10 August 2010

The Gap

Following on from my theme of getting the user experience right, let’s consider how much money organisations invest in telling us what experience we can expect, only to deliver something completely different. Let’s take a point in case.
In my humble opinion NatWest has a great brand, despite, like most retail banks, having a poor NPS. Apart from the fact I’ve always liked their use of colour, it is a visible organisation I can interact with across multiple channels – strong branch network, good online and telephone banking provision and I think the first UK retail bank to launch an iPhone app.

Recent ads in print and broadcast have featured their mortgage advisors. Apparently the advisor will ask your child all about their new bedroom and fane interest better than most parents can. Actually, this wouldn’t impress me much as a parent if it was a reality; after all they haven’t actually given you a mortgage yet, so it would be a bit premature to be letting little Johnny or Katie choose wall paper.

That aside, the point is they are all chummy when you go in to make the application. I haven’t been able to test this as NatWest couldn’t see me in a branch on a Saturday for 4 weeks, so we had to do the application on the phone. That’s fine, it worked well and the guy that took my details was excellent. He did everything he could to make it easy for me, so far so good, experience kind of matches the promise.

Post application, when the additional information requests start, well that’s a different story. Clearly nobody showed mystical underwriters the ad. Now we are into the cycle of an IVR system, a front office telephone operator with little mortgage technical ability and zero visibility of what is happening in the back office other than to say “that’s a 5 day lead time, so it will be 5 days.” They have no ability to contact the part of the workflow doing their thing to qualify that lead time. You’re telling me the customer facing operators are the only person in the business with a phone?

I have dealt with more customer centric local authorities than this, granted not many. This is a case study in how to waste money on branding, how to set customer expectations higher than you can fulfil and how to drive negative sentiment about your business.

I think NPS has a real value to a business. It’s not the only metric, but for NatWest it’s crucial. Friends, family colleagues all know I’m in the process of moving. All ask how it’s going, knowing full well it’s a torrid experience. And guess who gets pointed to as my lightening rod for this frustration, you’ve guessed it NatWest.

Now compare that to Apple.

04 August 2010

The power of data

I was chatting with a colleague the other day about how I didn’t think it was right that the FSA was banning self declaration mortgages. At the end of the day if a lender wants to take the risk and the borrower can pay the premium then what’s the problem?

He wasn’t to bothered to be honest, but what he did get animated about was how regulators swing into action on the back of some Daily Mail ‘something has to be done’ type campaign and over react. (yeah I know what you’re thinking, we’re missing having the world Cup to talk about).

“Look how everyone disses direct mail and that some people want that regulated out of existence” chirped up another colleague and this prompted to get some thoughts down on a case study on the power of data I heard recently.
I well networked man from Gartner was speaking at an event I attended recently and he told me a story that illustrates the power of data, what intelligent marketing people can achieve and why spending more on thinking than doing generates greater results.

A UK credit card firm had around 200k customers with varying spending habits and credit profiles. The company’s direct mail team of 3 people used to send them a direct mail piece, twice a year (before Christmas and before the summer holidays). Using some fancy mathematics, that’s around 400k mail pieces per year.

Then they hired someone that understood the power of DM and put in a bit of CRM kit. He hired a few more people that included the obligatory creatives and campaign managers, but most importantly, people that could use the CRM tools to mine the data and find meaningful patterns and customer segments. Combining spending data, demographic and CRM records they could now create focused propositions and campaigns.

Now they still send around 400k pieces each year, but sometimes the campaigns have as few as the Gartner Guy couldn’t tell me too much detail about results, Could have been about confidentiality or because he simply didn’t know, but revenue per client and retention had grown significantly.

The days of broadcast communication having been dying for over 10 years. I think this has been expedited by the global recession, social media, technology and organisations grasping customer experience. But ultimately it is the clever guys like those at our credit card company that will see it off.

30 July 2010

iPhones aren’t the best thing since sliced bread, so why am I in love with it?

