Recently the lease on my wife’s car expired and it was time to get her a new one.  While I have been eyeballing the Ford Edge as my next purchase, my wife had her eyes on a BMW.  The challenge is the BMW dealer closest to us had salespeople with an “above everyone else” attitude and a service department that was charging way too much for declining service (remind me to tell you about the time they reversed the long and short wiper blades and they disintegrated the first time I went to use them).

So the buying of the car first became about selecting the dealer.  After visiting 4 dealers over a 3 week period we chose one and had almost a great buying experience… Note to self… my wife – and I suspect most women are VERY picky about the relationships they chose to engage in.

There was however a caveat… and not a minor one.

Somewhere along the way the BMW dealership we bought the car from made a REALLY bad assumption.  Just because I happen to sign the loan does not mean I am the buyer. This reality in most retail is important – whether its banking, food market, or car buying – women are making the majority of buying decisions.

My wife chose the BMW dealer (and deselected the nearby dealer that we had done business with before).  She selected the car.  She knew the target price and the car is hers.  I may drive it twice a year… and yet…

• I am the one who got the thank you (not her)
• I am the one that got the “There’s nothing like owning a BMW”
• I am the one that keeps getting the emails welcoming me to BMW service, and
• The gift packet was all about the guy.

Here’s the point.

At the dealership I made it absolutely clear that I was not the car buyer and that my wife was making the buying decision.  How easy would it be to have the sales agent enter in the customer experience program that she was the primary person to cater to for the repeat buy.

Instead by missing a simple “flag” or segmentation tier  both BMW and the dealership erode their brand with each and every “Dear Rick” email that ignores her and her ownership of the vehicle.

Dear BMW – get up to date on the equality in marriage memo and start understanding who the buyer really is.

Good Luck!

Rick

CX Alchemist

One of the challenges in executing a great customer experience program is to translate gains in customer satisfaction to profit.  My past experience is that there is an appropriate optimization between driving net promoter scores and cost-to-serve and lifetime customer value.   I believe the best CX transformers blend art, science, and profit understanding to make the choices needed in where to focus and by how much.  I was looking for a primer on the profit mechanics of a great customer experience and ran across Brett Whitford’s white paper – Measuring the Financial Cost of Bad Service is a great read on how to approach the value and ROI of a customer experience program.

Enjoy!

One thing I love about great clients is that you usually learn as much, or more, than you give.  I’m coming off one of the best customer transformation projects I’ve had the chance to work on.  It’s interesting to see the results when an organization is truly committed to placing the customer at the core and being willing to overcome the addictions of functional silos, acquisition addiction, and walking in the customer’s shoes with a critical eye to opportunities to drive shareholder value.

Starting this journey is not easy.  You can tap my thinking in a new white paper, “The Next Level of Customer Engagement”.

Enjoy!

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.

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…

1. 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?
2. She researches and finds there is known issue with the NVidia cards and Apple will replace them…
3. 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…
4. 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?
5. 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.
6. 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?
7. Wednesday she calls the Melville Apple Store… where is the computer?  “We’ve been busy and have not been able to get to it.
8. 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.

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!

I’ve been traveling the past few weeks doing consulting jobs in places like Seattle and Dallas, all the time an overlay of wondering (and yes worrying) about my son in Afghanistan, who leads of team of specialists that each day work to keep IED’s from blowing up and killing or maiming Afghan citizens and our soldiers.

He has been part of the team that protects the President – a job he called the electronic food tester.  He has been assigned to protect US citizens when a bomb is found on US soil. He has been deployed 8 times overseas in as many years – including having tribal totems from Africa,  being a decorated veteran of the Iraq war, and previously been to Afghanistan two other times, being awarded the bronze star on his 2nd deployment.

The yellow ribbon will be coming down shortly as he let us know this morning that he is on his way back to the States after his 3rd deployment to Afghanistan.  As a parent, I have no shame in being selfish and wanting him out of harm’s way, knowing full well the likelihood is that in another 6-8 months it will go up again.

My son was so proud that on his last deployment every one of the 20 some odd folks that deployed in that interval returned home – pretty much physically intact, albeit one team battered from an IED explosion under their vehicle.

I still remember his first deployment to Iraq.  He had been there less than a week when the first Air Force woman EOD and two others died when a car bomber targeted the team:

DOVER, Del. — A former New Castle resident was one of three airmen killed Sunday in a bomb blast near Baghdad, the Pentagon said Monday.

Senior Airman Elizabeth A. Loncki, 23, died after her explosive ordnance disposal team was targeted by a car bomber near Al-Mahmudiyah, her family said. She is the first woman from Delaware to die in combat in Iraq.

Also killed in the blast were Tech. Sgt. Timothy R. Weiner, 35, of Tamarac, Fla. and Senior Airman Daniel B. Miller Jr., 24, Galesburg, Ill. The three were assigned to the 775th Civil Engineer Squadron, Hill Air Force Base, Utah.

