Customer Crossroads

My credit card just sold my so-called relationship

I've had a gold CIBC Aeroplan card for a number of years that I have used for business expenses. More than a decade. And charged a ton of business expenses, keeping a good credit record. I liked that card. I chose it from a bunch of other bachelors vying for my favors, and have felt proud to have it in my pocket. It has served me well.

But then the card portfolio got sold to TD, and I got sold along with it. Now, let me be clear, I know TD to be good organization, and I have other accounts with them. But this was not my decision.

This is not proving to be a great customer experience

First, the emotional hit. I was happy where I was, and it felt really odd to find out that they really didn't want a relationship, despite saying that for years. Me and my business could be sold, just like that. I seriously considered cancelling and moving on, and may still do that. The goodbye letter from the old bank did not communicate an essential message of thanks for business done in the past. Or communicate any empathy about the fact that they, not me, made this decision.

Then letters from the new guys started to arrive. And the hassle-factor set in.

New card. Several letters. New card number. New PIN number. Reminders that I need to change all the regular payments going through the card. (Guess what guys, it's a business card, and there are a TON of regular charges!)

Oh yeah. You can't do a thing before the big switchover date. You can't input the changes into all those other systems in advance -- they won't take the new card number. You can't change the PIN in advance. The letters have warned me that I should take BOTH the old and the new card, and the new secret PIN with me if I just happen to be traveling on that date. (Yes, I do just happen to be traveling on that date.)

My Director of Everything guy tells me that the entire online history of the account will disappear. You know how we keep getting told we should stop getting paper statements because we'll always be able to get the information online? That would be incorrect, I have now learned. (Sorry guy. Guess you'll be doing some downloading over the next few days prior to the switchover!)

I was a little concerned that I have booked travel on a card that will no longer be active. Travel companies have a way of not liking that. I asked the nice lady on the phone about that little problem. She seemed to think it was a highly unusual situation (uh, nope), and wanted to know when, exactly, I had booked the travel? (Huh? how is that relevant? Months ago.) No useful information to impart. Kind of suggested I should have called a different number. (You mean NOT the one printed on the back of the new card??)

I'm not giving them my heart this time

All the letters are filled with blah-blah-we're-wonderful-blah. It's all going to be great. I should be really happy. And please make sure I carefully read the many instructions and fine print. 

So far, it's been a ton of work and annoyance, and we're nowhere near done.

And the new card isn't pretty, either. I may have to put some Hello Kitty stickers on it. Cause right now, it looks like it's all about them, and I want it to be all about me.

But here's the crucial thing. The letters are just so much boilerplate marketing-speak. I'm not going to give them my heart this time. I'll collect the points for now. But at the first good offer from someone else, I'm moving. I would have done it this week if it weren't for the fact that -- yes -- I am traveling, and can't wait for a new card to show up from some new guy seeking my affections.

My take

We in the marketing corner talk a lot about relationships. But the truth is that this is really a one way street. I think consumers may be catching on. What do you think?

What's your take?

I'd love to hear your reaction. Am I just being silly? Should I be grateful I got sold?

Related articles

Is loyalty a one way street?

Should you turn simple transactions into sales opportunities? Yes, but there are rules.

The power of small numbers: n=1 insights

I'm a big believer in the power of insights. Insights come from stories, anecdotes, observations. You might later need to verify or deepen that ah-ha moment. You might decide to look for supporting big data. All good. But the individual incident is still important.

When I managed sales people way back in the last century, there was a great saying I learned: "If you see it once, it's a pattern." I believe this is true, mostly. People are creatures of habit. It is challenging for us to change our behavior "just once" -- much more likely that you have actually stumbled into a pattern worth investigating.

Which is why I thought it was very interesting to find out that Jeff Bezos at Amazon reads a certain number of customer e-mails sent directly to him, and that he makes specific enquiry about some of these. One result is that entire teams drop what they are doing to respond. That might seem a bit extreme, but it's their way of keeping the focus on the customer experience.

So a company like Amazon listens to individual customer anecdotes. N=1. To keep focused on the customer.

It's a question we could all ask ourselves -- how do we keep the focus on the customer? How do we do it culturally, not just with processes, or slogans, but really constantly. How do we keep the focus on the customer.

 

46% of your customers want things easier and faster: are you helping them?

Strategy Mag recently published fascinating stats from research firm Fresh Intelligence. One that caught my eye:

Consumers think brands should be better at:

Saving time 46%

Product innovation: 44%

Seamless and transparent communication with consumers: 27%

Making buying easier - apps/sites that help make informed decisions and online ordering: 24%

I got a lovely example from Porter Airlines this week that created genuine surprise and delight, and saved me a step in the process. They notified me by e-mail that I am checked in for the flight, and they attached my boarding pass.

One whole step removed!

Can you remove some steps from your customers' lives that add them no value? Or are even irritating?

