the power of the unexpected

I was ordering a pizza for the kid’s dinner today from Dominos in Farnham. I’ve always thought they had a great web site – it’s simple, easy to use, does exactly what it’s meant to do, and has some nice little touches that give it a bit of a personality. 

What was great about the experience was what I wasn’t expecting – getting something free. The choice of garlic bread or chicken strippers. I have no idea what chicken strippers are, and I’m sure they probably taste of chicken, so I opted for the garlic bread. It’s not that garlic bread in itself is anything special. It’s the fact that it was unexpected, offered without asking. It was a gesture, and I appreciated it.

Do I expect it every time? No, absolutely not. That would take away from the ‘power of the unexpected’. And sometimes, that’s what great customer service is about: the power of the unexpected. That small gesture offered without prompting. It’s a bit like a smile, a hello, a thank you, an I’m sorry. Small gestures that don’t happen very often, but are immensely powerful.

ramblings on finding my customers…

It has been ages since I last blogged and I definitely fall into the camp of the occasional blogger; perhaps lazy blogger, but I’d prefer to think ‘occasional’.

I want to be more conscientious and dedicated about it, but I know I’m not. I kid myself that I’m still finding my blogging style. Do I blog best (or easiest?) when I write about something that has happened to me that day? Keep it short and sweet, doesn’t necessarily have to have a point, but it’s about something I thought interesting and just wanted to share it with whoever cares to listen or simply stumbles upon my blog. 

Perhaps in reality I don’t really have that much to say that often?

I know I find Twitter a lot easier. Perhaps it’s the shorter format – 140 characters – that’s it. For some reason I feel that a blog needs to be longer, a lot more crafted, with a cogent argument, a well structured beginning, middle and end… 

Likewise, email. Why don’t I find writing an email difficult? It’s less structured, it can be as long or as short as you want it. I don’t feel the same sense of pressure as I do with a blog… 

It’s kind of about now in a blog that I suddenly feel as if – what’s the point of what I’m writing? Who’s going to be bothered to read this anyway? Would I? But I push on through my ‘blog wall’. The end is in sight.

And my point? Not sure. 

The thing is I started this blog with the intention of writing about something completely different: how companies no longer can expect customers to come to them.

Companies have got to go out and find where their customers are at, what sites they’re looking at, what communication channels they’re using, what they’re talking about. And once they’ve found where they are, engage with them there on their customers’ terms across all the different channels. Key to all of this is how well a company understands their customers, and what motivates them, what frustrates them, what engages them, what turns them off…

There’s no magic answer or formula for that I’m afraid. You’ve just got to try, and if you get it wrong try it differently, and if you get it right, try again but do it better. You’ll learn something new all the time. I am. And if your nemesis is this thing called ’social media’, well I’m afraid to say that’s more a comment about you, than it is about social media.

Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube… they are what they are. Embrace them, because your customers have. Don’t try putting a social media policy together if you’ve never tried any of them. Quite simply, you can’t!

I use Twitter, and I’m finding different ways to use it with customers. But no matter how I use it, I always try to listen and imagine that I’m in their shoes. How would I feel if I was on hold for 45 minutes? How would I feel if I was told that the documents I sent in had been shredded? How would I feel if I had to wait 57 days for a repair to take place and when I got the phone back it was damaged? How would you feel? What’s the ROI on listening and saying: ‘I’m sorry, we got it wrong. How can we make it better for you?’

Don’t use different standards just because you’re at work, don’t hide behind your company’s terms and conditions, don’t try to protect your brand or your reputation above your customers…because quite simply, you can’t anymore.

I’ve rambled on a number of different topics in this blog. I’ve started on one thing and finished somewhere else completely. But there is an underlying theme, I think. And it’s this: Whether it’s Twitter or blogging or Facebook or Stumble Upon or a mix of all of them, whatever it is, understand it, try it, experiment different things with it, learn from using it, and from this try to engage with your customers in a relevant way. Above all, listen and be humble about it, because your customers were there first! You are a guest, and like any party that you’ve been invited to or sometimes gatecrashed, you can overstay your welcome!

customer experience score and experience baggage

I was thinking about what made a good or bad customer experience, and even the words we use to describe that experience. I came to the conclusion:  it depends.

It depends on how we are feeling that day,  how previous encounters have been, the type of interaction we are going to have (ie. phone, face to face, ATM machine), what we’ve heard from our friends or read in the papers… This amorphous pool of personal and shared experiences with an inifinite number of variables that we constantly add to or take away from, the sum total of which is like our ‘experience baggage’ that we carry around with us. We unconsciously apply it to whatever situation we might find ourselves in.

We almost score each interaction or ‘micro-interaction’ using the following unconscious equation which has been built up over our life, but is worked out within milliseconds:

experience baggage + expectation = customer experience score

Our set of expectations is equally random. They have likewise been built up over our lifetime and are made up of and influenced by an infinite number of everchanging variables.

