2010 February | Liri Andersson

Archive for February, 2010

Why don’t we start with some customer logic?

Sometimes all it takes to be user friendly, to ensure you have the customer’s best interest in mind and that you put people first (or as we call it in this fluid world achieve citizentricity), is a bit of common sense and some logic…Yep nothing more than that, no marketing or usability consultancy… just some logic and common sense!

Let me throw you a challenge. You are responsible for the web site of a major bank, you have gone as far as understanding that customers often need to locate one of your branches, hence your site does have a branch locator. And of course you have also figured out that the most common use for someone using a branch locator is to find the closest branch to where they are.

Or, have you…?

Well not if you’re responsible for the Lloyds Bank’s website. When I put in my postcode in the search engine I had a choice between disabled access and Saturday opening hours.

I assumed that any search results would automatically rank branches according to the ones closest to my location. But no, not so much! This is the search result I got back.

There are apparently 91 branches closely matching my request, but no exact matches.

No EXACT matches they say…I’m beyond grateful…Lloyds have just informed me that I don’t live on top of a Lloyds branch. Who would have known, I mean I only enter my building on a daily basis so I could easily have missed a bank had it been there!

The first result shown is for a branch on 67 High Street, Watford, Hertfordshire. Yep Watford, which makes complete sense since I entered a Marylebone postcode and Watford is only a 36 minute drive from Marylebone, or a mere 5 hours and 7 minutes away by foot (I could go even further if I really wanted to, some of the branches suggested are further away than Birmingham…).

I’m thinking maybe the branches are sorted by city…so I scroll down to London. But no I only find two branches with the heading London in them, so that can’t be the way forward.

After staring at the result page for a while I realise they have sorted the branches by branch names. Could you be any less customer centric? Why would we know what they call their branches, and more importantly why would we want to know, or care for that matter?

I finally give up.

Thank God for Google … I was lucky enough that the closest Lloyds branch to me is apparently on the corner of Marylebone Road and Baker Street, so when I entered my search query ‘Lloyds bank Marylebone high street’, Google picked up on the word Lloyds and Marylebone (now that is logic). Had this not been the case I would still be sitting here entering postcodes in Google map trying to match Lloyds branches to where I live.

Whatever way you look at it, the only winner in this story seems to be Google…as it certainly isn’t me, a frustrated customer, nor is it Lloyds bank, a company who should go in search of some very very very basic customer logic (maybe they should Google it?)!

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2010: 02/28
CATEGORY: Customer Experience
Thoughts
2 comments

Companies and people working together

I know, an original and disruptive thought, don’t you think?

I have however during the last couple of days in Sweden been reminded of what it’s like to use a service developed with the user in mind, and have users appreciate it.

Would you believe me if I told you it has snowed so much here I could hardly find my car yesterday morning, and yet people were incredibly surprised that there was some disruption to the underground?

(Note this picture was taken a day before the snow storm)

Would you believe me if I told you that anyone using the underground in Stockholm is allowed to, if there is a disruption to traffic of more than 20 minutes, claim back the sum of up to 70 pounds to get themselves to their destination (this includes taxi). Well it’s the case, all you have to do is fill in this form and send it to SL (Sweden’s version of TFL).

resegaranti

And would you believe me if I told you that as I was leaving the platform to grab my taxi, most people remained on the platform. Why? The announcer had mentioned that the refund was available for people in a hurry…so anyone not in a hurry stayed calmly waiting for the trains to run again. Do you think it would be this calm outside a London underground if free taxis were made available every time there is a 20+ minute delay?

I think this is extraordinary on many levels.

1) SL is able to offer second to none service under extreme hard weather conditions. I don’t know about you but I have been in situations where companies face a lot less adversity and are still not able to get the basics right. Maybe the harder something is, the more effort we put into it, the better the results.

2) SL is so confident in their service that it’s sustainable for them to offer travel refunds as and when they disrupt passengers journey. How many of us work in a company so confident in the product and service we provide that we make compensation (not just refund) part of our SLA. I wonder if we made such compensation part of our value proposition, would we manage and run companies in a different (and therefore better) way?

3) People seem to see the relationship between them and SL more as a partnership. In other words, if I don’t need to take a taxi because I’m not in a hurry, then I wont do so just because I can. I almost felt guilty jumping into one on my way to the hospital. There’s very little chance I would feel any of that guilt if TFL would offer me a free taxi journey once in a while. This tells me that if you treat customers with respect, more times than not, you will get the same respect back.

Could be an interesting way forward for an organisation – set yourself some almost impossible customer service challenges, set out to deliver on them…and build the kind of relationship with your customers where it is appreciated, and not taken for granted!

Having said all this, I would not rush to move up here in the hope of having a relatively easy journey to work. My brother has just spent the last 2 hours shoveling snow so we can get out of the house and get into our cars!

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2010: 02/21
CATEGORY: Customer Experience
Thoughts
1 comment

What is the role of the high street in the future?

I love high streets. I chose to live in Marylebone because of its particularly lovely high street. I go out of my way to purchase as much as I can from the independent stores there (well from the ones that are left) rather than from chains or on-line, this to show my support, and to ensure their survival.

But lately I’m finding it increasingly hard to buy things from the high street. Which makes me seriously question its future…

Why?

Well; let’s look at it from a basic marketing perspective. Forgive me for using such a simple, and to many outdated model, as the 4 P’s, but hey I’m a 60’s child so for the sake of simplicity I will stick to the 4 P’s rather than debating what should replace them. (The 4 P’s by the way was invented in 1960 by Jerome McCarthy– so I don’t dispute they need a revamp ).