Missed opportunities: when you do something good for customers, make sure they know

I buy lots of stock photos for use in my work -- either to illustrate concepts for people, mock up new ideas, or to enliven my client reports.

When I got a good-for-one-day-only offer from iStockphoto to get a 15% discount, I was interested and clicked through.

The problem:

• Landing page did not make the discount clear. I thought I was looking at regular prices, and that the discount would show up later
• There was a coupon code box, but no coupon code. More confusion
• When I paid and confirmed, I thought that I would see some kind of "you saved $x" notice. Nope.
• Thinking that I didn't get the discount I was supposed to, I made an enquiry of customer support.
• 8 days later, I received an e-mail response "The coupon was already built into the site when you made the purchase, that is why it does not appear as an additional discount on your receipt."

The mistake here, often made, is the assumption that I am so familiar with the regular price that I would instantly see the discount. The landing page did not make it clear I was getting anything special -- it looked the same as always. So an opportunity to make a little wee splash was missed.

The other odd thing was that this offer arrived on a national holiday. So only us poor fools who were working would receive the offer, and we had to act on it immediately (I think -- the offer wasn't crytal clear on that). Alll I wanted to do was finish up and go play, but instead I had to add something to my urgent to-do list.

My take:

When you do something nice for customers, make sure they know. Don't assume it's obvious.

Reader participation:

Are the "special offers" you get actually special?

In the era of self-serve, the problems people call you about are not ordinary

Large organizations gather lots of statistics. Such as who calls the call centre. And what their problem is.

When they encounter a frequent problem, they do one of three or four things:

- they fix the problem (design feature, assembly instructions, whatever it is)

- they create self-serve options on the web site to help the customer fix the problem (such as tracking your package)

- they create an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) file to deal with the problem

- they put a message on a phone recording to tell you the answer (such as what hours the store is open)

All of this is done to reduce the number of enquiries about simple stuff, and (hopefully) to make the experience better.

This has led us to an interesting situation -- all of those problems that used to be dealt with by people are now dealt with by us. By definition, what's left is uncommon problems.

So have a little respect for your front line call-centre staff, because they only get the difficult stuff. You may not be training them that way, but that's their reality.

My take

I was thinking about this again because I am speaking to some service quality professionals at the end of the month. And I think this is one of the things they have to contend with. We've actually solved many of the obvious service problems. What's left is not all that straightforward.

Products versus services - what's the difference?

From time to time I hear the question raised about whether something is a product or a service. This comes about, I think, because marketers and brand managers in service businesses often refer to products as a matter of convenience. For example, a mortgage product or a vacation product.

However, there are some substantial differences between products and services, which definitely affect how you think about managing both the customer interaction and the marketing generally.

For example, services tend to be perishable in the sense that they cannot be inventoried -- what you don't sell today cannot be sold tomorrow. Consider the impact of this element on airline seat pricing -- it's a huge driver in that industry! 

Service quality is notoriously difficult to control. For example, one lawyer is not interchangeable with another lawyer, even though they may work for the same firm and have similar training.  This is very different from the world of products, where we fully expect two boxes of laundry detergent to be virtually indistinguishable.

I've attached a PDF you can download that gives you some examples as well as some criteria for consideration.

Download a PDF of "Is it a product or a service"

Leveraging e-mail to extend and improve the experience: managing before, during and after

In October, I'll be attending the Qualitative Research Consultants Association annual conference in Palm Springs. It's a fun conference, because it is only practitioners who attend, and the schmoozing-for-business-development factor is pretty low. We learn from presentations, try out the local restaurants, and even have a costume party. [I have described my colleagues as people who wear flowy clothes. Not all of us, but there are a lot of F-feeling personality types in the profession.]

Okay, so this is a few weeks away -- but this morning, the hotel sent me an advance welcome e-mail, and invited me to use their electronic concierge to set things up for myself.

This really made me smile. It was a good reminder of my reservation code, now tucked away in the trip file. It made me look forward to a bunch of things like swimming in the pool [that I probably won't have time for. I only wish they had an on-site costume service...]

From a business angle, this totally makes sense. I can order and book spa treatments, restaurant reservations, even room service items to be ready on my arrival.

Something to think about: before, during, after

Services are always anchored in time. There is time before the experience, the experience itself, and time after. You can think about ways to do a number of things in advance of the experience, whatever it is:

• simple reminders of an appointment, from a hair appointment to a doctor's appointment
• what to bring with you, for example, to a meeting with a mortgage officer
• an opportunity to book additional services -- while you're here, would you like to add an eyebrow waxing?
• a simple welcome message -- telling people you know they are coming to your organization, and that you value them

Your interaction before the experience can be designed to heighten anticipation, reduce anxiety, help people prepare, or help you prepare for them. And new information technologies makes this so easy.

What can you add to YOUR experience?

Why are we waiting?

