Processes do let us down sometimes

Having recently joined Budd I wanted to transfer my mobile account from my previous business account, held by Vodafone, into Budd’s business telephone account, also held by Vodafone. Thinking this would be a one call fix, as I was not taking anything away from Vodafone, just changing billing details, I called expecting it to be a simple action. How wrong can you be!

A very polite lady advised me that they would have to send me the PAC number, I asked could it be given over the phone, no, I was told, I had to request the PAC number in writing, an email would do, but it could not be given immediately. She went on to tell me that once Vodafone received my email they could then send me a letter with the PAC number. Could I not receive this information by email I asked?, apologies, but no, this was not the process.

On receiving the letter I was advised, I would then have to send the detail to our internal admin team, who could then call Vodafone, who would then transfer the account billing details. Why, I asked cannot you do this now. Explanation given was that they were on different databases and could not transfer my details but had to go through an internal administrative process to enable another section within Vodafone to handle.

So from a simple request to transfer billing details internally within Vodafone we will generate at least 2 calls and 1 email to Vodafone, 2 internal calls to/from my admin dept, I have received 3 emails so far telling me the PAC number was coming, I have also received a letter from Vodafone with the PAC number and, I think, but I am losing track, there is another letter going to Budd’s admin dept to tell them what to do with it.

By my count that’s around 10 interactions for a piece of internal administration. Why?Surely with the number of people moving between business accounts this process should have been refined by now. Even if the databases do not talk the customer should not see the problem. I understand the need for security, but nothing was said they had to do it this way due to security issues.

So, I’m left a frustrated customer, dreading the day when something really goes wrong. On a high note however, everyone you talk to in Vodafone business team is always friendly and seems to be doing their best. So well done Vodafone business team, just please look at this process and consider how many other processes are frustrating to your customers. Might be time to actually listen to what the customer is saying?

Thought for the day

One for the 'carpe diem' brigade as the dark mornings and dark evenings close in and you need cheering up in a perverse way

Death's like to steal tomorrow
So sip not gently of life's charms
But rather gather whilst ye may
The sweet harvest of today

Looking at processes through the eyes of your customers

Processes have their proper their place, but why do companies stick so rigidly to their internal procedures that they fail to take seriously what the customer is telling them? A recent trip to the dry cleaners illustrates - although I also recollect similarly exasperating experiences with my computer, bank, telco and electricity suppliers where I’ve just wished someone would apply a bit of common sense to the process. Recently, I went to pick up a skirt from the dry-cleaners (just before it closed for the day), handed over the ticket and watched as the assistant searched along the pristine ranks, searching not once, but twice. Shake of the head, “Sorry, its not here”. He had his hand on what looked like the right item. “That’s it,” I said, recognising the shape and colour of my skirt. But looking up at the ticket said: “No, sorry, it’s definitely not here”. Driven by desperation, I managed to get him to allow me the other side of the counter to look, went straight to the item I recognised as mine. Indeed, it was mine, but the numbers didn’t match the one on the ticket I had given him. Turns out his colleague had given me the wrong ticket. (Well, that’s not surprising because he was chatting on the phone when he served me, but that’s another blog!) But if the assistant had listened, we’d have been done in double quick time - and then he wouldn’t have missed his usual train home - for which he blamed his customer!

Offshoring significantly beneficial to UK consumers?

I had great fun in a formal debate at the ICS conference at Heathrow yesterday. We had to formally debate….propose, second, rebuttal etc….the motion that “This house believes that offshoring is significantly beneficial to UK consumers and has led to improved customer service”. David Williams and I had to propose and Graham Hoskins and Marie Cross opposed.

When asked to take part, I must admit I thought it a lost cause….particularly having gone thro a lovely banking example myself the other week. But never one to lose anything willingly, I tried without success to get the word “significantly” removed. Alas we would have surely won the debate if so, losing narrowly 60/40.

How did we get so close – apart from being the more charming of course?

