Strategy

#91 – Critical difference in B2B vs. B2C feedback, Speaking experience in Amsterdam

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Differences in the way B2B and B2C customers answer open questions. Speaking experience at CustomerGauge event in Amsterdam. Welcome to the 91st edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Unexpected (to me) difference between B2B and B2C customer feedback
  2. My recent speaking experience in Amsterdam
  3. Latest blog posts – Answers to CX leadership questions, employee/customer happiness
  4. Notable items from other sites – Annette Franz and Rosaria Cirillo Louwman
  5. Looking forward

Unexpected (to me) difference between B2B and B2C feedback

While working at HP my experience was that NPS Promoters write the longest answers to open questions. My operating assumption is that such customers like you and want you to continue to improve, so they do their best to help. Rob Markey confirms that this is what they see with Bain clients too. However, all of this is for business-to-business customers.

Since retiring from HP, I have been exposed to the situation at a number of B2C companies. I have seen data that shows the opposite pattern. Detractors write the most. In one large data set, Promoters used about 8 words to answer the ‘Why?’ question after the NPS rating, while Detractors used twice that, with Passives half way between. It may interest you to know that it made less than half a word difference for Promoters when people answered on their phones. Single-word responses from Promoters were quite common in all cases. “Great!”, for example. It would have been nice to know what exactly was great.

Since the data sets I have looked at are for companies without annual contracts I suspect this may just be true for companies that have a purely transactional relationship with their customers. Unfortunately, none of these data sets came from research that included the standard ‘What could we do better?’ question, so I don’t know whether the same would be true there.

Your views would be most welcome.

My recent speaking experience in Amsterdam

I spoke at the CustomerGauge Monetize! event in Amsterdam two weeks ago. What a great experience! The event was held in a theatre that has been created inside an old church. The lighting was great, and the general atmosphere was wonderful. Customer Experience work has advanced quite a lot in the last few years. It was great to see leaders from DHL, Electrolux, Salesforce and other companies present their achievements and concerns.

As is often the case, half of what I learned came from discussions during breaks and during the evening between the two days. Fascinating stuff. One of the blog posts in the list below covers my answers to the two most common questions I was asked during these informal interactions.

My main stage presentation was based on two different blogs that you may remember. The first is my ‘Valentine’s Day’ blog about the similarities in the relationships couples and companies have. The second is my recent work on using stories and emotions to communicate effectively. And I just received the preliminary results of the feedback request sent to all participants. My session was the top rated one on the first day. I have not seen the results for the second day, and don’t expect an overall ranking to be published. Anyway… Yay me! (And thank you to all the attendees.)

Congratulations to Camilla Scholten, Adam Dorrell, Sarah Frazier, Katerina Sinitskaia, Cvetilena Gocheva and the rest of the CustomerGauge team on a great event.

Our latest blog posts

Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image Answers to two questions from new Customer Experience leaders: Where do I start, and to whom should I report?

I attended and spoke at the CustomerGauge Monetize! event in central Amsterdam last week. It was fabulous event, held in a theatre that has been created in an old church. Here are the answers to the two most common questions I was asked during breaks…
image The best and worst of customer and employee satisfaction (Part two in a two-part series)

And here is today’s Fake News (though the quotes are real): “Our core values: … Put the customer first…” – Frontier Communications website… In reality there are many companies that customers hate though employees love them, and vice-versa. Here are the results of my research on the topic…
image Do happy employees bring you happy customers? (Answer: In general – No!)

“Everybody knows that happy employees make happy customers.” “Satisfied employees are the single most important driver of customer satisfaction.” In reality, I don’t believe employee satisfaction even makes the top three for most companies. There are exceptions. I recently completed my third annual study on the (non-) relationship between employee and customer satisfaction…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Annette Franz – Putting the customer at the center of every conversation

While this memorable article just came up in my LinkedIn feed yesterday Annette actually wrote it on her ‘CX Journey’ site back in 2002. It includes a mention of my ‘favorite hate’ in customer experience work. As she puts it, “I think hearing requires a subsequent action or reaction. And in the customer conversation, that part is often missing.” Annette goes on to suggest that only 5% of companies tell customers what they have learned from their research and what they are going to improve.

I think Annette is an optimist. In my own experiments in which I provided a total of 150 B2C companies with feedback, just a single one wrote back to tell me what they had learned and what they were going to improve. (Just FYI, that company was British Airways, which may surprise you. It surprised me as I have probably sent them about 20 survey responses over the years. At least they closed the loop that one time.)

Read this classic blog post here.

Rosaria Cirillo Louwman / Wow Now

I was able to meet Rosaria for the second time on the afternoon before the CustomerGauge event in Amsterdam. I first met her a few years ago when I spoke at a Satmetrix event in London. It was great to catch up, especially to discuss Yellow Goldfish, the recently-published book she has written together with Stan Phelps.

Rosaria founded Wow Now back in 2013. Her focus is not customer satisfaction or customer experience. I think it would be safe to describe it as happiness, meaning happiness of everyone involved in customer interactions, especially the customers, of course. Her framework builds a new layer on top of the well-known Maslow motivation pyramid: Happiness. She describes her focus as ‘happiness driven growth’ and has invented the Happiness Contribution™ Factor.

Read more about Rosaria’s book, training courses and Wow Now here. And you should be able to find the link to download her Happiness-Driven Growth booklet quite easily.

Looking forward

April will bring the second birthday of our first three books. My co-author/brother’s son is preparing a special birthday animation that you will see a few weeks from now. Thank you for your support during these two years. We are happy with the way the book has been selling, and especially the way they continue to sell well, even two years later. The CX strategy and NPS books occasionally make it up into the top 2% of all Amazon book sales. The cost-reduction book does not do quite as well. I suspect we need another economic downturn to make it more relevant.

Here are links to all of our books on Amazon.com. Kindle versions are available in all stores. Print versions are available from the major stores only. If you have already read any of our books, please write reviews on Amazon.

Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation

Net Promoter – Implement the System

Customer-centric Cost Reduction

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Color edition)

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Black & White edition)

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.

#89 – Employee and customer sat, Consumer subscription service feedback

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Welcome to the 89th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Relationship between employee and customer satisfaction
  2. The right time to ask for feedback on a consumer subscription service
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites – Willie Pietersen, Eric Smuda ex-Compaq, HP, Avis, Hertz
  5. Looking forward

Relationship between employee and customer satisfaction

The American Customer Satisfaction Index people released the final part of their 2018 customer satisfaction data earlier this week. I have been able to match the scores against Glassdoor employee satisfaction data for 398 large businesses that sell to US consumers. This is up from 345 last year and hopefully makes the data more reliable.