In this age of magical IT applications, one has to wonder why it is so difficult to schedule home service calls and deliveries. It's as if this part of the experience is frozen in time somewhere in the pre-computer age. [I wrote about this not long ago, here].

From the company side, I suspect scheduling software IS being used, but it's being used to optimize the distance and costs to the company, not to deliver a better customer experience.

TOA Technologies, a company in the scheduling tech business, just released a survey they have done on this issue. 

• Nearly 1 of every 5 consumers (18%) have taken unpaid time off to wait for a service or delivery in their home in the first 6 months of 2009
• One third (32%) of consumers have taken a vacation day or sick • time to wait for the cable guy or some other service in their home in the first 6 months of 2009
• 18% have refused or cancelled a product/service because the • service/delivery person was late or didn’t show
• 29% have left their home in frustration (costing their service provider • more money in rescheduling, customer service and operations costs) because the cable guy or delivery person was late

Most customers blame the company for this problem -- another example of operating decisions that affect the brand.

And guess who thinks they are waiting more, and are more annoyed about it? Well that would be higher income households, no doubt your most valued / targeted customers.

It's a nice little study, and it just might help you make the case to revisit your organization's approach to in-home delivery and service calls.

Speaking as a customer, we're just begging you -- please, don't make us waste time this way.

Resources:

Here's the link to the PDF report on the study.

BYOB: bring your own bag, and how to manage it

In the fruit market on the weekend, as the cashier carefully packed our luscious-looking peaches, tomatoes, green and yellow beans, we talked about the BYOB* situation. 

Like other places, our city has decided that plastic shopping bags will carry a $.05 charge to discourage their use, and encourage people to BYOB**.

Our greengrocer clerk had recently been shopping for clothes, provided her own bag, and was very dismayed that "they didn't even wrap it". She was missing the careful wrapping in tissue paper, and then packing of her recent purchases. Purchases which cost a lot more than peaches. 

"They basically just handed me the clothes to pack myself", she said. She also pointed out that the major chain grocer just up the street does a much better job of using the BYO bags than this, and that "Clothes are really expensive; they should be treated special".

As we come to grips with reducing our impact on the planet, many strange things will happen under the green banner. As you and your organization figure out how to comply, don't forget to look after the details of the customer experience.

*Bring Your Own Bag

** Thereby reducing the use of something that is multi-use -- a plastic shopping bag -- and replacing it with single-use plastic, such as kitchen catchers garbage bags and the like. But it played well to the public. Now we are learning that re-usable grocery bags are a potential source of toxic germs and need to be regularly washed or otherwise cleaned.

Yes, I forgot my password and my ID. Please don't punish me.

Just booked a flight on WestJet. Who is a pretty user-friendly company. But today it took me longer to update my profile than to select and buy the tickets. ARGGGH!

After booking the flights, when I said "yes, remember my information" for the next trip, I was sent to create a profile. It turns out there is already someone in the system with the same first name, last name and e-mail address. [Creepy. Wait, maybe it's actually me.]

Usually when you see something like this, you get a link that says, "Are you Susan Abbott?", and you can escape profile Hell. Not this time. Instead, I entered into a Kafkaesque process with multiple steps, each of which had to be confirmed by really complicated CAPTCHA words. I had to redo those a few times too.

Finally, my user ID is revealed!  So I try to finish updating the profile so I can save time in the future. [Wait, wasn't that why I did the first profile?]

Turns out they have no special question on file for me, so they can't validate who I am, and will not let me in. But they kindly offer to "Expire the Profile" for me. [I'm not kidding. This is enough of an issue for them that they have an option like this.] Killing off my former self also requires multiple steps, including an e-mail link and more confirmations.

After which, I can start all over to create a new profile and hopefully save time in the future.

They still don't want me to use my e-mail as an ID, because it is being used by another customer. Okay, that's just too bizarre. I thought we killed off that other person...

So now I can't link my recent ticket booking to the profile. And there's no way to correct this. I guess their CRM system is stuffed with this kind of noisy data. I imagine management team meetings where people wonder why x% of ticket bookers have no profile, and what this means. 

It occurs to me that the productivity problem we keep hearing about may actually be related to profile updating, lost IDs and passwords.

When this happens with a brand I have a weak relationship to, I just say forget it, and I bet you do too. However, I kind of like WestJet, and will probably travel with them again in the future.

Seriously, WestJet, you can do better than this.

**************************************************************************
Just check out this un-WestJet-like Expire notice. Who wrote this thing?

THIS IS AN AUTO GENERATED EMAIL.  PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL.

 A request has been made to expire a westjet.com profile that is associated to this email address.  The information contained in or attached to this e-mail is intended only for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, or a person responsible for delivering it to the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately by replying to the message and delete the message from your computer.  Any  form of reproduction, dissemination, copying, disclosure, modification, distribution and/or publication of this message without our prior written consent is strictly prohibited.

 

Please click the link below to expire your profile with westjet.com.

