Sometimes working in and around customer service environments gives you an opportunity to stand back from a situation and just see it from above, and most importantly, from “outside”. Seeing first hand how failures in notification, communication and co-ordination effectively destroyed customer trust really brought home to me, again, how much value there is in CEBP coupled with service design and a customer experience focus.

Recently I was in the United Kingdom and hired a car to get from A to B for an important family event. The short version of the story is that car was malfunctioning badly, and only barely got me to my destination, shaken and stirred. This is where my customer experience journey began. First of all let me outline how that proceeded.

(1) When I phoned the hire company they told me to phone the breakdown service.

(2) The breakdown service gave me an ETA of within an hour, and turned up 3 hours later.

(3) They didn’t actually fix the car, and next day it didn’t work, so I was late form my family event. I had to get cabs, back and forth and pretty much I lost half my day.

(4) I phone the breakdown service and am told I can’t book ahead for a mechanic, I have to call from my hotel and wait until one shows.

(5) I phone the car hire company and am told that unless the car it toable I won’t be able to get a replacement, or/ and could I bring it back to the airport to get a new one today, because they are understaffed and can’t get out to me.

(6) Mechanic arrives but didn’t know the car type, my phone number, or any other details, that made it hard for him to find me on site. I had given them to the customer care people fronting the breakdown service, who were representing the car hire company and were “there employees” Anyway, the guy fixes the car.

(7) I call the car hire company, and front desk apologizes for the bad experience I’ve had, and she says obviously we won’t be charging you.

(8) Next day I get back to the airport and the staff at front desk have no record of my interactions and my experience to date, they can’t refund me because of some technical issues, and I’m given the name and email address of the location manager.

(9) I email the location manager with a full, and detailed description of my experience on the next working day, Tuesday morning. I don’t receive any notification that my email has been received or read. Nobody contacts me on the next business day (Wed) to tell me they are on top of this etc so I phone them. As a part of this telephone conversation I am assured a cheque will be issued, and that the systems did have my details, and that the notes on my experience were on the system.

(10) Today, still no cheque. Still no notification from the company as to where it is in process: is it sent, is it in the mail, when can I expect it to arrive? Still no trust in the company. Real and significant Brand Damage potential.

Some Take Away Points:

(1)  ”My experience” was what I lived, and what lives with me. That’s just how human memory works. You may have many good reasons why things just didn’t work out, but that’s not how the customer will view it;

(2) Although “Company” are not “crazy bad” the cumulative effect of all the mis-matches, mis-communications, and un-ordinations is that I lost Trust. Once my Trust was gone, no amount of reason would bring it back. Customer experience is almost an “emergent quality”, a culmination of all the little things you get right.

(3) It could have been all very different. Let me hypothesize another scenario.

Using CEBP to Delivery Customer Care Experience

(1) You take my phone number and make it a unique identification. When I ring you, you should know who I am. You tell me who to ring if there are any problems and you send two numbers to my phone (via sms/ email/ or as a contact) so that I have those numbers at point of need.

(2) You ask do I have a map to get me to my location; have I been on this journey before; you ascertain if there are any special contexts to my journey that might enable you to understand my total journey (going to a wedding, important meeting, holiday etc.). You figure out what kind of traveller type I am.

(3) When the car breaks down, I call the number I have been given and the person I was last speaking to answers at the front desk. She greets me by name and listens to my problem. While on the call she locates the AA service, ascertains where I am, and directs them to my location. She assures me that they will be there in under 20 minutes, and informs me that if the mechanic thinks it will be more than 20 minutes to fix when he gets there, they can arrange a cab back to the hotel, and the car will be delivered to the hotel car park for me. Basically don’t worry, we’ve got your back.

(4) At 20 minutes after our call, the AA is running late due to traffic. An automated call is generated by the AA (reading the van location and the traffic flow) calling me, and telling me that my AA mechanic John, is approximately 20 minutes behind time. If I’d like to activate a call to a local cab company to get a taxi sent to my location, just press 1) and you will be connected to the nearest taxi cab provider.

(5) The AA mechanic receives an email with all my relevant details: my name, the make of car, the hotel I need to go to, and the name of the person to contact in the hire company if anything more needs to be arranged. This is all a part of their Service Breakdown InterAct. The mechanic fixes the car and signs off on his mobile device that the car is fixed and the job is closed out. This triggers a call to the car hire front desk and to the customer. The AA mechanic drives it to the local hotel, and gets a cab back to his own van.

