Posted on

Press Release — Upcoming Customer Experience Speech

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

A NEW FOCUS ON CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE COMING

Companies are betting that a new focus on “experience” will help them better serve local customers

One of the major trends in the world of customer service seems to making in roads in Jamaican corporations. Instead of merely serving customers, companies are hoping that by going after a precise experience they will be able to motivate employees, raise standards and provide customers with more of what they are looking for in their interactions with companies.

Local companies such as Scotiabank, Cable and Wireless and Victoria Mutual have all recently appointed high level executives in charge of “Customer Experience.” They understand what many companies are trying to grasp: the customer’s experience is impacted by every single “touch-point” or interaction they have with a company, including their website, the front-line staff, how they pay their bills or make deposits, and even what they see in their advertising.

On November Wednesday 21st, Francis Wade of Framework Consulting will be addressing the Jamaica Customer Service Association’s International Certificate Graduation, and will be describing this important shift in emphasis that is already positively impacting service standards in the Caribbean region.

According to Wade, “Employees across the board are finding it much easier to appreciate this new approach. Companies are finding that they can tap into an employee’s understanding of “experience” more easily than they can describe to them what happens in some far away company they have never visited.”

“Managers that are still talking about Walt Disney or the Ritz Carlton are speaking over employee’s heads, and are having a hard time relating to their daily experience of the service they experience from their minibus driver, post office, bank and grocery store.”

By adapting this new best practice, local companies are able to do what many companies around the world have done, and start with a set of “target experiences” that the company has decided will support its brand. Once these experiences are defined, they are translated into standards at each “touch-point.” Employees are taught how to deliver these experiences consistently, and how to monitor the customer’s reaction with a combination of advanced interpersonal skills and personal intuition.

Websites are tweaked, process are changed –all in order to produce the particular experiences. Wade said “Managers who think that they can motivate employees by speaking about the service they experienced at their last trip to Sandals are mistaken. They don’t appreciate that a major reason that front-line employees deliver better service in North American companies, for example, is that they have many, many examples of good service that they have seen first hand.”

“They merely have to copy the service levels that they see every day. In Jamaica, employees cannot do the same, and their job is much, much harder.”
Posted on

Customer Relationship Value vs Customer Lifetime Value

An interesting article in this month’s Harvard Business Review describes the difference between Customer Referral Value (CRV) and Customer Lifetime Value.

CLV is more well known — it is the lifetime value of a customer to a particular company. The value is computed by taking a sum of their purchases from the company over time.
CRV is more tricky — it is defined as the value of the customer’s referrals over time. In other words, it is the degree to which other people do business with the company as a result of being referred by that individual.
What is interesting is that the two are not necessarily related.
Miss Mattie, who rarely frequents the store and hardly buys anything when she does, could turn out to have very high CRV if she happens to be the helper of the richest family in the district, and her sister also happens to be the helper of someone else in the same family.
In an earlier post, I made the point that traditional CRM is too shallow an instrument to measure the value of a customer in Caribbean economies. I argued that the person’s network was just as important, and to ignore the Miss Mattie’s of the district is to do oneself grievous harm.
This new measure is, I think, an important one in understanding retail behaviour in the region, marked as it is by vast disparities in income and education. The societies are small, and CRV is critical to understanding the importance of customers by beginning to understand the quality of their networks, and the likelihood of them giving a positive referral.
When the CRV is known, companies can make intelligent decisions about how to market and advertise to each customer. Such an analysis is sure to produce some surprises.
Posted on

Caribbean CRM and Facebook

Here is the genesis of new possibility…

In an earlier post, I mentioned the idea that doing CRM properly here in the region would benefit from a way of finding out who are the people in a prospect’s network.

Funnily enough, I am discovering that Facebook is precisely and exactly the right solution to the problem of finding out who is in one’s network. Here in the Caribbean, this equates to opportunity, as everything important is done through “who you know” and for the first time, you can find a LOT of people that are known and trusted by each other without asking them directly.

I am amazed that no-one seems to have taken advantage of this in any way that I can see.

Amazed.

But I am sure it’s just a matter of time before someone sees Facebook as more than just a cute application, and an addictive pastime, and starts using it to get into the world of influential people.