***************************************************************************

What happened when everyone started bringing their own bag: the law of unintended consequences

I just got a call from a good buddy leaving Loblaws, which recently introduced a save-the-planet charge of 5 cents a bag for those no-goodniks that don't bring their own.

"I'm just leaving the Superstore now," says buddy."Everyone is bringing their own bags.

"And you would not believe how this has slowed down the checkout process. At least 30% slower."

I witnessed this myself at a Wal-Mart. The bags are not all the same size. Some are floppy and need to be held open. One guy was handing the bags over one at a time.

Last week when I commented about the cost of human-delivered services, I wasn't even thinking about this.

Researchers like me know how much customers hate waiting in line. They hate watching inefficiency in line. It used to be just the brown rice brotherhood that took their own bag. Soon everyone will be doing it.  Yikes!

One way to get loyalty behaviors: make it really difficult to cancel.

I was rounding up invoices for the accountant today, and realized that I am still on a couple of premium plans I thought I had cancelled. LinkedIn was one of them. 

I was really sure I had sent them the cancellation request, as I had only upgraded to manage a specific project, which ended more than a month ago.  Unable to find my request, I went looking through their site to figure out how to downgrade.

Here is their amazing list of instructions for downgrading. Draw your own conclusions, but for me, this does nothing for their brand, and will make me even more cautious about upgrading in the future.

*********************************************************************************************************************

Downgrade your Premium Subscription

How do I cancel or downgrade my current premium subscription account?

A request to cancel your premium subscription switches your account to a free personal account. Cancellation will end billing and remove access to the premium features designed for premium subscriptions.

A request to downgrade your premium subscription changes your account to a lower lever premium subscription while still offering features like InMails and expanded people search. Changes will be made effective with the billing expiration date of your current subscription.

To downgrade to a lower premium subscription level or to cancel your premium account and switch to a free personal account, follow the steps below:

1. Click on 'Account & Settings' found in the upper right hand side of the home page.
2. Click on 'Compare Account Types' and identify the account type that best fits your needs.
3. Click on 'Customer Service' link found at the bottom of the page.
4. Click on 'Ask Customer Service' tab on the 'Customer Service Center' page.
5. Enter your account's primary email address in 'Contact Information'.
6. Select 'Premium Accounts' from the 'Category' dropdown under 'My question is about'.
7. In the 'Subject' type 'Downgrade My Subscription' (if you want a lower level premium subscription) or 'Cancel My Subscription' (if you want to just keep the free personal account).
8. In the 'Question' text box, identify what type of account you want to end up through this request. For example, "I would like to move to change to Business Plus account" or "I only want a free personal account."
9. Click on 'Continue'.

******************************************************************************************************************
Nine steps. Remarkable. So I have now sent a new request via their request function. Look at the confirmation screen reproduced below:

 

So the instructions are not quite correct, actually.  You might think this is just a boiler-plate confirmation screen and not read it. But there is one more step. If you are seduced into clicking on a link that has "answers", your response would not be submitted at all, you'd be in an infinite loop of some kind.

After you click "finish submitting question" you finally get this confirmation. And then a confirmation e-mail. That confirmation e-mail was the first positive about this process, in my view.

Quite apart from canceling, you might want to be able to produce an invoice to support the credit card charge. [Accountants, you know, they have their rules. And so does the tax man] See if you can locate the link that shows where you find the invoice for prior charges.

Having trouble? I know I did. But it's tucked up there in small type below the line that tells you what kind of account you have.

Incredibly, the company has already responded to my request to back-date the downgrade and refund one month. So they did really well on the service recovery front. But created some unnecessary work for themselves in the process.

LinkedIn is surely not evil. But this process and the visual design supporting it is awful. And they are not the only ones out there pulling this kind of nonsense.

I just hope there isn't some customer experience expert out there recommending this approach.

Removing barriers to engagement - why easy web addresses are essential

Hilton Honors wants me to join their loyalty program. They sent me a nice letter and a plastic membership card.

This has been sitting in a pile of stuff in my office for a while. The letter is dated June 9, which suggests potentially 3.5 months. However, in the interests of staying in touch with everything that relates to experience, I thought I should check it out.

Here is where most of your customer communications are going to start. Not with big excitement, for the most part, although I bet they were trying for this. I did have a passing notion that there might be some cool free stuff involved. There was certainly status appeal -- I was being granted Gold VIP status without earning it. Woo hoo!

The letter said to visit HiltonHHonors.com/vip to register. That's exactly the format I was given. It took me about four tries to get in. Misspelling due to the HH accounted for two errors, being unsure about whether I needed a www accounted for a couple more.

The less committed would surely have given up at this point. Not because of a poor offer. Not because of a weak brand. Only because of a really bizarre web address, communicated poorly. Less than one line of text on the entire mailer.

