Customer Experience

#75 – Instagram business art, NPS podcasts, LinkedIn groups, patient satisfaction, NPS benchmarks

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Instagram page with our drawings, NPS podcasts, LinkedIn groups and more. Welcome to the 75th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Instagram page with our business art
  2. New Net Promoter System podcasts coming – your input needed
  3. Latest blog posts – In praise of LinkedIn groups – R.I.P.
  4. Notable items from other sites – Patient satisfaction, Temkin NPS benchmarks for tech vendors
  5. Looking forward
Instagram page with our business art

First, thank you for the positive feedback we have had about Peter’s business drawings in our books and website over the last 18 months. We appreciate it. He is my younger brother, has an Oxford doctorate in cognitive psychology, has made his living as a professional artist and as an art magazine editor. Now he also exercises his creative talents as a website designer and programmer (here). His way of thinking is often unexpected, and his drawings and websites reflect that.

Peter has now decided to launch a business drawing Instagram page that you can find here. I think it looks great, but I am biased. What do you think?

New Net Promoter System podcasts coming – your input needed

I will start to record a new series of Net Promoter System podcasts with Rob Markey next week. (If you have never heard of the Net Promoter System podcasts, please have a look here.) We are planning a short series that will cover NPS by industry, probably starting with healthcare. I have picked healthcare because I believe the way most health-related institutions measure patient satisfaction is counter-productive. Other industries have specific issues too.

For clarity, Fred Reichheld and Rob Markey are the co-authors of The Ultimate Question 2.0 which is the reference for the Net Promoter System.

We have not yet decided what topics to cover in our series and have not even decided how many episodes we will record. That depends on you. What do you want to know about the Net Promoter Score and System? Please write to me at mfg@customerstrategy.net and I will do my best to include your questions and concerns.

 

Our latest blog posts

This time I only want to highlight one post, and it is not even on our own website. Following the interactions with LinkedIn that I mentioned last week, I posted the article below on their site. Feedback welcome. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

In praise of LinkedIn Groups – R.I.P

Just an article I wrote on the main LinkedIn feed expressing my disappointment at what I believe is LinkedIn’s intention to kill off LinkedIn groups.

 

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Medium: Death by patient satisfaction in the ER

Speaking of healthcare, this is a rather brutal article by an emergency room doctor expressing extreme dissatisfaction about the impact of the way hospitals measure patient satisfaction. It brings additional weight to views I have already expressed that healthcare satisfaction should be measured on outcomes, rather than on individual interactions. Yes, Dr. Rada Jones is angry. Read it here.

Temkin: B2B Tech vendor NPS and loyalty benchmarks 

Bruce Temkin’s team prepare reliable NPS benchmarks for technology vendors each year. I met with VMware’s then head of Customer Experience about five years ago in Palo Alto and am not at all surprised to see them topping the NPS performance list. I am surprised to see ServiceNow and Splunk towards the bottom of the list. They were both doing so well at a time in their histories when profit was not a strong motive. Oh well. Read all about it here.

 

Looking forward

I will be writing scripts for the new series of Net Promoter System podcasts early next week (see above). Of course, we will continue promoting our books. I have to say that September looks like it may become our record sales month. 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, with the notable exception of Australia, where print versions are not available from amazon.com.au.

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.

#74 – Communication issues, bad service, text analytics, IKEA, NPS and more…

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A series of unusually bad interactions with companies. Welcome to the 74th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Personal experience with health insurance and online ordering of some lights
  2. Personal experience with the LinkedIn feedback process
  3. Latest blog posts – The heart of the Net Promoter System
  4. Notable items from other sites – Thematic and Sampson Lee
  5. Looking forward
My experience with health insurance and ordering some lights

While Swiss tax rates may seem low to people in surrounding countries, it is worth noting that taxes do not fund health insurance. Our health insurance is both privatized and mandatory. When you add that cost to the low VAT and income tax rates you quickly discover that we are not all that different from (say) France. There is intense competition for both the mandatory basic contracts and the complementary insurance products that provide additional services. My family and I are insured with one of the largest providers. Four weeks ago I phoned asking why a set of medical bills sent by post had not been reimbursed. The answer: “We never received them.” They agreed to accept our scanned copies of the receipts by email.

Three weeks went by and the reimbursements had still not taken place, with no communication from the insurer. So I phoned again. “We can’t reimburse you because you have submitted the receipts twice and it is up to you to correct that.” Certain actions were agreed after a conversation that I will censor about lack of communication. Let’s see what happens. My message to you is that it is totally unacceptable not to communicate problems back to a customer. Yes, if they had genuinely not received the receipts by post, they could not have known there was a problem. But still. (For the Swiss readers, the insurer’s name begins with the letter H.)

The above happened while I was not in a great mood about an order for two ceiling lights from the website of the second-largest supermarket chain in the country. They promised delivery in “two to three weeks” in the second half of July. After just over three weeks with no delivery and no answer to an email I sent them, I phoned. “One of the lights is out of stock, so we did not deliver the other either.” They promised to deliver the in-stock light right away. Two weeks went by with no delivery and no answer to two emails asking about delivery. A new phone call. A new promise that has not been kept, as of two days ago. This sort of behavior is totally unacceptable. I speculate that it is driven by an internal rule that everything in an order must be delivered in a single shipment, since the delivery costs they invoice are fixed. (For the Swiss, the supermarket chain name begins with a C.)