I’ve just been issued with an iPhone 4. To be honest I didn’t think it would be such a big deal, except for showing off I have an iPhone 4.

I’m not going to pour over how marvellous it is as I’m sure you don’t need another review. I'm not going to comment on the hullaballo about how to hold just now either. So I’m just going to say this, it's good. It doesn’t do things the latest BlackBerry does, but the latest BlackBerry doesn’t do things the iPhone does. It’s fast, intuitive and I have found myself explaining away the missing functionality. It is truly a digital assistant.
Over all, it’s a worthwhile piece of kit; so why a blog about the iPhone?
I have had a wakeup call in just 2 days that the true experience requires all the kit. Which is not a normal reaction for me, since I bought my first golf clubs 15 years ago. After just a few days I have decided my next laptop has to be a MacBook Pro. Why? Because now I’ve tasted the world of Apple, I want to replicate the experience across all my technology needs.

The iPhone is clearly designed for maximum revenue generation based on the best possible user experience. Now be honest with yourself. Does your organisation build whatever you produce, a phone, an audit, a pension fund, a wind turbine based on the same principal I am experiencing?

Have you ever stepped back and said let’s completely redesign what we do with the only metric for success being the user’s experience? And when we’ve done that, let’s make sure every interaction our customers have with us offers the same experience so that they want more.

Why don’t we design our user experience so well that our clients will pay for all the extra bits along the way that we currently give away for free and call ‘value ad?’ And then let’s change the rules completely by creating a market place for other organisations to make money from our platform.

I think the guys at Apple are geniuses of the highest order. I’ve got to get me some of that.

27 July 2010

Was strategy ever alive?

I was going entitle today’s drivel ‘is strategy dead?’ But as that’s the kind of headline you would find in so called management magazines. More importantly, I’m not convinced strategy is a thing anyway. It may be in the corridors of real power where they have shag pile carpet and real PAs, but down the line between these heady heights and the trenches was strategy ever real.

Aren’t most strategies we talk about in cuff linked shirts in meetings with white boards far from our customer’s experience really about setting plans, establishing policies and sharing our perception of reality?

I think we spend too much time putting activities into a strategic perspective and even worse, use strategy development as a reason not to do something. “Let’s wait until we know where the strategy wants to go before we do this.”

Strategy is great in public sector, when you want some money to do something you ensure the project description ticks as many strategic intents as possible. Firstly, this broadens the number of potential funding sources. Secondly, it ensures that the sponsors of each of these strategies will not block your project as it may be the only one that delivers something resembling whatever it was they committed to delivering.

Wouldn’t we use our time better by systematically:

  • breaking through barriers to our success with small focused initiatives that take us in a general sense of direction;
  • scanning our environment, qualifying what we see and sharing it with those around us that add to the view;
  • understanding our clients (did you know Intel has over 30 anthropologists working for them?);
  • defining the rules of the game rather than following our competitors;
  • innovating a little everyday.

21 July 2010

The future of the office

Please indulge me; I want to combine two thoughts and ask for some input.

Firstly, let’s look at this story from the BBC (http://bit.ly/adss1pl). In summary, Mike Faith couldn’t find any headsets for is California based business. While on the journey to source them he has ended up being one of the leading suppliers in the US through his site headsets.com. On the face of it a fairly typical tale of a US entrepreneur that Tony Robbins would point to the happy ending.

Mike’s advice is “look for those things in your life or business that annoy you, where you can’t get the satisfaction that you want; if you can’t find what you want in the market place, and you try hard, it’s probably likely there’s a business opportunity there.”

See, all very law of attraction.

Now let’s consider what I simultaneously love and hate, the office. Now I’m a pretty social guy, always up for a work night out, love to engage people in the lift and around the coffee machine in how their day is going and pretty effective at dropping by people’s desks to get quick decisions to move things forward. I’d go mad at home all day; stir crazy could have been coined just to describe me working at home.

However, I hate the commute, and resent having to be so far from my home all day. I hate lugging a laptop or tapping away at emails on my PDA. Let’s face it; very few of us get to live close to our office production lines do we?