Once in, I kept getting error messages because my company name contains an ampersand. Then I had a bunch of tough decisions to make about whether I really preferred a single king or two doubles, and do I want to be close to the elevator or not. Three pages of blank-filling-in just to register. I wondered to myself, why bother, really. Would I ever get anything through this program ... and yet, the gold status called me onward.

The bottom line

Yup, all those meetings you went to? The innovation offsites? The agency briefing, the review sessions, the drafts, the months of work, the measurement, the metrics, the business case. All of that can go down the drain in a heartbeat due to minor usability problems.

We live in a complex world. Marketers need to keep it simple to succeed.

Sticky receipts: how to get people from the pump to the store

I was getting gas for the Vespa yesterday. [Mostly I don't have to get gas, as house elves seem to keep the four-wheeled vehicle fueled. The house-elves don't ride, however. So a whole new world of customer experiences is opening up for me here.]
I used my VISA card to pay at the pump, and at the end got a message that says "receipt available inside". Interesting on several levels:

• reduces the operational demands on the pump. No printer, no paper to replace. Might even be something they can say is greener, because it reduces paper litter
• provides an alternative that encourages you to go in to the store where you might buy something
• is only a slight inconvenience to achieve these benefits

Additional remarks posted July 1
There are some pretty interesting comments below. I admit to having been being mildly annoyed by this process. But others are much more seriously ticked. I'd love to know what the real story is here. [i.e. what the real strategy is, and if it is working].

As an alternative method to get people into your store, I'd suggest printing a receipt with a tear-off coupon or offer on it for a discounted coffee, chips, etc.

Where have all the usability guys gone? Or isn't anyone hiring them?

I'm feeling rejected. I tried to make a comment on e-How to correct a bunch of errors in one of their Facebook articles (how to import a blog into Facebook). They encouraged me to comment, but when I clicked post, I had to apply for membership.
After filling in the entire form, they gave me a message that says,

"We're sorry, but you did not qualify to register for e-How. Thank you for your interest." 

This is a new low for me, folks. I don't qualify to provide free content. [Was it my birthdate? Don't you like Canadians? Should I have selected Cambodia, or another C-country instead? Was it because I don't want a daily e-mail from you? I thought we could have been good together. I'm addicted to Instructables, after all.]

It's so irritating to waste time like this, I just want to scream. But no one would hear that. So I'm doing what people do now, I'm taking it out on them in other ways.

More to the point... isn't it pretty obvious web design good practice to put "you must be a member to comment" right on the button?  I could go on, and I bet you could too, because this sort of thing is everywhere. We are all joined at the hip to the web, and we expect more.

Seriously. Hire a usability expert. Avoid being trashed on someone's blog.

Making things easy for your customers

There are so many ways to make things easy for customers. Here's one I encountered today: integrating travel arrangements into your Outlook calendar.

I'm headed to New York at the end of the month to speak at the ARF conference. So I was just on the Marriott web site to reserve a room.

Quite apart from the simple reservation process, and the opportunity to ask for extra towels in advance, there were a couple of things that were really nice.

First -- a nicely formatted form to print that didn't produce a bunch of extra pages of gobble-de-gook.
Second -- easy function to e-mail to others.
Third -- one click upload to my Outlook calendar. That one was a WOW.

We are starting to expect these things from travel oriented services. But surely they are more widely applicable. Here's a couple of ideas.

Anytime I make a booking or complete a transaction, give me a nice statement

For example, a nicely formatted confirmation would be great to have for many financial transactions, from transfers between accounts to tax payments. For a business account, this sort of thing should be a given, but it isn't. For the most part, you have to print what's on the screen using your browser, which doesn't necessarily give you a complete summary of the transaction and the confirmation code in one easy-to-record document.

Easy e-mail function for the statement or confirmation

Second, the easy e-mail function. Having now put a simple summary page in place, let me e-mail it. I find I am quite often faced with sending a link to a page. And we've all been faced with getting an e-mail that is unintelligible, or a link that we can't use, sent by someone who wanted us to have this information about an event, an order, a whatever.

This functionality should be far more ubiquitous than it is now.

Easy upload to calendars or other personal management software

So many things in our lives are part of a schedule. We've got a lot of electronic devices set up to help us manage these schedules, deadlines and dates.

Why should I have to remember when my term deposit comes due -- why can't I have an upload option?
For that matter, why can't the tax-man let me upload key due dates for me or my business into my calendar?
What about a reminder that a delayed shipment is due for a book on back-order?
I don't want all of this stuff in an e-mail -- more often, it would be nice to have the option to put the dates or details into my electronic calendar.

Depending on your market segment, you might need to consider platforms other than Outlook. I've seen lots of evidence of teens managing their calendars on their cell-phones. And they are a forgetful bunch, they need at least as much help as I do to remember important dates and deadlines.

Eureka! The solution to the productivity problem

We've all been hearing about the productivity problem.

