Nothing is more fun than swapping horror stories about bad (or good, or weird) customer experiences you’ve had. And TotalCX is a place where you can do just that. However, it isn’t just a place for stories—it’s also a place to figure out how the customer experience should have been…what exactly went wrong…how to best improve it…and what lessons can we learn from it.
I’m sure
you are tired of articles about the Boston Marathon bombings and
aftermath events. I know I am, and I live in Boston, in one of the
neighborhoods that was in lock down on April 17 and 18. But something
that happened during that week brought me to clarity about a bias that
I, and many other U.S.-based customers have. We don’t like—nay, we don’t
really trust—customer service agents from other countries.
Now, I
have always prided myself on my lack of prejudice and my acceptance of
all people no matter where they are from, their color, their religion,
their sexual orientation, etc. I am intolerant only of those who are
intolerant. I was brought up to believe that you didn’t have to like
everyone—that you could, indeed, hate someone, as long as that
individual deserved it. The key point is that you make decisions about
individuals, not about people as a group. So I have always been slightly
ashamed of how adverse I am to dealing with foreign customer service
agents.
Sometimes
I would wonder, why am I being so jingoistic? What’s happened to me?
When did I turn into such a bigoted bitch? But something clicked last
week when dealing with a Philippines-based customer service rep from
Dell.
There seem to be three areas where offshore CSRs have trouble connecting to the U.S. customer base:
Lisa
Kimball is a thought leader and master on changing the structure of
conversations in order to help people deal with complex issues. A few
weeks ago, Patty presented her interview of Lisa (in How We Learn and How to Change)
including a discussion of “Liberating Structures,” simple facilitation
techniques that make it possible for people and organizations to be
innovative. This week, we present some of her exercises for helping to
promote her concepts of engaging in effective continuing conversations
based on these techniques.
Designing Effective Group Meetings Using Concepts and Techniques of Liberating Structures By Lisa Kimball, Executive Producer, GroupJazz, May 3, 2013
Only a
few years into its existence, the entire online coupon business is
struggling. Over 800 daily deal companies closed their doors in the last
two years. I turned my focus this week to coming up with strategies and
enhancements to daily deal sites, and offers that might renew the
excitement consumers felt when these deals first started showing up.
Some of the main ideas include:
More personalization of offers
Wish list fulfillment
More information on merchants
Flexibility of offer details
Longer window before offers expire
Allow merchants to “own” the relationship with the customers
What did
you do after stuffing your face with turkey and all the fixings? If
you’re like most of us in the U.S., you shopped! In-store, online, or
combining the two, alone, or with family members, the call of the sale
price lured us in as we fought our way out of our food comas and
football immersions.
Patty Seybold has identified a number of shopping trends surfaced by the sales statistics that have resulted from Black Friday thru Cyber Monday, including:
Social shopping with family members and friends.
Shared online shopping using tablets that get passed around to show each other things they’re interested in.
Earlier retail openings on Thanksgiving evening.
In-store
group shopping with someone as the smartphone guru, responsible for
price checking, while other family members use their phones for
logistics and coordination.
Solo Cyber Monday shopping focused on getting the best deals.
Online retailers offering waves of deals throughout the long weekend to encourage shoppers to visit their sites often.
Bricks and mortar retailers willing to match prices from price comparison tools.
So, did
you follow the trends? If you’re like me, you will be getting very
chummy with the UPS delivery person over the next few weeks as I revel
in my online shopping deals.
~ Ronni
Shopping Smarter with Mobile Devices Changes the Face of Holiday Shopping Mobile Makes Its Mark on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday Sales in 2012 By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, November 29, 2012
How does consumers’ use of mobile devices change the way they shop?
The detailed shopping statistics from the five-day kick-off of the 2012
holiday shopping season gives us some clues. “Couch Commerce” was
popular on Thanksgiving, as friends and family passed computer tablets
around. Price comparisons on mobile apps helped in-store shoppers find
the best deals. On Cyber Monday, power shoppers used laptops and tablets
more than phones to grab deals.
Ronni Marshak continues looking at how customer emotions impact
their relationships with your organizations and your brands. In an
enhancement to our Customer Co-Design methodology, Customer Scenario®
Mapping, we encourage capturing how customers might feel depending on
how well you help them achieve their goals. Doing so can give you a line
of site from customer priorities through your bottom-line opportunities
based not only on how they measure success, but also on how they are
feeling while doing business with you.