I like the idea of local working hubs that I first saw floated 15 years ago. Open plan offices with break out areas, meeting rooms and a canteen. A space with my own desk where I can dress for the office and virtually be there while being virtually at home. Where I could cycle to in 10 minutes. Where I could have random conversations in the lift or waiting for some warm brown liquid to be released into a paper cup.

But who would pay for it. I have no idea what real estate costs, but let’s say my company pays £500 sq metre for my desk in London, with overheads, why would they pay for a desk for me where only a couple of my colleagues work? What about travelling in for meetings, who pays for that? Could we conference effectively from our laptops?

Is there a solution here, or am I just in need of a summer holiday?So let’s put some crowd sourcing into place, what do you think the solution is?

19 July 2010

Away day time of the year

Certain times of the year are big for ‘off sites.’ Those meetings where you are invited to a nice hotel or small conference centre in the middle of nowhere and told to wear business casual, but not jeans. Wearing jeans can be the highlight of these events. What are they going to do, send me home to change or give me lines to write in detention?

Mainly held around the end/beginning of financial years; we go to review how and what we did and to plan to do different things to get an even better outcome. For some reason there is a resurgence of off sites in July. Maybe it’s a pat on the back as the summer holidays approach, or simply because we are half way through the year and its a good time to check progress.

Cynics love to hate away days. Optimists hate to love away days, but they do.

I’m actually a fan of micro off sites. Take a small group of managers that can influence their own destinies and mix the day with some downtime and light touch objective setting they can really help to make progress.

So having said all that, why do we groan at the prospect. I know I do, my friends do, and some of my colleagues do. Certainly the couple on the train as I write this do. In fact they are discussing tips on faking enthusiasm for the event.
The truth is they are necessary. From time to time we must stop what we are doing, pop our heads out of the trench and take a look around at where our colleagues are at. After all, you don’t want to find yourself the only person jeans and in the wrong trench.

12 July 2010

Why is social media so difficult? #2

Further to my previous blog, I have been chatting with a colleague that works at a charity. Their business is about engaging one group of people to help another.

Social media is the perfect tool. It enables everyone in the organisation to transparently capture a broad network outside the organisation. But that applies to any P2P business; especially professional services. Doesn’t it make sense that every person in the business has a social media contact list that anyone in the business can leverage?
Yet still many executives wear their absence from social media as a badge of pride.

The information available through my network puts the power of production in my hands. Karl Marx would be spinning in his grave.

I have used my online community to find a client’s son a job in a mine in Australia, find accommodation for overseas friends of friends visiting London, find lodgers, raise a £1,000 in sponsorship, introduce clients to other clients, source more than one lawyer, share complex process maps globally, find clients, source corporate video content, introduce a friend’s start up to VC, arrange social events, keep in touch with MBA classmates in live in Jakarta, Sacramento, Kiev, Lima, La Paz, Accra and East Grinstead and find work.

Wouldn’t I be a fool not to maintain those links?

Wouldn’t anyone be a fool not to maintain a link to every person that has touched their life positively, not matter how diverse the relationship?

09 July 2010

Why is social media so difficult?

I have spent a lot of my time over the last few months looking for volunteers to participate in a social media experiment.

My colleagues objections and hesitance is based on some their lizard brain talking to them:
· I’m not sure I’m interesting
· Other people are better writers than me
· What would I talk about?

I’m sure, like me, you’ve heard this before. Normally from reluctant friends we have invited to join us at social engagement where they won’t know anyone. I remember taking a junior account manager to his first industry networking event at the TMA in Brighton having the same concerns. Unsurprisingly he shone that night, just as my colleagues will excel on mallowstreet.com

Operating in forums and blog sites is no different from attending a professional networking event.

I know it’s a cliché, but business to business is people to people. You wouldn’t show up to network in a corporate t-shirt carrying brochures looking for someone to broadcast to. Online, just as with any networking event, requires the simplest of approaches to be successful:

Go along, listen, chat, learn a little, share a little, be yourself and enjoy.