Actually, maybe the folks over at Boom Networking may have gotten the right idea. They have opened up a page on Facebook to advertise their next event this weekend. If I weren’t on Facebook, I wouldn’t have heard about it, and I have been trying to attend one of their events for the longest time. (Once again, I’ll be missing out, too.)

Stay tuned for more on this topic.

Posted on

On Implementing Caribbean CRM

I recently attended a conference in Kingston on the topic of CRM and its implementation.

While I am no expert on the topic itself, I was asked to contribute a few words to the pre-conference newsletter. The conference was put on by a friend of mine, and included a presenter who happens to be my second cousin.

Attending the conference had me reflect on the efforts I am engaged in to use CRM for my own business, and also on some of the ways in which CRM is not practiced here in the Caribbean.

I suspect that Jamaica is representative of the region in many ways.

When I lived in the US, I, like many professionals, lived in an environment in which un-requested advertising — junk mail and spam — were a fact of life. Giving away contact information was always a question of how much unwanted advertising one would receive in return.

Here in Jamaica, however, just about no-one is interested in who I am, or in using targeted mail or even email.

Not that I miss being blasted with useless paper each day that only ended up in the garbage.

However, the fact that I have not even gotten advertising addressed to “Occupant” tells me something about the way in which local companies are not using even basic, bread and butter techniques. The fact that I live in a fairly affluent uptown community only adds to the mystery.

When I shop, bank or otherwise do daily business, only one or two companies have ever asked me for my email address or phone number. None of the one or two companies has effectively followed up with me after gathering the info. I can only recall a single company that did call me, and I seem to have fallen off their radar.

When the gym membership for my wife and I expired recently, we seem to have been the only ones that noticed. We received no calls, no mail, not a single email, and, it seems, no interest in continuing our infrequently used membership.

This all makes me think that the primary challenge in implementing CRM in Jamaica has nothing to do with the software or IT. Instead, it has everything to do with causing a shift away from mass-advertising to one-to-one advertising.

I recall up until a few months ago before moving, that trucks would pass by on Constant Spring Road mounted with speakers turned up to full volume – the better to be heard above the din of traffic and music.

It is classic interruption advertising conducted Jamaican style, turned up to “full hundred” levels.

Yet, the irony is that no-one really buys anything important in Jamaica without consulting the people in their network. In this small country, who you know and what they know is critical to getting things done, and the practice of asking for advice is the hallmark of the efficient professional.

Also, just about everyone in Jamaica carries a cell-phone that receives text-messages.

It seems to me that we are long overdue for a change to a form of that the uses brains as opposed to brawn, finesse as opposed to force. Since trust is the key currency of the land, and who you know is all important, companies that figure out how to gather the kind of information they need to build trust and learn who the customer trusts personally, will do very well.

They will however, have to demonstrate a key characteristic that our companies seem to lack in their marketing efforts – courage.

The first company that commits to building one-to-one relationships will probably make some very big mistakes in the beginning, and will probably face being shut down by the powers that be. However, if they persevere and are determined how to learn to do it right, I think that they would make themselves indispensable to thousands, including myself.

Posted on

Surpassing Customer Expectations and A Happy, Fun Workplace?

In a Harvard Business Review article dated from July 2003 entitled “What Really Works” by Nohria, Joyce and Roberson, the authors reveal some interesting research that makes a couple of very different points.

The two points come from their observation that winning companies use a combination of management practices that can be thought of as 4 mandatory practices and 2 optional practices.

The mandatory practices are strategy, execution, culture and structure.

The 2 optional practices can be chosen from a menu of 4 practices. They are Talent, Leadership, Innovation and Mergers & Partnership.

Among the many items of interest are a couple of points.

The first is the following:

“Evergreen winners deliver offerings that consistently meet customer’s expectations, and they’re very clear about the standards they have to meet. But they don’t necessarily strive for perfection… In fact, fully one-third of winning companies offered only average product quality. Which goes to show that many customers don’t care about a level of quality that goes beyond their needs and desires; they won’t necessarily reward you for exceeding their expectations. They will, however, punish you severely if you don’t meet their expectations. You tumble quickly when you fail on execution.”

