Total CX

Eliminating Customer Anxiety

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.

CX Audit: My Sears Community’s Facelift

By Patty Seybold

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

Be Nice to Your Merchants and They’ll Be Nice to You

I recently did a nice thing. Someone I cared about (my ex-mother-in-law) was in the hospital, and I wanted to send flowers. And I wanted the bouquet to be memorable. I went online to view arrangements, but, even on different online florist sites, the arrangements all looked very similar.

(Click on image to enlarge.)

My ex-mother-in-law on the mend with her new dancing and singing friend.

So I looked up florists near the hospital where they would be sent. I chose one for no particular reason, and I called. A very warm woman answered, and I explained what I wanted and how important this person was to me. She asked a few questions about what she liked and made a few suggestions (including sending a stuffed duck that sang “If You’re Happy and You Know It” and flapped its wings and jumped up and down). When I gave her my budget, she assured me that she could send the duck amidst a nice basket of flowers. We continued to talk for about 10 minutes about how healing laughter can be. By the end of our conversation, she said that she enjoyed our conversation so much that she was going to upgrade the level of the flowers in the basket. I gave her my credit card, and we said goodbye.

JetBlue Makes a Weather Delay Bearable

Last week, Patty Seybold, Fanny Wong, Meg Lewis, and I completed a rewarding, but exhausting, Customer Co-Design Session in Florida for a long-time client. Happy, but bone weary, we arrived at the airport to discover that our flights were all delayed. Although Fanny and I were on the same flight, Meg and Patty had different destinations than we did and were booked on different flights. But Fanny and I, as well as Meg, were all flying JetBlue, and, conveniently, out of the same gate.

Originally scheduled for 4:30 pm, when we arrived about 3 pm, Fanny and my flight to Boston was posted as being delayed until 5:50 pm. Meg’s flight to La Guardia was scheduled for 6 pm and no delay was indicated. Hmm, I wondered, how can two flights so close together leave from the same gate? In addition, we noticed that there was an aircraft at the gate waiting, but we didn’t know which flight it was for.

A few minutes later, we saw that the Boston flight was now scheduled for 6:05 pm—not a good trend. Wearily, we sat down, happily found outlets for our computers, and reluctantly went back to work. (Okay, Fanny and Meg worked. I was playing a game.)

Just as we were starting to get antsy, a JetBlue gate agent came on the sound system to update us. And, although the news wasn’t great, the update was.

What to Do When Sh*t Happens that Adversely Impacts Customers

By Patty Seybold

Nobody’s perfect. Stuff happens. Systems go down. Things break. Information is lost or stolen. This month, Bank of America’s retail banking website has had some issues with customers’ passwords. According to the beleaguered customer service associates we’ve spoken with, there was a July, 2012 system upgrade that did not go well at all. Maybe the upgrade was really necessary. Checking online at sitedown.com reveals that there have been 85 downtime reports by consumers on BofA.com since July 5, 2012 and 3,350 downtime reports on BofA since sitedown.com started reporting in 2010. The 3,350 “all time” number of downtime reports compares to many other banks with totals of downtime reports in the low hundreds for the same period. We don’t know who frequents sitedown.com. Maybe it’s skewed towards BofA customers?

Two weeks ago, Ronni Marshak tried to log into her bank account at BofA and discovered that it didn’t remember her password. Having trouble with your password doesn’t count as the system being down, but it IS really annoying. As Ronni and the BofA customer service associate dealt with her problem, she discovered that she was not alone. There had apparently been lots of customers who were suddenly unable to log into their bank accounts. Since most of us now rely heavily on online banking, this lack of access can be paralyzing and hugely frustrating.

What should a company do when there are unexpected glitches that disrupt customers’ lives, cause them to take extra steps, and sow doubt in customers’ minds about the viability of your brand? You need to do more than fix the problem, apologize, and offer an appeasement.

Customer Loyalty Depends on More than a Great Experience

Recently, I read an interesting blog post by Bob Thompson, CEO of CustomerThink Corp., entitled “What Really Drives Customer Loyalty? It's Not Just About the Experience!” I was excited to read it because, even though I’m a fanatic endorser of providing a great customer experience, you have to have the products and services that make the experience worthwhile. After all, even the most elegant dinner party fails if the food stinks!

Bob Thompson agrees:

“Customer experience hype is losing touch with reality. Now it seems that the customer experience is the only thing that matters. Products are all commodities, so trying to innovate is a waste of time because a competitor will just copy you. You can't compete on price, either, unless you're Wal-Mart.

Improve the customer experience, CEM proponents argue, and your customers will be loyal, a competitive edge is assured, and the profits will roll in!

Really? This doesn't jibe with my personal experience as a consumer, where both product and experience are important.”

Bob goes on to talk about the balance of customer experience with other factors in a variety of industries. And it is very enlightening. But, to me, what it comes down to, and what he is saying, is that your company needs to satisfy your customers’ scenarios—what they want to achieve, their ultimate goals that are the reasons they came to you in the first place.

So, in a scenario of “I want my yard to look great,” you need lawn care products. And the things you care about are the quality of, say, the lawn mower, how easy it is to use, the price as well as the cost of fuel to run it, and, yes, the experience of choosing what to buy, making the purchase, getting it home, using it, and fixing it if it breaks. But if the mower doesn’t make the lawn look fantastic, none of the product features or customer experience will keep you loyal.

In the concluding section of his blog post, Bob asks—and answers, “Is Customer Experience important? Of course! But it's not the only thing that matters. The point of good loyalty research is to understand what really drives customer loyalty in your target market. Then you can build a strategy to decide where to invest, which will depend on your capabilities and the actions of competitors in your market.”