(6) Because the Car Fix event has been closed out the car hire people are prompted to phone the customer to ensure that they made it to their event on time, and also to ascertain how they felt about how the Car Hire Company has responded to the situation. Would you use us again? recommend this service to a friend etc.? OK. Push button 1 to activate your credit card repayment. Thank you for your continued custom.

(7) I receive a full report from the car hire company detailing the days events, the times and reports from all parties, and a total due balance of zero on my statement.

So Finally, Finally.

I saw a lot of comparisons with my Ashcloud experience. In this instance it was the car company that was impacting on my wider life, on my connections, on my commitments. The car hire company needed to co-ordinate with other service providers such as the car repair service providers, potentially with taxi cab companies, with airports, and with other car hire providers. They were part of a network of service providers and being able to Pull on the Resources of these other providers in a real time, synchronized fashion was the key to delivery. Of course, getting your own systems, processes, and people lined up properly in the first place is stage one.

During the first day of the crises VoiceSage was up and running with pro-active notifications to stranded American Airline customers within four hours. This is from “no relationship” to full interaction with their client base. There was no integration project, it was “loosely coupled, tightly integrated” in conception. American Airlines could have adapted, augmented, extended the messaging and interaction intent at any time, in real time. No, its not the full journey, but its a long way down the road.

Feelings of Abandonment

As the world becomes more and more interconnected the speed with which companies and individuals have to react to events changes. The ashcloud event left hundreds of thousands of people stranded, away from home, away from family. I was stranded comfortably at home but I was due to go to eComm in San Francisco. Many companies have a hard enough time living up to the demands of customers in times of ‘business as usual.’  Yet I am betting that people end up talking to others about the companies that responded “exceptionally well”, that were “just awesome’, that “totally made me feel I was going to be looked after, eventually”.

You see, the customers biggest fear was that they were going to be abandoned. The amount of frustration that people experienced on not being able to reach a call center was palpable. I tried myself. Tried to log onto my airline site as well to check the status of MY flight. No luck. Worse than no luck, no screens at all. Eventually I found the various airports on twitter and followed them for updates. I followed most of the e-vent on twitter after that. A brief check in this morning with the various airlines and airport twitter profiles shows them very active. I suspect that for many people this event has turned them onto social media for “practical purposes”.

Ashcloud Sparks Social Media Continuity Response?

Dan Levy at Sparksheet.com has an interesting survey of the Post Ash Airline Customer Care landscape.

(1) Inform: Not just what is the flight status, but how to rebook (add link?), what might be around your specific location that might be of help, provide links to more specific content. Airlines could have gone a step further and understood that the customer really needed help with their extended network of relationships. Who was waiting for them? Had they rented cars? How will delays affect their extended journey?

(2) Reassure: Examples given by Dan Levy include giving people hope by tweeting that some other people were getting flights, or had found hotels, etc. Standard positive reinforcement. But I think there was also the opportunity to let people see that you are ramping up as an organization, that you are getting on top of it, that your agents had now “rebooked 25% of all passengers” etc.

(3) Engage: Employees of the company engaged directly with passengers by replying to their twitter messages, or in such media as the company’s Facebook page. Passengers then shared the information they were given with others. An employee might have posted a link to Transport maps for Dublin for one stranded passenger, only to find that this passenger was now sharing and spreading this information in multiple social sites, and on the ground.

Enacting A Social Contact Strategy

Mark Tamis in a conversation elsewhere a few weeks ago, reminded me that to reap the rewards of a well defined and managed Social Strategy you need to have a Data Strategy, and Data Analytics capability.

There is indeed lots of information out there that could be made available at the right time, and right place. But there is usually data within the company itself that is a good predictor of customer behavior. Mark gives an example of where companies send out a win-back call when a customer terminates an account.  If they have high variability in their bill, or there are other standard preconditions to someone leaving the company, call them before they leave! (duh). In this Ashcloud instance the company might have used its data analytics capability to communicate with high value customers, or customers with more than 2 children, or with children under the age of 5. The company may have chosen to give first offers on Hotel bookings in a way that maximized customer lifetime value.

Meta Strategy: from Real Time to Right Time?

David Pakman seems to have initiated a discussion about the various merits of real-time versus right-time.