Well first of all in talking to contacts, clients, outsourcers ( thank you all – you know who you are…) one quickly hears the arguments being used internally to defend, promote existing offshore facilities, be they in India, Eastern Europe or elsewhere. The problem was of course that there is such a body of prejudice built up through personal experiences. And there is precious little quantitative data that can be put in the public domain to overcome this.

The big problem with this motion was:
- The damage done to the offshoring industry by its over promotion in the early days and its inability to avoid horrible outbound sales calls which set the image of “indian call centres” some 7 to 5 years ago.
- A picture that badly informed and prejudiced press built up in the minds of the UK contact centre management in the early years.

Against this I started with first hand experience of the quality of intellect, the speed of change and the reality of economics of global companies in offshore centres in which I’ve worked or visited.

By the time I’d spoken to a dozen clients my motivation towards the motion was considerably enhanced. So here are some of the arguments - one sided admittedly.

Back office
The majority of offshoring is, by far, back office processes which have a much lower cost and higher quality standard (one example given was 98.98% accuracy in 8pt kanji characters) than can be achieved onshore. Hence customers don’t know it, but they receive a much higher quality of service from which they benefit in terms of accuracy, right first time, product pricing, 24 hour availability and turnaround times overnight.


Call centres are like wigs
It’s a myth that customers do not like offshore call centres. They do not like call centres full stop (youGov 2006: only 4% like call centres). Good call centres are like a “wig”. You never comment on a good wig because you don’t see it. You only notice bad wigs. (Thanks Bernard for that one)

Well run centres for UK consumers are some of the best anywhere
As consumers, we do not notice the significant benefits and the improvements to customer service taking place year on year - but which from my own and my overseas colleagues’ experience is some of the best customer service in any country

The furore has forced UK management to act – on and offshore
Poor ratings in the early days from offshore calls have forced UK management to properly understand what drives customer satisfaction and great customer experiences. Good management has stopped looking for simple linear answers and generic statements. This has led to a much fuller understanding of customer experience. The extent of this rise in quality can be seen by agents who are given a choice of working on UK or US accounts in captive and outsource sites – they want to work on UK sites where there is a better balance or quality and performance metrics not just efficiency measures such as handle time (source: UK bank)

Good resolution = no problem with offshore accents
Accent complaints are not linear. Above all, if a customer gets resolution then they will not complain about accent. If a customer doesn’t get resolution they will complain about accent and understanding. If they don’t get resolution they will complain about accents and understanding.

It isn’t worse offshore
Companies who are good at managing offshoring (and outsourcers if they use them) are achieving higher customer sat scores than they used to achieve onshore (source: IT and Insurance clients)

Older people like it
Slower pace, repeating statements to check correct information and more deference such as sir and madam go down well (source: insurance client)

It has to be better to be the same
The poor quality of offshoring calls in the early days was driven by poor UK management of the opportunity and poor selection of call types. Poor companies onshore got worse offshore in search of saving money. Good companies onshore got better offshore, as well as saving money. This has forced all companies, who offshore today, to meet exacting standards. A 10% higher service standard is needed above the same call from onshore to match UK consumer perceptions (source: measured data –insurer).

Surveys are nonsense
Many surveys are quoting that people would prefer not to speak to offshore, would pay extra to stay onshore. If you ask what someone will or might do it is very different from what they do do eg Netpromoter is an example has just been proven to be wrong and over simplified (Mori). So surveys that say 90% of customers would pay extra for onshore service are not translated into real customer behaviours eg Direct Line do not offer to charge you more

UK consumers are not easy
UK customers are not the easiest to deal with – they are more prejudiced and complain more about accents than customers from other English speaking countries (source: banking client).

UK consumers don’t speak perfect English either
It is a myth that UK customers are “BBC English” speakers - many offshore centres report that UK customers accents are far from traditional white middle class Caucasian. With 8% non native people in the work force, plus English people who speak a different language at home. English as a second language is spoken more slowly and is therefore easier to understand offshore staff (source: telco client / member of the audience).