There are a few surprises, though the overall message has not changed: there is not much of a relationship between employee and customer satisfaction. Variations in employee satisfaction across the 398 businesses explain just 6.2% of the variations in customer satisfaction. This is up from last year’s number of 4.4%. There are industries and indeed a whole sector where there seems to be no relationship at all between the two. The big surprise is that the relationship for the retail trade has dropped significantly. This turns out to be an artefact of the ACSI including eCommerce sites in retail this year while they were separate last year.

At the moment I am doing extensive data validation. This is the third time I have carried out the study. I made minor mistakes each of the first two times and am in the process of ensuring I have at least not made the same mistakes again. I will then write a series of blog posts. The ones you should expect are:

  • Overall results, including an analysis of ‘high-touch’ and ‘low-touch’ businesses.
  • Lists of companies that employees hate but customers love, and vice-versa.
  • Lists of companies that both the employees and customers love, and of course the opposite view.

Based on the feedback I receive each year I suspect most of you believe my study is wrong. Indeed, I submitted it to one academic publication and one business publication the first year and it was rejected by both as not being credible. Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, has been able to present a scientific analysis that proves anything different. I look forward to the feedback this year.

The right time to ask for feedback on a consumer subscription service

I just answered a question about when you should ask customers for feedback about a ‘box subscription’ service. This is the type of service where you receive something different every month. Kiwico is an example, with their scientific toy kit subscription service, and I have seen subscriptions that give you a new book every month. Here is how I answered the question:

  1. If you have no people or budget to work on improvements that customers may suggest… well… you are better off not asking them for feedback at all. So, if you have no resources, the right time is never.
  2. You want to be able to work on improvements and tell the customers about them before their subscription deadline comes up. If all customers do not have the same renewal date, this really means working on a single improvement every quarter, then telling the customers when you have completed it. Once again, if you don’t have the resources needed, then please don’t ask for feedback.

Your input welcome.

 

Our latest blog posts

Nothing new this week as I have had my head down working on the employee-customer satisfaction research. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image Valentine’s Day classic blog – How to stay married – to your customers of course!

It was Valentine’s Day a few years ago, and I was puzzled by the results of some HP customer experience research. The data source and volume were impeccable. However, the results were surprising. Then I remembered what day it was, and everything became clear…
What skills do you and your customer experience team need to be successful? (5-minute read)

While pure luck was a major factor, my use of Microsoft Project version 1.0 on my personal Mac certainly had a major positive influence on my promotion to the European HQ of Digital Equipment Corporation…
image The nature of customer-centric strategy and why your team needs one (Intense 3-minute read)

I have been broadening my writing horizons somewhat over the last few weeks. Among others, I have contributed thoughts on customer strategy to discussion on LinkedIn, Quora and the members-only Customer Experience Professionals Association forum. Some clarity seems to be needed…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Willie Pietersen – Five time-tested ideas for success

Many of you know that I consider Willie Pietersen to be the greatest strategy teacher on the planet. As a former CEO of some major companies, his advice is intensely practical. His latest blog post is no exception. The five concepts covered are easy to understand. They are:

  1. Our only sustainable competitive advantage is our ability to learn faster than our competitors
  2. Success means putting the customer at the center of business decisions
  3. Strategy is about achieving differentiation by making choices
  4. Leaders must be able to simplify a complex world
  5. To move people at the deepest level, you need compelling stories

Willie’s first strategy book is the only book I have ever read a second time immediately after finishing my first read. I did the same with this blog post. Read it here.

Bain NPS podcast – Interview with Eric Smuda, former CX leader at Compaq, HP, Avis, Hertz

A fascinating and insightful interview with Eric Smuda. My time in CX at HP started after Eric left and I never heard of him at Compaq. I wish I had. He is clear and insightful about what it takes to develop and implement a customer experience strategy. I learned a lot about the car rental business and found some of the stories fascinating. Like the one about the need to reposition cars around New York. Hertz uses a single car fleet. The weekday demand is at the airports. The largest single weekend demand is from people who live in Manhattan and want to get away for the weekend, starting on Friday evening. So Hertz drives huge numbers of cars from the airports into town. It is a constant stream as there is not much space for them in Manhattan. That’s just one story and there are many others. Listen to them here.

 

Looking forward

I will be speaking at the CustomerGauge Monetize! event in Amsterdam on March 13th and will stay over to enjoy the other speakers on the 14th. I look forward to meeting any readers who will be there. And of course I want to complete my blog posts on the relationship between customer and employee experience. I am sure you will find them interesting.

Here are links to all of our books on Amazon.com. Kindle versions are available in all stores. Print versions are available from the major stores only. If you have already read any of our books, please write reviews on Amazon.

Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation

Net Promoter – Implement the System

Customer-centric Cost Reduction

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Color edition)

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Black & White edition)

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.

#88 – Valentine’s Day, Another restaurant survey, Lumoa predictions for 2019, Patient experience

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Valentine’s Day and your customers. Welcome to the 88th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Valentine’s Day again
  2. Another restaurant survey received and answered
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites – CX predictions for 2019, and patient experience
  5. Looking forward

Valentine’s Day again

Most countries celebrate Valentine’s Day on February 14th. (Brazil has theirs in July.) It is a time to reflect on relationships, and I have used it to re-issue the Valentine’s Day blog that I first wrote four years ago. You will see it on the blog list below. I believe the main messages have stood the test of time. Business and personal relationships are mainly based on effective communication.

Over the four years that have passed since the first version of the blog post, my thinking has expanded. By this I mean that I still believe what I wrote, and that some additional points need to be made. I now believe that just any sort of communication is not good enough. Specifically, and somewhat controversially, based on feedback from newsletter readers, I believe rational, scientific communication is vastly over-rated. This applies to both business and personal relationships.

The main form of communication that works is communication that causes emotions at the receiving end. And the most effective way to create those emotions is to tell stories. In both scenarios, stories can be about your own past, present, or indeed future. They can also be about others who have lived through similar situations to yours. This is one of the reasons the right story-based customer references can be so effective. People can relate to the story about the other customer’s journey with you far better than they can relate to a specification sheet or product description.

Think about it if you are doing something special with a loved one for Valentine’s Day.

Another restaurant survey received and answered

We had a nice family meal at a new restaurant in Lausanne last Saturday. The restaurant is called Eat Me and you can see their Saturday lunch menu in French and English here. The concept was a new one on me. They suggest each person order two dishes. They are designed for sharing and, most unusually, they are not served together. By this I mean each dish arrives at your table whenever it happens to be ready. That worked for us, including the two vegetarians in the family. Since I booked online, they sent me a survey by email afterwards.