In a prior blog, I wrote about the fact that the ICC Cricket World Cup, with its emphasis on “World Class Standards,” has so far failed to create an experience that West Indian cricketing fans are interested in paying a premium for.

This research finding seems to back up that assertion by showing that expectations that customers don’t have might not be not worth meeting. (I prefer to think in terms of customer experiences, as that is much more precise than talking in terms of vague “expectations.”)

In other words, then, experiences that customers are not willing to have just might not be worth creating.

On the other hand, experiences that customers believe that they must have are absolutely necessary, and not in some theoretical way, but in a felt way – deep down inside the bones of the customer. Mangers need to be careful not to superimpose experiences on the customer they do not want.

For example, it may very well be that a customer of world class standard cricket wants to be able to watch the game without having someone next to them blowing a conch shell… or selling peanuts… or shouting loudly… or dancing at every minute, or offering them food to eat that their “Auntie” made just this morning including something from a goat.

However, for a Caribbean customer, these are required experiences that make Caribbean cricket what it is.

The second point was the following:

“Our study made it clear that building the right culture is imperative, but promoting a fun environment isn’t nearly as importing as promoting one that champions high-level performance and ethical behaviour.”

In effect, the authors’ research results disprove the myth that if the company creates a fun environment, then employees will be so happy and “all else will follow.”

The problem with trying to create an environment based on “fun” is that not only is the stated value wide open to interpretation, but it also leaves management chasing after every employee complaint that they are not having “fun.”

Improvement then becomes a matter of trying to plug all the leaks in the fun people expect to be having. Unfortunately, no company can be expected to be the grand provider of all things that are fun… in fact, to commit to this goal seems to me to violate the principle that each person is actually responsible for their own fun in the first place.

Fun, and happy employees, seem to me to be more of a fortunate by-product for those people who happen to enjoy cultures of high performance and ethical standards. For those employees that do not enjoy such cultures, then the workplace will always be a miserable place.

Companies that try to make their employees happy run a grave risk of putting the cart before the horse.

Posted on

Altering the Customer Experience — A First Try?

I just read a report that the ICC is encouraging West Indians to bring musical instruments to the Cricket World Cup matches, insisting that there never really were any restrictions intended.

I am not sure, but it seems that they are saying that the 6 million people of the region have misunderstood their rules, and that it is somehow our fault…

Click here to read the article entitled “Cricket organizers Want the Calypso Feel Back in the World Cup.”

In a prior post I mentioned that there was still time for the Cricket World Cup Organizers to alter the customer experience. It seems that they have decided that the cricket-loving people in the region have been staying away from the matches because they are unable to make their own music on the ground.

Better if they had just apologised and taken responsibility for their part in the miscommunication, owned up to the poor customer experience they have created, and announced a raft of immediate changes, based on a respectful if not obvious request that they be forgiven.

In the meantime, World Cup tickets on eBay are languishing… unsold and unwanted, with no bids being made.

Posted on

The Demise of “World-Class” Standards part 2

The report reproduced in part 1 was instructive, and gave some important clues as to why an emphasis on standards, even “World-Class” standards, is insufficient for companies.

Clearly the hosting of the Cricket World Cup is a BIG DEAL, and the various organizing committees have told the public over and over that this could not be business as usual, and that the event would have to be organized along World Class standards.

I think that the problem began when the organizers committed an error in assuming that what is World-Class is always better.

However, if there is one lesson to be learned from the empty stadia for Caribbean companies it is this: World-Class standards are meant to produce a particular experience for First World people. It is an experience that First World people desire, and often pay a premium to have.

However, World-Class standards do not necessarily produce an experience that Third World people enjoy, and this, I think, is what is at the heart of the reason why St. Kitts was forced to gave away so many tickets to school children in order to help fill the stadium.

Essentially, the organizers neglected to ask themselves what it would take to create a particular experience for Caribbean people. I believe that they assumed that we would appreciate the World-Class standards all by themselves, and be happy with them.

