Opine Consulting » Customer service

Old-school hip-hop and a pretty strange lesson in customer engagement

Simon Kirby — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 15:59:49 +0000

Old School Hip-Hop and Customer Engagement

I picked up my first celebrity Twitter followers this week. Let me elaborate. Eric B and Rakim are old school US hip hop artists. Their 1987, album, Paid in Full, pretty much launched hip-hop’s modern era. These days, Eric and Rakim are big on personal empowerment, Islam, phat beats and making money. I’m a UK management consultant who’s big on strategy, service design, innovation and … well … um, making money.

These guys started following me on Twitter after reading my post on why employees should be entrepreneurs. My self-esteem went up several notches because of my new and notable Twitter following. The iTunes store ran up a couple more purchases of Paid in Full (the Deluxe Edition) and I got busy posting stuff about the rappers on my Facebook page.

In short, I’m now thinking that Eric B and Rakim are better than Eminem, Elvis, Grandmaster Flash, the Beatles and potentially Jesus.

Eric B and Rakim are a big deal in hip-hop circles; you could say that they’re a brand. Which made me think that the point of brand and engagement isn’t what customers think about our brand. The point is what our brands think about our customers.

Customer respect

A few years ago I did some marketing strategy for a big UK insurer. It had products for pretty much every socio-demographic and it called it’s poorest customer segment “bottom-feeders”. Lumping customers into categories with disrespectful names is not good humanity. There are three reasons why it’s also not good business.

Internal language shapes employees’ attitude and attitudes inevitably leak out to customers. Contemptuous language is a great platform for lousy customer service.
Contempt blocks empathy. Customer empathy is the best tool known to man for coming up with new product and service ideas.
Marketing is (at least) two-way these days. If you’re reading this on social media, you know this already. The days when a consumer brand could run in broadcast-mode only are long gone.

It’s interesting that companies think so much about how to build fans and followers and so little about following the people who buy their products and services. There are lots of brands that I like. I’d love them even more if they gave me back a little bit of social media love.

Banking customer service. The old oxymoron

Simon Kirby — Sun, 23 May 2010 14:36:17 +0000

What is about advanced capitalism that reproduces primitive Soviet-style customer service experiences?

Mrs. K and I went shopping this morning and found a wallet on the floor. It belonged to…well let’s just call her “Mrs. Smith” for the sake of the story. Mrs. Smith’s purse was stuffed with pretty much every kind of plastic card you can imagine except for anything with a personal address or phone number on it.

But we thought that’s not a problem. Mrs. Smith is a Barclays Bank customer and we can just phone her telephone banking hotline and then Barclays can pass our phone number to Mrs. Smith and she can come and collect her purse. Simple; after all, what bank wouldn’t want to help a valued customer stressing out about her lost payment cards and personal data.

Or so we thought.

After the IVR labyrinth, we got a “human”. Let’s not name names, but imagine that he’s called Edwin.

“Hello Edwin, we’d like to advise you that we’ve found a purse belonging to one of your valued customers.”

“Yes madam…”

“Yes. It doesn’t have any of her personal contact details, so we phoned you.”

“Just drop the card into a local Barclay’s branch.”

“Great idea, but it’s a whole large purse full of lots of personal things and we know that she’ll be worried about having lost it. Please can you contact your customer to tell them the purse has been found and pass on our contact details.”

“One moment please … I’m sorry madam, we don’t do that.”

“But what about your valued customer wasting her whole Sunday trying to find her purse? Then spending Monday cancelling all her cards. When you could just phone her now.”

“I’m sorry madam. It’s company policy. I suggest you hand it in at your local police station.

Causes of call centre customer service failure

How does a call centre end up being so utterly rubbish? Here are a few thoughts:

Employee micro-management expunging any sense of personal initiative or responsibility.
Compliance culture ditto.
Management of outsourced call-centres through strictly detailed service level agreements. If management by target worked, the shops would be full of great products from North Korea. They aren’t and it doesn’t.
Badly scoped outsourcing arrangements and strict silos between inbound and outbound teams.
Outsourced call-centres are often run as projects. The essence of good project management is to deliver exactly what’s expected. The essence of good service management is to deliver above expectations. These are two opposite management “values”.