I suppose it is good to be asked for feedback. In addition to the expected recommendation question (a 10), there were a series of other rating questions on the service and some other items. However, disappointingly, no matter what the ratings, there was no opportunity to suggest what they might improve. We had some suggestions to offer, but could not. I suppose they just use the ratings to evaluate people internally. So I felt I wasted my time replying. Anyway, let’s see whether I hear anything back from them about what they have been learning from their research and what they are going to improve. I bet not.

This made me want to research restaurant customer experience in some detail, which I have done over the intervening days. There are a number of technology solutions for this, but most seem to miss what I see as the most important point: regular customers need to be remembered and treated differently to one-time visitors. I suppose people who own a small restaurant will recognize the regulars, but I think technology is needed to handle this for larger setups. In any case, I would love to hear your views on the subject. You can reach me at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

 

Our latest blog posts

Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image Valentine’s Day classic blog – How to stay married – to your customers of course!

It was Valentine’s Day a few years ago, and I was puzzled by the results of some HP customer experience research. The data source and volume were impeccable. However, the results did not immediately make sense. Then I remembered what day it was…
What skills do you and your customer experience team need to be successful? (5-minute read)

While pure luck was a major factor for me, I have found three skills to be critical to success for customer experience leaders and teams. Read on to find out what they are…
image The nature of customer-centric strategy and why your team needs one (Intense 3-minute read)

I have been broadening my writing horizons somewhat over the last few weeks. Among others, I have contributed thoughts on customer strategy to discussion on LinkedIn, Quora and the members-only CXPA forum. Most customer experience discussions are about metrics. Unacceptable!…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Lumoa – What is Customer Experience in 2019 According to 15 CX Experts?

Always flattering to be considered to be an expert. My thanks to Anna Pogrebniak at Lumoa! Quite a few statements about leadership and the nature of CX. I was the only one to make the predictions I made about Natural Language Processing and its ability to give us automated loop-closing. I hope I will be proven correct. Read what Anna has to say and the predictions 15 of us made about the world of customer experience in 2019 here.

Adrian Swinscoe – A story about how a successful outcome doesn’t guarantee a positive patient experience

Adrian has a regular customer experience blog and I found this one particularly interesting as it says almost the opposite of what I have said in a blog on a similar subject. In my case, I complained that patient experience research does not ask about outcomes, restricting itself to the touchpoint experience in the hospital or clinic. I said that outcomes were far far more important than anything else. Was I wrong? Adrian discusses an example where the outcome was good, but the experience was bad. Make up your own mind here.

 

Looking forward

Two big things will be happening over the next five weeks. As soon as the American Customer Satisfaction Index people publish their report for retail, I will be able to complete the data analysis work for my annual study of the relationship between employee and customer satisfaction. And I am also pleased to say that I will be speaking at the CustomerGauge Monetize! event in Amsterdam. I will probably be on stage on March 13th, and expect to stay over to the 14th. I hope to meet some readers there. The event website is here.

Here are links to all of our books on Amazon.com. Kindle versions are available in all stores. Print versions are available from the major stores only. If you have already read any of our books, please write reviews on Amazon.

Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation

Net Promoter – Implement the System

Customer-centric Cost Reduction

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Color edition)

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Black & White edition)

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.

#87 – Reverse-engineering CX, Customer-employee NPS, CCXP exam questions, your personal promise to customers

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Let’s reverse-engineer customer experience. How about asking your employees what you should improve for customers? Welcome to the 87th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Reverse engineer customer experience improvements
  2. How about implementing Customer-Employee NPS?
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites – Sample CCXP exam questions, personal promise to customers
  5. Looking forward

Reverse engineer customer experience improvements

As you may have seen in my blog post about customer-centric business strategy (see below), I have become intensely irritated by my observation that most companies seem far more interested in measuring satisfaction than improving it. The core work of customer experience people should be the implementation of improvements. Measurements should support this work, but they are not what customer experience leadership is about. Today, most of the work done by customer experience professionals is about measurement and reporting. While individual business and functional teams may get relevant information and work on their own improvements, this leaves a huge gap: Cross-business, cross-functional improvement work simply does not happen at all.

I believe there is a better way. Let me go further: I believe there is a better way to approach customer experience improvement work than any current methodology used by any company on the planet. My thinking on this is driven by a sales course I took in 1996. It was given by the husband-and-wife team of Mary and Michael Molloy and the book that accompanied it is called The Buck Stops Here. The principle was that you set up the sales process from the end, then worked backwards to put everything in place that you need to win. And only what you need.

Applying the principle to company-wide customer experience work would look like this:

  1. Start by getting the sponsorship, funding, and people you need to implement one to three effective improvement projects. Perhaps you would agree with your CEO and HR that the company’s development program for its best people would include such projects and that they would each last six months, with people committed half-time. If you can’t get the sponsorship and resources, well, at least you will have learned something and you can avoid bothering customers with research that won’t be used for anything. And if you are the CX leader, you will understand that you don’t have sponsorship for your work and you can look for a new job.
  2. Get agreement on how the one to three projects will be selected. Perhaps you will need to form a Customer Experience Council to make the decision and to monitor progress.
  3. Use the council to gain agreement on what data and information is needed to submit a project for approval. The council can also decide on a focus area. If you are a B2C eCommerce business, an example of a focus area might be understanding your repeat customers’ views about your company in more detail, and implementing improvements they suggest. Or perhaps you would like to get employee views about what cross-company improvements should be made for customers.
  4. Let’s suppose you have decided that the next six-month effort will be dedicated to implementing employees’ CX improvement ideas. Set up and carry out all of the necessary research. Kill off all other research you may be doing with customers and which will lead to nothing for the next six months, since you just decided you do not need it.
  5. Tell your people and your customers what you are doing.

The message to your teams would be simple: our customer-centric improvement work will be driven by specific research that will always result in improvement projects. There will be no customer research done simply to measure people. You have operational metrics for that, and don’t need to bother customers with it.

What do you think?

(I feel a book coming on.)

How about implementing Customer-Employee NPS?

Continuing one of the points made above, while customers are the best source of improvement suggestions, there is no reason they should be the only source. Why not ask your employees? On top of costing far less than customer research, you will get them engaged in improvement work and are likely to get enthusiastic volunteers.

Employees may have insights in areas that would not naturally occur to customers. One example that springs to mind happened shortly after HP set up a centralized pre-sales group in Bucharest, Romania. When the new operation started up, it would be fair to say that the people were quite passive, just doing what was asked. Sales people and resellers asked them to provide price quotations to customers, and they did that work well. Then the team supporting the Benelux noticed something. As negotiation cycles continued, sales people removed things from orders to meet a customer price point. Notably, offers for servers and storage that started with round-the-clock support services were often reduced to a cheaper business-hours-only proposal.