Grumble grumble.

Personal experience with LinkedIn feedback process

As many of you know, I manage the Customer Experience Management LinkedIn group that has over 100,000 members. Large groups are quite challenging to manage. It is quite difficult to avoid ‘spammers’ joining the group. There are lots of posts every day, and I like to pin whatever I currently find most interesting to the top of the list. There are people who post too much, sometimes twenty or thirty posts per week that include ads for their own services. I move such people to a moderation queue and only allow interesting things through. If a post is irrelevant to the group I delete it and send the member a message explaining why.

A few days ago LinkedIn changed the group management features. It has become much harder to check whether people requesting membership actually have LinkedIn profiles. I can no longer approve multiple membership requests at once. The ability to pin things to the top of the list is gone, as is the ability to move a member to the moderation queue. The ability to send a message to someone whose post I am about to delete is gone. More importantly for members, the ‘Jobs’ tab has disappeared so nobody can look at relevant CX job openings.

Naturally I have used their Help Forum and product feedback processes to try to resolve these issues. In both cases they explicitly say that they will not reply to you, which I find most surprising. Both processes pointed me at their ‘New Features Blog’ for more information and that blog says nothing about the group management changes at all.

Your suggestions are welcome, including from the two people from LinkedIn on my subscriber list. The message I take away from the experience so far is that LinkedIn does not care about groups or group managers. And surprisingly, they no longer want people to look in groups for job postings.

 

Our latest blog posts

The latest posts are a series of three posts about the heart of the Net Promoter System: the Inner Loop, the Outer Loop and the Huddle. Feedback welcome. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image The Outer Loop of the Net Promoter System® (5-minute read)

The Outer Loop is where generic, systematic improvement opportunities get addressed. There are two types of Outer Loop activities: mono-departmental and multi-department work…
image The Inner Loop of the Net Promoter System® (5-minute read)

Your research process produces feedback that individual employees and teams need to understand and react to. Let’s consider the simplest and most common use of the Inner Loop: ‘episode’ research.…
image The heart of the Net Promoter System (1-minute read)

While it is unfortunately the only part of the system that many companies use, the NPS numbers don’t matter all that much. What matters is what you do with what you learn…

 

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Thematic blog: Text analytics insights, and a webinar with me

Regular readers will know I am a fan of the text analytics software invented by Thematic. Alyona is also doing a great job making Natural Language Processing understandable to mere mortals like me. Her fifth in a series of five articles on the subject should be appearing in her blog around now. You will also find a recording of a webinar she held with me on the list. You can find the Thematic blog here.

Sampson Lee: IKEA – Effortless experience is a wrong strategy 

Sampson’s articles are rare and deep. Always worth reading. This one happens to be over 18 months old and he recently re-posted it to the LinkedIn CEM group. He discusses the origins of the Customer Effort Score and how it has been misapplied to other situations. He correctly believes that there are customer experiences that must not be effortless. A bit of friction is good. Read all about it here.

 

Looking forward

Thinking about starting an Instagram page to post and comment on Peter’s artwork. August book sales were more than double sales we were already happy with last year, so thank you all. Please continue to spread the word.

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, with the notable exception of Australia, where print versions are not available from amazon.com.au.

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.
NPS framework

The Outer Loop of the Net Promoter System® (5-minute read)

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The Outer Loop is where generic, systematic improvement opportunities get addressed. There are two types of Outer Loop activities:

  • The first are those that can be addressed within a single team or function. For example, if your French customers consistently tell you they do not want service center people to use their first names when speaking to them, that can be addressed within the service center.
  • The second category of improvement work is that which requires collaboration across different businesses and functions. If your customers tell you that you need to be able to deliver products within 24 hours, when your current minimum is a week, different parts of the company will need to work together to make the improvement. This is the core work of the overall company customer experience leader.

Prioritizing Outer Loop work

The essence of any business strategy is the concentration of your scarce resources on just a few things that really matter and help you to beat your competitors. When one initiative is complete, start a new one. For the cross-functional work, I recommend having three to five initiatives, no more. It will make the work relatively easy to communicate and to resource, and the team will see regular progress. The (separate) mono-functional teams should have the same limit. A business or function does not necessarily have to have an improvement initiative. You should not waste resources on things that customers don’t care about.

Useful sources of data for Outer Loop work

Here are the sources of data that are most useful for Outer Loop work:

  1. If you have it, the competitive NPS benchmark data should be the most important source. While it might seem subtle, the purpose of your work is not continuous improvement of everything; rather it is the improvement of a few things that make the biggest difference competitively, whether to catch up, or to provide differentiation.
  2. Relationship feedback data is generally the second-most important source to use. If your target customer base is a small number of large companies, it may be all you need.
  3. Opportunities that the Inner Loop process has not been able to address are in third place. The reason they are not at the top of the list is that they need to be prioritized in a broader context. While it may seem odd, there will be things a lot of customers would like you to improve but where there is no real benefit in doing so, compared to other potential actions.
  4. Operational data is necessary to establish the current state of things customers complain about. For example, your customers may complain about long delivery times for products, and your operational data may confirm that the most popular product was out of stock for two weeks, but it is available now. You may decide to discuss how that situation can be avoided in the future, or may just decide that it was a one-off event. Personally, I totally failed to fix one of these situations at HP, despite trying hard for years. Our manufacturing plants for servers shut down for a week at the end of each calendar year. The order management systems continued to provide customers with estimated delivery dates that did not take the shutdown into account. I tried to get this changed for four years in a row, without success. I believe the root cause of my failure was a corporate function that was being measured by these committed dates, rather than actual shipment dates. And don’t get me started on a metric where the ‘shipment date’ was the day something was put into a shipping container, rather than the day the shipping container actually left.

