Category: SCO

Six customer imperatives for everyone

Many decades ago, as a trainee industrial engineer I was introduced to the works of Rudyard Kipling[1].

In the context of the Customer Age his sage wisdom lives on.

A renowned English writer (born in Mumbai) he influenced my life from that get go and here I pay homage to his life changing verse Six Honest Serving Men

1.Why What Who Where When How

Why do you want to measure your customer experience?  We want to understand the current state of our experience and see how it impacts the bottom line, revenue growth and shareholder value.

Why is that important?  We know that a great customer experiences leads to significantly enhanced customer lifetime value. Customers buy more, stay longer and become a part of your Awareness for future customers.

Why do you need a measurement for this? We need to get scientific about the customer experience. We need to understand where we should focus to profitably improve experiences, and to measure the ongoing evolution of Customer Experience Management.

Why is this important? Existing measures of Customer Experience are subjective and prone to bias, whether that is sample size, emotional influence or even the time of day. It is not realistic to base our future growth on a set of flaccid anecdotal measures.

2.Why What Who Where When How

What is the first step? We need get factual. What are the real measures? The hard noised objective and accessible metrics that move beyond the soft and fluffy emotional feedback.

What system do we need in place? Something that is repeatable and predictable. Certainly not the latest anecdotes from the customer service

What is the priority? To coin a phrase – where the rubber hits the road. In a very direct sense it is where the customer interactions are taking place and where the reality of the service and product offering happens. We need to measure the real interaction, less so the feelings created.

3. Why What Who Where When How

Who is the most important person in your organization? Who is the ultimate cause of all the work? The answer is the same – yes, the customer of course.

Who should lead the change to understand and develop the Customer Experience? Well that isn’t a bunch of guys doing strategy in their glass ivory towers remote to the business. Guess what. It is everyone of us, as ultimately we all walk in the customer shoes.

Who engages the organization for success? Vision is essential. Moving beyond the industrialized function specialist silos’ to the sunny uplands of customer awareness requires fortitude and leadership. It is certainly not for the feint of heart.

4. Why What Who Where When How

It is not top down, strategy driven. It isn’t even bottom up frontline informed. Where have those ideas come from? Yes the industrialized world of the 1700’s.  Wind forward to now. We are a bunch of able and skilled individuals aligned to successful customer outcomes (or we should be)

5. Why What Who Where When How
When? What are you waiting for? You do not really want to go down the road of Kodak, Nokia and Blackberry? Surely. The customers have changed. Have you? Or is the management team doing the same old same old? Light the fire. Make a noise. If you don’t you know all to well what will be next.

6. Why What Who Where When How

It is not top down, strategy driven. This is the easiest of all. It starts with you. The messages you relate. The language you use. The people you influence. Every conversation and internal exchange is an opportunity to win hearts and minds. Is it tough? Yes of course it is, however was anything ever worth doing easy? The choice is yours.


Globe trotting – certification and customer experience

Catch me if you can at:
Edmonton, Canada – w/c 7 October
Cape Town – w/c 14 October
Hong Kong – w/c 21 October
San Francisco – w/c 4 November
Singapore – w/c 11 November
A terrific mix of in-house accreditation and audit, consultancy and good plain old training. Government, Financial Services, Aerospace, Retail and Pharma.
Review the 2013 and 2014 Open sessions at: http://www.bpgroup.org/certification-by-city.html
Or drop me a line at the office (37,000 feet).
Happy Hunting
Steve
Steve Towers, Founder & CEO
steve.towers@bpgroup.org        www.bpgroup.org
Cell:+44 7415 063868       Office:+44 203 3030 894        Fax:+44 20 7691 7664

Link with Steve: www.linkedin.com/in/stevetowers /

LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/joinbpgroup Twitter: http://twitter.com/stowers

BP Group, New Bond House, 124 New Bond Street, London W1S 1DX

Coaching & Professional qualifications since 1992

 

Customer Interactions aka Moments of Truth (Part One) – develop, control, measure and manage

Customer Interactions (CI’s) are taking place all the time. Are your CI’s under control? Can you quantify them? and are they aligned to the Successful Customer Outcome? Some folks might think this is a mountain to climb and don’t even bother to pay attention to those critical moments.

   Customer Interactions – (Click photo for full size)

High Performance Organizations on the other hand know that engineering the CI’s, designing them Outside-In and keeping them owned and controlled determines every aspect of the Customer Experience.

So let’s take a journey together and start with the basics. If we look at healthcare and hospitals especially we all know the smallest things make the biggest difference. Hygiene for instance.

So what are the smallest things in your business that make that massive difference?

Successful Customer Outcomes – are you delivering (or are you part of the problem?)

Simply put everything an organization does, from the tasks and activities through to strategy should be explicitly linked with a Successful Customer Outcome.

Say you are in the Accident and Emergency at your local hospital? How much of what is actually happening is contributing to the well being of the patients? At a recent family crisis as a visitor I managed my stress by doing a time and motion study (sad I know). Over 48 hours I sampled activity and tasks, and albeit not scientific (it was hardly a controlled environment) it produced an interesting profile:

Sample size 256.

I would suggest an interesting stat in there is the time with the patient (7%).