The Benelux team in Bucharest decided to systematically give the customers two proposals: one exactly as requested, and one with the service levels they believed the customers really needed, at a higher price. The initiative was a great success, with about half the customers taking the more appropriate service proposal at the higher price. For customers who accepted, it completely eliminated the situations where they would call during a weekend to be told that their contract did not cover the repair. A customer would never have thought of this double-proposal idea.

Using Net Promoter System methodology, a ceNPS feedback request would go to all of your employees and look like this:

  • How likely are our customers to recommend our company?
  • Why?
  • What should we improve for customers and how?

Please let me know what you think. If I could have come up with a word that started with ‘A’ for the name, I would have called it ‘aceNPS‘, which would have been nice.

Our latest blog posts

Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image
The nature of customer-centric strategy and why your team needs one (Intense 3-minute read)

I have been broadening my writing horizons somewhat over the last few weeks. Among others, I have contributed thoughts on customer strategy to discussion on LinkedIn, Quora and the members-only…
image Nudging customers to do what they should (2-minute read)

In their book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein explain that people are poor at choosing among options, and can quite easily be ‘nudged’ or pushed gently to make a…
image The plural of ‘anecdote’ is ’emotion’ – You can use this for good or for evil

Some time ago I wrote a short article suggesting that the plural of the word ‘anecdote’ is not ‘science’. My point was that just because a lot of people have said something does not make it true. Let’s take this further and talk about anecdotes and emotions.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Shep Hyken – Your personal promise to your customers

Shep always has some nice cartoons in his blog posts. His main content is about healthcare this time, though the message has far wider implications. Shep uses Dr. Neil Baum’s ten personal promises to his patients as an example for us all. I have to say that caring for elderly relatives means that I come into increasing contact with different parts of the (excellent) Swiss healthcare system. I think most doctors and clinics could benefit from a set of promises like these. It’s about a four-minute read here.

Omnitouch/Daniel Ord – 10 sample questions for the CCXP exam

I am a member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA). The association offers one of the few recognized customer experience exams, which results in Certified Customer Experience Professional accreditation. There are six areas involved. Daniel Ord has posted sample questions in two of the areas. The set I suggest looking at first is about customer experience strategy. Test your knowledge here.

Looking forward

Two big things will be happening over the next seven weeks. As soon as the American Customer Satisfaction Index people publish their report for retail, I will be able to complete the data analysis work for my annual study of the relationship between employee and customer satisfaction. And I am also pleased to say that I will be speaking at the CustomerGauge Monetize! event in Amsterdam. I will probably be on stage on March 13th, and expect to stay over to the 14th. I hope to meet some readers there. The event website is here.

January book sales are going well. Thank you. Here are links to all of our books on Amazon.com. Kindle versions are available in all stores. Print versions are available from the major stores only. If you have already read any of our books, please write reviews on Amazon.

Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation

Net Promoter – Implement the System

Customer-centric Cost Reduction

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Color edition)

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Black & White edition)

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.

#86 – New NPS training course, how I landed in CX, the customer experience factory, customer advisory boards

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A new NPS ‘All hands’ training course is available. How I landed in CX. Welcome to the 86th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Richard Owen and team launch new ‘all-employee’ NPS course
  2. How I ‘landed’ in Customer Experience
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites – Customer Advisory Boards and a CX Factory
  5. Looking forward

Richard Owen and team launch new ‘all employee’ NPS course

I am a big fan of training, and an even bigger fan of what is often called ‘all-hands’ training that targets an entire company. When we implemented NPS across HP we designed our own training course. We did not make it mandatory, but it was by far the most-taken voluntary course. On top of the knowledge I believe the establishment of a common vocabulary is important. When people use a particular word, they should have a common idea of what it means. Company-wide training courses provide this.

Richard Owen was CEO of Satmetrix up to their merger with NICE. He and his company, OwenCX, have now launched a new NPS course. I have taken it, and you will see that you can too, without charge for individual use. Here is what they say about it:

Owen CX’s NPS Training for all employees was designed from the ground up to engage, educate and align every member of the organization, no matter what their functional role is. Based on the same foundations as the certification program, it takes the core concepts and explains them in a fast paced and clear fashion, without talking down to the participant or baffling them with jargon.  For larger companies, the training can also be customized with video messages from their leadership and localized with multiple language subtitles.

The outcome you can expect from All Employee Training is every member of the organization with a common understanding of the program and how they can positively affect it.

The link to access the free trial is: here

It’s all online, and I liked it. Why not give it a try? Note that I have no commercial arrangement of any kind with Richard Owen or OwenCX.

How I ‘landed’ in Customer Experience  

Many customer experience leaders have entertaining stories about how they wound up in their jobs. I had the job in two different companies and got it by chance both times.

At Blue Bell Apparel, the parent company of Wrangler Jeans, I was the ‘Quality and Engineering’ manager for France, the Benelux and Italy from 1981 to 1983. As we were innovating by bringing stonewashing to the market, I decided to do something nobody had done before. I went to the most important customers in Paris and asked them what they thought and what they would like us to improve. The results were totally different to what my boss and I expected, and surprised relevant people across the company. That is how I learned that the only way you can know what customers want is by asking them.

The second time was of course at HP. It was in about 2007, I think. My job title was Director of Strategic Initiatives and I was the Chief of Staff for the Enterprise Business in EMEA, and for the overall HP EMEA leadership team. A leadership team member to who was in charge of the customer experience team reported left the company. I approached the head of the company in EMEA and said, “Here is how quality and customer experience work is managed today. Here is how I think it should be managed. These are just suggestions for when you appoint the new leader.” His reply: “OK, you are in charge.” Oops. That was in addition to the work I already had at the time.

What an experience! I never looked back.

Our latest blog posts

Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image The plural of ‘anecdote’ is ’emotion’ – You can use this for good or for evil

In their book ‘Nudge’, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein explain that people are poor at choosing among options and can quite easily be ‘nudged’ or pushed gently to make a particular choice. They encourage ‘benevolent paternalism’, meaning nudging customers to make choices that are in their own best interest…
image The plural of ‘anecdote’ is ’emotion’ – You can use this for good or for evil

Some time ago I wrote a short article suggesting that the plural of the word ‘anecdote’ is not ‘science’. My point was that just because a lot of people have said something does not make it true. Let’s take this further and talk about anecdotes and emotions.
image Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Part6 of 6: Internal realities, and conclusion

The final article in the series covers what is often the most difficult area: Can you actually get the sponsorship and resources for your new strategy? The questions I propose should at least help you find out. And once you have analyzed the six situation analysis areas, you need to assemble your top insights about how to achieve a breakthrough strategy, whether for customer experience or anything else.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

CX Journey (Anette Franz) – Questions to consider before forming a Customer Advisory Board

Nice article by Annette Franz on CABs. I am a fan of customer advisory boards and interviewed members of one of HP’s boards to find out what they wanted us to improve. The top suggestion was that they wanted to be able to spend more time with each other. Several said that the main benefit they got was the opportunity to learn from their peers in other companies. The second point they made was that our balance for the speaking and listening was wrong and that we should let them do more of the speaking. As Annette puts it “Keep in mind that a customer advisory board is all about customer listening.” Read her article here.

