How hard is it to stay with AA

(Sorry for the radio silence. We have a new site coming up and so the blogs have been going there - you can see them next week)

This cartoon from the front of our 2008 calendar has struck a chord with so many people. Lots of people have been downloading it and the others from the library at our website.

Tonight it happened exactly as in the cartoon. The AA lost out and M&S benefited. If you cannot make renewal simple, what can you do !!

Here's the potted story. Renewal notice for building insurance with quote arrives some time ago. I carry it around in my bag along with 2 others (M&S travel and one of the cars with NFU). Due today so have to make the time. Daughter gets little attention on one of her nights with me as I spend about an hour sorting it all out. That upsets me.

First stop is an aggregator to check the price is in range since it feels steep compared to last year. I go thro all the forms on Moneysupermarket.com and find AA is one of the cheapest, But £100 less than the quote they gave me.

So I try to save them and me a lot of work by calling the renewal hotline on the notice to ask them to meet the price. I go through the IVR and talk to the agent. He can't just match the price. He explains the difference as being not an AA quote but the aggregators and questions if it'll really be there. He says the cover will have different parameters. He cannot look at last year's parameters on which his renewal notice was based. So so he cannot bring it up to date with my parameters (and he cannot get them I know them best!). No he cannot give me any discount to get near the price. I give up.

I go thro the aggregator's link to the AA page to try and get the lower price. It's blank so I have to fill in all the data again.

The last item on the list is to add previous claims. I press and it blanks all the data I added. Sugar! Luckily it comes back when I press the button again. I try again. Nope. So I ignore it and proceed to the next page. I have to give my previous contents insurer but there's no option for "self insured" and its not relevant to buildings only. I have to give my previous buildings insurer, but the AA isnt an option. There are no "other" categories. So I give in! I cannot proceed.

So I ring the 800 number on the page to look for web help.

This time I get IVR routing and IVR security digits to enter from my renewal letter, my postcode and birth date. You've guessed it..when I get through the agent asks for the postcode and birth date. On protest she blames system issues.

I try for blind help with the web site functionality, but the notes are obviously good and she spots I just came through before. So I have to go back down the story. The same track. No result.

In vain I try to ask for web help. Can't do. Got a number for web help? No. Can you get one? Nice but no? Can I speak to your supervisor. I give up waiting on hold and start again.

In fairness someone phoned back later, but I was on the other phone getting through my third call to the AA. No one had it in their job to spot the problems and get the root causes reported. No interest at all.

So now practiced in AA processes, I go thro the 800 number IVR and ignore the fact I'm a customer. Much simpler, I get to a good agent. A modicum of interest. A tiny bit, but not nothing. I go thro the new business process and get a fresh quote. It's £100 more than the renewal letter!! But at least she does have the ability to go through the criteria and we tweak them til we get back to the exact sum in the renewal notice. And on a tiny push she can give discounts and I get a further £50 off, so I'm halfway between the AA price on the aggregator and teh original renewal letter.

By now how do I feel? She was good, but she did what the first guy should have been able to do, half an hour before. That's a waste of my time and I'm not renewing unless they are last resort. I ask for a number to get back to her, but she can only offer to call me back. 7.15? Good technique to try and make me wait afterI get other quotes. Incidentally she didn't call and I went out at 7.25 - perhaps by then she read the notes and gave up on me. Still she said 7.15. Obviously didn't want my business either.

I need a rest so I try renewing my M&S Money travel insurance. The figure is close to last year. I am NOT going to try...... I phone the number on the renewal letter. Just renew it. They just renew it.

Do you do buildings insurance? No.

I'm thinking I know they do.....

But I can transfer you. Phew ! Ring ring etc and eventually I'm through.

By now I can give the answers to the next three questions in the exact insurance language before the questions are asked. How old is the house? Pre 1851, brick, tile roof, detached. French windows? Yes, security locks at the top but not at the bottom, all other windows have locks, burglar alarm but not that Nas standard thingie. Its a bit like the 2 Ronnies doing Mastermind !

The price is where the AA price was on the aggregator web site. Done deal. Its that price because I was asked what excess I wanted and given options. Simple stuff. I took a bigger excess. Thats probably why the AA aggregator price was where it was. If I 'd been offered the higher excess by the last lady from the AA, she'd still have got the business.