Managing improvements — the Huddle

The primary vehicle for the selection and ongoing management of improvement initiatives is the Huddle. The main mono-function Huddles should be weekly or more often, and can be very brief. The majority of their discussions and work need to be on things team members can do on their own. You can complement these by longer meetings on a less-frequent basis. Cross-functional Huddles are harder to coordinate and should be planned as monthly events. The same cross-functional team can have a longer session twice a year to work on the overall customer experience strategy.

Typical agenda for mono-functional Huddle

Like any other meeting, there needs to be an agenda and people need to prepare for it in advance. Here is a reasonable starting point:

9:00 Welcome — John
9:05 Check status of items on Huddle action tracker — Paul
9:10 New feedback from transactional surveys — George
9:20 Status update on Order TAT initiative — Ringo
9:25 Any Other Business and Close

Fifteen minutes can be plenty for a huddle too.

A great method for prioritizing work

Jim Dixon of Bain has published a great methodology[1] for prioritizing improvement work. It finally addresses the challenge of making customer journey mapping into something truly useful. Journey Mapping is a popular customer experience technique. Its main disadvantage is that it considers every customer touchpoint as equal. It also fails to distinguish between hygiene factors and things that give you a competitive advantage. Jim’s work solves both problems.

Hygiene factors

A hygiene factor is something like taking a shower: nobody cares if you have one, but everyone will notice if you don’t have one for a long time. Think about a real-world example: you don’t think about data security when using online banking. You would not recommend your bank because they did not leak all your personal information and passwords. However, you would certainly be very unhappy if they did.

Jim Dixon takes this into account by considering each touchpoint in terms of its relative ability to delight or to anger customers. The source for this information should be customer comments on the open questions in your feedback system. If Detractors say that long waiting times are the top reason for them being a Detractor, and Promoters never mention waiting times, waiting times only have the potential to anger, and are a hygiene factor. To an extent, this logic is built into the best of the customer journey systems. What Jim adds is competitive benchmarking. This gives you a way of visualizing and taking account of areas where your competitors have an advantage, as proven by your research. Here is the way to combine it all into a single chart. The diagram below is from Jim Dixon’s work.



Use in a Huddle

If an Outer Loop team were considering the graph to prioritize improvement work, the two red circles would take top place. This example does not have any green circles, which would be areas where you have a competitive advantage you may want to push even further. You would probably avoid taking any action on items in the bottom-left box, as your customers don’t care about them. Existing ‘bottom-left’ improvement work can and should be wound up to provide resources to work on the new priority areas. This process should be used to establish the initial ‘long list’. A further step is needed to get to the final short list.

Prioritizing initiatives

The graph below is a simple diagram that will help you to prioritize improvement initiatives based on impact and ease of implementation. In the example below, you would get to work on the ones in the top-right box right away. This one was used to prioritize actions after collecting feedback from Swiss business school students.

Ease-impact diagram


[1] You can read the Bain description here:
http://www.netpromotersystem.com/resources/toolkit/interaction-prioritization.aspx

(The image at the top of the article is copyright Bain & Company. Used with permission. Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.)

As is usually the case, this post is an edited version of a chapter in one of our books; in this case Net Promoter – Implement the System. Like all of our books, it is available in print and Kindle formats from Amazon.

 

NPS framework

The Inner Loop of the Net Promoter System® (5-minute read)

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Your research process produces feedback that individual employees and teams need to understand and react to. Let’s consider the simplest and most common use of the Inner Loop: ‘episode’ research. A customer has a query of some sort and wants it resolved. Let’s suppose they have filed an insurance claim. An agent in your team has just finished a call with a customer to let them know the payment has been made to their bank account, and closed the incident in your CRM system. The system automatically sends a feedback request about the whole claims experience to the customer. (The agent has of course told the customer to expect it.) Surprise, the customer says the payment was not received, but they were since able to find a different way to solve the problem on their own. First, this feedback needs to go directly back to the agent concerned. Personally, I feel it should go back without human intervention if possible. I don’t see a reason that the agent’s manager would need to know, depending on how the agent reacts of course. While I have picked an unsolved problem as the example, the agent should get all positive, negative and neutral feedback directly.

Follow up with the customer

Ideally the agent or his / her peers or manager should follow up with the customer to thank them for the feedback, no matter what it is. The call should happen within 24 hours, preferably much more quickly, before the customer forgets about what they have written. Unfortunately, most companies say they are not able to afford the ideal process and only call back the Detractors, at best. (I can’t count the number of Detractor responses I have given to Air France and Sabena surveys without ever being contacted in any way.) If you have made the (bad) decision that you can only afford to call the worst Detractors, start with just those who gave you a zero or 1.

There is no formal script for such calls. You need to apologize, then have a discussion. Apologizing works, and you must do it on behalf of the company. “I am sorry we screwed up.” not “I am sorry they screwed up.” Whatever your cost limitations, you must at least thank every customer who took your survey for doing so. Even if you use a standard email for this, it should come from the head of the appropriate department and give examples of improvements that have come from prior customer feedback. The department head’s email and phone number should be included, with an invitation to call or write. That won’t cost much and at least your angriest customers get a way of sharing their anger directly with you, rather than just spreading it across the Web.

