Ryan Powell’s Blog

I spent a few days aboard P&O’s boat the Oriana recently attending the Call Centre & Customer Management Executive Forum. This event provides the delegates and suppliers alike, the opportunity to spend 2 1/2 days shut away together on a boat with a personalised programme of keynote addresses, one-to-one meetings and personal development sessions.

The forum I attended runs in parallel with two other events for Internal Communications and Human Resources specialists. It is a real shame that the rumour mill suggests the event will not take place next year. Mind you, it was noticeable that the number of suppliers was much lower this year. Considering each vendor has to fork out a tidy sum of their marketing budget to sponsor the Oriana gig, it comes as little surprise.

This brings me onto the theme for this thread - the challenge of delivering customer experience improvements on a shoestring (minimal) budget as opposed to constructing a longer-term (strategic) programme.

I attended one workshop that asked us all to, (working in small groups,) come up with ways in which we could deliver something of high perceived value to our customers at little or no incremental cost to our hypothetical businesses. I found the creativity in the room to be pretty inspiring. When you put your mind to it, there really are a number of great ideas residing in the heads of those that work for your business. Last year, the equivalent topic was entitled “employee led change.” Either way, I think we can each think about the ways in which we encourage our people to contribute to the improvement of the products, services and customer experience we deliver to our customers.

Nevertheless, and not merely because I work in a function that appears to be a dying breed - strategy, I still firmly believe successful businesses need to invest in their longer-term future and empower people to continually develop the longer-term view of where the business is heading so that all the short-term initiatives meet a meaninful purpose.

What are your thoughts? Is strategy a waste of time? Can you continually improve without having a long-term vision?

This is a rant aimed at Customer Service Directors of British Banks and Credit Card providers… I suspect you are all playing the same game, but perhaps readers of this blog can share their own stories on the subject so we can see.

There was a time, not long ago, when I used to travel to mainland Europe and further afield, comfortable in the knowledge the Visa and Mastercard symbols meant I did not need to buy cash currency before travelling as I could use my plastic at cash dispensers and in shops and restaurants without a second thought. If my card provider, be they Bank or Credit Card company, suspected fraudulent behaviour on my account, they would contact me by phone or email to check.

I travelled to Hong Kong in December 2006 and all went well. However, when I returned in September 2008, little did I know how much things had changed. Duly, I took no cash with me whatsoever. I visited a cash dispenser just after arriving in Hong Kong to find first my Bank card and then my Credit card were refused at the cash dispenser. With no cash to my name, I ended up having to walk for an hour from my hotel to get to my mate’s stag party, which we were celebrating the night of my arrival. Thankfully, my friend was able to lend me a few dollars until I had a chance to speak to the card providers and sort out the situation.

That is where the experience got a whole lot worse. First there was the challenge of actually getting through to the providers in the UK. The credit card provider had a UK-only phone number on the reverse of the bank card, which I couldn’t ring from overseas. I tried using Skype, I bought a calling card, I eventually had to ask a relative to call the card company for me and get hold of a telephone number that I could legitimately dial from outside the UK.

The Bank card provider made things even more disagreeable for me. I was rather miffed to find out that the monthly premium I pay to them for their so-called Premiere service means bugger all anymore. I used to have a relationship manager based in my area at the end of a local UK phone number. It was at this point I learned that particular phone number is no longer in use and my calls are routed, along with those of I suspect all the rest of the Bank’s customers to an Indian call centre, where the service I received was actually over-polite and under-empathetic.

To be clear, I do not remember having received ANY communication from my Bank telling me they were changing the service and giving me the option to continue or stop paying for a so-called premium service.

After this very annoying experience, I decided to pre-empt the same issue with my cards in advance of a four-day trip to France in December. I called my credit card provider to let them know of my intentions. They were helpful and took a note of my travel dates, though they did tell me I may still need to call them when overseas if I encountered a problem.

Upon ringing the aforementioned Bank, they told me I could now inform them via their website, though they did take down the details over the phone. Needless to say, I felt less than certain I would not encounter any problems during the trip - though thankfully I did not.

My gripe is that neither the Bank nor the credit card company has made me aware of the fact it is now MY responsibility to remember to tell THEM whenever I am going to travel outside of the UK. How customer-friendly is that? Is this just another step along the road toward the impersonalisation of customer service in the UK?? Either way, it sucks in my opinion! Your thoughts?

Over the course of 2008, I have attended a number of customer strategy and call centre executive forum roundtable discussions on topics about customer service and customer experience.  The attendees come from a variety of firms in the UK, across all different industries: financial services, telecoms, media, retail, pharmaceuticals, etc.

I often approach these sessions with a degree of trepidation, uncertain as to the gulf in approach and performance between my company and the others around the table.  What has struck me more than once though is that we’re about on a par with them - in other words, we are all about as bad as one another when it comes to putting customer strategy at the core of our business focus.