Service that wouldn’t be included in the product otherwise
Lower prices to consumers thro reduced cost of service. And price and product score more strongly as Netpromoter drivers. Would mobile phone calls keep reducing in price to the same extent if it weren’t for offshoring of some processes. “The world is flat” argument that 20 years ago cheap nasty cars were produced offshore that nobody wanted but now the quality has risen and become part of the total brand eg Skoda. People buy Skodas very happily today when, if asked, they wouldn’t have touched one in the past.

More coverage
24 hour and out of hours support that wouldn’t have been affordable and therefore available is now available in some key markets

Market opportunities
Rising living standards abroad results in increasing opportunities eg McKinsey quote $1.12 return to the US economy for every $ invested and $0.33 profit to the Indian economy. In addition many global companies want toperate in the very large Indian market themselves.

Access to world class capabilities

Graduates who want to work, be accurate and build a career. The education level, the volume of people and the hunger to learn mean that companies can be much faster to change, more analytical and ultimately provide innovations that customers want more quickly. In growth companies this is a significant issue – accessing the best talent anywhere.

Capacity so you wait less time
Additional capacity is affordable to reduce queues in competitive markets

Whether you agree or disagree with these points, offshoring is unlikely to disappear. Certainly in the back office and in specialist vertical applications. And where UK management has the skill to manage offshore call centres well, it will remain for many suitable processes.

Nevertheless it will take many years before the ghost of the bad spam call from India goes away. Certainly there were two vivid and current examples given by the audience in the debate. That was enough to lose the motion !

I have been reading with interest an article given by Sheila Dikshit, Delhi`s chief Minister for nearly 10 years, describing with such passion the considerable improvements that have been made in Delhi and it suddenly struck me how very, very basic getting things right ` truly is.

Sheila said that previously Delhi had lacked effective management which resulted in its people lacking confidence and having to to go elsewhere to work, but not any more, now they have more confidence and believe that Delhi will succeed and the good news they are already starting to receive good salaries.
Leadership must be one of those good old basics that Sheila has, her commitment and drive is clearly obvious, her dream is to make Delhi world class even maybe play host to the Olympics, she has a clear vision that everyone understands and can see, she and they recognise that it will take another 5/6 years to put the city on course, but she is changing peoples attitudes, making them feel proud of their City.
The ability to lead is the key to effective change in any country, business, group or team.

Sheila gave an example of Government schools only achieving 35/37% pass rate whilst receiving 900 rupees per child, when non Government schools received far less but achieved a much higher pass rate, she asked the question `why?` and discovered they were not being motivated.
Things have changed and the Government schools now achieve an 85% pass rate.
So how simple but how effective is good motivation?
Sheila received a `best practice` award for a program called Bhagidari, which focuses on governance through partnership. Citizens groups and the government interact with each other every week/month in little groups. "The coming together has helped a lot," Sheila said.
How does that relate to business, well again a question "how strong is a team of people that work together?"
I have only mentioned a few good things that have happened, but you must see that getting the basics right is the key to success,what ever you do and where ever you are!

When is technology not Fast+Simple?

I stood in the pouring rain on tuesday evening at the railway station car park waiting to pay for ticket. Nothing unusual about that other than the fact that 2 weeks ago I wouldn't have had to do it - stand in the rain that is. In their infinte wisdom, GNER have installed new paystations. All three of these are positioned low for disabled use with keypads and screens angled so that 99% of people have to bend right down to see where the card goes and read the screen. Of course, there should be disabled access machines but do we need 3? Probably, since there's a good chance that 2 will be frequently out of order.

As a result of this and the PIN checking process, the average time to pay for your car park ticket has doubled and the receipt is now the length of one you're likely to get at Tescos the week before Christmas so they quickly fill up your wallet (when the machine hasn't run out of paper that is).

Ok, so I sound like a grumpy old man. Well, call me that if you wish but I just thought technology should be here to make our lives easier. Barclays are introducing their new OnePulse card for cashless transactions of £10 - simply wave the card. GNER have introduced new chip and PIN machines to make paying £10 harder and slower.

Who's getting it right??