~ Patty
Assigning Emotions to Moments of Truth Enhancing Customer Scenario® Mapping by Capturing Feelings By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, November 15, 2012
Customers
are people first and foremost. And their emotions come into play as
they traverse their scenarios to their desired goals. Capturing how
customers might feel depending on how well you help them achieve their
goals can give you a line of site from customer priorities through your
bottom-line opportunities based not only on how they measure success,
but also on how they are feeling while doing business with you.
I always
assumed that the Groupon offers I was sent every day were based on
location: these were the offers for my neighborhood. But I was
surprised, and pleased, to see that Groupon is using a recommendations
engine to determine offers I would find appealing. The primary daily
deal in my in box now includes a statement saying, “Suggested for you
because you purchased XXX.” (See illustration.)
I am,
however, confused. The offer below is for a Tex Mex restaurant, whereas
the recommendation is based on my purchase of a deal for an upscale
Italian restaurant in a different town.
By
coincidence, the new deal is for a restaurant down the street from me
that I quite enjoy. However, I don’t really follow the logic of the
recommendation criteria.
Nevertheless, bravo to Groupon for showing customers why it is highlighting specific offers.
In this
week’s report, I talk about paying attention to customers’ emotions as
they do business with you. How fortuitous to receive an excellent
example of how one financial provider thought about customers in a
crisis situation and made a strategic decision to take one burden off of
them as they face the storm—literally.
As
a Chase credit card customer, I received the following email on Monday,
10/29/2012 at 7:14 PM, shortly after Hurricane Sandy violent hitting
the Massachusetts shore.
We hope you, your families and your customers are safe. Natural disasters are very stressful and we want to help where we can.
This
week, we are expanding our efforts to help you and all of our customers
in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as you manage through the storm.
We are
waiving the following Chase fees through Wednesday, October 31st for
customers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Please know that you'll
have until the end of business on Thursday to make a deposit or a
payment to bring your account current and avoid the fees.
Overdraft Protection Transfer, Extended Overdraft, Returned Item and Insufficient Funds Fees for deposit accounts.
Late fees on credit cards, business and consumer loans, including mortgages, home-equity, auto and student loans.
Please visit chase.com frequently and check our branch locator for details on the branches near you.
Over the past decade, our Customer Co-Design consulting practice has expanded
to creating and facilitating Customer Advisory Boards. Our clients are primarily
large B2B organizations who embrace the customer-empowered approach to CABs in
which customers’ issues and priorities are the focal point for the meetings,
rather than inviting customers to be wined and dined and subjected to endless
marketing hype.
Patty Seybold offers a blueprint for creating an effective CAB by highlighting
what customers want from this type of group gathering:
Network with Peers
Get Insights from My Peers about Specific Issues that Are on My Radar
Solve a Thorny Problem
Validate Our Roadmap
Be Taken Seriously; Make a Difference
Get Best Practices and See How We Compare to Others
Build Strong Relationships with My Supplier’s Top Execs and Subject
Matter Experts
How well does your CAB (or plans for a CAB) stack up?
I have a new customer experience pet peeve: being bullied into using online help.
How many
of you have experienced the following: you have called a company’s 800
customer support line only to be on hold for…well, practically
forever…and between the nondescript elevator music, you are told that
you can get support on the company web site. The implication I get from
this is, “you moron, there are answers there, and, besides, we don’t
want to talk to you.” I admit, my strong negative reaction is probably
because I’m in some sort of customer crisis and am feeling negatively
about the company anyway.
This
message is particularly annoying when you’re calling your ISP because
your internet access isn’t working well, or your calling a merchant
because its etailing site isn’t responding. Speaking with other
customers, they have the same reaction. “How the heck can I go online to
get help when my problem is I can’t get to your site?”
How do
you evolve your customer-facing e-commerce and customer service site(s)
and your online customer-community in synch with one another? That’s the
question that must be facing Sears’ management as they brace themselves
for another brutally competitive holiday retail season. We don’t know
how Sears has organized its staffing and reporting structure to support
its various web properties, but, based on Ronni Marshak’s customer
experience audit of Sears’ newly updated online community site(s), Sears
to have a fragmented, rather than a unified approach to content,
commerce, and community.
MySears Community Gets a Facelift Community and Commerce Are Still Too Separate! By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, October 18, 2012