Only this morning I was reading how Kellogg biz school is now studying MBA students to figure out which ones are procrastinators and make them change their ways. [An economist's idea of how to handle variations in human beings -- let's change the people!]

This is not the answer to our productivity problems. Indeed, I think I may have found the answer ... it's quality customer service.

Here's my evidence, from two places.

Productivity Mess #1 -- Premiere Global

First, Premiere Global. They bought Enunciate, the teleconferencing and web conferencing company I had been using for a few years. I got a lot of mail from them during the transition, which I dutifully filed for the most part. It was fine print and emphasized the importance of how they were making things simple for me during the transition.

Today, when I went to book a call, I discovered they have sent me TWO completely different sets of passcodes and IDs. This is going to trigger a bunch of back-and-forth between me and their sales rep, thereby wasting a bunch of time on both our parts. Not only that, but there's no way I'm using this service with a client or on a project until I'm sure it's going to work. So there's lost revenue also.

Imagine this scenario being played out thousands of times, which is surely what has happened.

Productivity Mess #2 -- Online services

The Premiere Global example is nothing compared to the thousands of dollars flushed with Dell in the last few weeks trying to buy an upgrade to space on my Dell DataSafe account.

After I had personally spent several hours on the phone with my Gold Tech Support person, a few sales staff he conferenced in, and an online chat support, I decided the problem had to be delegated before I went broke. That was more than a month ago.

The next victim [my delegatee] went through more of the same until he decided to go up ... way up ... and call the executive for Canada. A couple of senior people got right on the problem, and in just over a week (and counting) they have made progress. We aren't done, but we are getting there.

Throughout this process, there has been a continuing stream of e-mails committing to help, there have been apologies, there have been surveys asking us to comment on the service experience, and more than once the original Gold Tech Support person has called to commiserate, but advise that he is unable to help, except perhaps to try bullying someone else. [His exact words.]

A couple of weeks ago, we tried to surrender and just cancel and get a refund. I actually was glad that they decided to stay with us and try to solve the problem, rather than just give us the refund, actually. So we're in it for the long haul and heaven knows how long this will take to fix.

At one point, a senior manager admitted to my delegate that "there is a logic problem" on this service, and "they've had a few issues." The thing is, I don't question the goodwill or effort of anyone involved. This must be driving them nuts, too.

How efficiency initiatives in customer service are ruining the economy

I have no idea how the Dell story will end, but I can tell you one thing for sure: the ratio of expense to revenue on something that costs less than $100 is just staggering.

All of this comes from productivity initiatives that have pulled the brains out of the customer service and support function and replaced it with a fake-friendly script. 

Note to senior executives:

[1] There's no such thing as an isolated service problem. If you see it once, it's a pattern.

[2] The way we handle customer service these days only looks more efficient. It ain't.

Resources:
"Can't wait to put things off?" Philip Jackman, Globe and Mail, Tuesday, Feb. 12,  2008 print edition.

I first heard the words, "if you see it once, it's a pattern" from sales trainer Steve Schiffman. Words of wisdom, and so, so true, for sales, and for everything else.

Getting upgraded: how Westin does it right

I'm here in Vancouver at the QRCA 2007 conference. The Westin knew they would not have enough standard rooms to accommodate all the registrants. So instead of upgrading latecomers, they upgraded those that reserved early. Good decision!! This gull stopped by to chat.

Customer Contact Reduction: is Wal-Mart on brand with this program?

Wal-Mart has announced a Customer Contact Reduction Program. They certainly deserve an award for honesty and transparency -- many organizations have launched programs with this intention, but I have never heard of one that was accurately labeled.

Most of WalMart.com's calls relate to order tracking, and they are investing heavily in an order tracking system. As a result, they won't need a phone number. That's the plan, according to Katie Hafner at the New York Times.

Is this on brand for Wal-Mart?

Most commentators seem to think this is a bad idea. My view is somewhat contrarian. The question we need to ask about any customer experience is whether a change is on-brand or off-brand.

Wal-Mart is all about convenience and low prices. So if they can pull this off, they will reduce costs to serve customers, and perhaps even improve the online experience. If you are shopping at Wal-Mart online, you're not looking for a high-touch experience. You're looking for plentiful, cheap and convenient access to stuff.

Operational challenge of withdrawing all phone support

The challenge Wal-Mart will have is that completely shutting off any door to a human helper might slop over somewhere else. Few processes are so goof-proof that they never have issues. Even at Six Sigma, you have 3.4 defects for every million opportunities. At Wal-Mart's scale, and if they're less than Six-Sigma reliable, there will be lots of customers who have problems that their web site can't solve.

If there is really great e-mail support, that might be sufficient. They might also have a "secret service" option. This is what I would call it when there is human support available, but it isn't publicized. It's only available after you are well into the service hierarchy. Amazon, for example, does have phone support available, but you have to dig for it.