Anyway, back to the high street.

It’s clear that it can’t compete on price. A while ago I went to Selfridges to buy a memory card, and ended up buying one on-line for £50 less. I wanted to buy ink for my printer at Ryman’s, and bought the same ink on-line at a 50% discount.

How about product? I doubt anyone would dispute that when it comes to product range and type, no-one can beat the Internet (especially with the effect of the long-tail and therefore the ability of offering a product even if there are only a few hundred buyers in one place).

Distribution (place) maybe? There is no way a retailer can have a presence everywhere (although some try at a massive cost). So nope the high street does not seem to be able to compete on place either.

As for promotion, I wont even go there as the Internet has most available communication and targeting tools at its disposal, at a relatively small cost.

So what if we extend the 4 P’s and add a service element to it – process (which refers to the systems used to assist the organisation in delivering the service)? A few weeks ago I went to Divertimenti to buy a new filter for my Bialetti espresso maker. They had none in stock and I was told they could order one for me, and call when it arrived. In the spirit of support I chose to accept to wait and said yes. I went back today thinking they must have forgotten to call me. But oh no, the delivery would take 6 weeks. 6 weeks! So I guess it’s a no no to being competitive on process!

So what is the high street retailer doing about this rather serious problem? Well, some offer their own on-line e-commerce facility, or they allow Amazon to power their sales (to overcome the distribution challenge ), they try to put more products in store (range challenge), they slash their prices (price challenge), they pack their windows with sales messages (promotion and advertising challenge)…I could go on… but basically all efforts are ‘me-too’ strategies, and I don’t know about you, but to me trying to compete with the Internet head on seems rather stupid!

One would think that the only way forward is to differentiate. Basically to try to offer something which is not possible to offer on-line. Which brings me to the two remaining P’s of the service marketing mix, (in addition to process) people and physical evidence. These are the two things retailers have today that the Internet does not have. You would think they would use it! And yet finding an original retails space, offering a great experience, populated by people that add value (rather than affect it negatively) is extremely rare now a days.

So who get’s it right outside of the constantly mentioned Apple and Nike stores (with their endless marketing budgets)?!

I suggest a visit to Daunt’s bookstore where the books are categorised by country and not author, and where people serving you actually read books! Make sure you pop by La Fromagerie, a cheese shop that would hold its own next to any French cheese shop, and where the staff can tell you the origin of any cheese. Still hungry? I recommend Mr Biggley’s sausages, made from scratch in his basement – he will tell you all about the art that is sausage making. And just in case you need a button – pop by the Button Queen, there are more buttons there then you know what to do with – and believe it or not, staff that are enthused about – yes buttons!

Or maybe the future will look differently. My business partner in this fluid world Jonathan MacDonald has a very interesting view on where we may be heading!

“In the future, people will pay for human interaction – perhaps we will have toll roads that harbour these interactions – due to the nature of saying ‘hello’, we can call these ‘hi streets’ and we will congregate in Public Urban Boundary Systems (which will be shortened to the word ‘pubs’)”.

I shall now say good bye to you all, and who knows maybe we will meet, sometime in the future… on the ‘hi-street’ or in the ‘pub’!

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2010: 02/07
CATEGORY: Competitive Advantage
Customer Experience
Marketing
Retail
2 comments

How would you like to work in a world where you receive a 360-degree performance review on a daily basis?

Sounds a bit stressful? Well I argue that you already do!

The question “who do you work for” is usually answered by a company name, and in the top five answers to “what motivates you at work” you tend to find money, and being respected by colleagues (the latter measured by how often you’re promoted).

These answers are no surprise in a business world where hierarchy is part of the control and reward mechanism. However, this has one big downside and that is that employees feel they work for management, or for the CEO.

I know what you’re thinking…but we do don’t we?

In practise yes… but I would argue that in principle we work for the customer. Why you may ask? Because they’re the ones paying your salary, they’re the ones that will fire you if they’re not happy, they won’t hire you without extensive research or without checking your references, and you’re more likely to be hired if others recommend you! In summary, what social media has done is created a world where employees receive a 360-degree performance review by their customers, in public, on mass, and on a minute-by-minute basis.

Which makes me think they should be the centre of any company’s universe, and at the top of the management pyramid.

So if I was the CEO of an organisation I would not only create an army of fanatics in my customers (to quote Jonathan MacDonald – Happy Birthday by the way!) but I would also create a workforce with one boss, the customer!

The implication of this on how a company is managed would be radical…We would live in a world where the most powerful person in an organisation is the Head of Customer Care, who of course sits on the board. It’s a world where decentralised structures are systematically favoured, because being responsible to customers in a centralised system is seen as impossible. In this world, customers are regularly part of the recruitment process.

I could go on but I agree that this may come across as a little too much like customer utopia, and not so realistic…but I still argue that a fundamental cultural shift in who companies think they are ultimately responsible to is needed…(and this would require organisations, and therefore everyone working in them, to reconsider who they think they work for)…

… oh by the way I mean a real cultural shift, in both thinking and action – not just paying lip service…

But until then, I’ll keep praying that one day a miracle will happen and I will finally understand my mobile bill, my service provider will call me back when my e-mail is down, and my bank will decide that Sweden is a country, that Swedish Kroners is a currency, and therefore allow me to transfer money there using my on-line banking service.

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