So that cartoon......pin it on your walls ! And email us if this story is familiar and you want help. We'll sendround a repair man.

Or take a look at our mini book (more cartoons! ) which tells an amusing story not unlike this one

Even first direct can do dumb things !

(Sorry for radio silence. We have a new site going live and the blogs have been going into the new site which you cant see yet! )

Call me sad, but I found a dumb thing at first direct at last! I have given them the feedback - it's worth it because I believe they will act on it.

Unlike the guys at Swindon station today after I trod on a loose flagstone outside the front door of the station. It had a huge puddle under it that went straight up my legs. At least I was too wet to look like I wet myself!

Telling the ticket clerk, it was clear she had no way of dealing with what customers say. "Tell that guy in the orange jacket over there". I didn't bother.

So what did first direct do? A classic in the web site. Click on mortgage sales and it asks you to log in if you're an existing customer. You log in and click on mortgages. It asks you to proceed to log out and look at mortgages. Back where you started! ! Tee hee.

The other dumb thing is quite interesting. And another classic. Marketing versus operations.

Marketing obviously made their mortgage offer way too good. Not only couldn't I be put thro now, they couldnt call me back until Monday as they were booked solid!. It's the classic oversell or underpricing that generates more demand than can be handled. Even assuming the forecasts were notified. The customer experience - frustrated. Being a fan I'll wait. But it doesnt reflect well.

Bet operations are getting it in the neck not marketing.

Could I do it myself on the web? "We've taken it down because of the demand...." !!

A new year, more of the same or a new approach?

For 4 years now, Budd has been championing the cause, developed at Amazon, of "The Best Service is No Service".

With our passion for "How do we stop doing dumb things to our customers and people?" we remain focused on how companies can drastically improve their customer experiences by reducing contact by 20%+ per annum, with its consequent impact on operating budgets.
But, and there is a but, many companies appear to be adopting the strategy of saving 20% of their operating costs without a good understanding of what it takes to avoid inflicting pain on their customers.

So - your strategy is to reduce unnecessary contact by 20% in 2008 - but how much damage or how much good will you do for your customers?

The most common problems are:
--- A focus on cost not the experience. The focus must be on the experience first with cost savings as a consequence
--- Starting projects to fix the problem. It's about implementing proven, sustainable processes that constantly take out unnecessary contact. Projects rarely sustain the behaviours required over years
--- Trying to do too much too fast. The first wins are critical but they need to be part of a coherent approach
--- Leaving out the frontline staff. Regardless of new tools to gather data, tapping into what the frontline staff know and their engagement is key to sustainable success
--- Doing again what worked a year or two ago but lapsed as soon as the next focus appeared

Budd brings proven processes that can be embedded to make the savings year on year. Our top clients are saving 80% of their operating budgets now.

On a £100m operating budget, you'd be saving £20m per annum in the first year. That's £1.67m per month, £400k per week. If it's done well you'll be a hero. If its done badly it will cost another £100m to regain your brand's reputation. Do you feel lucky? Or do you need to get it right first time?

Contact us if you'd like to talk through your ideas - peter.massey@budd.uk.com

What happens when customer are just 'too good'

I've been an Egg credit card customer for many years. I also loved the brand so much I bought shares in Egg when it was floated several years ago. I'd seen what Mike Harris had done at first direct and bought into that as a great customer experience and could see the same future for Egg. Not the best reason to buy shares I know, but companies that think about the customer experience think about their staff as well and that makes a big difference to delivering that customer experience! In fact when it was launched back in 1998 Egg had the stated purpose of "revolutionise the customers experience of financial services driven through unleashing the power of people."

In an article in MyCustomer.com in November 2006, John Jennick, Head of Customer Experience and Action at Egg said "Strategically Egg has set out since 1998 to be a bit different. We try to have our customers at the heart of everything that we do."

As a credit card customer I admit that I am probably just 'too good'. When I was OFFERED the option to pay off my balance monthly by Egg, I took up that option. I probably took credit increases as well, but managed my card too well, so rarely needed them. I have several other cards in my wallet but when I wanted to use a card, I used the Egg card.

My renewal was due last month and I discovered, when trying to use the old card, I hadn't received my replacement. I rang Egg to chase it up, only to be told that my account had been reviewed by the Renewals Team and that I had been switched to a 'repayment only account'. When asked what this meant I was told that I could only make repayments of balances not purchases.