We then express thatcustomer  experience with a set number of stock words or phrases, almost like a score: good – bad, positive – negative, satisfied – dissatisfied…

Where am I going with this? Well it made me think that actually this makes it quite difficult for a company. But that made me then think, that even though it might be a difficult challenge for a company, there must be a base level of expectation that needs to be met in order for a positive customer experience to result. What’s difficult is that base level of expectation is everchanging. Take the following two examples.

1) Withdrawing money from an ATM machine. The entire transaction is a physical one – put in my card, enter PIN, account verified, money counted, get card back, take money, buy pizza. Simple. I don’t need to fill out any forms, talk to anyone, just need to remember my PIN. My ‘customer experience score’ is perhaps idling in neutral, until the machine runs out of money, swallows our card…

2) Renewing insurance. Finally managed to renew my insurance last night and unexpectedly had a fantastic experience from Mike at company XYZ. My ‘experience score’ was definitely set to negative. I was expecting it to be a longwinded and frustrating experience. I wasn’t disappointed to begin with and I posted a blog about it - renew my car insurance – make it easier please. 

The company that I ended up using was recommended to me by a colleague at work. So perhaps I was already off to a good start. I researched the company online and went through the process of getting a quote to see whether it was potentially competitive or not. I had a few questions that I noted down as I went through around legal and breakdown cover, and protecting my no claims bonus. Usually, if money is involved or there’s a legal aspect to it, I’ll do my research online, but end up buying it over the phone: I want to talk to someone about it. 

I called the company up and ended up speaking to someone called Mike. He was friendly, clear in his explanations, and in spite of a few stock phrases, left me feeling that he was genuinely interested in helping me find the most appropriate deal available for me. He was also impartial to a degree: if your current policy is cheaper, there’s no point moving elsewhere. 

Taking out insurance like reading through a booklet sent out by your bank on interest rate changes is a chore. But Mike managed to make the whole process much easier and smoother both for him and for me, because he simply tried to make the experience a pleasant one for both of us. He surpassed my expectations, and in so doing raised my ‘customer experience score’ not necessarily overall for renewing insurance, but certainly for this insurance company. My expectation of them at any future encounters will now certainly be higher and benchmarked against the service Mike provided to me. 

It also made me realise that there is such a fine line between a positive customer experience score and a negative one, and how quickly one can turn into the other. Sometimes, however, if I’m simply in a bad mood, it doesn’t really matter what level of service or customer experience you provide; but that shouldn’t stop us trying.

help guides and me…boring

I came across a tweet this morning which had a link to a couple of great articles by Mike Hughes on user assistance and manuals.

• Straight Talk: Surviving Tough Times as a User Assistance Writer
• User Assistance in the role of domain expert

The takeaway for me from these articles was that user manuals have traditionally been written from a product perspective. That is now changing. Many of us simply don’t read the instructions, we stumble through, and if we are moving vaguely forwards we keep on going until we sort out the problem. There’s only so many buttons, it’ll come on sooner or later, right?!

Companies producing user manuals, how to instructions, technical specs, online help are going to have to realise that customers have changed, and the way in which help is and can be provided has changed and is changing. A new help experience is evolving and customers are driving it, we just don’t know it yet.

More often than not (billing queries aside), customers don’t even need to go back to the company they bought a product from to get help anymore. There’s enough of us who have bought the same product, who have experienced the same difficulty, and posted a clip on YouTube or tweeted about it. Go on to YouTube and see how many videos there are showing you how to remove a SIM card from an iPhone. Search ‘iPhone SIM card’: 419! And we aren’t just talking about 30 second videos either.

What companies do know, however, is that the customers of today are far more demanding, perhaps not more demanding, they just simply have the means to be more vocal about it. If something doesn’t work, we receive bad service, or the instructions don’t make sense we can blog or tweet about it. The great ‘advance’ is that we can blog or tweet about it now, while it’s happening, from where it’s happening and more than that, what we say can be read by literally thousands of people, and even more than that they can pass it on and on and on…

If companies are now faced with the rise of a modern day consumer who is brand-agnostic, independent, selfish of how they spend their money and time, and willing to participate (or be a voyeur) in a highly congested constantly ‘on’ information network fed by a plethora of trusted and untrusted sources, how do they provide them with help?

If the starting point for many of us is ‘I never read the instructions, I just stumble through’, where does that leave a company trying to put together a help manual or provide a help experience. Actually, I think it’s a really good starting point for a company as well.

They are at last trying to understand the relationship between the customer and help: what help is actually needed by the customer when the customer actually needs it, as well as how the customer approaches the whole dynamics of help. There’s another layer in there as well, but that can be dealt with another time – emotion. What’s the emotional state of the customer when they need help: excited, anxious, frustrated… This all adds to the overall experience, and perhaps more often than not dictates how we feel about a company when we put the phone down.