07 July 2010

The illusion of corporate love ins

A friend of mine has been working for a large business services firm for nearly a year. A couple of months ago he attended their annual sales and marketing management love in at a top venue near Dublin.

Not usually as cynical as me, he didn’t really see the point this time. Although the business’ profits have fared well through the recession, this had been achieved through cutting investment in change projects. The spending freeze had become an excuse for doing nothing. Low cost and even zero cost projects had failed to get traction in a culture of inertia in middle management


However, he came back from Dublin a changed man. He insisted on telling me how the most intransigent of managers had committed to start change initiatives and agile project teams.

So what’s the big deal? Well, it all ground to halt within weeks. Everything’s back to business as usual. Every project has more reasons to abandon than continue.

Clearly the facilitators did the job that was asked of them. So how do we overcome the challenge of change blockers transforming off site into creators, just to return to their default state back at their desks?
I know the concept of establishing breakthrough itiatives isn’t new. There are lots of books by people far cleverer than me to tell us it makes sense; but I just haven’t seen it work.

I think we need more incrementalism.

Why not create the environment, platform processes, and culture for change to happen all the time. It’s not like we need to artificially create change is it. Change is happening to us all the time. Economic cycles, competition, disruptive technologies, game changing competition; major environmental occurrences aren’t breakthroughs we can plan for. So let’s get used to dealing with them. Let’s develop the ability of our organisations to be agile, and enable our teams to cope with every change, not just those imagined off site.


05 July 2010

Fee fodder versus emotional labour

I attended a focus group last week to help one of the top five global consultancy firms develop their "Employment Value Proposition."

No matter how engaging their proposition, it is unlikely to attract me to work for them. But I was curious about the process, and as I’m naturally a bit gobby; it didn’t seem like a bad way to spend a couple of hours.

Most of the group were about to become second jobbers. A group of bright young things recruited during the milk round at their universities that have cut their teeth over the last 3 years on a graduate training programme with a large firm. A smaller group were well on their way to their third or fourth firm. They had over 10 years experience of time sheets, 60 hour weeks, utilisation targets and budget hotels in provincial towns.

Two distinct views on consultancy clients evolved.

The younger group of my fellow ‘focusers’ were passionate about the act of consulting. They described clients as the ‘key data source’ that should get out of the way when the consulting team are developing their solution. They put consultants on a par with investment bankers based on the importance of their decision making and superior knowledge, and without any sense of irony. (Sub-prime anybody?)

The ‘experienced’ group described their genuine interest in client’s domains and about building an emotional link with clients. They advocated empathy for the client’s desired outcomes and personal agendas

Very little differentiates the big consulting firms, hence the research. Each has had their public success and failures. They are derided by politicians, despite the public sector not being able to function without them. They fight for the same work in what is largly a zero sum gain market.

So why do they persist in recruiting graduates on the promise of becoming a master of the universe?

Consultants bring some subject matter expertise, but mostly they bring their own flavour of problem solving process. Both of which can be copied. Veteran ‘fee fodder’ consultants understand the emotional value of their work that adds real value to this. They are therefore personally successful, employable and more content on a day to day basis.

The first of the big 5 to embrace the ’emotional’ side of their work will attract and retain people that can build a real connection with clients from the get go. They will create better client outcomes, win more business and not need to ask old cynics like me, that would never work for them in the first place, how to brand their recruitment.

02 July 2010

Smoking bureaucracy...

Every organisation comes with its own bureaucracy, and with that comes form filling.

My first office job at the tender age of 19 was temping for an international bank in HR Administration. When I joined, they were still reeling from having their name changed from ‘personnel’ as it was seen as an un welcome Americanism in their eyes. We shared one networked PC with email between 12 of us, but we all had our own ash tray and adding machine on our desk.

For about 3 months, I happily processed season ticket loan applications. My proudest moment being when my boss agreed to use my design for a new form when it came to reprinting due to a brand redesign.