Over Sunday lunch, we imagined Mrs. Smith cancelling the rest of her day in a futile search for her purse. While Edwin clocked up another exemplary day of customer service by handling our call in less than 60 seconds.

We’ve left the text of this blog post in Mrs. Smith’s purse so that she can discuss the meaning of customer service with her bank.

Customer service or customer servicide?

Simon Kirby — Mon, 10 May 2010 11:01:55 +0000

Can any company with bad customer service survive in a world of ubiquitous social media?

Here’s a small round-up of the many ways in which my local train company, First Capital Connect, is committing customer servicide.

Twitter feed of real-time feed of passenger angst.
Search YouTube for First Capital Connect and results are full of documentary evidence of lousy customer service. The most witty reflection is below:

Online government petition to end First Capital Connect’s franchise here.
First Capital Connect official Facebook page (364 members).
I hate First Capital Connect Facebook page (2,548 members).
FirstCrapitalConnect parody site (Page 1 on Google for ‘First Capital Connect’).

Can’t help but think that as a shareholder, I’d be worried. I can’t help but think that this weight of authentic, peer condemnation neutralises any investment that FCC could make in its brand. Putting it another way, your customer service is your brand.

Bad customer service is dead

Simon Kirby — Sat, 08 May 2010 11:00:12 +0000

Imagine the cost of bad customer service in a world where:

If it was a country, Facebook would be the third largest in the world.
50% of UK mobile internet traffic is Facebook. Imagine what that means for customer service word of mouth.
25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are user generated content.
200 million blogs exist and 34% of bloggers post opinions on products and services.
78% of consumers trust peer recommendations. 14% trust advertising.

Bad customer service begins to sound like customer servicide doesn’t it?

There’s a great video here, which explores the social media revolution:

Customer service heaven

Simon Kirby — Sat, 01 May 2010 16:12:48 +0000

OK, I admit I’m a customer service geek.

I get unreasonably impatient with bad service but turn into a love-struck puppy when a company really impresses me. But to do that, doesn’t just mean exceeding expectations. It’s increasingly about doing the seemingly impossible.

My wife and I are just back from holiday in Cyprus. The amazingly lovely Elysium Hotel gave us one of the best customer experiences of our lives. So this is a ‘customer service postcard’ from our holiday.

The Elysium Hotel's warm customer service glow.

Day 1: We get to our room late. Drawing back the curtains we’re rewarded with a fabulous view of … the hotel car park. This is NOT the view we thought we’d paid for. Heather (the head receptionist) is apologetic even though we work out it’s probably a mistake by the travel agent not the hotel. She sorts out a sea-view room, offers us dinner while the bags are moved and doesn’t even mention the fact that the new room is an upgrade.

Day 2: Quite a few people have been marooned by the Icelandic volcano and the shutdown of Europe’s airspace. Today they’re finally able to leave. Lots of them are hugging the staff to say thank you and goodbye. You don’t often see that at hotels…

Day 2: Alexis, the Head Porter says “Good morning Mr. & Mrs. Kirby”. Four hundred guests are staying here and he remembers our names.

Day 3: Our room key malfunctions. My wife sits waif-like in the doorway while I go to reception. But a cleaner recognises her and lets her back into the room while I’m at reception.

Day 4: Karl, the personal trainer at the gym, stays in his own time to give us a workout. He’s a brilliant trainer too.

Day 5: Our waiter, knows where we ate two nights ago and which restaurant we’re booked into the following night. There are five different restaurants at the Elysium. Aggelos, the Restaurant Supervisor tells me he remembers what his guests drink even if they haven’t been back for a year.

Day 6: It’s our last night. At the manager’s drinks party Aggelos, the Restaurant Supervisor, asks how our stay was. We’re honestly and glowingly complementary … three hours later a box of chocolates is sent up to our room to thank us for our comments.

Staying at the Elysium left me with four thoughts about customer service:

Processes, journey mapping and experience design are necessary but not sufficient.
People need to be so highly trained, that they’re allowed to be themselves.
Everyone does customer service. At the Elysium the cleaners are better at customer service than some hotels’ front-of-house staff.
Memory is one of the hotel’s service signatures. I don’t care that some of it is done with a CRM system. It gives the impression of a magic trick. Every five star hotel is good. So only something that seems impossible is really going to impress.

My only complaint about the hotel: it’s so good, it stops me from seeing the rest of world.

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