Well, they were wrong. From the very beginning, the experience of the ICC Cricket World Cup across the region has been that:

  • we had very little say in the “runnings”
  • ticket prices would prevent the average citizen and cricket fan from attending
  • the same prices meant that the crowd would be more upscale, less experienced in the game, and therefore quite different
  • tickets were hard to get, ordering was complicated, some tickets could only be bought as part of 2-match deals and the information on getting them was scarce and often blatantly incorrect
  • we were restricted from doing the things we always do to enjoy cricket matches — eating what we want, wearing what we want, playing music the way we want, etc.
  • they were trying to “change Caribbean culture” according to Stephen Price, the tournament’s commercial director

The organization seems to have left a little something behind on the floor of the planning room.

Yet, this oversight is not unusual — many companies do the same with their over-focus on standards, and lack of focus on the customer experience, and here in the region, it gets them in all sorts of trouble.

For the ICC Cricket World Cup, there is a small window of time to get things right, and to reverse the customer experience that currently exists. Hopefully, someone will take the opportunity.

Posted on

The Demise of “World-Class” Standards part 1


New stadium dominated by empty seats for high-profile clash

Andrew Miller in Antigua March 28, 2007

Brian Lara has vented his frustration at the lack of support West Indies have received over the past two days of their contest against Australia at the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium in Antigua. In a match that ought to have been the plum draw of the Super Eights – an inaugural fixture at a brand-new venue against the reigning world champions – a pitiful crowd was in attendance. Despite suggestions the match had been a sell-out, the 20,000-capacity ground was barely half-full for the first rain-affected day, with perhaps half that many when the sun came out for West Indies’ run-chase.

“It’s very disappointing,” Lara said. “You’d back yourself to think that at least every single game that West Indies plays is going to be a full house. We were received very well in Jamaica, where we got a good crowd against Pakistan and Ireland, but I thought I would be able to close my eyes here, and for the rest of the tournament, and just see our people come out and support the World Cup and support West Indies.”

The attendance figures don’t square with local anticipation of the match. One disgruntled fan suggested that the fault lay with the local organising committee, whose marketing of the game had fallen way short of what was required for such a big occasion. “There’s no culture of buying [tickets] online in the Caribbean,” he told Cricinfo. “Instead there were queues around the block for the few kiosks at the ground, and everyone assumed the seats would have gone.”

Stephen Price, the tournament’s commercial director, told Cricinfo 11,100 tickets had been bought in advance for this game, and a further 700 on the morning of the match. He denied that the pricing or the marketing strategy had been at fault for the poor attendance, but added that plans were in place to distribute the spare tickets to local schools and tournament sponsors. They were unlikely, however, to be implemented in time for Thursday’s match against New Zealand.

“Centres in each of the territories put tickets on sale at the same time as they went online,” Price said. “We also utilised a global network of 50-plus agents. Tickets were easily accessible, and with a significant amount of entry-level prices, starting at US$25, which is the equivalent to a category two ticket in a regular bilateral series. But in some cases, the fans have not attended.”

Price said there had been an attempt to change the Caribbean culture into one that buys early instead of leaving everything to the last minute. “Tickets went on sale ten months ago,” he said. “For a normal bilateral series, they would go on sale two weeks in advance. But there have been the same number of kiosks as ever. The queues may have been long in the late evening, but in the early morning they were empty. People could have come out at lunchtime, or in their own time. To claim otherwise is just an excuse.”

“The infrastructure is good, so now it’s time for the manpower

The commentator Mark Nicholas was disappointed the match was not a sell-out and said the locals were frustrated by the long queues. “A lot of them gave up and said ‘no, I’m not prepared to wait two hours’,” he said. “It’s been one of the problems confronting spectators. The huge amount of security, that’s one thing, the other is the long lines for tickets and long lines for food.”

Nicholas said the remoteness of the site – “you can only park a mile away despite huge areas all around” – was a problem when comparing it to the previous venue. “The old ground was in the middle of St John’s and it was very popular,” he said. “There was a great party feel to the place, but it’s going to be very difficult to rekindle that here.”

The controversy dampened an occasion that ought to have been a proud moment for West Indies and for Antigua. “It’s a very good stadium, it’s beautiful and it’s a tribute to the man, Sir Vivian Richards,” Lara said. “It’s been an awesome effort by the Antiguan people getting this ready, and it’s going to be wonderful for West Indian cricket moving on. The infrastructure is good, so now it’s time for the manpower.”