No call-back script? Really?

It is obvious when people are speaking to you from a script. It comes across as insincere. You need a formal or informal expert system for the unscripted call-back dialog to be consistent and provide value. The best informal system is coaching from a supervisor, supplemented by discussions with team-mates doing the same type of work. Team-mates can help during live calls if you have an instant messaging system. “Let me just check whether any of my colleagues have seen this.” Then a short message to the WhatsApp or Slack group for the team, for example. I have also seen this work in a small software development team where the person taking the call would simply (and audibly to the person on the line) talk to a more expert person near them to resolve the situation.

Calling Promoters back

If a customer has told you they would definitely recommend you and that the latest transaction has made this even more likely, you need to have a ready way of activating them; meaning letting them actively promote you. In many businesses, you could simply thank the customer and say you would really appreciate it if the customer could write a product review on a specific website. You may also like to invite them to join your user group or give them a free ticket to a company event. Transactional feedback comes mainly from end users of products and services. In B2B situations, they will not normally be the ones making the purchase decisions. End users have a more direct impact in consumer businesses.

Why talk to Passives?

In businesses where the cost of change is high, Passives are the category that are most likely to leave you. This is the case for B2B companies that sell things on the basis of an annual contract, or who have dominant market shares in some area. While that may seem surprising, there is a certain logic to it. Passives usually represent about 40% of your customers. You tend not to talk to them much, if at all. The Detractors get lots of attention and often wind up happy. The Promoters are people we like to talk to because they love us.

The Passives? The typical attitude of most companies is “Well, they are not complaining, so I am sure everything is going just fine. No need to talk to them.” If you have any competitors, this is a disaster. You have to assume that your competitors are already talking to your Passive customers, and being particularly nice to them. If you seem to have forgotten about them, they will leave you. Of course you can try to stand that on its head, work out which of your competitors’ customers are their passives, and start to talk nicely to them.

Customer competition
If you don’t have the resources to talk to everyone

How should you prioritize follow-up if you do not have enough people to call everyone?

  • Your top priority should be the people who have provided long responses to the verbatim questions. They care. They have taken a lot of time to provide thoughtful input. You should take at least as much time to call them back and discuss their input. Anyone who provides lots of suggestions is a potential Promoter, regardless of current status.
  • The second priority is your Detractors.

Of course, if you don’t have the resources to call anyone back, you really should not be surveying.

Email and instant messaging for collaboration

Many teams use email to discuss and resolve complex customer situations where people outside service center operations have to get involved. It is not a great solution. Email makes it difficult for people who have just joined the conversation to catch up on what has happened up to then. The use of CCs in email chains may mean that no single individual has the full picture. Sophisticated instant messaging systems like Slack may help if you want to be able to view and search the entire conversations easily. It is tricky to find a good balance, as people who only need to contribute something to a small part of the discussion should not have to be notified of every additional message.

Next time: the Outer Loop.

(Image is copyright Bain & Company. Used with permission. Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.)

As is usually the case, this post is an edited version of a chapter in one of our books; in this case Net Promoter – Implement the System. Like all of our books, it is available in print and Kindle formats from Amazon.

 

NPS framework

The heart of the Net Promoter System (1-minute read)

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While it is unfortunately the only part of the system that many companies use, the NPS numbers don’t matter all that much. What matters is what you do with what you have learned. The heart of the Net Promoter System lies in the three processes that support feedback, learning and improvement. They are shown above.

The Inner Loop covers improvements for individual customers. You will find that some issues come up repeatedly and need to be improved for many customers. These ‘class issues’ are the subject of deeper analysis and improvement work in the Outer Loop. Some Outer Loop items cross business and / or functional lines and need to be led by someone who has the appropriate authority; usually the customer experience leader in larger companies. The Huddle is a regular team meeting to discuss progress. For those not familiar with American Football, the Huddle is the brief get-together each team does to plan its next play. It takes seconds. Implementing each of the three elements well should be the top priority for your Net Promoter System implementation.

(Image is copyright Bain & Company. Used with permission.)

#72 – McDonalds, Singapore Airlines, and lots more

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Strange in-restaurant survey by McDonalds, Singapore Airlines feedback process. Welcome to the 72nd edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. My experience providing feedback in a local McDonald’s
  2. Singapore Airlines customer feedback process
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites –  Cognitive Bias, ROI of customer experience improvement
  5. Looking forward
My experience providing feedback in a local McDonald’s

I made a rare visit to a McDonald’s restaurant in Geneva a few days ago. While enjoying my meal, a person who seemed to be a supervisor came up to me and told me I could have a free coffee in return for answering an online feedback request. It did not take long but did contain a (negative) surprise. After some thumbs-up/thumbs-down questions about cleanliness and the meal, I got the following two screens. (The screen captures were taken after I answered the questions.):

So, what is surprising, you may ask? The answer is simple: I had no contact whatsoever with their website. (For readers inclined to be picky, you can see that the URL for the feedback form is not a McDonald’s URL.) The following question was the recommendation question about the restaurant, but I had no way of knowing that when answering about the website.