You are so right, Bob! And that good loyalty research to understand what drives your customers’ loyalty is to identify and embrace their scenarios.

How to Be a Great Customer!

By Patricia Seybold

My brother Andy Seybold is a great customer! It’s not that he buys more than most people (he doesn’t), or that he travels and meets more people than most (he does). But what makes Andy a great customer is that he likes people. He’s naturally outgoing and cheerful. That rubs off on everyone around him. He gets the best service of anyone I know. Not because he’s haughty, but because he’s attentive and personable. He treats the people he deals with in person, on the phone, via email, with respect, humor, and compassion. So does my colleague, Ronni Marshak. Ronni has a knack for making friends, for unruffling ruffled feathers, for smoothing troubled waters, and for coming to the rescue. Both my brother, Andy and my long-time colleague, Ronni, are expert in the art of being a good customer. So when Ronni suggested that she write about what it takes to be a good customer, I loved the idea!

These tips will serve as a great reminder the next time you’re in a less-than-ideal situation and/or as you’re embarking on a new relationship with a client.

What I found interesting in reading Ronni’s description of what makes a good customer is that I can match them up, person-for-person, with the customers that we and our clients have selected to participate in their customer advisory boards. Good customer advisory board members are critics, and they are demanding. But they are articulate, respectful, and have a win/win attitude.

How would YOU rate yourself as a customer? Do you fume silently and tweet your annoyance to the world at large (which is what I do!), or do you reach out and bridge the gap, offering to be helpful in the mutual dance of commerce?

How to Be a Great Customer
Good Customers Have the Best Experiences
By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, November 3, 2011

Accepting Customer Feedback in the Right Way

The last time I was flying JetBlue (which I do often), there weren’t any Extra Leg Room seats available. Usually I secure one of these seats, not so much for the extra room, although it is very welcome—it’s nice not to have to worry about anyone hitting my laptop closed when the person in front of me reclines their seat as I’m working—but primarily for the other benefits that come with that upgrade: early boarding (so enough room in the overhead bins for your luggage) and the priority security line at major airports (including my home base of Logan airport in Boston).

I mentioned to the gate agent that it would be great to have an upgrade option to priority security and boarding that wasn’t dependent upon a restriction of specific seats. He advised me to go to the JetBlue web site and offer this recommendation. I figured that this was a nice blow off. Offering feedback on a web site rarely seems to do anything except generate an automated response that leads nowhere.

However, the next time I was booking on the site, I decided to try it. On the JetBlue.com home page, I decided to try the link for “Speak up.” (See Illustration 1.) Sure enough, it led me to a page where I was welcomed (on the “Get Answers” tab) with a very simple, but convincing argument for email feedback: “JetBlue's Help Site was designed with your needs in mind. Chances are that the answer to your question can be found here. Plus, it is much easier than picking up the phone to ask.” In addition, there were two additional tabs: “Give compliments” and “Share concerns.” (See Illustration 2.)

Creating Brand Loyalty

By Patricia Seybold

We are all mourning the Steve Jobs’ death. Although not unexpected, it is a very sad turning point for many industries. Steve is being remembered and revered by musicians and music labels, by retailers, by radio, movie and TV executives, by educators, by marketers, by phone users and computer users and podcast creators. It seems that there’s not a single industry that Steve Jobs’ magic touch didn’t reinvent! That reinvention invariably revolved around transforming the customer experience in ways that simplify our lives and delight us.

We all know what it means to have an “Apple” or an “i-experience”—whether we’re discussing user interfaces, physical device design, business models, physical shopping, customer service, software design, or any other aspect of design and execution. Steve Jobs raised the bar forever and took us into new territory. He also proved beyond a doubt that designing and delivering customer-centric products and experiences is hugely profitable!

We can’t all be Steve Jobs. In fact, no one will be able to replace him or come close. But as we consider his legacy, think about what he has done to and for the Apple brand. Most of us have a really strong attraction to the brand. We see ourselves in it. It fits our self-image of who we want to be seen as, and what we want to surround ourselves with. We don’t see ourselves as Steve Jobs’ clones. We DO see ourselves as people who appreciate and deserve well-designed products, seductive experiences, and great relationships with the people who represent the brand. That’s because we know we can trust them to embody the brand values and to provide a level of personal service that respects our needs and context.

As you think about Steve Jobs’ legacy today. Think about how well your organization delivers both products and experiences that customers love to love!

Brand Loyalty
The Direct Path to Customer Satisfaction, Referrals, and Revenue
By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, October 6, 2011

A Flyer’s Ideal Customer Experience

In Optimizing the Airline Passenger Experience, Patty Seybold gives an insightful look at the challenges that airlines face in delivering a great customer experience. As she talked about the tradeoffs that airlines need to make between customer delight, safety, and financial considerations, it started me thinking about what practically all passengers really want when they take a flight.

So what is it that all air travelers want? They want to arrive at their destination on-time, with no hassles, and have a pleasant, uneventful, experience. Note that the destination is the point, not the flight itself. When we talk about our trips in the future, we rarely focus on the actual travel unless there were unexpected difficulties. We talk about what we did once we got where we wanted to go, and we hope to be able to say, “The flight was fine,” and leave it at that. Although there may be a few passengers who actually look forward to the flying experience, for most of us, getting there is a necessary evil, not “half the fun,” as advertisers would have you believe.

Let’s look at what I consider to be the universal airline customer scenario, from flight planning to arrival at the final destination. We’ll look at the Moments of Truth (MoTs), or showstoppers, where everything can fall apart and ruin the experience. We’ll also look at what can mitigate the showstoppers — how airline customers determine that these MoTs have been avoided. Note that we will start with the assumption that the flight leaves as anticipated. The final MoT will deal with unexpected delays and situations.