Not everyone was impressed with the positioning of the new ground. Built on a greenfields site 20 minutes outside of St John’s, many fans had to walk for several kilometres to reach the entrance, or pay for a shuttle service. An impassioned West Indian supporter told a local TV station that it was the spectator’s right to expect to be able to park outside a new and purpose-built ground, while others complained that the spontaneity that had existed at the old Antigua Recreation Ground was missing from the new venue.

But Lara said there would have to be a change of attitudes all around as West Indian cricket gets used to its new era. “When you’re talking about the improvement of facilities the spectators also have to adapt,” he said. “It’s not enough to be able to stay in the same areas or stadiums just because the atmosphere was great. We’ve had some wonderful times at the ARG, but now we move on to the Sir Viv stadium and it is something to be proud of over the years.

“Some of these stadiums were dilapidated. Georgetown and other grounds have been around for donkey’s years. I’m sure people will adjust. I may have been disappointed with the crowd today but I thought the party stand wasn’t bad here or in Jamaica. People are going to enjoy it, and I think the cricketers are very happy that we have facilities that are second-to-none. If you go to the MCG or Lord’s the facilities are great. It’s nice to know we are getting there.”

Andrew Miller is UK editor of Cricinfo

Posted on

Measuring the Mood

Now and again I read an article that takes my breath away. Taking the Measure of Mood by Patrick O’Connell appeared in the March 2006 issue of the Harvard Business Review and it did just that.

The idea is simple and has powerful ramifications for our region.

But first, a little background. The author is a chef at The Inn at Little Washington in Virginia. Their goal is to provide customers with nothing less than a transformative experience.

They do so by training their staff to be keenly observant and sensitive to guests’ words and behaviour–especially to body language. They also developed a system for tracking and communicating this information to everyone who needs it.

They are trained to quickly evaluate the mood of a party, by using the indicators that we all use–body language, eye contact, voice tone, etc. They start off by assigning the party an initial score on a scale of 1 to 10, and logging that score into their database.

They go to work on those parties that enter the establishment with low scores to increase this subjective assessment to at least a 9.

They use common facilitation skills — asking questions, paraphrasing, clarifying, asserting, etc. Actually, they use ALL the means at their disposal to increase the score, including the choice of waiter, speed of service, taste of entrees, seating, music, etc.

They consider the job done when the customer volunteers their personal story, which for the staff is the proof that an emotional connection has occurred.

While I have tackled the issue of customer experience creation at different points in this this blog — click here to see a page of past Chronicles entries on the topic — this takes things to another level.

Something about this article brings me home to our region. In the past year, I have spent nights at hotels in a variety of countries, and there is truly something distinct about the service we render here in the Caribbean.

In other posts, I have referred to it as “Friend Service.” This is the closest I can come to describing the feeling that happens when an emotional connection is made, and the switch is turned ON with a Caribbean customer service provider.

(When the switch is OFF, by contrast, the experience is positively painful.)

This article has led me to think that a service provider who is emotionally intelligent, is better able to read the mood of a person or group of people However, if I use the definition of Emotional Intelligence that I have been using lately, that explanation seems inadequate.

How to define the skill is the next problem I’ll be tackling, but my instincts tell me that we have an advantage over service providers in other cultures, for whatever reason, in detecting the unspoken experience that other people are having. I am guessing that this advantage carries over into the customer service profession.

I have my theories regarding slavery, our education system or our parenting styles that are my best guesses, but I will be exploring the subject further in future posts, and in my work.

Posted on

Customer Experience “Intelligence”

An article entitled Understanding Customer Experience recently came out in the February 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review that echoed some of my earlier posts on the topic.

Here is one of those prior posts.

I am convinced that a focus on experience can be more easily taught to Caribbean service workers, than training based on abstract standards or vague definitions of “customer needs.”

Perhaps there is scope for something called “Experience Intelligence” which has to do with a customer service provider’s ability to scope out the experience that the customer is having in the moment. This phrase seems like a much more precise way to define this important skill.