Communications are back to front

A piece on unified communications caught my attention today. Findings from research commissioned by Siemens Communications Inc. was reported byTMCnet, its focus was on the techie side of unified systems, workflows, and communication process in customer-facing enterprises. Unsurprisingly, the findings show that large organisations waste a huge amount of money compensating for poor communications between staff. Eg enterprise of 1,000 people with average 62% in customer service and sales could be losing as much as $13million every year in lost productivity and avoidable expenses. Whilst all this is relevant and measurable, there is another waste going on in customer-facing organisations which often goes completely unnoticed. Namely, great nuggets of wisdom piling up on the frontline - I’m talking all those bits of realtime, qualitative feedback from customers via front line agents that if consistently collected, analysed - and then something done about them by the business - would enable companies to truly begin delighting their customers and bringing in revenues - not just plugging the leaks. Of course, you need a process and tools in place to do that - but often that’s not as complex as you think. Sometimes, it just requires managers to reassess what ‘thinking customer’ means in terms of sustaining feedback from the frontline - and start panning for gold. That way companies will get to hear what customers are really telling them, not just findings of a post call IVR survey - which rarely ask the type of questions that fundamentally make the difference to us, the customers.

Change behaviours not just the tools

ISPs frustrate me. First, the IT support process requires you to quote usernames and passwords (which are a non-configurable jumble of letters and numbers) in every email you send to them. Why would I want to contact Fasthosts if they weren't my service provider? I think 99.9999% of us have better things to do than get assistance from another ISP - which is bound to be technically flawed anyway.

Second, several of us in Budd are now using Blackberry's and judging by the numbers of people sending email on the train this morning, so is half the business world. So why does Fasthost insist on not supporting them? My support question this morning asked why they didn't, when they would and should I take my business elsewhere? The response was pilot but completely missed the point. "We have no plans to support Blackberry but contact us if you need anything else". No I don't need anything else, I want Blackberry support!!!

This sensitivity to the situation is often missing from the customer experience process. How often do you end up being told "sorry we can't do that here, you'll have to call another number" or similar, and then be asked "but is there anything else I can help you with today?", is a ludicrous and blindingly stupid approach to the customer experience.

Awareness of and sensitivity towards the customer frustrations have been squeezed out of many call centres by performance management approaches. We see this more and more as we implement WOCAS and train the front line. We spend more time on the awareness part than we do on using the tools and need to support for them for some time afterwards to embed the habit of spotting the frustrations (and logging them).

As ever, changing behaviours is far more critical than just changing the process or tools.

Today was very dissappointing for me for two reasons. The first, I had arranged a birthday party for my husband on Saturday at a local pub and THEY(READ A VERY ANGRY THEY),the new owners of the pub,telephoned ( Wednesday)to say the pub was now shut, big,big blow but not the biggest - the most enormous frustration was that the new owners of the pub just didnt care that their potential customers and 30 local friends would be extremely upset. What is the matter with business`s today, do they not realise that there are consequences to the completely unbelievably dumb things they do to their customers - do you think any of us will ever go to that pub again and I bet you already know how many people we will tell ( well a few more now that I ve just joined the blogging brigade!)BUT "am I bothered!Do I look bothered" "NO" because now I`ve found a smashing, couldnt be more helpful, equally local substitute and how many people am I going to tell about that!!!!!!

Netpromoter scores minus 22 with Netpromoter users

As many will have heard me preach from the pulpit of the conference circuit, I don’t think asking someone if they intend to recommend is anywhere near as useful as asking “how many people have you recommended?” or “were you recommended?”

So it was interesting to see at the SOCAPie conference last week that Ipsos MORI have done some basic research to test Reicheld, Bain and Satmetrix’s contention that the one metric you need is to ask on a scale of one to ten “would you recommend to a friend or colleague?” and work out you Netpromoter score by taking the volume of 1 to 6s from the volume of 9 and 10s.

What MORI showed is that
•Correlations of all the attitudinal and customer behaviour variables were modest (say vs do).
•The single question didn’t correlate with business growth and that it performed “universally” worse than multi-variant scoring – that’s measuring several things to us non statisticians.
•What’s more intention to recommend as a single variable wasn’t as good a predictor as retention or share of wallet.

