Customer Experience

The rise of the power of user generated content is leading organisations to offer new ways of enticing participation, and an innovative example I will be following is that of Simon Seeks.

There are plenty of sites vying for participation, in the form of user generated content: some offer to pay up front for the content, while others hope that by linking into other successful social networking sites, that they will boost their usage, and a confident few are content to start by carefully seeding, hoping that the community will grow, simply through brand, interest or both.

However Simon Seeks offers rewards based on both conversion and loyalty. Registered users of the site write reviews. If their review leads to other users booking a holiday, they are then given financial rewards back. Conversion and loyalty are not new, but it’s a model of encouragement that I have never seen before.

I guess the hope is that if reviewers are rewarded with something in context, it should lead them to have another experience, and in return, for the site can hope for loyalty, and more crucially, another review posted of that new experience.

Can a bad customer experience with one brand affect another brand?

Holiday season; I excitedly went online to Expedia, found decent fares for my flight to Thailand and proceeded to the booking page. Everything went smoothly until I reached the confirmation page: instead of getting the much anticipated confirmation number, I received a sad “Sorry, we were unable to make your reservation” message. Ok, fair enough; I told myself that I must have had mistyped my bank details and decided to try again.

Following this slight disappointment, I went onto my online banking to make sure that a lack of provision on my account hadn’t been the reason of the failure. Once logged in, the view of my statement petrified me: I had actually been debited of the amount of the flight I was trying to book. I must have sworn harder than for my internet problem.   I had no booking but the money had gone.

Upon calling Expedia, I was immediately reassured and told to contact my bank, ask for a fax number and a representative’s name, so that Expedia could fax the bank a cancellation order. Basically, my money had flown out of my account to land into a mysterious buffer zone between my bank and Expedia, waiting to be authorised. What I did not know at the time, was that if the retailer doesn’t claim the money, (which was the case with Expedia as the booking had not gone through) the pending transaction would cancel out after a few days and the money would return onto my account.

What follows now is a joke of call centre support:

• Phoned up the ‘current account’ service of my bank for the fax number (20 minute wait)
• Told “in the wrong service department” and transferred to the ‘fraud division’
• Another friendly but unhelpful support person (another 20 minute wait) told me I still wasn’t in the right service and the operator told me “Sir, I’ll transfer you to online banking operations”.
• From then on, every 5 minutes, the lad would pause the increasingly annoying waiting tune to announce me that he was trying to jump the queue and connect me to somebody.
• Another 20 minutes of this comedy (I was 1 hour on the phone at this point), told that nobody seemed to be working anymore as no-one was picking up the phone. Out of curiosity, I asked him for the direct number of that department.
• Called direct and received the automated response “This service is no longer available. Please call xxx for online banking operations”. Guess what Gordon Ramsay would have said at that point.

After blaming loudly and angrily my bank’s internal communication system, I phoned up the new number, waited a tiny bit, got to talk to someone, got a name and fax number, call back Expedia and eventually got my money back three days later.

So what’s the morale of the story…? Did this epic experience affect my perception of Expedia? Yes, a little bit as I now fear the same issue to happen again. However, the bad online user experience was offset by a professional, quick and friendly service on the phone.

Did this affect my perception of the bank: yes a lot, as it felt like no-one on the phone knew what they were talking about (I actually forgave them the waiting time). The incompetence of a few ones completely discredited the seriousness of the bank. However, I went to my local branch on the following working day and had my distrust of the bank blown away by a professional and very capable clerk.

Hopefully for them, neither of these two brands relied on one channel only to convey their image. But this story really demonstrates is how a travel agency almost made my bank lose a customer.

With a few exceptions, call centres are pretty awful. One reason is that customers aren’t pushing hard enough for improvement. They might complain bitterly about the lousy wait times, but they will consider that against a background of all the other poor call centre experiences and partition it off. If the value of a brand is truly a measure of ‘everything’ including all customer touch points then it seems there is an opportunity being missed.Ethnographic research has shown that customers compare online experiences between different brands, and even different sectors so they expect the same service from a white goods supplier as they do from one that provides consumables. So why haven’t customers started to compare experiences between different channels and demanded an improvement in the call centre?

There has been grumbling in customer service forums, but it’s had little effect. Businesses have been looking at improvements, but they have been focused on adding and optimising single channels. Integration has been a relatively recent phenomenon.