If we assumed the objective of going through the process (the Successful Customer Outcome) is to make people better how much time is really spent doing that? How much time is spent on tasks and activities which may not directly contribute to that?

All our jobs involve us in tasks and activities which may not directly contribute to the SCO – how many of those could be released to spend more time achieving the desired outcome? It might not be 93% but it is one helluva a lot.In this example we would reduce costs, improve morale of overworked nurses and enhance the customer experience. Who wouldn’t want that?

How can you do that?

There is no excuse for complexity.

There is no excuse for complexity. It is a consequence of muddled thinking and a lack of understanding of the true goal of the organization, which is creating Successful Customer Outcomes.

Complexity has developed as organizations have added new routes to market, new ways of delivering service, new enterprise IT systems and a myriad of improvement approaches. Each internal functional specialism has developed a mindset to optimize their part of the organization, sometimes at the expense of others. The unwieldy complexity that results has caused a reaction primarily aimed at the need to create order out of this chaos, as if accepting that complexity itself as a right to be. This is not so. Let us unravel the muddle of complexity once and for all.

All work in an organization is fundamentally created by the need to provide product or service to the customer. Everything else is a consequence of that need, which creates value for the shareholders and creates a livelihood for the work force. All else follows.

Furthermore all interactions in meeting the needs for customers are the cause of all work within an organization. These interactions, or Moments of Truth[i], create work in so far as we need to attend to a request internally.

In doing so we interact with our colleagues, systems and other internal processes, and create internal Moments of Truth, which can be referred to as Breakpoints[ii]. The way we deal with Moments of Truth and Breakpoints is underpinned by Business Rules[iii] which may be thought of as ‘decision points within processes’.

These three entities determine the shape of our organization, the internal landscape of how we do work. The resulting activities from Moments of Truth, Breakpoints and Business Rules create the very processes themselves. In fact process is simply an effect caused by the way we choose to interact and guide the customer to obtain our products or service.

Think about that – process is an effect. If that is the reality then the vast range of tools and techniques created in the last century, and sometimes before, are fixing an effect. It is like taking painkillers for discomfort and nothing more. If we are not getting to grips with the causes of the pain it will surely get worse and as we discover, stronger pain killers are then required.

That’s the rub. We have been systematically fixing the wrong things and is it any wonder that change doesn’t stick? Have you ever had that feeling that this is the same project challenge as before, just dusted off and here we go again? It is because we are not fixing the causes of work, and while we continue to ignore the causes the complexity worsens, costs increase and service suffers.

Einstein put it well when he said
“We can’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”

The Science of the Customer Experience

The new site featuring Customer Experience has gone live: http://www.cxrating.com

You can access and download the resources that will provide an overview of the value of becoming scientific about the Customer Experience. Meanwhile Customer Experience Mapping gets a kick in the pants as we integrate ABACUS (the BPGroup toolkit) to demonstrate a generic process across several channels.

Let’s talk Successful Customer Outcomes…

James Dodkins –
Chief Customer Officer BP Group
Well as it is so often said, it isn’t rocket science. In fact it has to be one of the simplest concepts available in business today – and yet so often missed. It is often so simple it is elegant, so let’s review what Disneys SCO might just be…

Most of us have been there. A car full of screaming kids eager to start their Disney vacation, however trouble is you’ve driven six hours (or flown ten) and frankly the last thing you want to do is fight the car lot. Much better find that quiet hotel room and bar and chill until tomorrow? Not so. This is the kids vacation and they’re going to squeeze every minute out of the long awaited trip to the Magic Kingdom. So what say Disney in this situation? Do they leave you to fight the crowds, get incredibly irritated and leave you with a pile of now prickly family? Well no –  they have been there too after all and it is real easy to see it from the customers point of view.

Perhaps the SCO is ‘simply magic’? Not some weird business jargon Mission/Vision but something that talks and causes everyone in the Disney business to ensure they are aligned and delivering to that promise. So how would the SCO  ‘simply magic’ work? Let’s review where we are – on the way to the busiest car lot this side of the LA freeway. It is the hottest day this summer the question ¨are we there yet?¨ echoes around yourself, partner and three kids in the car (that’s the average party size to arrive at Disney – five). And yes you are! So you find a spot disembark the kids, look around to size your location and… shut the car doors.


In the ‘rush to the fun’ process Disney discovered that many people lock their keys in the car so right at the start they have on-hand a team of professional locksmiths. They drive through the lot looking for distressed families and unlock their cars – free of charge. Simply Magic. Then there’s the walk to the gates – but wait. Driving through the crowds are golf carts and helpers to steer you towards the nearest ‘magic bus’ with color coded location tags! You probably get the picture and that’s one of the things that makes the Disney performance truly outstanding. The belief that if everything gets itself aligned to the SCO we reduce cost (how much effort do you currently apply to fixing stuff that goes wrong that results in queries and non value added activity?), drive up revenue (how many people would you tell?) and improves customer satisfaction (would you be pleased?).

To coin a phrase, the SCO is a gift that just keeps on giving.

Kindest Regards

James Dodkins
Chief Customer Officer
BP Group

Twitter – @JDodkins