Phil's Customer Service blog

I walked into my local Tesco Metro the other day and they have this new, real-time display above the entrance doors. Sometimes it says ’30 seconds’ even. This time it was less than 60.

The lesson’s  obvious for all of us. This just makes the point in one wonderfully ‘in  your face’ screen. In the 1980s and 1990s, large organizations busily created processes for managing customers based on them/us queuing or waiting in line – most notably the contact centre/center industry.

But, customers don’t want to wait. They hate you for it. They hate your call centres that queue them or make them wait in line. They hate your attempts to route them through your system with Interactive Voice Response.  They hate you for making them fill in a form with their personal details when you already have that information. They don’t want that. They want a real person answering their question now.

The reason they won’t wait is that time is life. By asking them to wait, you are stealing their precious time – you are taking little chunks of their life. You are killing them by moments. That’s how they/we see it. Life’s short. We all want to get the most out of it. The more you eat into people’s time by making them wait, the more you are, literally, taking their life away from them, second by second, when they want to do something else with that time.

So, before you build yet another process based on the assumption that customers will wait in line to reach you. Or even on the cynical assumption that they won’t wait, so you ‘manage’ the queue that way – which we all have experience of as customers; you actually exploit the ‘Life’s too short to wait’ feeling we all have by making your service have a long wait time – the traditional route for keeping customer complaint calls down – then you are, in the long-term, dead yourself as an organization.

Follow Tesco. Follow Disney. Bust your queues or lines. Don’t build processes that assume customers will wait for you.

Why on earth should they?

Phil Dourado 

My colleague, Susan Johnson, is working on brand behaviours for a client. We were doing some research into brands that are brought to life by the people who deliver the service. As we were looking into Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, Susan came across this and shared it with me:

“Virgin has Brilliant Basics and Magic Moments”

Brilliant Basics. Magic Moments. That’s a powerful four-word formula for bringing a brand to life through how people behave.

Clear brand behaviour guidelines provide the framework, great processes and committed people provide the brilliant basics within the framework. Then the Magic Moments often come from the personality of your people and their freedom to express it. Freedom within a framework is the way to frame the thinking on this.

Nearly always, a ‘magic moment’ comes from anticipating a guest’s need. And surprising them. Magic needs surprise.

The Telegraph ran this letter to Richard Branson a while ago – I’m late in noticing it. I like the eventual response – Branson rang him up (he does that – he did it to me once when I worked for The Independent) and offered him the chance to select the food and wine for future Virgin flights. I also used to work for The Telegraph and haven’t read it for ages and was more than surprised at the praise it lavished on this letter. Yes, it’s funny, but why go on about how it is ‘almost universally praised’ – Their news journalism used to be good. That’s just hype. Which is why I gave up on journalism for the most part…

REF: Mumbai to Heathrow 7th December 2008

“I love the Virgin brand, I really do which is why I continue to use it despite a series of unfortunate incidents over the last few years. This latest incident takes the biscuit.

Ironically, by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I was subjected to at thehands of your corporation.

Look at this Richard. Just look at it: [see image 1, above].

I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day. What is this? Why have I been given it? What have I done to deserve this? And, which one is the starter, which one is the desert?

You don’t get to a position like yours Richard with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue hasn’t it. No sane person would serve a desert with a tomato would they…

more here

There’s been a tendency in recent years to downplay getting something perfectly right and apply the Pareto Principle of 80/20 instead. If you wait to get it perfectly right, we’re told, you miss the boat. Up to a point. I actually don’t like that way of thinking but can see that it’s necessary. I prefer extremists – ‘monomaniacs’ Peter Drucker used to call them – who obsess over making every detail perfect.

When it comes to a customer experience, it’s the detail that will make or break you. There are no small things. That’s what I’m uneasy about with the ‘go when it’s 80% right’ approach. Or the ‘ready, fire, aim’ approach, as Tom Peters puts it. I guess you can bring the two approaches together – Launch something at 80% then refine it while it is ‘out there’, using customer feedback in real time to adapt it to reach 100%, then keep on going to improve it.

It’s a strategy of ‘emergence’, which fits fast-changing times.

Anyway, what sparked off that thought is a blog post on the BNET network, which is itself fast-emerging as a great portal that aggregates sources from around the net then puts a layer of distillation on top in an attractive way. On this occasion by working with commentators from Harvard. No, I have no affiliation with BNET whatsoever, I just like their output.

Here’s the blog post, from Sean Silverthorne, on working with perfectionist and extremist leaders to produce a stand out innovative customer experience - James Cameron and Steve Jobs: Passionate Leadership .

From Tom Peters’ blog…

“Airline service”—I’ve called it the ultimate oxymoron for years and years and then more years. Well, that was before I met Kingfisher Air on a roundtrip to Mumbai last week. First there were the “butlers,” I guess you’d call them, that carried our bags on and off the plane for those of us lucky enough to be in business class.”

Peters goes onto say how the attendant in business class walked down the aisle asking passengers if they needed their glasses cleaned before leaving the plane.

Here’s the post.