I believe the recession will be a catalyst for change, as it has been so many times before. The need to save money has placed business operations under a microscope and this will drive businesses to integrate previously disparate channels so that cross-channel service delivery becomes a reality.

Foviance has already seen a big increase in the number of organisations that are asking us to map out their customers’ journeys across all channels. We have then identified how the lower cost channels can be used to save money, without causing damage to the customer experience.

This is an area where co-creation is an excellent approach as the answers come from our consultants, customers and their customers working together, rather than in isolation. Indeed I would extend the group even further and include call centre consultancies. Many of these have already helped organisations identify a huge number of operational efficiencies. Without the constraint of a single channel, they could find new opportunities for further gains.

It is pleasing to see publications such as Customer Strategy, which has a long heritage in customer service and call centre strategy, embracing the change that is required and projecting itself as more cross-channel in its editorial approach and content. For example, the publication is currently running a series of masterclasses, the last of which in July is focussed on helping organisations establish a cross-channel approach to improving customer service and cutting costs. The masterclass will be run by RXperience. The course description includes the words “using a contact strategy that reinforces your brand”, and if organisations do start to take this approach, perhaps motivated by the recession, we will see a step change in the quality of customer experience delivery.

There’s a saying that beauty is only skin-deep, and for some companies, branding is only logo-deep. When they invest hundreds of thousands of pounds rebranding, the result is a new swirly logo to represent some re-imagined values. What goes on where the company meets the customer remains the same, though, so the customer’s perception of the brand is unchanged.

There can be a wide gulf between the brand promise, and the brand experience of the average customer. The website Brandtags invites members of the public to say what springs to mind when they see famous logos. The keywords entered rarely echo the company’s brand values, and all too often are a direct rebuttal of them.

Customers are more suspicious than ever before, with the latest Edelman Trust Barometer showing that more than half the customers surveyed trust brands less than they did a year ago. People are less likely to be influenced by marketing, and are more likely to trust their own experiences of a brand and those of their friends and influencers. With people densely connected online, the word of mouth effect is amplified, and that’s particularly true when there are negative experiences to share.

The investments that companies make in branding are important and should be sustained. They help to build trust with customers, and reinforce key messages. But they must be supported and reinforced at every customer touch point. You can’t be “innovative” if you make customers wait five minutes for a call centre agent, or if you can’t cope with customers moving between channels in a single transaction. You can’t claim to be a “luxury” product, if it’s a hassle to buy from you.

If companies are to ensure that their brand experience supports and enhances the brand promise, they must make delivering the customer experience a much bigger part of brand planning. They must involve operations directors in rebranding exercises, and ensure the performance metrics on the shopfloor reflect the company values, rather than just pushing for sales and conversions. They must strive to turn customers into ambassadors, and use word of mouth to build the business.

When companies get it right, the brand can be the business’s greatest asset, and its greatest defence against competitors. Without customers trusting that the company delivers on its promise, though, the brand is nothing more than a sugar coating on a bitter pill.

Jason Spencer is the managing director of Millward Brown in Shanghai. In the latest Foviance podcast, we discussed customer experience and digital marketing in China.

Hi Jason. Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m originally from Brisbane, Australia, but I’ve been in greater China for the last 15 years. At Millward Brown, most of the work we do is helping our clients with their brand and communication strategies, predominantly in mainland China but also in Greater China, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan.

I’ve heard differing stories of how digital plays a role in Asia: everybody uses mobile, nobody uses computers and all sorts of crazy ideas.

I can really only answer for China, because it’s very different across the Asia Pacific region.

Technology adoption in China has picked up and accelerated phenomenally in the last ten years or so. But it’s not so much blogging that’s big here, nor Twittering, and it’s not so much social networking in the sense that Facebook is a social network forum. What’s different about China is that when people go online here, their main activity is to go onto bulletin boards (BBS). It’s something I remember from 20 years ago when I had my first modem.

Bulletin boards are culturally and socially ideal for people in China using the internet. You can log on anonymously and have your say and air your complaints and participate in a dialogue with other web users about controversial issues. That’s something people are not able to do in real life.

What impact does the use of bulletin boards have on brands?