Lots of companies are focussed on delivering shareholder returns, yet few seem to realise that if they actually focussed on understanding and then satisfying their customers’ needs, they would inevitably deliver said returns - because their customers would remain loyal (dangerous word, I know!) and keep coming back.

The other big challenge is demonstrating (in numerical terms) what having such a customer-oriented focus would actually do for the bottom-line of the business.  There are a number of books that have been written on the subject now but still, a leap of faith is needed by senior management if a business is going to really embrace putting the customer at the centre of everything it does.

Have you any thoughts on this?

I really have been tardy at writing on my blog.  I didn’t realize until logging in just now that it’s been 5 months since I really added anything!  Shocking, awful and a really bad customer experience to boot!

But it’s not like there hasn’t been anything to write about.  Only thing is, I’m off out to dinner now, so I can’t really get stuck into one story or another.

My vow however, is to do a much better job in 2008 on my blog.  The first story I’ll share concerns a trip to Glasgow just prior to Christmas, intended as a vacation, that turned out to be rather nightmarish thanks to BA - yes, British Airways, the former bastion of the airline industry.

I’ll leave it there for now, ‘cos if I get started, I’m likely to run a while.  Feel free to share your Christmas vacation nightmares here and we can compare notes!

When was the last time you seriously considered switching banks?  I got to thinking about this again recently when I moved house.

Before the big day itself, I prepared a great long list of those organizations I needed to inform of the change of address.  Plenty of people change their address regularly enough, right?  So, you’d think it would be one of those processes an organization such as a bank would sort out first.  Not so, obviously.

I called my bank to inform them, and yes, they made the process seem really easy and the call was finished within a couple of minutes.  Cut to a couple of weeks later and I realized the change of address obviously hadn’t gotten through first time because my former flatmate informed me there was mail from my bank at the old address.  Cue a second call to the bank… Following the authentication process, I was informed that indeed, yes, they could see the record of my previous call and the fact I’d rung to change my details, but that in fact, the bank has three different name and address databases you see… And, well, the change doesn’t always get replicated across all the systems properly.

Now, I can live with that, working in IT, I understand just how complex that can be.  But then again, as a customer, I don’t really care – it ought to be “once and done.”  So, when the nice person on the phone suggested, “in future, perhaps you could ask the person you speak with to make sure that they check the change replicates across the three databases?” I was a little taken aback – particularly because I am one of their preferred customers!

I am pretty certain all the other British High Street banks are as bad… But should they be?  I mean, they really are playing on our inertia I think.  They take a gamble that switching banks will be in the “too hard” basket for most people, and perhaps they’re right – especially if you work full-time, the switching in of itself is a slightly daunting prospect… After all, you don’t want things going wrong with your money, do you?

What are your thoughts?

Why is it that I have to think so hard to come up with a really good example of great customer service? I am struggling so much I thought it would be easier to solicit your examples whilst I share some points of view on the reasons why…

Of course, we consumers are hard to please! In fact there is just no pleasing some people – of that there is no doubt! However, dig a little deeper and you start to uncover a variety of reasons for poor customer experiences – and guess what, some of the underlying causes aren’t that difficult to modify.

For example, did you know that a good proportion of people in customer service and customer-facing roles don’t actually want to deal with customers as a part of their job? It might sound odd, but how many times have you been asked whether or not you actually want to deal with customers when you’ve interviewed for sales or service roles? Research backs up this point and a number of books and white papers have been written espousing the need to find this out when interviewing potential employees.

The most alluring element of good customer service for me, is when whatever happened to make me feel good is repeated, be that on different occasions, in different parts of the company or across their different channels (phone, branch, online…) You have to look hard to find examples of repeatable, deliberate, positive customer experience enhancing behaviour today, but I do believe the tide might finally be turning.

People like Colin Shaw of Beyond Philosophy have been talking about customer experience as ‘the next big thing’ in business for several years now. However, like so much thought-leadership, it takes time for fresh perspectives to gain traction and to move beyond being a ‘fad’.

I firmly believe customer experience has moved up the boardroom agenda over the past 12-18 months as companies start to realise consumers aren’t mugs and that we are increasingly willing to take our business to the competition (churn).

The signs are there. Customer experience (CE) is increasingly synonymous with the much older acronym for Customer Relationship Management – CRM. My feeling is that the association adds weight to the CE concept. I have seen a number of service providers and technology firms starting to adopt CE terminology in their literature. Mind you, the sceptic in me wonders how many of them will try and sell you on the idea that their gizmo or gadget will somehow revolutionise your customer experience, when in fact the lion’s share of responsibility for making that happens lies instead with the staff in the company.

Remaining positive, it is surprising just how many large organizations in the UK have made moves in the right direction over the past year or so by appointing a Head of -, or Director of Customer Experience. That can only be a good thing, and hopefully the beginning of a long-term strategic shift towards making more of an effort to treat consumers with a little bit more of a personal touch. More soon.