It isn’t technology…it’s your choices
I think I’ve mentioned before one particular service provider I’ve had for decades that’s constantly disappointing me. For some reason that’s completely lost on me—at least in recent years—this company has along the line picked up a reputation as being superb in the CX realm. To be honest, way back, they really were, but these days I think they’ve definitely fallen asleep at the wheel. Here’s something they do that ticks me and a lot of their Customers off as an example:
You can’t communicate with them.
Well, you can, but you have to do it exactly the way they want you to. I know there’s an old story about certain brands (including one I worked for a million years ago) that would actively hide their Customer Service phone number from their Customers. And I’ve even written previously about the outright funny way brands seem sometimes to deliberately tell their Customers to not bother even trying to communicate with them. But this brand in particular makes communication not impossible, but rather, a huge hassle each time. […]
Knowing before you’re told: Learning good CX from utilities
I was chatting recently with a colleague who’s in the public utilities industry and we were discussing (as I do with most of my colleagues) Customer Experience and how certain brands handle ‘issues’ and ‘tickets’ and ‘incidents’. Often these terms are used interchangeably because many brands are pretty self-centered instead of being Customer-centric.
The point my friend was making was that, when someone contacts their help center, it’s likely an issue with service. Something’s gone wrong and a Customer is calling both to report an issue and ideally raise attention so the company can fix it. But, my friend said, how many people are having the same issue? Now, in her line of business, that makes good sense. While power or water or cable may go out due to a very localized issue (our neighborhood, for example, has an alley where all the wires are strung between poles and it’s all-too-frequent that the garbage collector will pass through and snip someone’s access to either phone, cable, or power altogether…these service providers are constantly having to fix our city’s lack of concern for its citizens), usually when someone is contacting a utility to report an outage, it’s not just that one Customer who’s impacted.
[…]
Have I been recruited?
Have you ever complained about something and rather than the agent at the Customer Service desk or on the Customer Support line having what seems to be a well-rehearsed, often-used, ready solution to your concern, you receive instead a well-rehearsed, often-used, and ready explanation for why what’s bothering you has to be the case?
Usually the scenario is something like: There was this other problem Customers used to have. So, the brand comes up with a solution that takes care of that specific issue while (hopefully, fingers-crossed) attempting not to cause a more aggravating condition. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.
But even if the “solution” really is less annoying than the prevailing circumstance, the inconvenience isn’t gone altogether; sometimes it’s just replaced with a different hassle.
And so there you are as the Customer receiving a history lesson as to how we got to this state instead of the brand taking it upon itself simply to take note of your concern and recognizing that, while this may be better (again, fingers-crossed), they’re still not quite there yet. […]
The unreachable CXO
I recently had a series of not-terrible-but-still-irritating experiences with a major service provider. I’m a pretty loyal Customer of this company, but a few of their new procedures and rules have made dealing with them much more cumbersome and frustrating. What’s more, their Customer Support staff has been empowered really only to express their sympathy and re-explain the same rules that I had just told them were a burden and an aggravation. (Always poor form for a brand, by the way, in response to a Customer outlining what’s so bad about a policy or process, to turn around and extoll how wonderful the new annoyance is, as though the Customer should be grateful for having been inconvenienced…a story for another day.)
Anyway, as I’d said, I really do like this brand, and as such, have a sort-of investment in their remaining a good company to do business with (I much prefer them to most of their competitors). So, not being content with the shabby treatment, being a CX guy myself, and truly wanting them to get better, I shot off a quick note (actually, when I replied to the CS email, I copied him) to their new CXO.
A little background: This brand had recently (in the past few months) suffered a somewhat viral episode based on a (different) frankly horrible new policy of theirs that had raised hackles of many Customers. The CXO is new, the industry seems to presume, in part to handle such debacles and recover from this type of mistake. (That they haven’t rescinded that policy yet shows either how much he’s got on his plate, the pushback he’s receiving from his peers in leadership, or even perhaps his disagreement with his entire Customer base that it’s a bad policy in the first place.) That these other, new, inconvenient policies (the ones about which I was complaining) have only recently been added on top of their previously called-out issue bodes poorly for the direction of things.
But I’m not here today writing about these policies per se. Check out what happened when I wrote this guy: […]
Changing your perspective changes your methods
Last time I wrote about how we need to update our attitude and culture when it comes to Customer Insights. An overreliance on simply collecting and reporting KPIs is making all the information we’re gathering (and perhaps, if we even go this far, analyzing) pretty useless. That uselessness will reflect on the broader effort (insofar as there is one) to improve your Customers’ experiences. If our attitude toward Customer Insights and VoC is simply, “where are we (our numbers)?” then we’ll miss the opportunity to drive better CX: “Where do we want to go (our Customers’ experiences)?”
Too often when leaders (even CX leaders) seek to improve their Customer Insights approaches, they focus simply on better tactics: Can we improve the questions we ask on our surveys? Can we increase the response rate? Can we better segment and analyze the results we receive? Can we follow-up with some of the respondents? That last one at least moves us closer to where we’re trying to get.
But I think those who try this are really barking up the wrong tree. What they need is a perspective shift when it comes to VoC and Customer Insights, not just a tactical change. […]
You’re doing VoC wrong
Sometimes I can get cheeky and say crazy little things like, “Maybe just stop doing VoC?”
Now, I realize that outbursts like that have their provenance in the paradox that is the combination of petulant child and grumpy old man that reside in my own mind. But sometimes there’s more to it, and the more I think of it, there’s a philosophy that emerges (At least with regard to this outburst.)
As of late I’ve started referring to “Customer Insights” instead of “Voice of the Customer” to emphasize the importance of not only looking beyond simply surveys, but also into the analysis required to better understand what your Customers are experiencing and what they think about those experiences. So, it’s two dimensions: Unique and creative sources of insights, but also curious, active, and thorough examination of what data we find. […]