Loncki, who was deployed to Iraq in August, was scheduled to return home in 20 days, her family said. Her boyfriend, Sgt. Jayson Johnson, also stationed at Hill, had planned to visit the family’s New Castle home on Thursday to ask her father’s permission to marry her, said Loncki’s aunt, Tina Masiello.

Instead, Johnson will serve as a military escort for Loncki’s body as it is transported to the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base and prepared for burial.

I wonder about the mental stress of a of a job where each day you wear a confining 80lb suit while taking “the walk” to disarm a bomb while being shot at by sniper fire.  One thing about the EOD team that the movie Hurt Locker created misunderstanding around was they really don’t stake stupid risks and every one of the EOD folks I have met are trained to a Zen like focus on risk management of their surroundings and their emphasis on teamwork is a model of high performance teamwork.

This current deployment had been going extremely well and uneventful until January 5th…

Richard Bell remembers how his son explained why he became an Air Force explosive ordnance technician: “Dad, I don’t want to kill people, I want to save people.”

Originally, the younger Bell wanted to be a firefighter, like his father, but he found the opportunity to defuse bombs appealed to him, Richard Bell said.

“The last phone conversation I had with him several weeks ago, he was pretty elated that they had taken care of an IED,” the elder Bell said. “So it’s comforting for me to know that he was doing what he wanted to do, and he always told me that.”

The two wouldn’t get a chance to speak again. Senior Airman Bryan R. Bell, 23, was killed Jan. 5 in Afghanistan along with two other EOD technicians: Tech. Sgt. Matthew S. Schwartz, 34; and Airman 1st Class Matthew R. Seidler, 24. They were killed by a roadside bomb in Shir Ghazay, Helmand province.

My prayers go out to those families…

If you ever want to “pay it forward” visit the EOD Memorial Foundation and make a donation to help the families of fallen EOD.

As a a citizen, I wish the “war on terrorism” would be over, but realize it may wane from time to time, but will always be there.

Thanks for letting me emote.

I happen to be on a the board of the Executive Forum and Jack Gelman, Board Chairman (and also Group Chairman of Vistage International) sent this reminder out…

THE SITUATION??? ??

In Washington , DC , at a Metro Station, on a cold January morning in 2007, a man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, approximately 2,000 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

After about 3 minutes, a middle-aged man noticed that there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds, and then he hurried on to meet his schedule. ??

About 4 minutes later: ??The violinist received his first dollar. A woman threw money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk. ?

At 6 minutes: ??A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again. ??

At 10 minutes:??A 3-year old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head the whole time. This action was repeated by several other children, but every parent – without exception – forced their children to move on quickly.??

At 45 minutes:??The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.??

After 1 hour: ??He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed and no one applauded. There was no recognition at all. ??No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars.

Two days before, Joshua Bell sold-out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100 each to sit and listen to him play the same music.??

This is a true story. Joshua Bell, playing incognito in the D.C. Metro Station, was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people”s priorities. ??This experiment raised several questions: ??*In a common-place environment, at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? ??*If so, do we stop to appreciate it? ??*Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context???

One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this: ??If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made… ??How many other things are we missing as we rush through life? ??Enjoy life NOW… it has an expiration date

As you reflect on this, ask the customer experience question… are your customers and employees being rushed through it (the motions) or are they feeling it (experience for customers and engagement for employees).

Here’s the original video:

Think about it… or should I say feel it?

Thanks Jack.

A CXPA friend of mine, Mike Wittenstein, sent over three blog postings he felt might be of interest to you.

The first of these is Apple’s Customer Experience Secrets Exposed:

Boasting sales per square foot of over US $5,000, Apple has become the world’s leading retailer. What makes this brand so successful? What keeps customers coming back? What’s their secret?

It’s Apple’s customer experience design, of course. It’s an integral part of their customer experience strategy. In this White Paper, you will see how Apple actually delivers the kind of experience customers appreciate, remember, and talk about. You will also discover patterns you can apply to your own business. But, be warned, you can’t ‘be the next Apple’. Your brand can only be what your customers allow it to be. Even if you took Apple’s furniture and products and signs and made a store of your own, it wouldn’t be the same experience.

Read the rest and download the free whitepaper.

Cheers!

Rick

Art by Ben Heine

Here’s how the past week of CX experiences went…

Verizon

It was with keen interest that I watched the consumer smack down this week against Verizon’s move to charge a fee for credit and debit card payments made online or via phone.  The bigger lesson is the exponential  “voice of customer” leverage  via social media that all companies need to be ready for – with a strategy, internal and external policies, and people that actually know how to engage.

Now if we could only get Verizon to work on their “bad profit” behavior of offering new customers much better rates than existing customers.

Mercedes Benz of Huntington

My wife’s lease on her CLK 350 ended so we turned in her car yesterday to Mercedes Benz of Huntington.  I called earlier in the day to set up an appointment for 2:00, which is when we arrived.

Upon entering the dealership there was no receptionist.  There was actually no one on the sales floor???

One of the sales people saw us and decided to try to help and wanted to fill out the turn-in paperwork.  I explained I had completed the pre-return paperwork earlier that month.  He insisted on doing it again to “speed things up”, which took about 3 minutes….