Bain – Firing up the Customer Experience Factory

I find the concept of customer ‘episodes’ to be a good one. If you think of them in terms of episodes in a TV series, you will be on the right track. Each episode contains a lot of scenes. The sum of our experiences with all of the episodes creates our brand image for the series as a whole. (My all-time favorites are Game of Thrones and Sherlock. My favorite for 2018 was La Casa de Papel. I suppose that is not really relevant.) If we take the example of a home insurance company, an episode might be an insurance claim after something bad has happened. The episode starts when the customer starts to work out how to contact the insurance company and ends when the claim is paid. There are lots of short transactions that happen in between, like phone calls or emails. In principle an episode is the shortest thing for which the Net Promoter System should be used. This Bain article shows how companies structure their improvement work by episode and use that to form what the Bain people call Improvement Factories. Read all about it here.

Looking forward

While not directly about customer experience, I would like to thank the four readers who sent me suggestions about how to engage with the Swiss TV people about a misleading program they finally put out this week on GMO cotton in India. The various points and tone you suggested have produced a useful engagement so far. The extent of the usefulness remains to be seen as they really need to retract a substantial part of what they said on Tuesday. The rest of the program was good, and I learned new things that add to the knowledge I gained about cotton during my seven years in the clothing industry.

December book sales were substantially better than the already-good sales in December 2017, so thank you for that holiday gift. Here are links to all of our books on Amazon.com. Kindle versions are available in all stores. Print versions are available from the major stores only. If you have already read any of our books, please write reviews on Amazon.

Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation

Net Promoter – Implement the System

Customer-centric Cost Reduction

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Color edition)

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Black & White edition)

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.

#85 – The art of persuasion, BA NPS manipulation, CX tips for 2019, 1-800-GOT-JUNK NPS podcast

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Happy New Year! Some thoughts about the art of persuasion in 2019, how British Airways manipulates NPS numbers. Welcome to the 85th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. How to motivate people to act in 2019
  2. British Airways color-coding NPS scale (Don’t do this)
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites – 19 CX tips for 2019, 1-800-GOT-JUNK NPS podcast
  5. Looking forward – Our books are great gifts for your teams, colleagues and friends

How to motivate people to act in 2019

People, including people in our own teams, often act in ways that we can’t understand. Put aside insanity as an explanation for a moment. (Though if you enjoyed The Psychopath Test as part of your holiday reading, you will understand that mental problems can sometimes be the explanation.) Let’s assume that a predictable mechanism exists and is being followed by those you can’t understand. What could that mechanism be?

Regular readers won’t be surprised by my suggestion that the explanation lies in what Nobel-winner Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 and System 2, meaning the two different ways our minds function. You may remember that System 1 is emotional, intuitive, and quick to react. System 2 is slower and more rational. Most importantly, if System 1 has reached a conclusion, System 2 may not engage at all.

Here is the thought I would like to offer you for 2019: To persuade people to do things, rely on System 1 and try to forget about System 2. The best way of engaging people’s emotions is through stories. In the case of customer experience, these stories should ideally be told by customers. Naturally, if you are a customer experience leader, you will want to select and manipulate the stories that are told so they match your strategy, your funded initiatives; the things you need to achieve. These should of course be based on a System 2 methodology that is scientific in its nature.

My thoughts are evolving about the subject and I can use your help. You will probably recognize all of this as an evolution of the blog I sent you recently. I am trying to come up with a single image that communicates what I am getting at here. What follows is a first attempt. The upper row represents System 1 thinking and the lower row System 2. I have deliberately made the font size smaller in the second row to indicate that it is less important as a motivator. If you have other ideas on how to communicate this, please let me know.

British Airways color-coding NPS scale (Don’t do this)  

In the last newsletter I covered a Hilton hotel employee’s attempt to manipulate NPS results by writing a note soliciting a 9 or 10 and leaving it in a guest’s room. It is just human nature to try to influence any score you are measured on. While your managers may hope that you will do this purely by improving your performance, other methods are possible too.

British Airways has now started to color-code their NPS scale when soliciting feedback. You should absolutely not do this, according to Reichheld and Markey. I have to say that providing explanations about the numbers on the NPS scale is one of the most common questions I have been asked over the last few years. The explanation is usually something like, “I don’t think customers understand what the numbers on the scale mean, so I feel I should add some additional explanation.” A couple of times it was positioned as a way of addressing the cultural differences in the way people answer feedback requests. “If those grumpy Australians could understand that a Passive / indifferent score is actually a 7 or an 8 they would score us higher.”

Doing this sort of thing biases your results, and I believe you would fail an NPS audit (should such a thing ever exist). Note in passing that you should never compare customer satisfaction results between countries. Your competition is local, and you should only do single-country competitive comparisons.

And yes, this is yet another instance of Goodhart’s law, as covered a couple of weeks back here.

Here is what the relevant part of the latest BA email feedback request looks like. Thanks to reader Loch Miwa for sending.

Our latest blog posts

Only one new entry in the last couple of weeks. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image The plural of ‘anecdote’ is ’emotion’ – You can use this for good or for evil

Some time ago I wrote a short article suggesting that the plural of the word ‘anecdote’ is not ‘science’. My point was that just because a lot of people have said something does not make it true. Let’s take this further and talk about anecdotes and emotions.
image Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Part6 of 6: Internal realities, and conclusion

The final article in the series covers what is often the most difficult area: Can you actually get the sponsorship and resources for your new strategy? The questions I propose should at least help you find out. And once you have analyzed the six situation analysis areas, you need to assemble your top insights about how to achieve a breakthrough strategy, whether for customer experience or anything else.
image Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Parts 4 and 5: CX industry and external trends

This time the situation analysis process moves on to relevant trends in your industry and in the external environment. Accurate observations about these areas can give you a competitive advantage. As always, you need to ask new questions to get new answers.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

CustomerGauge – 19 tips for great B2B CX in 2019

Katerina Sinitskaia wrote this great set of tips on the CustomerGauge site. I would have liked her to indicate her personal top three. Seems like a good checklist for everyone in any case. You can find them here.