What if, when we put together a user manual or provide how to instructions online we approach it from trying to meet a customer’s possible need state at that moment in time? What if we accept that a customer will only dip into a help manual when they want to find out how to do something they don’t know how to, but also accept they’ll want to get it set-up in two minutes or less; what’s the implication of time in that scenario? What if, we start to also use what’s already out there on YouTube, Flickr, blogs, tweets etc? What if we provide more meaningful headings that are specific to certain groups at certain times, such as - Sending pictures of the kids to the grandparents on your cameraphone? I don’t know what any of that might look like, but it already sounds a whole lot more fun and engaging for all of us.

PostIt note for Monday 9am: Make Carphone Warehouse Help tweet of the day more fun and engaging (see that, clever play on tip of the day, get it, tip – tweet. Okay, forget it then. Another note to self – don’t try so hard, customers will see through it! Humour has to come naturally. Further note to self: don’t forget to link to Carphone Warehouse web site, good for natural search, added bonus).

Challenge for Monday: Be fun and engaging in 100 characters or less.

midnight ramblings: who is twitter for?

I was emailed the other day about whether I should be tweeting ‘Carphone Warehouse Help tip of the day’ – was this the right use of twitter or the very wrong use of it? Now, whilst I would love to think that the tips have a growing and loyal fan base, I would be seriously deluding myself if that were the case. However, it got me thinking about what is the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ use of Twitter for a company trying to reach out to its existing customers or attract new ones.

Mistakes will happen in the use of Twitter because that is part of the humanising and levelling nature of social media, we’re all the same in a sense (of course, Stephen Fry will always have exponentially more followers that I could ever hope for), but that’s not the point for most of us.

Perhaps we should stop thinking about should corporates tweet or not. Perhaps it’s about seeing what those who tweet do, and what they tweet about, and when they choose to tweet, and if we can do the same, then it might be worth a go.

UK trains – timetable updates
JetBlue – flight announcements
Comcast – customer service

Be brave, but don’t be afraid. Look, see, learn. I’m reminded of a poem by the French poet and philosopher Guillaume Apollinaire (which I bring out of my closet of hackneyed phrases and cliches at moments such as this):

“Come to the edge.”
“We can’t. We’re afraid.”
“Come to the edge.”
“We can’t. We will fall!”
“Come to the edge.”
And they came.
And he pushed them.
And they flew.

Whilst I do agree that twitter is not for every company, I also think that it is very easy for companies to use the ‘value’ or ‘ROI’ argument against even dipping their toes in the water and actually trying to find the evidence of whether twitter has a relevance for them or not. Twitter, like many ’social apps’ is evolving all the time, and we evolve with it. It is moving in different directions and cajoling, provoking and challenging established ways of thinking; something that any disruptive agent does. I use twitter in the workplace. The more I use it within a business context, the more I understand about its relevance (or not) to what I do, how it might help to engage with customers (or not), how it might change the way in which we engage with customers and they with us (or not). Am I nervous about using it? Yes. Am I excited about using it? Yes. Does it challenge the way I think about how we might provide help and support to customers? Yes. But, at the end of the day, I am more nervous about not trying it out.

At the end of the day, we all have the choice to ‘follow’ or to ‘block’.

Enough ramblings for a day…

renewing my car insurance…make it easier, please

I’m trying to renew my car insurance at the moment. What’s great is that I can do the whole thing online. What’s not so great is that it takes forever and just to get a quote I have to fill out the same information over and over and over again. Why can’t you have a ‘quick quote’ function, an express form that asks the basics, and then gives me add-ons depending on what I want. Something that takes no more than two minutes.

Until I actually want to buy from you, you don’t need to know my name and telephone number. Start thinking about it from a customer’s point of view. And why is it that your online deals are different to your telephone deals? I research online and find a price, and then perhaps prefer to speak with someone when I come to actually buy it or simply to confirm some details, and yet I end up with a completely different price and in some cases totally different questions to answer.

And please if you are going to do an automatic look-up on my address, make sure you have my house number! Perhaps you might like to read Luke Wroblewski’s book – Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, there’s probably a LinkedIn group or three you could join as well!

Please think about me, your customer.

online customer service interview with Econsultancy

Here’s a link to an interview I did with Econsultancy on online customer service at Carphone Warehouse.

…talked with Guy about how Carphone Warehouse provides help and support to its customers online, his plans to improve the service offered, as well as the company’s attitude to Twitter and other social media… read more

mind the gap

I’ve been tweeting for a few weeks only now and following for the most part businesses that are tweeting (attempts at twittersquatting aside), particularly those tweeting from a customer service, help and support point of view.