Tick, tick, tick.  It’s now 2:15 and the receptionist shows up.  However, the “turn in guy” is nowhere to be seen.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

2:40 and the turn in guy shows up.  Not one word of apology for being late.

He ignores the file prepared at 2:00, gets the pre-inspection file,  and heads out to the car.  He comes back in less than a minute, salivating (the car was in mint condition with only 5200 miles), tells the receptionist to complete the paperwork and says he’s “buying the car” (It’s all about him).  He heads off to inspect with another car, comes back in, and tells the receptionist to get the sales person as “something is up with the Audi’s door”.  He then heads off somewhere else.

About 3 minutes later we sign the end of lease paperwork, and think we are done.  However, they have already taken our/their car off to sell and then realize we do not have the title sticker off the windshield. So now we wait another 8 minutes for them to retrieve the sticker.

Finally the turn-in guy walks by and on his way out the door, in his first real acknowledgment of my wife, says, “You’ve taken really great care of the car.”

50 minutes.  5 minutes of actual transaction time.

No thank you.

No please consider us again.

Marie was fuming.

CX lesson – ending on a great note is the start of winning back customers.  Mercedes lost a repeat buy yesterday and now can add exponential social media – “don’t go there” to the list.

Huntington BMW

We went down the road to the near-by BMW dealer.  I am a BMW geek and love their engineering and handling.  I bought my BMW SUV at this dealership from Lance.

However, my last service was a tragic comedy.  I had windshield wipers replaced. They mixed them up (one is long and one is short) and they self-destructed in a tangled mangled mess when I tested them (makes you wonder about the rest of the service). I was a bit apprehensive.

It did not go well.

We decided to investigate several convertibles on the lot.  We were being very visible about our perusing in hopes one, of the many sales people walking about, would stop and offer some help.  Mind you Marie was READY TO BUY.

No one, nada, zip, zero… 20 minutes.  Strike 1.

We went into the show room looking like we wanted someone to help.  We could have pulled a Romney and had $100 (or was it $10,000 ) bills hanging out our pocket, but resisted.  An overly bubbly woman walks up and says, “Hi I’m the greeter” and gives us each a limp handshake.

I could see Marie’s eyes and knew this brought back bad memories of when Bank of America instituted roboticon greeters at our Charlotte branch in 2004 and Marie felt “slimed with love”.  Strike 2.

OK.  Then we waited… everyone seemed busy, but no one seemed to be talking to customers.  What’s with that?

Tick. Tick. Tick.

We left and walked over the used car section.  Strike 3.

So we walked into the pre-owned shop and Marie asked a perhaps too brazenly dressed receptionist (Marie’s words as she wondered why the receptionist just didn’t do the pole dance right there and then – actually her words were a bit more colorful) to visit with “our salesperson”.

What’s odd from a brand view point is that the receptionist was in the Mini- section (where almost 50% of cars are sold to women) and she was oh-so not the right persona as a first impression.   I wondered who does their hiring?  Have they not heard of mirroring the client?

So the receptionist looked up our file and says, “Alan will be right with you”.

Marie raises her eyebrows  “Alan? Is he a gray haired guy?”

The overly spray tanned receptionist with the tell-tale raccoon eyes says, “Oh no, he’s one of our youngest”.

So the receptionist gets up and walks back with Alan and says here’s your sales person Alan, who shakes Marie’s hand (whew – he knows who is the buyer) as she says I’ve never met you before?

It turns out Lance (who sold us our last car) retired and turned his “book over” to Alan.  (Marie is a killer mystery shopper and I often take her to my clients retail shops as she used to manage customer experience and quality in a large hospital system).

I could go on… but the CX lessons are really simple…

1. Meet and greet any customer – in the first few minutes – when they are looking and acknowledge them and advise them on how to get help if they need it.
2. Mirror the target audience.
3. Never assume any relationship until the prospect/has validated it.
4. If you turn over a book of business, it might help for the prior person to do a warm baton pass.

Hunter Mountain

I took the family on a surprise ski journey to nearby Hunter Mountain.  Much to our surprise, people shied away as there reports of too little snow.  It turns out there was quite enough for this green and blue kind-of-guy and we had a great “low traffic” day skiing.

There was a surprise though.  On our last visit to Hunter Mountain we had to go through an arduous check in process.  This time it appears a lean six sigma team had attacked the check in process.  First, there were plenty of check-in-kiosks (something new) to start the process.  Then the workflow had taken up an assembly line aspect with check in points for the boots, skis, poles, etc.  Total customer cycle time was less than 5 minutes with most of the workflow being value-added versus waiting.

Well done!!!

On a personal note 2011 was a year of challenge and pain for us with events ranging from the loss of loved ones, a break-in, a burned to the ground SUV, and my son’s fifth war-on terrorism deployment to Afghanistan … I won’t bum you out with details. The great news – family and friends have always been there… the best gift of all.

A toast…

to new beginnings, great customer experiences, and a knock-your-socks off 2012!!!!

Cheers!