Bain NPS podcast – Interview with Brian Scudamore of 1-800-GOT-JUNK

With my B2B focus I was not sure I could learn anything when I started to listen to this Net Promoter System podcast. Rob Markey interviewed Brian Scudamore, who seems to be somewhat of a serial entrepreneur. His focus area is helping people with relatively ordinary tasks like moving house, painting a house, and some other household-related tasks. He seems to use students for at least some of the work. I found it all fascinating and relevant to all types of business from about the 20th minute onwards. I believe we can all learn something from Brian’s approach. Listen to it here.

Looking forward

It’s January and your teams, colleagues and friends need our books to get 2019 off to a great start!

Here are links to all of our books on Amazon.com. Kindle versions are available in all stores. Print versions are available from the major stores only. If you have already read any of our books, please write reviews on Amazon.

Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation

Net Promoter – Implement the System

Customer-centric Cost Reduction

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Color edition)

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Black & White edition)

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.
Great Marie anecdotes

The plural of ‘anecdote’ is ’emotion’ – You can use this for good or for evil

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Some time ago I wrote a short article suggesting that The plural of the word ‘anecdote’ is not ‘science’. My point was that just because a lot of people have their own personal stories about a subject does not make what they are saying true. Take the example of nutrition advice that follows a common formula, “I have been taking ten times the daily recommended amount of Vitamin D and have not had a cold for over five years. My sister and her best friend have found the same thing. Vitamin D is ‘the sunshine vitamin’. Everyone knows that we get far fewer colds in the summer than in the winter. Vitamin D is the reason why. Click here to buy my Vitamin D supplements with added iron and jubjub berries, which are essential anti-oxidants.”

I am sure you have seen lots of anecdote-based advertising like this. If twenty people all say vitamin D supplements prevent colds, does that make it into science? I hope you will agree the answer is no.

This happens in business settings too

The same phenomenon arises frequently when businesses are developing their long-term strategies, and indeed when they are deciding how to deploy resources in the short term. Your CEO goes to see a customer who has a particular problem with your product or service. The CEO only sees a couple of customers a month and comes back believing that because one customer told him/her that this was an issue, it is indeed a critical issue. The CEO may also have committed to the customer that the issue will be fixed as soon as possible. Major projects must be stopped and resources reallocated until the problem goes away. I wish I were fantasizing, but I have seen it first-hand a number of times.

It would be nice to think that your customer experience leader or another executive could approach the CEO and provide a list of the top five customer issues that you have learned about through research. You may even be able to list the three strategic initiatives that you have under way to address the problems. For some reason that won’t matter. The anecdote has become science in the CEO’s mind.

Daniel Kahneman’s work

While I say that your efforts to provide data won’t matter ‘for some reason’, what I mean is that they won’t matter for a specific well-understood reason. That reason has been documented by the Nobel-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He describes two ways our brains function in terms of two systems:

  • System 1 is intuitive, emotional, and quick to act.
  • System 2 is rational, scientific, and relatively slow to act.
  • And… if System 1 has jumped to a conclusion, System 2 will not engage at all.

French study on organic food as an example

If you Google “French study shows that eating organic reduces cancer risk by 25%” you should find a lot of links to articles on the topic. Indeed, you will find so many links that you might think that it is true. You would be absolutely certain that this is what the French study said.

What the study (which I have read) actually says is that a group of almost 70,000 people who lived particularly healthy lifestyles and also ate organic food had a cancer incidence that was 25% lower than that of the general population over the four-year period of the study. For example, the study group had 15.7% of ‘current smokers’, compared to an average of 31.8% in France as a whole. They also drank less alcohol and exercised more than average. I don’t find it at all surprising that they had far fewer cases of cancer. How much of this was due to organic food? The authors suggest that it had no effect for most of the observed cancers, and may have had an effect for two types of cancer. They also acknowledge that a much larger and randomized UK study of a million people did not show any positive effect of organic food consumption on the incidence of cancer.

The plural of ‘anecdote’ is ’emotion’

None of the facts make any difference. The 25% anecdote has passed into the folklore of the organic food and nutrition communities. In two of the three Swiss cases where the 25% cancer reduction story has been published, my attempts to provide the actual data have been rebuffed. The answer given is “So many sources are saying the 25% story is true that you must be wrong.”

The point here is that the many anecdotes have grouped together to create an emotion about a particular topic. System 1 has reached its conclusion. System 2 is not welcome.

Use this for good in your business

So, you can now use this information for good or for evil. If you have science-based facts that you want to promote, come up with some human stories that will help. If you work at a security software company and want to ask for funding for a particular project, make sure you have your data and add a human-interest story like this:

We lost his data

 

Or you can use it for evil

On the other hand, if one of your colleagues, or perhaps a political opponent, has science-based facts that are inconvenient to you, don’t push back on the science. Simply come up with a human-interest anecdote that supports a different direction. This is easy in politics.

Let’s take the example of immigration. In most countries the immigrant population commits far few crimes than the native population. If you are in one of these countries and want to promote anti-immigration legislation you simply come up with a story about your neighbour who was attacked by an immigrant. The story does not even have to be true. You simply imply that all immigrants from your target country are dangerous. “A woman down the road was attacked by a teenager from Outer Slobavia last week. The Outer Slobavians are all dangerous criminals and we need to keep them out of our country.” It does not matter what the data says. Evil, eh? [You can’t hear me practicing my evil laugh here.] And yes, I am sure you can work out how to use this general principle in a business setting.

Conclusion

I have to work on an email to the producers of a Swiss TV program that has been announced for January 8th. As far as I can tell from the trailer, the anti-GMO journalist is going to show a documentary about cotton production in India. I think the information will be based on an entirely false story that the Indian anti-GMO activist Vandana Shiva started to spread about 15 years ago. She says that GMO cotton, specifically a variety that is resistant to bollworm attacks, has been responsible for a large part of the 270,000 suicides there have been among Indian farmers since 1995.

Yes, it is tragic that farmer suicides represent 10% of the total suicides in India since 1995, but there are many holes in the story. For example, the GMO cotton in question was introduced in 2002, requires far less pesticide use, and has a much better ROI than non-GMO cotton in India. My challenge is that her argument can be summarized in three System 1 words, “GMO Suicide Seeds”, and I only have a System 2 rebuttal. Ideas on how to condense it into a System 1 summary are welcome. Contact me by email if you have any ideas.

 

Remember that our books still make great holiday and New Year’s Day presents! All of our books are available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon stores worldwide.

