one week, but that I would be able to track my order status online.

The picture above is my actual order status. Notice anything? Somehow, in ten days, according to this, the is no difference in status from the moment when I was standing talking to the AT&T employee in the store to now. My order is processing.

I put this in the “failed customer self service” folder.

Order status checkers like this one are create tools to reduce call volume. The more customers who can see what is going on with their order the fewer will clog the phone lines with questions about shipping dates.

Unless of course you fail to update that status at all.

Not only does this produce more phone activity but it also sends a subtle message that either you’re hiding something or you don’t care all that much about the customer.

So why might a system like this show NO activity over ten days?

  • We’re slammed and the system is overloaded
  • We don’t know from the supplier when the items will be available
  • We now know it will take four weeks so we’re avoiding telling you
  • We didn’t create enough differentiate status levels in the system

In truth the reason doesn’t matter, the communication does. Even if “the system” posted a status that said “we’re backlogged and hope to clear the jam buy the following date” it would be more communication than “processing”. My order has been “processing” since I first said, “Hey, I’m here to order and iPhone 5.”!!

If you’re going to use a customer self service tool like a status checker you need to remember a couple key rules for success:

Rule 1: Keep the information up to date
Now to be fair the information on my status above may BE up to date. My order may not have moved at all. But you would think that it would have processed by now and just be awaiting inventory. But is does not appear to be up to date. By leaving it mostly blank the system has failed at its two primary purposes: reducing call volume and communicating status to the customer.

Rule 2: Communicate, even if it is bad news
It is far better to know that my order will be delayed than it is to keep guessing. By communicating even the bad news you communicate that you care about the customer. Trying to hide the bad news says you care more about your image than you do about your customer.

Rule 3: Think with a customer perspective
Too often these systems glitches become internal finger pointing or design arguments. If you failed to think like a customer during design think like one during the problem period. I wonder if anyone at AT&T is asking how customers feel about a dead order status?

Customer self service tools are great when they’re firing on all cylinders. When they’re not you need to react quickly, communicate effectively, and think like the customer.

What other types of “customer self service” tools have you run across and how effectively were they managed?

Bonus points if you know the movie that is referenced in the title of today’s post.  🙂

 

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How Likely Are You to Recommend?

If you’ve purchased anything online lately, or even walked into  a store where you’ve had to interact with a sales person, odds are fairly high that  you’ve received the follow on questionnaire that asks:

“How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?”

It has become almost startling now as my iPhone receives that email with the survey attached before I even walk out of the store. It also seems to me that I am being asked this question more and more frequently.

Now, as a marketing guy I understand that… companies are trying to calculate their Net Promoter Score.  They really just want to know how well they’re doing.

Just briefly today I want to pose some questions that are worth considering when you start to think about using Net Promoter Score as a measure of how well your organization is serving your customers.

1. Is the answer to the question of whether someone will promote you or not reflective of your overall relationship or just the most recent transaction?

I have had great experiences with front desk people at hotels, airlines folks, cell phone sales people (and just as many bad ones) and my response to the question of whether I’ll promote or not is typically based on that most recent few minutes.

That means that in order to get an accurate picture of my relationship to any of those businesses they’d need to get me to answer that question after every significant transaction and calculate an average. I can guarantee you I won’t fill out the survey every time!

As a result it is important to remember that:
Timing and frequency are crucial to get right

2. Does a customer’s positive response mean that they’ll actually promote your organization?

Obviously that differs person to person and situation by situation but it cannot be assumed that “yes I WOULD promote” equates to “yes I WILL promote”.

Rather than asking the blanket “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?” it becomes more useful to suggest where and when you might recommend: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend who is looking to book a vacation?”

Remember:
Providing context makes it easier for the customer who wants to promote you to recognize the opportunity to promote you.

3. How can you make it easier for your customers to promote you?

Asking the blanket question gets you a philosophical response, providing context makes it easier for the customer to consider action, but you’re still asking them to engage in creative effort.

  • Why not, instead, provide customers with a couple of options: “If you’re willing to promote us would you please like our page on facebook?” or “If you had a great experience with us today would you be willing to post the following tweet: etc. etc. etc.”

Remember:
The easier you make it for someone to promote you the more likely it is that they will.

Rather than just asking folks if they’d be willing to promote your organization provide them with the ways and means to do so and you’ll find you get much more mileage out of the practice of capturing net promoter information.

When was the last time you answered positively on a “will you recommend us” survey? How quickly did you actually recommend and what means did you employ?