We expect vastly different things from Wal-Mart and from Williams-Sonoma, for example, who's phone number is one click from their home page.

Good customer experience is not always high touch; it is always on-brand. And that's not the same thing.

Resources:

Sam Walton's philosophy of business, as reported on WalMart.com: 

"The secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want. And really, if you think about it from your point of view as a customer, you want everything: a wide assortment of good-quality merchandise; the lowest possible prices; guaranteed satisfaction with what you buy; friendly, knowledgeable service; convenient hours; free parking; a pleasant shopping experience."

- Sam Walton (1918-1992)

Thank you to Dan Obregon at eStara for bringing this to my attention.

Katie Hafner, BITS Blog on NY Times: "Walmart.com to Customers: Stop Calling"

Image of the Emerald City from MGM Wizard of Oz from OutNow

The hardest part of retail: coordinating execution or why marketing executives need to get out of the office more

Sean Howard reports on a tale of good marketing gone bad in this post. Volkswagen starts off great with a joy-ride and free movie tickets campaign for their Touareg, and ends up taking the leads generated and turning them into a hard-sell when the lead gets to the dealer. And creates negative word-of-mouth while doing it.

Sean's conclusion is so right:

"The hardest part of retail is that you can't sell your idea to corporate and be done with it.  You gotta take it all the way down through a channel you may or may not control.  But not fighting this fight is bad news."
-- Sean Howard, word-of-mouth consultant, on his blog Craphammer

Marketing departments are seriously challenged to manage this downstream contact, and may not really understand what even happens in the channel. It's not all the fault of sales, of course. Marketing may not have communicated effectively with the channel about what is supposed to happen. A hundred things can go wrong on a campaign of this type. But it's crucial to at least try to manage all the levers.

The role of the marketing executive is not all about tactical communication any longer -- if it ever was. If you are one, you need to start broadening your sphere of influence, and get out of the office more.

Abandoned Shopping Carts: How does your process rate?

I just had an amazing experience. I was trying to order a small item online -- less than $10. The shipping charges came up as over $3000.00. I tried a couple of times to fix it, and when I couldn't, I just abandoned the shopping cart.

Here's the amazing part. About 10 minutes later I get a PHONE CALL asking me if I still would like to place the order? WOW.

Happy customer, and potentially lost revenue captured by company. Not bad for a quick phone call by an employee on the ball, empowered to make things happen.

Teaching your customers - how to do it well

Customer experience quite often relates to learning. Examples:

1. The flyer in your bank statement that is telling you why you should buy insurance, or how to use the telephone IVR system.
2. The binder in your hotel room that tells you about the services of the hotel, and how to access them. If you don't know the protocols of a spa, do they help you avoid looking like a goof?
3. Learning how to set up the machines in your gym. Do they make it easy for you, or were you supposed to be born knowing?

If you conduct seminars for marketing, business development or as a customer loyalty offering, you are also asking people to learn something.

If your employees ever have to deal with new products or procedures [jeez, likely every week, if not every day in some businesses!] then understanding how people learn can save you a lot of grief.

So how good is your teaching?

There's a great list on Hacking Knowledge called 77 Ways to Learn. Consider a few, and how they relate to customer communications, from signage to seminars:

Use acronyms and mnemonic devices
Yup, that's how I made it through many courses over the years, and I bet you did too. So why not leverage these for interactive telephone systems, or other regular processes to save customers time?

Use visual learning techniques
Show the structure of information visually; use mind-maps, graphical process flow, or any other technique that communicates in pictures as well as words. The site lists 6 methods, and provides links.

Engage people
"Lectures are one-sided and often counter-productive. Information merely heard or witnessed ...  is often forgotten. Teaching is not simply talking. Talking isn't enough."
No kidding. Do your customer communications just talk at people... or do they engage?

We are all learners and teachers every day of our lives. Too often we act like there's no need to pay attention to what's been learned about adult learning. And what a waste that is.

Upcoming Webinar on Click-to-chat

Forrester and eStara are sponsoring a webinar on best practices using click-to-chat and click-to-call.
If you are interested, you can register here: https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/490210179. (March 7, 2007)

Since Marketing Communications Manager Dan Obregon at eStara was good enough to put a "click to call" link right in his e-mail to me about the event, I decided to call him and ask a bit more about this product, and why it's a good idea.

I was familiar with click-to-chat, but not click-to-call. When you click, a web page asks you to input YOUR phone number, and completes the call to your phone, either immediately, or later. Dan tells me that this approach means that the person you connect with on the phone (call centre agent, most likely) would then have access to your shopping cart, browsing history, or similar types of data. Hopefully meaning they can be more helpful to you.

I asked Dan to share some nuggets of Forrester's learning on the topic. And he had a couple of great ones:

"Customers overwhelmingly prefer speaking to someone on the phone, rather than being referred to an FAQ page...