 

 

#83 – Most-read articles update, manipulating NPS scores, funny videos, AI bias

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Last week’s ‘most-read articles’ list is already way out of date, and an example of bad research from a major company. Welcome to the 83rd edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Most-read articles update – Includes one I could not mention last week
  2. Don’t measure individuals on NPS – They will find a way to manipulate it
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites – Funny service videos, AI bias
  5. Looking forward – Our books are great gifts for your teams, colleagues and friends

Most-read articles update – Includes one I could not mention last week

Over the last week I have learned quite a lot more about what people (including you) apparently like to read. On Friday I wrote an article about the badly-written PwC customer experience research report that I mentioned here last week. It has already become by far my most popular article on LinkedIn this year, doubling the prior number one’s reads. The new article is here. Note that I wrote to the lead author of the report last week Wednesday suggesting he retract it until it can be improved. He did not reply, so I put my full critique on LinkedIn on Friday. It is more extensive than what I wrote here last week.

And an article I wrote two weeks ago that is not about customer experience just became my second-most-read post on LinkedIn. I criticized a different piece of research, this time on the ‘morning routines’ of ‘300 high achievers’. Their suggestion was of course that if we all copy such routines that we will be high achievers too. The defect in the research is that there was no control group. Perhaps the medium and low achievers among us have the same routines, or maybe something even more intense that we should therefore avoid. Who knows? My article is here.

However, the most-read thing I wrote last year did not appear on LinkedIn and was not on my own site either. It has had over 16,000 reads. It is on Quora, a site where people ask questions and get answers. (I suspect the majority of ‘answers’ are written by the people who ask the questions, or at least the first answer on the list.) Quora had a huge data breach two weeks ago, which is why I did not include my post in last week’s list. In this case, the question was “Why do business people fly the expensive business class if the goal of businesses is to minimize cost?” 

Here is what I wrote:

“When the CEO and/or other senior executives feel they are justified in flying in Gulfstreams at $46 million each, it is hard for them to take a position that everyone else should fly in coach/economy. One Gulfstream costs the same as 300,000 advance purchase Chicago-Atlanta return fares. I just looked for midweek flights a month from now, on Delta, from Midway to Atlanta, so am not making this up. I realize that some companies still do have Gulfstreams and a coach-only policy. The same companies also impose travel freezes for Chicago-Atlanta (for example) while continuing to own and operate Gulfstreams.”

300,000 is not a typo. Let me know what you think. This reinforces my general view that (sadly) people prefer negative messages over positive ones.

Don’t measure individuals on NPS – They will find a way to manipulate it  

A family member checked in to a Hilton Garden Inn this week. This message was in her room:

This is a typical example of what happens when you measure individuals on NPS. Compared to your reference period before you started the individual measurements, your NPS will improve, whether or not the service has actually improved. I am not picking on Hilton here as they are not worse than many others. Indeed, I have received a note from a car sales person asking me to phone first if I could not give him a 9 or a 10. His year-end bonus depended on the number of Promoter scores he received.

If you find yourself stuck with a system like this because (for example) your CEO thinks it is a great idea, do what the General Motors CX leader does and ignore the scores. Just read the answers to the ‘Why?’ and ‘What could we do better?’ questions.

Our latest blog posts

The articles listed here are part of a new series on a specific aspect of strategy creation: the process of asking new questions so you can get new answers. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Part6 of 6: Internal realities, and conclusion

The final article in the series covers what is often the most difficult area: Can you actually get the sponsorship and resources for your new strategy? The questions I propose should at least help you find out. And once you have analyzed the six situation analysis areas, you need to assemble your top insights about how to achieve a breakthrough strategy, whether for customer experience or anything else.
image Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Parts 4 and 5: CX industry and external trends

This time the situation analysis process moves on to relevant trends in your industry and in the external environment. Accurate observations about these areas can give you a competitive advantage. As always, you need to ask new questions to get new answers.
image Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Part 3: Competitors

There are two main categories of competitors: traditional and emerging. The emerging category includes companies you do not know about yet, but who may be about to take over your business. Here are some questions that will help you understand how you are doing compared to your competitors.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Curated by Userlike – 16 great and really funny customer service videos

I love these and could not stop laughing. Enjoy them here.

You Are Not So Smart podcast – Machine Bias 

The actual title of this podcast is ‘How we transferred our biases into our machines and what we can do about it’. It is the best explanation of the topic that I have heard, and I consider it to be essential listening. The ‘You are not so smart’ podcasts can occasionally be tedious, but this one is definitely not. Learn more here.

Looking forward

It’s December and your teams, colleagues and friends need our books! Great end-of-year gifts, in my unbiased opinion.

Here are links to all of our books on Amazon.com. Kindle versions are available in all stores. Print versions are available from the major stores only. If you have already read any of our books, please write reviews on Amazon.

Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation

Net Promoter – Implement the System

Customer-centric Cost Reduction

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Color edition)

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Black & White edition)

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

To change your subscription, click here.
Situation analysis internal realities and insights

Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Part6 of 6: Internal realities, and conclusion

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So far, the situation analysis has allowed you to dream about what you can do for customers and partners, how you will crush your competitors and how you will lead your industry. This time we move on to the internal realities in your own organization. It’s a tricky subject and can be the hardest of the six areas we have been studying. Let’s be positive: to get new answers, you have to ask new questions.

This is the fifth in a series of articles about what I consider to be the most important aspect of strategy development: an accurate analysis of the current situation and what should be done to improve it. The first article was about customers and is here. The second was about partners and is here. The third was about competitors and is here. The fourth was about industry dynamics and external factors and is here.

Questions about internal realities

While the first five areas are all about what is happening outside your company, you are unlikely to be able to sell and implement every conceivable idea within your company. These questions may help establish what you can achieve:

  • What is the state of executive sponsorship for your current efforts?
  • How likely are you to be to get any additional funding and people you may need to implement?
  • What can you do to prove the value of your work?
  • How can you secure enduring sponsorship for your work; sponsorship that will survive leadership changes?
  • What current work can you stop in your own area to provide resources for new work?
  • Do you have a formal talent management program in your company that you could use to staff improvement work on a part-time basis?
  • What measurement and improvement systems and processes have your CEO and other key leaders used in their previous companies?
  • Look at the intranet pages of your business and function leaders. Which ones mention customers as a priority and which seem to have no interest in the topic? Which ones have announced and staffed formal customer-centric initiatives?
  • Have you grown by mergers and acquisitions? If so, are many different improvement systems and processes in place? Which ones seem to have the best reputations and produce superior results?

These are just suggestions

Each company is different. You need to come up with your own list of questions. Try to find at least some that you believe nobody has ever asked. My draft list is a reasonable starting place. I have tried to include questions that are about people and organizations as well as about sources of funding. The second question on the list is critical, nevertheless; if you have no hope of getting the people and other resources you need to implement a new strategy, well… you should probably change companies.

