A stitch in time...

A stitch in time, if you aren't familiar with the phrase, is not the most recent Dr Who episode. It is an ancient phrase which carries with it some ancient wisdom.
It means deal with the small problem now before it becomes a larger one: a small hole may require one stitch. Leave it and, as the idiom continues, you 'll end up with a hole requiring nine stitches (A Stitch In Time Saves Nine).

There is a lesson in this for those engaged in customer experience. If you can identify where customer's emotions are at their most intense in their journey and apply your efforts in real time at that point, you'll make the biggest difference. The effort required may be quite small - provided it is 'in time'.

This was evidenced to me last week in an experience with a leading online travel booking service. I'm not going to name them because even though I remained unsatisfied by the outcome I was impressed by the personal efforts of the CEO & President and hope he'll be taking on board the advice I am sharing now.

In May my wife booked our family a half-term break in Morocco. With less than 24 hours before our flight last week, the hotel sent us a confusing email which we took to mean they were shut and couldn't accommodate us. I informed the online booking service who we had used, who went off to find an alternative. But it didn't suit us. The long and short of it was I spent all day trying to find and book an alternative and sort transfers - all of which was last minute stress and actions no one wants and indeed most people expect all that stuff to be sorted by their agents with significant upgrading involved.

With an hour of the business day remaining I finally got booked and it took a series of emails into the evening (we were getting up at 1:30am) to confirm a transfer would be waiting for us when we landed the next morning.

I had asked The booking service to book and pay for the transfer. They told me they could not but if I kept a receipt they would meet the cost.

And so they are doing. But my level of stress when trying to get the transfers booked means that this 45 Euro 'apology' feels little more than a sop. Had they had the ability to book and pay for the transfer and simply tell me it was all sorted at the time I was in emotional flux, the impact could have been much more significant. That is, if they had done what I could do, what any human could do, but apparently not what this company's policies allowed, I think I would have felt much better.

In the cold light of day, after the emotional challenges, after the holiday, 45 euros just looks like money. It could have been a problem solved. It could have been the stitch that saved nine...

Being able to take real and meaningful action at the point of emotion is a critical part of the customer experience journey today. Too few businesses have enabled or trusted their Customer Service teams to think fast - to act like their CEO, to apply a stitch in time (one example is in my book The 10 Principles of Open Business)

The resulting costs in terms of additional customer support time, lost goodwill, damage to brand reputation and lost customers is worth considering by anyone at the helm.

Going Postal

I tried to track a recorded delivery on the Post Office website today.
When you Google 'Post Office' Track & Trace comes back as one of the four most important returns, as selected by Google, relating to the term Post Office.
On the Post Office site it is one of five (and listed at No4) of the Post Office Essentials.
Bear with me...
These to me are indicators of how important both the Post Office and its online customers view the Track & Trace function of the site.
So if you were looking after the Post Office twitter account you may think it worthwhile to stay abreast of its state of functionality - or at least have routes to hand to find out what the issues may be and the fix times estimated?
Or then again... you could regard it as someone else's problem.

This afternoon I tried to track a parcel and got the message that the system was down.
It gave no clue as to when it may return.
So I tweeted the Post Office.

This is how it played out:

1. David Cushman ‏@davidcushman  1h1 hour ago

   @PostOffice how long is your Track & Trace site going to be down for?

   0 retweets0 favorites
   

Post Office ‏@PostOffice  1h1 hour ago

@davidcushman Track and Trace is powered by @RoyalMail you may wish to tweet them about this. ~ Luke

4:49 PM - 20 Aug 2015 · Details

David Cushman ‏@davidcushman  1h1 hour ago

@PostOffice @RoyalMail It's on the PO site - one of the main links offered when 'post office' is googled. Perhaps in your interest to know?

Post Office ‏@PostOffice  54m54 minutes ago

@davidcushman That part is powered by Royal Mail, it would need to be investigated by them as it's their service.

5:02 PM - 20 Aug 2015 · Details

David Cushman ‏@davidcushman  9m9 minutes ago

@PostOffice Ah thanks. Does that get ticked as a customer issue resolved then?

In the mean time, I'd tested it for myself - and it was back online. I do wonder why 'Luke' hadn't found the time - I guess he was busy gathering evidence that my problem was nothing to do with him.
I was after a relatively simple answer to a relatively simple question. In return I was getting a lesson in organisational structure.
I'm sorry, but I do find this buck passing at the front line frustrating.
The Post Office and those representing it really can't take so little responsibility for what is clearly an important piece of real estate on their website - and a significant driver of traffic. Who cares who it's powered by - certainly not Post Office or Royal Mail customers.