I unashamedly admit that in my single-minded pursuit of trying to immerse myself in twitter and following corporate tweeters (‘c-tweets’ – I don’t know, but I’m sure there’s a new word in there somewhere, what do you call it when you run two words together?) my following-to-followers ratio is pretty poor.  

I work for Carphone Warehouse and am responsible for the help and support pages on carphonewarehouse.com. As I’ve followed people tweeting about Carphone Warehouse and other mobile phone providers in general, it has become apparent that the majority of tweets fall roughly into two categories.

Firstly, those that bring to our attention a new application usually for iPhone or BlackBerry users. Secondly, a problem that you or one of your tweeps has had happen to them. The one that I am focussing on is the second one. 

Interestingly, not always, but in many instances the problem usually occurs when two companies are involved and either the information held in their respective systems differs or there has simply been a communication breakdown between the two and no one on either side  is prepared to spend a bit of time listening to the customer and trying to understand not only the problem, but sometimes more importantly their frustration. There’s a great example of this on Brendan Cooper’s blog. We’ve all got our own examples to add to the list.

Is it too much to ask for a company to spend 5-10 minutes listening? What is the cost of that? What are the real implications of it? What are the results of not listening?

What this problem highlights is simply the age old problem of companies continuing to work in silos. Each department a wall or barrier unto itself. Applications or concepts such as Twitter, whatever you may think of it, question, provoke, challenge and force companies to look at how they are structured, how they engage with their customers, how they engage with other companies. But moreso, Twitter and other social media give customers the potential to create their own models of customer service, their own expectations of how help and support might be provided. They will find gaps through which to force departments to talk to each other, erode lines between companies, and perhaps ultimately for companies unwilling to change they may bypass them altogether and look to each other for help through applications such as Twitter. Customers, if nothing else, will hold a mirror up.

For switched on companies, however, the opportunity to perhaps even co-create these new paradigms or ‘micro-interactions’ of customer service and help are there waiting to happen.

By the way, when you run two words together it’s called a ‘portmanteau word’, coined by Lewis Carroll in ‘Through the Looking Glass’. Do you know what word it was? Answer

understanding how we can help

I am trying to get to grips with understanding how ‘help and support’ fits in with the whole customer retention equation: customer buys phone and then what? Well, hopefully, if you’re me you’ll have a problem sooner rather than later.

We tend to think of customer retention in terms of the billing experience, informing you about new tariffs if you are due for an upgrade, letting you know about new handsets, surveys, competitions etc. But very little to do with the whole help side of things. 

Part of the problem is how we view the whole concept of ‘help’. We tend to see ‘help’ as a reactive, emotionless and fairly functional encounter operating outside of the whole customer retention toolkit. But how often can and do these encounters end negatively?

My premise is that we should be able to turn ‘help’ around. There is no reason why it can’t be a proactive, engaging and positive experience, albeit a ‘micro-interaction’ as David Armano puts it, which if done well, builds up a customer’s bank of emotional goodwill in a company. However, the whole idea of ‘help’ needs to be introduced to the customer much earlier in the piece than is usually done.

‘Help’ and by extension the idea of the ‘problem that needs resolving’ is not something that suddenly happens or becomes available only once a customer has purchased a mobile phone. What do we do to manage a customer’s expectations about the post purchase experience?

help me help you contact us

The Carphone Warehouse contact us section is typical of many businesses that have designed their web pages from the ‘inside out’. Thankfully – huge sigh of relief – from a customer perspective this approach is gradually changing to ‘outside in’. Companies, such as Carphone Warehouse are embracing the notion that actually if you provide a positive online experience it will add to the emotional bank of goodwill a customer  invests in a particular brand.

The current design is great for reporting purposes – you can find out whatever you want to know to the nth degree about how many emails and letters are coursing through the system at any one time. We have some 335 possible queues that an email could go down! 

Quite simply, I need your collaborative input to help guide me/us to designing a better experience for people who need to contact us, particularly email. Part of this is understanding how you would want to receive the answer to your problem or query – email, via the web site, SMS, contact centre etc (What works best in which channel?).

For example, if it’s a query to do with billing, would you prefer to speak with someone or are you happy with getting an automated email response. I know it depends, but send me your thoughts on the matter.

For a bit more background information, we’re looking at moving from a department-based approach to dealing with correspondence to a skill-based one. By this I mean that if someone emails in a complaint with multiple issues how do I make sure it gets to the right person? If it were you how would you think to send the email in? 

• Would you pick any option and just send it in?
• Would you look to go to the highest point of contact ie. CEO?
• Would you use an option called – multiple issues – if it existed?
• Other?

All insights, observations, comments welcome. Feel free to email me – Guy Stephens – at stepheg02@cpwplc.com, using the subject line: help me help you contact us