It’s very, very easy for a brand to make a small mistake and then have that mistake magnified by the level of discussion that goes online. Mercedes Benz about eight years ago had an issue with one of its customers. A dealership apparently didn’t want to take a car back and so the customer set up some cameras and took photos of himself bashing his Mercedes Benz to smithereens with a sledgehammer, and then published that online. Then other people started talking about the issues they’d had with Mercedes Benz, especially the after-sales service. Mercedes Benz, to their credit, responded quickly and staunched the level of discontent that was being displayed online. I think Ford have had some oil pump issues with the Ford Focus. It was only after Ford themselves were trawling and scanning what was being said online that they were able identify this as a significant issue and then address it.

Is e-commerce playing much of a role in China?

I don’t think there’s many retailers that have independently tried to capitalise on e-commerce in China, or been successful at it. Certainly not as much as you might see in the US or in Europe.

There’s a company here called Taobao, which started off as a B to B forum for people looking for components for machinery or manufacturing, and things like that. Recently they have moved much more towards the business to consumer model.

When people here buy their houses, they basically buy an empty concrete box, and then it’s up to them to go out and renovate that and put in all the toilet fixtures and the kitchen fixtures. Now people will join websites like Taobao and engage in group buying using the bulletin boards. Everyone gets together on this third party website and then goes and bulk-buys from a particular supplier to get a better deal. That sort of thing is very successful here.

What is your prediction for digital marketing in China?

Most of our clients still devote a single-digit percentage of their communications budgets to digital. I’m expecting this will grow exponentially in the next two to three years, especially as the price of advertising in China will become exorbitant, really. I think a lot of clients are being forced into a situation where they would like to look at digital as a more cost-effective platform, and then once people are forced to use that platform a little bit more, that’s when I think you’ll see the creativity and real maturity start to develop.

Thank you Jason for taking the time to speak to us. The full podcast will be available for download from the Foviance website next week.

Not one to follow the hype or emerging trend, I was still intrigued by why anyone would queue from 5.30am to buy something, namely the new iPhone which launched last week in the UK. On catching up with my brother-in-law last weekend, an avid iPhone user (and essentially all things Apple), I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. He proudly pulled out his phone and handed it to me, initially I was amazed he would trust his new prised possession in my hands, what if I ‘broke’ something by pressing the wrong button? It would seem that it’s not possible.

I initially went and tried out what is usually the first thing I use a mobile for, sending a text, upon realising how simple that was, I wanted to know how useful some of the applications really are - this is where it got exciting, I could fill a page on the 30 minutes spent ‘playing’ on the phone, the most useful apps for me are anything to do with travel, getting from A to B with minimum fuss - the routes can be displayed in different formats, map, satellite, text with built in compass, and the ease of use is paramount, as someone who uses the internet frequently to plan my journey, I was amazed that it was so much better on the iPhone. Not one normally for games, I spent a good ten minutes ‘driving’ (the phone acts as the steering wheel and it moves extremely well) as for playing the synthsiser, who knew I was so musical?! We even shot a short video, did a quick edit and uploaded it to You Tube within minutes.

Basically I was hugely impressed with the iPhone, it’s slick, sleek style which fits comfortably in the hand, the large clear screen, sound quality, sheer speed and the most useful applications that simply provide a cleaned up version of the internet! A great customer experience and for the first time I can see where the cost of an item like this actually holds it’s value. The iPhone is not only pretty and fun, but useful too.

This is the fourth podcast in our ‘…on Customer Experience’ series of interviews. This interview was with Graham Webster Director, Customer Experience for Telefónica and myself, Marty Carroll, Foviance Consultancy Director.

Graham provides some real insights into an organisation that is putting the customer experience front and centre of its strategy. He discusses how customer experience acts as a growth enabler for Telefónica, the world’s 3rd largest telecommunications company.

• Episode title: Graham Webster on Customer Experience
• Episode number: 4
• Series: on Customer Experience
• Duration: 26 minutes

Listen now:

Or, Download Graham Webster on Customer Experience podcast (11.6 mb)

I recently downloaded a free trial of Axure. After hearing so many good things about it from colleagues I decided I must try it. After entering my email address as requested I unticked the e-marketing box out of pure habit just as I was scanning the text. After unticking it my eyes reached the last few words ‘about one email a month’. This was enough to make me stop and reconsider. While part of me would like to know about updates and news what I didn’t want was to be inundated with emails and my natural instinct in all these situations is to opt out. But once a month or thereabouts I can cope with. So I reticked the box. Including that little piece of extra information has meant that Axure has the means for ongoing communication with me. Clever work.