The Ashcloud customer service crises exemplifies how real time access to everything isn’t always useful. What we the customer want is the real-useful information at the right time. What would have been useful? Well if I was stranded in Dublin airport and my flights were not going to happen, I would have liked a proactive message from my airline alerting me to this fact as soon as possible, and giving me the option to connect to a local hotel to book a room ASAP. I would like the airline to tell me that they were able to get me this offer now because they used their existing relationship with this hotel to free up as many rooms as possible. I would like to be able to hear what the next bus time is, or to be told where the taxi’s to the city center are. I might even want to be inform my credit card company that I am in another country overnight and to honor my credit card requests.

Culture of Right Person, Right Time

Lior Arussy on mycustomer.com has a very human response to the logistical nightmare. Things to praise: smiles, friendliness, hotels that check how are you doing, will you need to stay another night? We’re not going to charge you excessively for that by the way, come talk to us. The system hasn’t got you booked in? Let me do what I can to fix that for you…. This is what people will remember. I have heard that in Lanzarote the hotels actually reduced the price of an additional night if you were stranded, and gave you vouchers for half price meals in town. The opposite seems to have happened in Amsterdam. Which location has the culture that you want to experience as a holiday destination?

Somehow these people “shared your experience”, and not with a knowing nod, but with real concern and actions that demonstrated that they were “going beyond the machine” to help you. What you were “feeling” is that you have been touched by the culture and values of the people that make up that company.  That you were being cared for.

Outcomes- Power of Pull Networks?

An airline that shuts off its website and has a call center you can’t get through to is displaying the signs of being overwhelmed. The structures, the systems, the people could not scale or adapt to the new situation.  The airlines that had the capability of pulling together many different resources, companies and people to get “the job done”, had a 21st Century Network, or “Pull” capability.

Those airlines that were able to reach out, at the right time, and right place, to give the right information, and make the right connections, for an extended context, were part of a pull network. They were co-ordinating and orchestrating processes using real time information. I think this lesson will be extended to other contexts and other industries really soon. The power of networked organisations; the power of culture; the power of enabled employees and enabled customers; the power of pulling information and actions together quickly “at the edge”; I think we’ve all learned a lot from this crises.

Explore Tags: ashcloud, CEBP, customer service., SCRM, voicesage

I was in a shop with a colleague recently and he picked up a bottle of wine and said “oh that’s a bit on the expensive side’, and put it back down on the shelf. I told him I didn’t know that much about wine, but I knew one bottle and how much it should cost, so I looked for that brand, and that gave me the “price point” for the shop (everything here is 20% more expensive). It’s my personal heuristic.

When I do a check in or check out at a hotel I pay a lot of attention to what is going on because it more or less “signals to me” how the rest of the hotel is likely to be run. For instance last evening, I handed over my credit card when booking in, and as he was taking my credit card booking she told me, with a smile, we’ve upgraded you to superior room. Great I thought. Then I remembered she was the same person I spoke with when I made a late booking for the room two hours earlier. She originally thought I was calling to cancel a room booking, but became jovial and upbeat when I said no, I was calling to book a room, and it would be my first time at the hotel. Obviously the lady at reception was going out of her way to extend a welcome to remember.

It reminded me of being in Brown Thomas buying some expensive cosmetics and skin products the month before. As the assistant was punching the obscene number onto the terminal pad (how apt), she reached under the machine and pulled out a lovely gift pack, beautifully presented, with numinous objects. It seemed to have a lot of stuff, and as we poked through the “free stuff” our attention as deflected from the events at the painful terminal pad.

In both cases, by design or by chance, the free-gift exchange occurred at the most painful moment for the customer; handing over the money. We are already going to be anxious about handing over money, so making me wait to have the act performed upon me, is just going to build, and increase the tension. As consumers we remember the painful moments and the joyful moments, not the hundreds of mundane routine moments. Making the payment moment as easy and painless as possible is important to not creating one of the lows. When you consider that low moments weigh more in cognitive and memory terms, means that waiting to pay, being frustrated with the wait, not having the paperwork in order and at hand, and “looking messy” leaves a disproportionate impact on the overall customer experience, you would think that companies would be super slick. There is nearly always room for improvement.

I think my hotel this morning understood this. When they saw a que of 3 in a row building they immediately opened two other check out desks.  It had the look of a hard wired rule (”never more than 3 people in a que to check out”), but it got me wondering why everybody in the que has to be treated on a first come first served basis. It also got me to thinking about how the hotel might offer you something on the checkout moment, i.e. a copy of the Irish Times for the journey home, or a take away coffee. I think it might work.

Here’s Dan from Predictably Irrational talking about some of these issues but from the theme point of “Sometimes we don’t act rationally when it comes to making decisions around money”.