"So you're closing my account you mean?" I questioned. The response was "no, just changing it to a repayment only account which you don't need a card for". That's the same thing in my book!

Now I know Citigroup as the new owners of Egg want to make something out of this business and have a few subprime mortgage problems to deal with. So 'good' customers who pay off their balances, are not going to set the profits racing. But they didn't even have the courtesy to contact me - NO LETTER, EMAIL or CALL. Just NO CARD! It would have been nice to add an Egg card back into my wallet alongside the 4 other Citibank accounts I hold. But clearly, I'd be asking too much for that them to notice that little fact.

The MyCustomer.com article provides a lot of detail about the new survey tools that had been implemented at Egg. I wish I had been asked to be surveyed today after my call. The lack of empathy and explanation was astounding. "We normally do write to customers to tell you" I was told. My emotional state was easy to read (ie angry!) but the agent still failed to adapt to the situation. We finished the call with no resolution but an offer from the agent - "Is there anything else I can help you with today". The fate of my relationship with Egg was sealed.

There could have been a positive outcome for Egg if it did think I'm not being profitable enough. A call or email to ask me to use the card more, selling me the benefits of the card, the low rate, the cashback... Instead I've told 10 people already what has happened since I discovered the situation today, plus all the people who overheard me on the train this morning. In terms of wallet share from me and my family, Egg has just blown it. Glad I got rid of the Egg insurance last year as well.

So what happens when customers are just too good? Businesses try to get too clever with segmentation, get hung up on numbers, loose sight of the customer and do dumb things to them.

If this is a broken process then maybe the survey tools Egg are using could pick it up. One thing's for sure, that agent knows how much frustration I feel about the situation and needs a way of getting the feedback back into the business it not for my sake, for his, so he can avoid another Monday morning like the one he had today.

We have put in continuous closed loop improvement processes at other banks that have taken 80% of the contact and loads of these dumb things out of the business. Amazon.com did this (77% in 3 years) with processes like Skyline and WOCAS that track contact, engage the frontline in telling the business what's not working for customers and make sure the right things get fixed. They save money and give the customer more time to work out what to buy next from you.

So if John or anyone from Egg wants to investigate this situation and reassure me that this is an isolated case then I'm happy to hear from them (david.naylor@budd.uk.com). Perhaps the 1998 goal of "revolutionisng the customer experience" in the right way can yet be achieved.

Watch the Customer!

Remember the old movies when a guy taking a picture used to say ‘watch the birdie’ and everyone promptly stared at the stuffed bird held in the photographer’s hand?
Usually it was only for a very short time, then with a bang and a flash it was all over and hey presto you had a beautiful picture (well something in sepia anyway) to keep the customers happy

I sometimes wish delivering customer service could be so visual and dramatic, where you could wave a magic wand and it would be fixed instantaneously to the customers delight. How different it is in real life

Normally it is down to the detail of how you respond to, and manage, peoples expectations, being able to meet changing demands and thinking on your feet

A small event happened to me this week that emphasised the need to keep an eye on your customer at all times and remember that the customer is the primary reason we are here (they hold the money after all)

I made the mistake of driving to Gatwick Airport and trying to park in the short term car park. This is always very busy, irrespective of time of day, and has a row of automatic barriers where you take your ticket, the barrier machine waits for a period of time, obviously doing some detailed electronic analysis of you, your car, number plates, painting it’s electronic nails etc and then lets you in to the hallowed sanctuary of the car park

Well on Monday one of the barriers had broken and the attendant was trying to fix the machine. A lady in her mini was stuck at the barrier entrance as the bar would not lift, and the weight of traffic rapidly built up so she could not reverse. The traffic then got so bad it started to block the entrance road. Chaos and tooting horns, very embarrassed lady (not her fault) grumpy commuters going to miss the Gatwick express to London and general travellers lost at the start of their journey. (It’s amazing how bad tempered we become when something gets in the way of our routine commute)

But back to the attendant, who at that time represented NCP. Did he let the lady through? Did he try and manage the traffic? Did he call for assistance?