"The customer doesn't really think about a particular channel -- they are not interacting with the company's web site or call centre, they are interacting with the brand."

Right on. I don't know if this technology is the answer to your prayers, but it sounds like these folks understand some fundamentals about customer experience.

[Please note this was not a paid announcement. No t-shirts or other booty were exchanged. I just thought you might be interested.]

Fast Company vs McKinsey Quarterly: renewal processes

To fill the ever-gaping maw of this blog -- and to stay informed -- I subscribe to a surprisingly hefty number of publications.

McKinsey Quarterly is not a fun read, but it's a quality read, and you get access to their whole archive library with a subscription. This archive has proved very useful over the years on client projects. I love their slogan -- "Required reading for the business elite."

Fast Company is a fun read, and probably the best source of innovation stories out there, with a lot of good stuff about customer experience, both topics near and dear to my heart.

I actually expect a lot out of both of these publications, but in different ways. Fast Company let me down today, however. Here's how.

I got a renewal notice by e-mail. I presume their database knows I live in Canada, since they manage to mail the magazine here every month. The renewal offered me a chance to give a free subscription to a friend.  Well, my young friend Matthew is in his teens, and I thought he might find the magazine inspirational. It might help him with career decisions. So I asked if he was interested. Yes indeed, he was.

Today I went to formalize the arrangement. Well into the process, I learned the following:
1) the great renewal price does not apply here.
2) the free subscribe-a-friend offer does not apply here either.  There is an offer, it is a savings, but it's less.

Of course I signed up my young buddy, and am happy to do it. [He's on his own with McKinsey, however, because it's about 10 times the price. Probably a bit dry for a teen, right?]

The real problem with FC's direct-marketing campaign is that they thoughtlessly and needlessly created an expectation for one group of their customers that they were not able to/planning to deliver on. And they did it rather mindlessly. I'm surprised, actually, that they don't have more nuanced direct marketing. But there you go. So I haven't yet renewed, and am now waiting to see their next offer.

I'd say there's a sales opportunity for somebody here who can help them do a better, more integrated, more nuanced job of connecting with their customers. Because really -- don't we expect a LOT more than this from FC?

[McKinsey's renewal logged me in to my account, presented the exact offers it had earlier, and was quite seamless -- just as expected.]

Line up management: watch your layout

The airport provides some good examples of managing large numbers of people -- either well or badly, depending on where you are.

Check out the photo above. This guy's whole job is to make sure you don't get in the wrong line-up.

When the self-serve boarding pass machines were installed, the idea was that you would just walk right up to the counter, present your ID, and then give them your luggage. But massive staff reductions have made that design concept a distant dream. Now you need to schlep yourself and your bags back and forth through a giant line-up. The line-up is so long, that it is actually in two parts, not unlike at a movie theatre on the first day of a blockbuster release. [But without the anticipation and excitement of a movie, of course.]

Here's a closer look at this fun situation:

I'm sorry I don't have a picture of the luggage chute for you. Because after you do all this lining up, the agent doesn't take your bags. He or she puts a baggage tag on them and checks your ID. Then you have to hump your bags over to a SINGLE conveyor. A giant clump of people was pushing and shoving to get their skis, snowboards, etc. into this single conveyor window. A situation designed to accommodate one person at a time. 

By this point I was starting to laugh out loud. I told the agent I didn't think there was much benefit to the customer for taking the time to check in online. He told me pretty soon I would have to print and tag my own bags. 'Fine, no problem', I said. 'But will I have to line up for the priviledge????'

What useful things can we extract from this long story, hmmm?

Observation #1:  There is very little evidence that things stay the same for long. So why would you cement these machines into the floor so that you can't move them without a major renovation?  Good environments have a certain amount of flexibility built in.

Observation #2: This layout assumed there would not be line-ups ever. How dumb is that?

Observation #3: It should be obvious where you are supposed to be. If it isn't, either the process flow, the layout, or the signage are wrong. In this case, all three. So now you have a senior staff member spending his day directing traffic, and people are still confused. [And great for staff morale, I'll bet]

Here's a good example of a signage problem:

When you have to have a lot of signs telling people not to do something, you have a design issue. Wouldn't it make sense to do one of the following things:

1. design the carousel so you can't sit on it, or
2. design the carousel so you can sit on it safely, or
3. provide more seating
4. Or a combination of all of the above

When I came into the baggage hall, there were several empty carousels. But three large aircraft all had their luggage on this one. No doubt this makes some sense from the standpoint of the baggage handlers. But none from the standpoint of the customer. Not an impressive situation for an airport that only just opened.

When you travel with a researcher or experience consultant, you don't have a normal journey. We spend the whole time trying to figure out how to fix the process without spending a fortune. [My Mom, who was waiting in line with me, thought I was getting upset. I said, "No, I'm just trying to figure out how to fix it, should anyone ever offer me the opportunity".]

There must be airports that do these things well. If you have examples, please share!