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?

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 spent several days during the last week of June at the Satmetrix (http://www.satmetrix.com/) conference on Net Promoter Score (NPS). The best take-away for me from that event was the fact that there is now irrefutable evidence that focussing on the customer pays - as leading firms around the globe are able to demonstrate the tie between a focus on their customers and an increase in the financial growth of their firms.

The premise behind NPS is that a company asks its customers one question: “How likely are you to recommend us to your friends, family, colleagues, etc.?” to establish how successful it is in the eyes not of its accountants, but its customers. That way firms can dispense with lengthy questionnaires and cut to the chase by asking their customers whether or not they are hitting the mark, rather than obliging them to endure lengthy 20 or 30 question-long surveys!

Several examples were extolled on the audience. We were also privileged to hear the infamous Dr. Fred Reichheld, (author of “The Ultimate Question”) speak about his research, travels around the World and learnings of big businesses that he works with.

There has been a heck of a lot of debate about the effectiveness of asking so few questions. After all, the “how likely” element on its own is not going to allow you to do anything meaningful with the answer, is it? Most firms are now following up the Ultimate Question with a second, along the lines of “why did you give us that score?”

As I mentioned earlier in this post, it’s impressive that several firms Fred highlights in his work are new so mature in their application of NPS that they are able to demonstrate the link between their focus on NPS and financial growth of their businesses over recent years – irrespective of whether they are privately or publicly held companies!

I am going to write more on this topic as it’s close to my heart, but I’d welcome your thoughts and if the company you work for is thinking about looking into applying NPS, drop me a line or post your article on the blog.