No. He did the very human thing of doing what he was most comfortable with, trying to fix the machine, then as the pressure got worse, carried on trying to fix the machine and ignored the increasing chaos around him. It was much safer with the machine than trying to calm a load of frustrated customers of NCP!

Simple message, but get it right it’s a powerful one, train and enable your staff to look after the customers first, not the machine or the process. You can (normally) fix them afterwards. Think of the positive impression that attendant could have created if he had taken control of the situation and kept the traffic flowing. Those people involved would have praised NCP, not muttered some of the comments I heard!

Open letter to O2 - anyone listening?

My daughter has an O2 phone. She’s been waiting for the 12 months to end for the last few months to get a new phone.
Its finally out of contract so we called to try and get renewed with the phone she wants.

After simple security q&a (see more later), the best the sales agent could do was to increase her contract in money and length to get a free phone.
I try for the best deal I can get – which isn’t any deal, so we decide to go elsewhere

My daughter looks on the various websites and we find various better deals ( she wants more text) but she doesn’t want to be without service and I don’t want more paperwork
We then find the same phone on the O2 website, free on a 12 month contract, so we try to do that, but of course that means a fresh contract and we therefore need to go back and cancel the old contract. We might as well try for a “common sense” saving of effort (for both of us and O2) whereby we don’t cancel and they just give us the online deal

We phone again, abandoned once on the “thinking of cancelling” option. Eventually got thro and then get transferred to the “right” person. She wants to know our security question, not the security answer, the question. Well 12 months have passed….you know where this is going. She says it’s a DPA regulation – I tell her its not. Its more than my bank (first direct) want. Slowly we negotiate different questions. The tariff we’re on. Its on the bill. Well it isn’t. (subsequently find a second page of a bill later with it on). Eventually we spend several minutes debating info before I find a bank file and give her bank details instead. I’m very wound up by now to say the least !

She cant do the common sense deal. So we need to cancel to buy again. She can't cancel us, so she transfers us to "retentions" not cancellations.

I explain why we want to cancel. Cancel and not buy again, since the whole experience has been so dumb and annoying.

We now get the offer we wanted to start with – a free phone, a 12 month contract. And we get a load of free texts. No paperwork.

So we get to where we needed to be.

A waste of my time and the four agents we spoke to. And O2 are giving away money. 4 contacts and a give away. Expensive way to renew. That's ok, they'll say - we were retained.

We were churned, we were retained, we cost money in time and giveaways, in brand damage.

I asked both the last 2 agents if they could take customer suggestions about how to improve. The first said no, I’d have to speak to customer services. The second said yes she would. I wonder what it woudl say if you could see what she captured compared to what I offered as feedback.

Anyone at O2 there?

The best service is happy service

I sit writing, bleary eyed, having just taken off from Milan very early this morning after an excellent night on the tiles at Stream’s annual user conference. The conference circuit has been taking its toll on my blogging of late….. In the last 30 days, its been ECMW, a telco CRM event in Lisbon, our own Chief Customer Officer forum, then Dusseldorf and Paris with LimeBridge external events, LimeBridge’s 10th global gathering. This week it’s been Milan and the British Bankers Association. Finally next week I chair Advanced Customer Management in London and the “season” finishes. I probably need to buy an acre of Brazilian rainforest to offset the flights and the midnight oil that has been burned.

There’s at least 10 blogs to back date from the interesting things I’ve heard people talking about, Prahalad, Eisner. Updates on how LimeBridge is jumping to its next iteration etc – I’ll catch up at the weekend….may be.

What just caught my eye was an article in the FT titled “In the pursuit of happiness”. The story goes that the long held premise that happy staff make happy customers is not backed up by the evidence. Crumbs, I just noticed I know the journalist – will have to shoot him – Alan I know where you live !

On the conference circuit I’ve been talking a lot about our passion of “how do we stop doing dumb things to our customers and people” and trying hard to get people to feel the feelings that customer facing staff feel when they deliver dumb things in what we call the “stupid factory” of poor processes. How it feels when they are not supported by management, and worse when they are controlled by management practices and measurements. And how they perform when they are supported rather than managed (see the blogs on red nose day, and on the 4 questions that Happy use). I’ve been working hard to recognise that change in attitudes starts with them, not someone else. How they respect people by saying hello in the morning, how they listen to their frontline staff who know what customers are saying. How they are as managers and designers of the operation around them.