I believe this issue could have several explanations. First, McDonald’s seems to have implemented the Net Promoter Score in an inappropriate way. NPS is an overall brand metric that is also useful at the level of an individual product or service. Second, the people in charge of selecting the research vendor are probably IT people responsible for their website and they decided to slip the question in there anyway. Third, since the copyright notice suggests the survey form may exist since last year, it is possible that nobody reads the results or acts on them. Perhaps they are only interested in the numbers.

Anyway, we live and learn. My advice: use the Net Promoter System and Score only at the overall brand level, or to measure and improve individual products or services. Your website is not a product unless you are a company that creates websites.

Singapore Airlines customer feedback processes

Singapore Airlines usually finishes at or near the top of lists of the world’s best airlines. A flight this week gave me a chance to understand their email/web customer feedback process. It includes what I believe to be the single best thing you can do to improve response rates, and still has room for improvement. Indeed, there is a major ‘gotcha’ that I will describe at the end.

The feedback process for Singapore Airlines is administered by Qualtrics and there are several Qualtrics subscribers to this newsletter who may be able to act on some of my comments. The email I received 24 hours after the flight is just below my comments and suggestions.

  • First, embedding the NPS rating scale in the outbound email is the single best thing you can do to improve response rates to feedback requests sent by email. In my own A/B testing at HP it at least doubled response rates. Others have found that it triples response rates.
  • Personalizing the emails helps response rates too. This one is doubly anonymous. It is sent to ‘Sir/Madam” and we have no idea who has sent it. The lack of an addressee name may be a consequence of privacy laws that prevent transmission of personal data to third parties such as Qualtrics without the consent of the people concerned.
  • There is no commitment to improve anything, at least according to the email. The purpose is research only, apparently.
  • This is a relatively short survey with just ten screens, including the thank you screen at the end. However, the email provides no time estimate and there is no progress indicator as you answer the different questions. Providing a time estimate helps response rates. And I am still traumatized by the British Airways survey I received about three years ago that had over 100 screens.
  • It is explicitly stated that you will not be contacted, no matter what your feedback. That’s pretty disappointing.
  • Response rates and customer sentiment can be improved by telling people what you have learned and improved in the past.

However, none of the issues mentioned compare to the single biggest problem. I received the feedback request, but I did not take the flight. I booked it for a family member who received her boarding card by email, so I know the airline had the correct email somewhere. This also happened to me with Thai airways a couple of years ago.

 

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image Time to think about the plural of ‘anecdote’ in new ways

Just a few thoughts based on hearing that “the plural of anecdote is not data” twice in the last week. I think there are two new ways of thinking about accumulations of anecdotes…
image Avoiding confirmation bias when interpreting CX, NPS, indeed any research results

Some thoughts on how to avoid confirmation bias when interpreting research results. While I will use Net Promoter System research as an example, this applies to all forms of research…
image Thoughts about survey infrastructure for Net Promoter and other feedback/improvement systems

Unless yours is a very small company, you will not be able to implement and operate an effective Net Promoter System or any other feedback and improvement system without appropriate…

 

Notable customer experience items from other sites

The Atlantic: The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain

Ah… cognitive bias. One of my favorite subjects. This 15-minute read by Ben Yagoda covers all of the common reasons our brains trick us into believing things that are not true. While it all seems particularly relevant in the modern political environment, this is a customer strategy newsletter so of course I would like you to take a different perspective. Use the article to understand why your colleagues and friends believe many things about customer experience (OK, and other topics) that are simply not true. And if you want to be a bit Machiavellic about it, learn how you can exploit these biases to communicate your own messages more effectively. Learn about it all here.

Temkin Group: ROI of Customer Experience improvement in 2018 

Bruce Temkin and his team have just published their 2018 report on the ROI of customer experience by industry. As a software veteran, I am not at all surprised to learn that software is the industry with the best ROI on CX work. The research covered 318 companies in 20 industries. Fascinating. Read the summary here.

 

Looking forward

Book sales continue their positive trend. We first published the books starting in March 2017 and every month in 2018 so far has had better sales than in 2017. As mentioned previously, the thing that helps most is Amazon reviews, so please provide your views there, no matter what you think.

As you probably know, my brother Peter illustrated our books. He has an Oxford doctorate in cognitive psychology. While not about customer experience, I want to mention the three books he has just published in Kindle format. All three are photography books, demonstrating how a 90-degree rotated view of people, landscapes, and architecture can change our persepctive. Read his LinkedIn article on the topic 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, with the notable exception of Australia, where print versions are not available from amazon.com.au.

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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#70 – Official NPS training, importance of project management

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New NPS ‘Masterclass’, importance of project management. Welcome to the 70th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Official NPS certification has been modernized and moved online
  2. You can’t fake project management skills (I know, I tried.)
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites – ‘Accidental CX’, new research on CX tool adoption 
  5. Looking forward
Official NPS certification has been modernized and moved online

Since Fred Reichheld, Satmetrix and Bain own the Net Promoter System and NPS trademarks, they are the only ones who can designate the ‘official’ NPS training provider. Up to now that has always been Satmetrix, via classroom training. That has now changed.

Satmetrix and NICE merged last year. At that time, Satmetrix CEO Richard Owen decided to found his own company, OwenCX. He and Satmetrix agreed that OwenCX would refresh NPS training and create an online certification system. That system is now live. 

I became involved in an odd sort of way. I approached Richard in early July with a proposal to work on online certification together. He told me that they had already done it, and that it was almost ready to launch. The result of that discussion was that I became the pilot student and the first person to be certified. Proud.