The answers lead to insights

The result of the situation analysis in each area should be a short list of insights. Each team should aim to have one to three insights and potential initiatives ready to explain and propose at the end of the analysis cycle. If a team has more than three ‘top priorities’, they have probably not put enough thought into it. As French philosopher Rene Descartes said when writing a letter to a friend (and this is often mis-attributed to Mark Twain), “Please excuse me for writing such a long letter. If I had had more time, I would have written a shorter one.”

Useful insights often take the form of “so therefore…” statements. “We looked at the industry benchmark data from Temkin Group and saw that Acme is outperforming us in this area. We believe we are stronger than Acme here, so therefore here is what we need to do…” The point is that the action proposals need to be based on data and analysis, and not on ideas that have come from thin air, with no factual basis for believing they will improve customer or partner experience. Each team’s insights and proposals will be competing with those from other teams for funding. The better supported the proposals are by fact, the easier they will be to explain and support.

Conclusion

We have now covered all six dimensions of a situation analysis and outlined how to turn the questions and answers into insights. The word ‘insight’ is a deep and meaningful word. It is not superficial. The process I have outlined should give you the depth required to decide what areas you should concentrate on and how.

Good luck!

 

As is often the case, the above is a substantial rewrite of part of a chapter in one of our books; in this case Customer Experience Strategy – Design and Implementation. All of our books are available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon stores worldwide.

 

 

#82 – Most-read articles, how not to do research, mandatory NPS for UK banks, cartoons

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The things I like to write and you like to read, and an example of bad research from a major company. Welcome to the 82nd edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Our most-read articles on our site and on LinkedIn
  2. What is your favorite color? (How not to do customer research)
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites – Mandatory NPS for UK banks, cartoons
  5. Looking forward

Our most-read articles on this site and on LinkedIn

I have been reflecting on the types of things I should write about. As you might expect, I would prefer to write things that you want to read. I think the best information I have about what you like to read (other than this newsletter with its ever-expanding distribution list) is the list of most-read pages on our website and the most-read articles I have posted on the main LinkedIn feed. Interestingly, to me at least, the lists are not the same.

Here are the top three from our site:

  1. The role and work of the Chief Customer Officer or customer experience leader.
  2. Measurement and improvement systems – Customer Effort Score
  3. New data: Does employee satisfaction drive customer satisfaction? Not really!

And here are the top three from LinkedIn:

  1. Journey mapping – The Main Customer Experience Measurement and Improvement Systems
  2. The Huddle and Inner Loop of the Net Promoter System® (5-minute read)
  3. Customer Experience ‘Watermelon Problems’

If you have not read some of these please have a look. And please let me know the main types of things you would like me to write about.

What is your favorite color? (How not to do customer research)  

Please bear with me for a moment. I am going somewhere with this. What follows is the general format used to gather data for a customer experience research paper published by a major global consulting firm. OK, I am going to exaggerate a little, just to make my point.

Please pick your favorite color from this list:

  • Red
  • Orange
  • Yellow
  • Light blue
  • Sky blue
  • Pale blue
  • Navy blue
  • Aquamarine
  • Purple
  • Sparkly glitter color

Here are the (fictional) research report headlines based on analyzing the answers:

In a shocking development that should change the way you think about color, global consumers prefer red, orange or yellow to any color of blue by a margin of over five to one. And for the first time ever, green has totally disappeared from global color preferences! Global fashion houses are in turmoil and those who have overstocked green items are expected to lose half their value on Wall Street.

This is why you should never base customer research on a closed list of choices that you have made up. The answers would be completely different if you simply asked people the open question, ‘What is your favorite color?’ and let them write it in a blank field.

I wish I were exaggerating, but I am not. Even reputable companies do closed-list research. Here is a new publication from PriceWaterhouseCoopers that claims to tell us what ‘really matters to American consumers’. The core questions, based on a closed list of 20 choices were ‘Q: When it comes to great overall customer experience, how important do you think each of the following will be in the future? Which of the following things are worth paying more for?’ Choices ranged from ‘Charitability’ to ‘Efficiency’, as you will see on page six of the report. Personally, my top answer would have been ‘That a company remembers me’ but that was not among the choices. Try to think of your top choice before looking at the graph with the list on page 6.

The report gets worse in that the headlines and takeaways do not seem to match the research. On page two they have an overview that says “What truly makes for a good experience? Speed. Convenience. Consistency. Friendliness.” Speed and consistency were not even among the possible choices on the list. The person writing the report seems to have made it up based on personal bias, or just on nothing at all. Disgraceful.

If you work at PwC or believe I have this wrong, please let me know.

Our latest blog posts

The articles listed here are part of a new series on a specific aspect of strategy creation: the process of asking new questions so you can get new answers. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Parts 4 and 5: CX industry and external trends

This time the situation analysis process moves on to relevant trends in your industry and in the external environment. Accurate observations about these areas can give you a competitive advantage. As always, you need to ask new questions to get new answers.
image Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Part 3: Competitors

There are two main categories of competitors: traditional and emerging. The emerging category includes companies you do not know about yet, but who may be about to take over your business. Here are some questions that will help you understand how you are doing compared to your competitors.
image Strategy: Ask new questions to get new answers – Part 2: Partners

The majority of companies have partners for at least some of their business. The three main categories of partners available to most businesses are resellers, implementation partners, and subcontractors. This article concentrates on the questions that should be asked and answered to get new insights about partner strategy.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Ian Golding: The future of VOC measurement – don’t let organisations do it themselves!

Ian is one of the top CX people on the planet and has great success with his ‘Masterclass’. The full article is worth reading and the core news is that UK banks are now required to be measured on customers’ willingness to recommend them and they have to post the results in their bank branches. This healthy development was driven by reports from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) saying that UK banks do not compete enough with each other. Apparently only 3% of UK consumers change banks each year. The new regulation requires independent measurement of customer satisfaction and they are of course using the NPS recommendation question as the main score. GfK did the first study. Read Ian’s article here. Fascinating.

Marketoonist – Cartoon Powered Marketing 

I just came across this entertaining site. I suggest you start with the customer experience article not far from the top. Tom Fishburn is the artist and he licenses his work. You can find it  here.

Looking forward

It’s December and your teams, colleagues and friends need our books! Great end-of-year gifts, in my unbiased opinion.

Here are links to all of our books on Amazon.com. Kindle versions are available in all stores. Print versions are available from the major stores only. If you have already read any of our books, please write reviews on Amazon.

Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation

Net Promoter – Implement the System

Customer-centric Cost Reduction

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Color edition)

“So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Black & White edition)

Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

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