There’s also a fundamental that people won’t get off their backsides for money, to make shareholders another million. But they will for a real purpose, for a passion that matters. When we did the CCO forum we calculated that about 30 million customers and 90,000 staff would be affected by how the influential people in the room drove their businesses – that matters. Not how much more money their businesses would make as a result. I realised I had to shout this from the roof tops when I heard a colleague of mine say he thought our passion didn’t make our sales proposition clear. Bollocks to propositions, its not about business – its about how frustrated and fed up we’re making those 90,000 people and 30 million customers. And how quickly can we stop it happening.

So as you see the FT article got me going! It refers to the seminal HBR article “The Service Profit Chain” (you can read it in our library at http://www.budd.uk.com/ ) and how the authors now admit its not that direct a linkage from satisfied staff to satisfied customers to higher profits. That’s its not that linear. Of course it isn’t. But that doesn’t mean that happy staff don’t deliver better results.

The article falls into the trap of measuring results only in shareholder terms ie profit. 21st century business is also about measuring social returns on customer time wasted, staff lives wasted and natural resources wasted from paper wasted on junk mail to midnight oil burned trying to get your laptop to work with all its new software and PDAs and printers. This matters far more to people. It gives purpose to what businesses are for.

In fairness the article does touch on the need for both dimensions, the process and the motivation, to be right in order to deliver a good result for customers. And it emphasises a key thing – that workers should redesign work, not managers or consultants. They already know what’s broken – you just have to free them to change what happens. It’s managers “managing by getting in the way” LINK that’s the problem with the Service Profit Chain logic, not the service profit chain itself. And the article does emphasise the Gallup 12 questions ( see previous post) bringing out that its your direct manager who affects most how you feel and therefore how well you perform

Alan must have been reading our blogs when he put his FT article together, given all the things he mentioned!!

Well that’s another half hour lost to ranting, but I feel better for it! A bientot

Is anyone at Ikea watching?

Taking money off people ought to be easy. Especially after they've made the effort to fight round the M25, fight their way into Lakeside, find a parking space closer than London, go through the trauma that is the Ikea shopping experience, put their back out lifting weights in the warehouse and then reach the check out with hundreds of pounds worth of damage about to be done to their credit card!!

So why the 100s of full, abandoned shopping trolleys littering the way to the check outs at Thurrock this weekend?

Maybe something to do with manning about 6 from 30 check outs and causing a queue half way round the block. Or just the thought of tryingto load the car?

If you think its not hard to get brilliant basics to work like Tesco do, just look at Ikea. Anyone at Ikea watching ..... I dont think so.

Now if I can just solve the multipart technical Nokia, Microsoft or Sony problem so I can transfer the photos off my phone, I'll show you what the evidence

Are you your company's Chief Customer Officer - if so then breakfast with us on March 21

Are you the CCO? WOT????

Well a CCO is a "chief customer officer" - the person who screams, scratches, bites and kicks the company to make it better for the customer. The one who "stops dumb things happening to customers" !! You may have a rich seam of them in your business or be a lone star

Of course given our mission of "how do we stop doing dumb things to customers" we are mad keen to meet and help as many CCOs as possible.

So two things are in train and we'd love your input (email me on peter.massey@budd.uk.com)

1) March 21st is a directors' breakfast seminar being jointly hosted with the heroic CCO Darren Cornish from Norwich Union. It will be a couple of short blasts on the horn from Darren and I, then facilitated discussion of what it takes to get your organisation acting on all the wonderful feedback customers give ( expletives deletives or whatever !)

2) Our 2007 4th annual Fast+Simple survey will be kicking off shortly and we're looking for chief customer officers and their CEOs to interview

Elect yourself to the role of CCO and get yourself a seat at the table !

Famous for 15 seconds

Radio 4’s You and Yours programme picked up on our mission “how do we stop doing dumb things to customers” today and included our sound bite. How do you sum up the answer to customer experience in 15seconds?

The thing to do is to recognise that customers know what’s wrong, so listen to them and act on it. Short and sweet eh?

You and Yours are looking to reward good service by accepting nominations which they'll broadcast on air. Today’s were:
Nat Savings & Investments’ call centre
A lady in New Maldon post office

To keep nominations coming in, they ask you send them via: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/youandyours/youandyours_contact.shtml