by Rick Otero on January 27, 2012
There is a great post by the folks at CustomerGauge on what we can learn from the US Navy Greenie Board in managing Net Promoter… here’s an excerpt:
In some ways it’s crass to compare this story to business. I am in awe of anyone who can risk their life like this. And how can customer relationships be anything like defying death on the ocean? But there are some points that I took away from his story that related neatly to what we do with CustomerGauge.
The method of having a simple mark and comment for each pass perfectly fits the Net Promoter® concept of Promoter, Passive or Detractor, together with an explaining comment. In the case of business, it’s a transaction, or customer contact in place of a “pass”.
Scores are publicly displayed for all to see – an excellent transparency that you see in the best organisations. This drives continuous improvement, and again, a feature that is found in CustomerGauge, showing the Net Promoter Score and comment by segment, by customer in real time.
And the point that I really liked is that the flyer’s career is in part judged by his/her success on the “Greenie Board”. In our world, that means the “Relationship” Net Promoter Score is made up of the individual “Transactions”. And our Waterfall charts help organisations drill into the reasons behind negative or positive sentiment.
Read the whole article and catch the video here.
by Rick Otero on January 25, 2012
It’s been sad to watch.
I decided tonight to put together a customer experience journey map of my wife Marie’s interactions on getting her Mac powerbook laptop serviced by Apple and the comedy it has become. Originally, I was going to use my recent experience with USAA on an auto claim as it had its own comical moments (the hazard of outsourcing your repairs without adequate QA).
So here’s the story line…
- Laptop mysteriously goes dark. We were in the living room it was on…we had dinner in the kitchen (30 min max) and came back and the thing was dark and cold… an electronic heart attack?
- She researches and finds there is known issue with the NVidia cards and Apple will replace them…
- She schedules an appointment at the Genius bar. Turns out they are “booked” and the earliest they can get to her is 4 days later…. tick, tock…
- Friday, we turn up at the appointed time and they tell us they are too busy and do we want to reschedule. The Seinfeld episode about reserving the car comes to mind. Is this Apple or Sony?
- We wait…. 1 1/2 hours later my wife is finally done, they keep the computer to “send it in”. Unfortunately her computer failed 6 weeks after the approved replacement interval for the known defect and we’ll have to eat the repair cost. She leaves it and “we’ll know something by Sunday”….tick, tock 5 days without the computer. If Apple only had any idea on how much we spent on iPhones (3 in the past year), iPads (1), new computers (2). I used to have 8 Dells in the house and quit them cold when they no longer provided service that met my requirement or timing.
- Sunday, no call…Monday…no call…Tuesday….no call…..tick, tick. 8 days without the computer… is it missing in action, is it in China? Do they even care?
- Wednesday she calls the Melville Apple Store… where is the computer? “We’ve been busy and have not been able to get to it.
- Wednesday 45 minutes later the Apple Store calls. “I will need a new logic board that will cost $995 if we do it… or we can send it in to a 3rd party fixer and it will cost $350. However, there is no guarantee of anything being done at that price…” and oh-by-the-way the fine print says they can use refurbished parts.
She is a small business graphic designer who relies on her Macs when she does major photoshoots and she has one coming up in a week and all her workflow is portable…. tick, tock….
She also teaches photoshop classes to hundreds of students and you can bet they are hearing this story… “Where oh where did my Apple go….oh where oh where can it be?”
Some lessons for Apple…
1. If you have an appointment system for servicing – make it work. Strike 1.
2. If you have kept the customer waiting for a repair and say you are going to have an answer by a target date – have the answer. Strike 2.
2. In the auto industry if there is a known defect they issue an alert to owners, in this case lack of proactive notice and 6 weeks meant the known issue was not dealt with. My wife had taken the computer in a few months ago for a sticking key and no one mentioned the Nvidia issue (Reicheld would call this a bad profit motivation). Strike 3.
3. Fine print around refurbished components is also another “bad profit” example.
…
For the record I have a Sony VAIO and an iPad. Unfortunately I love the Sony design, but their service is horrible. The last two repairs (I kill hard drives as a hobby) took two weeks! Yikers!
I was thinking about a replacing the Sony with a Macbook Air as my two sons in college rave about theirs…however… I may have to go back to Dell now that they have revamped their service.
tick, tick…
I’ve watched the decline of service (in the retail experience) at the Apple Store throughout the holiday season but had not expected it in the service experience. It’ll be interesting to see how this journey map ends.
by Rick Otero on January 23, 2012
I wish I could take credit for today’s title, but I’ve been doing some work creating a workshop for how to take customer experience inputs and translate them into action. I remember walking into one large company and asking, “OK, so what do you measure?”. The stack of reports was absolutely impressive. The follow on question, “OK, so what do you do with that?” Quiet.
This is not a trick question. One of the great things on one of my current engagements is that I am working with brilliant User Experience Design guy. I’ve always believe that great design thinking is absolutely critical to transforming the customer experience.
So I went looking through the cobwebs of the net to find CX transformation case studies that emphasized this point and ran across a gem called “Innovation by Design: Irish Companies creating Competitive Advantage” by the Centre for Design Innovation. I remember a debate I was having with an exec about the difference between big M marketing and little m marketing (It made him a bit twitterpated) equating little m branding to advertising and market communications vs. big M branding which is the notion of imbedding brand that includes value proposition clarity and service marketing and service delivery.
The paper highlights not just the “what” to consider but provides 6 case studies that you can shamelessly borrow from to formulate themes for your CX transformation (aka better services marketing). Here’s an example from the section – “Brand is a thousand small gestures”:
It was clear after some initial work that the company name needed to be changed; a difficult task on its own but being an Internet-based company, made even more so by having to secure a .com name. “100% of our customers come through our website. The domain name is critical. This cannot be underestimated.”
Infacta and Carton LeVert kept employees involved throughout the process. “We had a workshop with all the employees and they got a better sense of the whole. It was great for them to see what we were trying to achieve; how design affected not only marketing, but products and customer service.
I think everyone realises now that there is something in this.” The new company name hasn’t been determined yet, but “there are some great names
floating around.”
Martin pulls out a big brand comparison to make his point. “Apple didn’t just wake up one morning and have all this cool stuff. Their brand is always the
same. When you see something you recognise it is an Apple product.”
Just skim it and you’ll see what I mean.
Cheers!