And literally as I started writing this sentence, they announced that certification would be available free of charge to CX consultants for a limited time, and at a greatly reduced price for teams. Read all about it here.

You can’t fake project management skills. (I know, I tried)

I had been managing projects for over 20 years when I had an unpleasant surprise. I had recently moved to a new manager and met him in his office in Munich. We reviewed progress on my latest project. After about an hour, he looked at me and said, “Maurice, you know nothing about project management.” After blustering and arguing that I had been doing it for a long time, so that could not be true, I finally asked him what he meant. He asked me some basic questions, like “What is a deliverable?” and “What is a task?” I did badly in answering.

The root cause was that I had never had any formal training in project management. This had consequences. The main one was that I could not communicate effectively with people who had full Project Management Professional (PMP) training. We used the same words, but meant different things. My definitions were wrong and the PMP experts were correct. I fixed the problem by taking a ‘light’ course.

Anyway, that memory surfaced this week as I was managing a project in a more personal domain; a house move. Worth thinking about.

 

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image Thoughts about survey infrastructure for Net Promoter and other feedback/improvement systems

Unless yours is a very small company, you will not be able to implement and operate an effective Net Promoter System or any other feedback and improvement system without appropriate…
image The lower your prices, the happier your customers will be… right? (Not really!)

A combination of behavioral economics experiments and personal experience that should persuade you that your customers do not always want lower prices. Some fun stuff here…
image Suggested method for choosing your strategy from a list of proposals

Once you have a set of insights about customers, competitors, your industry, the external environment and your ability to implement, the next step is to decide what you are going…

 

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Ian Golding: The Accidental Customer Experience

Ian often writes about his personal experiences as a traveler. Most of the time, he chooses to write about what I will call less than perfect customer experience. In his latest blog he writes about the many unexceptional air and train travel experiences he has had over the last two years. He counted 206 trips in all, and he says he can remember something about just 11 of them, though in most cases he is not quite sure which flight or train trip it was. His theme is that these companies and many others are mainly producing customer experiences ‘by accident’. It’s a nice read. Enjoy it here.

Forbes/Bain: With CX Tools, Master A Few Rather Than Dabbling With Many 

Three Bain leaders just published a summary of their research into the adoption of 20 types of customer experience management tools around the world. Asian companies lead in predictive analytics, as you might expect. Furthermore, they recommend concentrating efforts on just a few tools, rather than spreading resources thinly across many efforts. That seems quite tricky advice to follow. To me it seems worthwhile doing a proof of concept on a range of tools, selecting some of them for pilot, and then deploying the best ones. Perhaps that is what the authors really mean. Read the summary here.

 

Looking forward

NPS is not the only CX certification-related thing going on in my world at the moment. For NPS I have to think about how to answer someone who wants unofficial NPS training for an association but has no money. Outside NPS, I am looking forward to seeing an announcement of another type of CX training being available in a new language. More soon.

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, with the notable exception of Australia, where print versions are not available from amazon.com.au.

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.

#68 – Open plan office layouts, LinkedIn CEM group hits 100k members

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Open plan office layouts, LinkedIn CEM group. Welcome to the 68th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Customer-centric cost reduction and open plan office layouts
  2. LinkedIn Customer Experience Management group hits 100,000 members
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites – NPS for win/loss 
  5. Looking forward
Customer-centric cost reduction and open plan office layouts

Earlier this month two Harvard researchers had an article about the negative effects of open plan office layouts published in the rather obscure journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. The article is titled ‘The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration‘. They studied employee behaviors before and after major office layout transformations in two large corporations. Their main conclusion is as follows:

“Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM.”

The article has been picked up by lots of news sources. I have read or at least scanned about ten such articles. Only one (on the Inc. website) correctly mentioned the possibility that the purpose of moving to open plan layouts is not to improve collaboration, but to save money. 

And yes, it saves lots of money. I have worked in the mixed open/closed environment that was common at Digital, the primarily closed office structure at Compaq until shortly after its merger with Digital, and the almost 100% open office layouts at HP. The HP layouts meant that about triple the number of people could be squeezed into any given space compared to the closed layouts at Compaq. (In our Dornach/Munich Compaq office, status was measured by the number of windows you had. As a Director I had three. A VP had four, and their assistants had three, for example. Lower ranks shared offices.)

A word about customers. Customers don’t care where your HQ is or what your office layout looks like. Putting your building in a low-cost location and squeezing as many people in as possible may be a great way of freeing up cash to invest in things your customers do care about. That is what ‘Customer-centric cost reduction‘ is all about.

LinkedIn Customer Experience Management group hits 100,000 members

Regular readers will know I took over management of the LinkedIn Customer Experience Management group a couple of months ago. Earlier this week we passed the 100,000 member mark. Of course quantity does not necessarily equal quality, and I am doing my best to drive both.

I have received positive feedback on my efforts to pick a new article to feature at the top of the list every two or three days. Both member interest and personal bias drive my choices. If I can see that an article is generating likes and discussion, it is certain to be ‘featured’. There are also subjects like text analytics and cognitive psychology / behavioral economics that interest me personally. I can only pin one article to the top of the list at a time.

I have excluded a number of members for repeatedly posting the same articles. I also delete everything that I see that has nothing to do with customer experience. Articles that don’t include the word ‘customer’ are certain to be deleted, for example. Lots of articles are posted every day, and I do my best to screen them. Your improvement suggestions are of course welcome.

