Customer Service Good and Bad

Bank accounts are more or less commodities. Ok, there are some banks that have high or low rates, but most banks are in the middle with similar rates and charges. To differentiate yourself you can play around with small freebies here and multiple discounts there, just as the mobile/cell phone companies do. To all intents and purposes, as most people haven’t a clue what calls they’ll make or transactions they’ll perform next month, they can’t make a simple choice. (of course, that’s the whole point of this strategy, but that’s another blog post).

So how can you stand out?

We’re looking for a bank in Canada and sent the same e-mail to six institutions. They all replied within 48hours, so far so good. But the content of their replies really differentiated them. We sent a list of numbered questions, i.e.:

1. Can we open an account from abroad?
2. What should we do with the house sales proceeds?
3. What’s your mortgage rate?
4. What would be an appropriate current account for us?
5. etc

An elderly couple go to their local travel agency, that they’ve used for 30 years, to ask the price of an Air Canada ticket to Montréal. The agency tell them that the cheapest ticket possible is with United (change at New York!!!!) and quote €300 more than they’ve already found on the Internet with AC.

The agency is clearly not delivering a good service and is treating good customers (who should continue to be good, captive customers) badly, it’s treating them as though they’re stupid.

So you should never treat your customers as though they’re stupid?

Yes you should!

Your customers don’t know your processes (well, it’s unlikely and in most cases you assume not). Your customers don’t know your internal structures (go to this department or that department, shouldn’t customers realise this? No). Customers don’t know your business inside out, they don’t know your processes so yes you should consider them dumb.

There is a difference though between considering a customer stupid and not giving them respect. Be honest and respect your customers. Help them to understand how to use your business, your product, your offering. Help them interact with you.

The take away:

Make it simple, respect them, be honest and you’ll keep your customers.

Treat them badly, only once, and you’ll see $s and €s flying out the door.

Garr Reynolds at PresentationZen.com has reported that the Toyota CEO has suggested banning PowerPoint.

I was thinking about doing so for presentations and what the result would be. My expectation is that we would go back to the “good old days” of overhead projectors (OHPs). What happened then? Two possible scenarios (I was in University when these were last used):

1. the “presenter” writes directly on the OHP slide

2. the presenter prepares an OHP slide full of bullet points which he uncovers one by one

So Garr is completely right, PPT is just a tool, presentation skills need to be understood first; and most importantly how the audience reacts to a presentation. I learnt most from my university professors who wrote the least or used the fewest slides.

I remember one course on Thermodynamics (!) where all the slides were just pairs of graphs illustrating the necessary point. Little text, few notes, but I understood it and remembered it better than other courses. Moreover, I was able to take the understanding and apply it to other fields in a creative fashion.

Take aways:

A good logical story and visuals to back up your subject are essential to a successful presentation

So who makes product management decisions in you company? Do executives get together and make quick decisions on the fly? Have you seen this happening in your company? Does the request or remark of an executive become the “word of God?”

All of this can be very dangerous. Product Management invests time and effort to fully understand the market and the impact of a feature, so it can be very dangerous for executives to take decisions without fully exploring the impact on PM.

Instead, they should reformulate their requests as questions to PM.

“If we do x, what will be the impact? Expected profit increase? Costs throughout the organisation? Perception on the market…”

Don’t be afraid to tell your executives your point of view…

I’m currently trying to sell my house; privately without a (Real) Estate agent. Why give 3.7% of the value of your house to someone else when the Internet can get interest?But the agencies see the same ads that everyone else does and they call. So one called and tried to argue with me that I had to let him see the house and that we should “work together”. How can I work “with” someone who is that pushy?You need to be really careful when selling to build the relationship and respect both parties; even if you’re a (Real) Estate agent. 