Today global organisations of the shape and size of that one are proud to have all these forms as digitised applications on the Intranet, linked to a monolith integrated back end Oracle type system for HR and Finance (still called accounts back in the day). But why wouldn’t you, we all have a networked PC on our desk and having anything resembling an ashtray is a firing offence, no matter how many breaks you take instead. So we submit a form and authorisation requests and permissions effortlessly fly between inboxes.

But digital form filling has created 2 problems for me:

1. Amending a form to reflect new requirements and requests is now a major change request nightmare. We don’t just change the form and print some more; databases and workflows have to updated. Most forms I seem to fill in now are not fit for purpose, and you need to be an expert in creative writing to explain what you really want in the character limited free text fields;


2. And this is the most important one, not taking the form to be signed. This used to be the opportunity to chat with the pretty girls in HR, the smart people in accounts or the curious people in IT. Most of all, it was the opportunity to interact with your boss. To chat about the holiday featured in the request for time off form and to build a relationship beyond an email.

Best of all, it was when you could to sit in their office and ponce one of their cigarettesfor a change.


30 June 2010

It's only when things go tits up you recognise the value of integration

South Eastern Trains does exactly what the name suggests; operate the train network in the South East corner of the UK. The trains run between five principal terminals in London and the coast. Everywhere is linked, every service is interdependent.

They operate an iPhone app and a web site to share live train running information. My colleague Lyn says this is her most used and valuable app; a big claim considering the gazillions to chosse from.

I’m assuming the train running information runs on a loop according to the timetable with a manual intervention when delays and cancellations occur. When things are running BAU, the digital travel information is perfectly adequate.

Last night the service simultaneous failures at two terminals, a signalling breakdown and a security alert, meant the value of information was at a premium.

A home page message on the web site said the terminal I use was closed, but the train running information app on the iPhone and web said all trains were running to time. So travellers had little choice but to join the thousands of people wanting to get home to hear a man shouting updates from the steps. On what was the hottest working day so far this year.

Separate from fixing what caused the problems and preventing them from happening again, the lessons for the senior leadership team are:

1. Providing accurate travel information is a core offering, not a nice to have, not just during major incidents;
2. Issuing it digitally is the most convenient channel for most customers;
3. The web and iPhone app are therefore business critical systems;
4. Business critical systems are not the sole responsibility of a single function IT, the digital team, the comms team etc;
5. Business critical systems should be fully integrated strategic assets;
6. Strategic assets need operational engagement at the most senior levels;
7. Getting this right on Monday would have transformed the experience for me, thousands of my fellow customers and the people waiting for us;
8. Getting this stuff right makes life easier for staff, helps them to be more productive and reduces the cost of these unavoidable incidents for investors.

26 June 2010

By way of introduction...

It strikes me that the most sensible way to start my blog is share with you an idea of who I and what it’s all about.

I work for one of the top 20 fund manager’s in the world in a world class customer experience and innovation team. I’m not going to claim to be an expert on either of these parts of my job role, and I won’t be providing any financial advice. In fact, the day anyone turns to me for any guidance on making investments, something has gone very wrong.

However, I have led teams in marketing, sales and customer service over the past 20 years and continue to be a student of these disciplines. I am confident I have enough to discuss about most customer facing issues that affect most organisation types.

My experience is based on working in Business to Business (B2B) roles in a FTSE 100 Plc telco, a Dow Jones 30 MNC, small businesses, the public sector, and for my sins, consultancy. Most importantly, like you, everyday I am a consumer and a tax payer.

I will cover most challenges we face as customer professionals, regardless of our discipline and some personal experiences too. I enjoy reflecting on the challenges of management and organisational behaviour related to customers, and you’ll find I have a quite a bit to say about this.

I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I think I have a useful take on some the most important issues we face in a world of ever changing customer expectations and technology.

I welcome your feedback. Please keep it clean, profesional, on message and avoid being abusive.