 

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image The lower your prices, the happier your customers will be… right? (Not really!)

A combination of behavioral economics experiments and personal experience that should persuade you that your customers do not always want lower prices. Some fun stuff here…
image Suggested method for choosing your strategy from a list of proposals

Once you have a set of insights about customers, competitors, your industry, the external environment and your ability to implement, the next step is to decide what you are going…
image How demographics affect customer experience research – You should expect surprises

It is tempting to keep feedback requests very short to improve completion rates and avoid wasting customers’ time. However, I have yet to see research where demographics did not make a difference. Most notably, men and women often answer differently…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Net Promoter System podcast: The Business Lessons of Rejection

Rob Markey interviewed Charlie Chase of FirstService for this episode. I have to say I had never heard of them. Their business started off by employing college students to repaint people’s houses. It seems quite intuitive that their lack of professional expertise must be compensated for in some way, in addition to price. That turns out to be the way they interact with their customers. The thing that I found to be innovative in their approach was the application of NPS to people who chose not to buy their services. I think you could consider it to be a form of win/loss analysis. This makes sense in that their business is entirely dependent on ‘word of mouth’. People who don’t select them for the work are of course unlikely to recommend them to others, making it necessary to understand the reasons. You can find the podcast here.

Daniel Ord: Funny things contact center managers ask their agents to do

I admire the work Daniel Ord does, particularly around contact centers. He is based in Asia, though he went to UC Santa Barbara. I suppose the combination makes him particularly attentive to strange and wonderful behavior he spots from time to time. This light-hearted piece is about some funny things he has seen contact center leaders ask their people to do. I have to say I was not sure whether to laugh or cry when I read a couple of them. You can decide for yourself  here.

 

Looking forward

Relaxing a bit in the northern hemisphere summer. Nothing major happening in the short term. I hope all northern hemisphere readers get a break too.

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, with the notable exception of Australia, where print versions are not available from amazon.com.au.

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.
Price_of_Medicine_2

The lower your prices, the happier your customers will be… right? (Not really!)

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One personal story

I found myself in charge of pricing software services for Europe at DEC. Customers had fewer problems with the more recent versions of our software, and we wanted them to update. First, we implemented a policy saying that once the software was two versions old, we would not support it anymore. That seemed to have no effect. Then the business leader, Denis de Pentheney O’Kelly, decided to add financial motivation. If customers were on obsolete versions of software, they needed to buy ‘Mature Version Support’ at a price premium of 50% over the standard support offer. In addition, Mature Version Support had a level of service described as ‘best effort’, with no guarantee of actually fixing anything. We sent this message to all potentially affected customers. Surprise! They were just delighted, and 100% took up this new offer, which they considered to be a premium service. Why does this make sense?

Expectations and perceptions improve as price increases

Dan Ariely and colleagues Baba Shiv, Rebecca Waver and Ziv Carmon ran a striking (and painful) experiment at the MIT Media Lab facility. 100 Bostonians went through the experience. While waiting, they were asked to read a brochure about a new painkiller, Veladone-Rx. The brochure said that in clinical trials “92 percent of patients reported significant pain relief within 10 minutes.” The brochure also said the price was $2.50 per pill. The subjects (victims, in my opinion), were then told that the experiment was about perceptions of pain. They were connected to wires and subjected to a sequence of electric shocks, ranging from mild to very painful indeed. After the painful part, the subjects were given water and a capsule of Veladone-Rx.

Fifteen minutes later, Waver asked them to return for a second series of identical shocks. Almost all reported significantly less pain in the second round. It must have been the Veladone-Rx! Surprising, since it was just a capsule of vitamin C. In the following phase of the experiment, only one thing was changed: the brochure now said that the price of Veladone-Rx was just 10 cents per pill. Now only half of the subjects reported pain reduction.

In addition to the obvious conclusion that pricing has a surprising placebo effect, my conclusion is that behavioral economists are sadists.

Lest you think this is not relevant

My colleagues in HP’s outsourcing business were very concerned. The CEO of a major multinational bank had recently testified to a US Congressional Committee. Included in his testimony were the words, “I knew nothing about any of my employees helping US citizens to avoid taxation.” The bank wanted to be certain that this was true and wanted to implement what is known as eDiscovery software, and compliant archiving software to prove it. Ten companies were bidding. The bank’s procurement people had told the account team that we were among the three most expensive, and had no chance.

The account manager came to me, pleading for a price reduction, having tried other methods. All our business with the bank was at risk, according to him. I asked him to imagine the following discussion between the CIO and CEO. “Hey Fred, remember that software we need to buy to ensure you don’t wind up in prison? You will be happy to know I chose the lowest-price vendor.” I asked the salesman how likely that conversation was to happen. He understood, and a few days later we were told who was on the short list of three finalists. Guess what? The three most expensive solutions were the only ones left.

 

(As is often the case, this blog post is a mildly-edited version of a chapter in one of our books. In this case the book is Customer Experience Strategy – Design and Implementation. All of our books are available in Kindle and print versions from Amazon.)