Here's my advice for a quick fix: 1. Move the Powered By graphic above the fold (old newspaper folk will know what that means, it means in this case you shouldn't have to scroll down the page to discover the Powered By secret... 2. Add a link to Royal Mail customer service, if that's where you would like to point the traffic (aka blame).

Here's my advice for the right fix: Reorganise the business around putting your customer first, but I realise that may be a very large ask for a Thursday afternoon.

The restaurant that designed out customer feedback

So tired, tired of waiting, tired of waiting for you...

To mark the end of term and the start of the Easter Holidays we joined some very good friends and our (between us) three children for an impromptu dinner at a family restaurant close to home.
The food was (mostly) adequate. It was the service that was shocking.

Our friends had been to this particular place some six months previous. Ever since it had been known to their kids as 'The No Pudding Pub'. This was because it had taken so long for them to get any attention to order a dessert that they had run out of time and had no option but to leave. Kids going home without a dessert leaves a lasting impression...

Once bitten - well sometimes you are prepared to try things one more time... lightning stikes once and all that...
But, you guessed it, the bolt from above struck again.

Put aside the failure (having been asked three times) to provide a straw for one of the kids drinks, the food being served at an interesting and not entirely satisfying range of temperatures, main course plates left uncleared for a good 30 minutes (we resorted to stacking them ourselves - see pic), desserts served without cutlery, one dessert not served at all (a fact the bill belied), the table next to us resorting to wolf-whistles and waving cash in order to get their bill... put aside all of that. We can live with things going wrong if there are channels allowing us to help you put them right for us.

What really bugged me about this place was that customer feedback seemed to be deliberately designed out.
At one point in our very long wait for any kind of attention I considered ringing the restaurant and asking them to come see us on table 40. But. Not a sign of a phone number, website, email address, name of manager, name of customer service lead anywhere on the menus etc at hand on the table.
Which opened my eyes.

There was nothing written anywhere which called for, mildly suggested or enabled in any way the customer to give feedback. For most organisations knowing what your customer thinks of your product, service or experience is gold dust - prompting you for it, essential.
This place had none of the 'we care about what our customers think' or 'rate our service today' forms with paper attached on tables. Not a sniff.

But the restaurant was full. Why? Value prices, good location.
So the coffers are filling - and (because they are hearing no different) the future must be rosey, right?
Of course not. Here is a business focused entirely on customer acquisition. It has no idea of whether you've been before and apparently no interest in whether or not you will darken its doors again.

When my friend kindly picked up the bill (yes we did get the missing dessert removed) he told his server why the pub had been renamed in his house (The No Pudding Pub, you'll recall), and how we were giving it a second chance, and what had gone wrong today. None of this was recorded, The person we think was the manager was in ear-shot but kept his head down and stayed away. Freely given commercial advice of the customer experience variety was being handed over in spades - and none of it was collected - Designed Out!
We were offered apologies, and more apologies. No discount. No incentive to return to give them a chance to redeem themselves (you'll note). Designed Out!

Later I tried registering my negative sentiment via their mobile website. I completed one of those nasty online email forms in some detail. And when I hit the go button, the screen went blank. Designed Out! I've no idea whether they got it or not. Frankly I don't care.
Today if your organisation does not make it supremely easy for me to provide you with feedback at source I'm really not going to bother going out of my way to help you make your business better. But I will tell my friends because I care more about them than I do about you. I will share my experience of your products and services via tweets and blogposts.

That's why I haven't named the pub until right down here - I don't want to make it easy for their search tools to gather this freely given feedback because they appear organisationally designed to do without what  the customer thinks.

But I'll happily tell you, friend. It's the Marsh Harrier in St Ives, Cambridgeshire. It's run by Marstons.

They need an extra pair of hands at busy times. That might slice their margin on the customers in on that night - but it'll give you a way better chance that the customer will return for you to make a margin on another time. Oh and by the way - I'm pretty sure you make a better margin on desserts than you do on main courses... you can work out what to do next, right?

BT holds its hands up and pays out credits

In my previous post I shared how I felt BT had got their CRM badly wrong - making an offer to current customers it then appeared reneged on. You can read the whole sorry saga here.

The very encouraging news is that after making my feelings known via twitter and blog, BT admitted it had got it wrong, said sorry, and has been brilliant at putting things right.

And for this we should heap praise. I publish this today to thank them for that - and to make sure others who received the same misleading mail-shot are empowered to benefit as I have.