Seth has raised a really interesting point about whether you would be missed in the workplace if you were to leave. (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/04/would-we-miss-y.html)
There is a growing propensity to de-skill some jobs so that if you do leave, you’re easily replacable. T

he big question is what effect this can have on customer service? Do you work harder if you feel valued? Can you feel valued as a cog in a machine? It’s really important for managers to get the balance right here - if there is too much resting on the employee’s shoulders then you are putting your customer service at risk if an employee leaves. So the organisation needs to keep a certain amount of knowledge and standardisation.

However, what opportunities can you give your employees to better serve each individual customer and meet their individual needs? How much better does that make the individual employee feel? Some people are not comfortable with a large amount of flexibility, but others are, so you need to know the limits of each employee and where they are in their career evolution.

Other factors can make a play here too. Some cultures are a lot more flexible than others - some require quite tight rules otherwise employees are working outside where they’re happy to be. What’s the background of your people?

Practically, you need to decide:

• What processes/rules/data are business critical for treating customers well?
• What is the comfort zone for each employee?
• Where would I like the comfort zone for each employee to be (what training & is needed to get them there)?

Yesterday morning I dropped off the car for some planned repairs. The queue at the service desk was short and they saw me quickly (great! I was on my way to work and in a rush)… but then it took them half an hour to give me the curtesy car. During this time, I was watching them having started work on my car already.So what’s the problem? You’re blatently showing that your time and efficiency is more important than that of your customer. There is no need to keep your customer waiting around all this time. It’s good that you are efficient (the customer gets the overall service done quickly) but the touchpoint here requires the customer to be in and out as quickly as possible.Takeaways:It’s not just the final service that counts, it’s all the touchpoints with your customer along the way and will make them come back. The whole product is the whole service experience. 

We’re expecting a new baby any minute now, so we thought we’d order a new bed so that she had somewhere to sleep. In the baby shop: “It’ll be about 2 months, we’ll give you a call…”

And the call came to say that the bed was ready to be delivered…. opps we’re at the midwife’s on the proposed day - so I ask that they reschedule the delivery. Two weeks later another call and yet again we canot be home for the delivery.

The caller then tells me that I can’t use her business as a furniture storage facility. A FURNITURE STORAGE FACILITY. This is a danger of outsourcing. The big France based company, Aubert, I ordered the bed with is being linked together with this dreadful delivery service and will see its reputation diminish.Let’s see if there is a response to the e-mail I sent.

It’s also an example of a company that is focused in on itself and its own needs. Basically here they receive orders from Aubert, group them, and deliver them at their convenience. Does that suit the customer? Not necessarily. Actually, it doesn’t suit the business either as they told me they were worried about running out of space.

The takeaways here are:

• are you looking internally or externally when thinking about your business processes? What’s most important to you?
• where are your partners looking? In the same direction as you?

Yesterday I flew BMI, which I usually do for the good service. However coming into Brussels airport I noticed that they played a recorded message in Dutch only, and not French. What’s the issue with that? Well just under half the Belgian population speaks French and the other half Dutch. Why annoy half of your customers like that? I’m sure that BMI have that same message recorded in French for when they land at French airports.

Dusseldorf is normally quite a cold and rainy city, at least when I visit, so I didn’t ever really think about air-conditioning in a hotel. That is, until this week with temperatures hitting the 31° mark.  After a hot day in the uncooled office, I was looking forward to a nice shower and a cool room in the Best Western. My face when the receptionist announced that the air-con was broken! So you’re the Best Western, the air-con’s broken during a heat wave, so what do you do?

• Guest number one: not informed
• Guest number two: told the aircon was broken
• Guest number three: offered a room in another hotel 

Ah-ha you’re saying, this is because one guest stays more than the others. So who stays more often at this hotel? Well that would be guest number one. Well, who has the most expensive room rate…. again guest number one.  

 The take-away:    So, what should the BW have actually done

1. Get their message straight, tell all customers about the problem, and offer all customers the same alternatives.
2. Why not offer a big bottle of water to apologise?