MORI challenge the robustness of the Riecheld and Satmetrix work and its claims for an ultimate question whilst acknowledging the favour done by getting “customer” firmly into the board room language, if not the psyche.

SOCAPie members who use Netpromoter had done some research of their own. They scored Netpromoter using the "ultimate question" and found it somewhat lacking with a score of minus 22. They counted plus 30 as average and plus 70 as good in the Netpromoter system.

As some wise gent once said "there are millions of complex problems with a simple answer that is wrong". And I naievely thought the ultimate answer to the ultimate question was 42.....

The Next Big Sting

All change at Skype it seems with the founders departing with only a fraction of the money that was predicted if they managed to hit the targets for growth. It's still $500m so I won't be worrying for their future welfare. Read the full story at Business Week.

What caught my eye was that Zennström was off to launch his new venture Joost - a web TV service that currently offers over 15,000 shows and counting. Maybe if he'd been concentrating on Skype's performance rather than the next big thing, it might have been a different story for eBay's $2.6b investment.

With Microsoft talking about a massive investment in Facebook (apparently) and a new site called MyWorld being created as a cross between MySpace and Second Life, there are plenty of ideas vying for the title of the 'Next Big Thing'. You can guarantee that these will always be followed by the 'Next Big Sting' when young entrepreneurs go smiling all the way to the bank.

Too good to sell....

When does advertising get wasted? When it's blown away by the product its on maybe ...

2 examples:
When it came to buying phones I never noticed for years that Vodafone sponsored my fav team Man U. In fact I do now use Vodafone but that wasnt me who did the procurement

This great Bob Dylan video clip - its masterful http://www.dylanmessaging.com/ . A great case of the viral trick being so strong you ignore the ads. But even as Dylan fan who has used it a dozen time this week I havent been tempted to look at the music it advertises - WHY NOT?

Indian agents lose every which way

When the phone rings at 9pm and there's a long pause and lots of crackle before someone says "can I speak with Mr Naylor", you know it's an India call centre. There's an immediate reaction in me that wants me to hang up. Trouble is, when this call is from the fraud department of my bank and they want to let me know my card has been used in a fraudulent transaction, I need to speak to them.

Why has the Indian call centre industry reached this point? I think it's because customers feel no emotional link with the agent. Efficient processes (when they happen) make the agents appear curt and poor processes make the agents appear incompetent. Either way, agents are frequently accused of not listening to customers and bulldozing their way through the call. It's a no win situation.

Fixing this is not a quick exercise as it's a problem that has been compounded by the industry itself over a number of years. I think the best that can be achieved is for customers to feel neutral about the experience of dealing with Indian centres. How long it takes to get to that point is anyones guess.

Smile on the train

Hi everyone looking forward to joining the fun of blogging.

Whilst on the train this morning the guard reminded us to take all our belongings and if we dont they will be available on ebay next week!!!!

Its really lovely when someone makes you smile first thing in the morning, just what we should all do if we manage people.

Chief Customer Officers - emotional analysts

The third Chief Customer Officers’ Forum (CCO Forum) took place last week at Studley Castle.

A brilliant bunch of CCOs assembled to suffer comedy waiters, relay races and the pressure of the Dragon’s Den – and that was just to warm up.

There were some really good conversations about the value of emotions in what we do championing the customer in big businesses: “People buy emotionally and then rationalise their decision logically”.

And some fascinating material on designing, managing and delivering world class sales environments: “Sales is a black art but I’m analytical and I needed to work out what’s going on so I can measure it, coach it, improve it”.

Here’s some of the feedback from last week:
“Fantastic day! ….., incredibly productive and thought provoking”
“there’s nowhere we’d rather be than here talking with this group of people”

Suffice to say it went rather well and we’ll be using the feedback to raise the bar even further next time. The next CCO Forum meeting will be on 27th/28th November in central London. Membership is by invitation only for those who champion the customers’ cause in their business and want to mix with like minded people behind Chatham House rules. Contact us (marion.howard-healy@budd.uk.com) if you think you'd like to be a member.