Here's what BT had to say:

Having now looked into this matter in detail, I can confirm that we had two different direct mailings (DM) for Essential Extra [The extra channels and HD deal the letters promoted]. One of which was aimed at customers on our “free Vision Essential for one year” offer, and the other at customer paying the standard £5 a month for their Vision Essential subscription. 
We had an error on our mailing system that meant the latter group of customers were incorrectly sent the DM containing the claims “from just £2 more a month” and “£2 extra on top of your current TV subscription”. 
We appreciate that the overall impression of this mailing was therefore misleading for customers who are not currently paying for their Vision subscription. Please accept this letter as a sincere apology for our mistake. 
It is of the upmost importance to BT that we are clear and honest with our customers and to ensure that they are not misled by either marketing or customer service communications. We are in the process of reviewing how we target marketing communications to ensure that errors like this don’t happen again. 
We will of course honour this price point and arrange a bill credit of £60 should you sign up for Essential Extra (this being the difference of £5 per month, over the 12 month minimum term). You will therefore pay just £2 more a month, as was stated in the mailing you received. 
If you would like to go ahead with Essential Extra please let me know and I can place the order and arrange the credit for you. I hope you find this satisfactory but if you require any more help or information, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

And I have done - and the customer service team have been excellent at making sure everything has happened as it should have done.

Neil O'Shea and Colleen McElhatton from the BT Social Media Team deserve particular praise.So well done BT - it's great to hear you are reviewing how you target.

Other companies would do well to take note - getting your CRM wrong can not only annoy customers - it can end up adding hefty costs.

I've no idea how many more people will now be able to claim a £60 credit - but I'm guessing it'll be rather more than a handful.

How to kill a £10K per year relationship

Tesco. Love it or loathe it, if you live in the UK chances are you line their pockets. Big time.

If you do a £100 weekly grocery shop you spend around £5K each year. If you get your petrol there too, you're likely up to £10K - and that's without the occasional bit of electrical, homeware, clothes or even mobile phone or car insurance payments.

So you, as a customer, are clearly very valuable to them indeed. But only for your money.
It seems to me their customer-handling has all but forgotten that the gullet that consumes is attached to a human being.

A friend of mine recently received a polite but threatening letter from Tesco because she had parked in the car park at their aircraft-hangar-of-a-superstore at Barhill, near Cambridge, for more than the time Tesco had calculated it was reasonable to shop (I think their limit was/is 4 hours).

This is a car park that's shared with other retailers, by the way.

Let's think about that for a moment. Tesco used a camera to record her arrival and departure from this car park, a camera with numberplate recognition - and one which is presumably connected to a computer which can both generate nasty automated letters AND find your home address, based only on your registration number, to send the nasty letter to.

Did you know Tesco had the right to your address simply because you choose to drive into their car park? Neither did I.

Ok, so that's shocking enough. But given how hi-tech this process is, and given Tesco's famous clubcard scheme and all the information it records about your shopping habits, then the only excuse for the automation of a snotty letter is pure profit-motivated laziness.

How so? Well, first, let's consider things from Tesco's perspective for a moment. Why do they want to limit your car parking time to 4hrs? Perhaps they have an issue with commuters parking their cars at the superstore and hopping on a bus into Cambridge. It wouldn't surprise me.

So, first of all, the people it should be targeting are those who are NOT coming into the store and ARE repeating the behaviour of parking for entire days, day after day.

Both of these behaviours are discoverable through Tesco's electronic surveillance.

Had the system been written to check for repeat behaviour (that's an IF THEN line even in Basic!) then it would not be writing a snotty letter to my friend. This was the first time she'd ever been there for more than 4 hours.

Had the code been written to query transactions in the store (again, it's a simple IF THEN) then it would also have known she had made two transactions in the store that day, one before lunch and one after. Again - don't send the letter.

My friend was shopping for a kids birthday party, had a break for lunch (in the Tesco restaurant!) and a shop in one or two of the other stores sharing the the same car park. That's how 4+ hours fly by Tesco dudes - at least they do for your 'valuable' customers - ones spending money.

This system would be so easy to put right - even as an automated one.

But here's my suggestion Tesco: Since the average family is spending £10-£15K with you each year - and each one of these sent-in-error automated letters could cost you a customer each time - wouldn't you be wiser employing say, just one customer services advisor to speak human-to-human to those you fear may be abusing your free parking?

A little conversation would soon reveal the true circumstances. And you'd be much more likely to keep your customers.

Every time you send one of these letters without understanding the circumstances you risk losing that customer's £10-£15K a year - for ever.

And they are telling their friends...

Two pictures of customer service

Right: At Terminal 5, Heathrow

















Left: Sign in the window of the Grand India Restaurant, London.













It's not what you say... it's what you do.