#66 – CX Communication – Complaints teams – Text Analytics – CX Career Development

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More on CX communication methods, complaints teams, text analytics and developing your CX career. Welcome to the 66th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Communication – The average person is very bad at math
  2. What does a complaints team do?
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites – Thematic Analysis, comprehensive CX career guide 
  5. Looking forward – Webcast on July 19th
Communication – The average person is very bad at math

I was re-listening to an old Freakonomics episode about gun safety in the USA a few days ago. Quite a lot of the discussion was about our emotional reactions to various facts, compared to a truly rational reaction. For example, factually, a US child is apparently a hundred times more likely to die from the parents having a swimming pool compared to the parents having a gun. This made me think about what I have written in our book Customer Experience Strategy – Design and Implementation about how to use emotional reactions to your advantage. In short, you should present numbers in one way to have people think they are important, and in another way if you want your audience to pay no attention to them.

Nobel-winner Daniel Kahneman describes this often-repeated experiment in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow:

Participants are given a choice of drawing marbles from one of two urns, in which red marbles win a prize. They are told how many white and red marbles are in each urn:

● Urn A contains 10 marbles, of which is one is red.

● Urn B contains 100 marbles, of which eight are red.

Easy choice, right? Not so easy, apparently. In the various repetitions of the experiment, 30 to 40% of students chose Urn B, despite the lower probability of winning.

As Kahneman says, “…the remarkably foolish choices that people make in this situation have attracted the attention of many researchers.” He uses Paul Slovic’s term ‘denominator neglect’ to describe it. Some of the phenomenon seems to be explained by how vivid the image of something is in our minds. It is easy for us to imagine the eight winning red marbles against a rather indistinct background of white. Our System 1 has acted and found the answer. System 2 continues to take a nap. Perhaps more remarkably, one study showed that people told about a disease that “kills 1,286 people out of every 10,000” believed it to be more dangerous than “a disease that kills 24.14% of the population.” The imagery of the absolute number overwhelms the relatively abstract notion of a percentage.

This matters for how you communicate the results of any study of what customers want. When you want your audience to internalize and act based on your numbers, use absolute numbers, not percentages. You will of course occasionally want people not to pay much attention to some numbers, and the use of percentages will help. Paul Slovic and his colleagues cite an article that states that “approximately 1,000 homicides a year are committed nationwide by seriously mentally ill individuals who are not taking their medication.” That could also accurately be expressed as “the annual likelihood of being killed by such an individual is approximately 0.00036%.” The former grabs your attention on an emotional topic. The latter makes you want to yawn. The version to use depends on what you want to accomplish.

What does a complaints team do?

As many of you know, I manage the Customer Experience Management group over on LinkedIn. We passed the bar of 99,000 members a couple of weeks ago, and will reach 100,000 within about a month, though that is not what I want to write about. A question about how to measure the effectiveness of complaint handling teams came in yesterday, and I would like to say a few words about the subject here.

The way I think about customer complaints is that they are situations where the ‘normal’ company process has failed to deliver the result the customer expected or situations where the customer can’t identify what the normal process is. In 99% of such situations, the best you can do is to prevent the customer leaving you. If they stay, you have succeeded. After all, they should never have had to complain in the first place. I just don’t see how a complaints team can drive revenue growth or bring you new business directly.

This means that the way to measure the effectiveness of a complaints team is by tracking customer loyalty. If you know your historic rate of losing customers each year by business and don’t have a complaints process, try implementing one for a single business, then comparing loyalty numbers after about six months.

 

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

image Suggested method for choosing your strategy from a list of proposals

Once you have a set of insights about customers, competitors, your industry, the external environment and your ability to implement, the next step is to decide what you are going…
image How demographics affect customer experience research – You should expect surprises

It is tempting to keep feedback requests very short to improve completion rates and avoid wasting customers’ time. However, I have yet to see research where demographics did not make a difference. Most notably, men and women often answer differently…
image Improving response rates to survey requests sent by email

Way back in October last year I blogged about using direct marketing techniques to improve response rates to surveys. This post addresses five additional ideas that are specific to survey requests sent by email…

 

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Alyona Medelyan – Why Thematic Analysis beats Sentiment Analysis

Alyona is one of the world’s leading experts in Natural Language Processing. I consider automatic text analytics to be the single most important technical innovation in customer experience. The reason is that it removes human bias from the interpretation of written customer feedback. It can be applied to unstructured survey data and to online reviews, among others. The whole area is evolving rapidly, as are the ways we can think about and understand it. This short article Alyona has written on LinkedIn explains thematic analysis and compares it to sentiment analysis in a clear and simply way. And she even put a cute photo of a pair of dogs at the top. Enjoy it all here.

Omoto – A comprehensive career guide for aspiring Customer Experience Managers

Moving on from Alyona in New Zealand to Omoto in India, Shruti Sarkar and Vivek Jaiswal interviewed a lot of people in the CX community and wrote this interesting article on CX careers. (Yes, I was one of those interviewed.) The result includes fascinating data about many aspects of our profession, as well as quite a bit of advice. I had no idea the demand for CX leaders was growing so quickly. This is worth the five to ten minutes it will take you to read it here.

 

Looking forward

I will be the guest in a live webcast hosted by Alyona Medelyan on July 19th.  The title is How to combine science and emotion for Customer Experience Success. My preparation is what made me think of the first article in this newsletter. Time zones are tricky to deal with. The webcast is at 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern, 8 p.m. Central European Time, for example. A recording will be available to everyone who registers. You can sign up for the webinar 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, with the notable exception of Australia, where print versions are not available from amazon.com.au.

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.
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