Big tech vendors still failing a simple CX test

I put myself in the position of customer yesterday - trying to trade with some of the leading technology companies of our time.
I tried 20 in total.

Most of these companies would claim they would at a minimum help you understand your customer. Some would claim to be leaders in improving customer experience. Yet all but one failed a very simple test. To contact them I had to fill in an online web form.

I hate online web forms with a vengeance.
To me they say: "You customer, You must do things my way if you want to trade with me."

• They force my compliance with your data fields,
• They mean I have no record of the correspondence (you do), not even which email or phone number I have given you (that's my data that is). 
• They tell me what I should tell you.
• They won't accept the realities of unstructured data. 
• They don't allow me to send attachments. 
• They make me act in the way you want and say only what you'll allow. 
• They cost me time in later clarifications an email and attachment could have resolved.

As I came across example after example yesterday I understood how so many have so far still to go on the journey to putting the customer first (not customer centric, but customer as partner). The door to their businesses had been designed to serve those on the inside better than those on the outside.

It put me in mind of a restaurant I once had lunch at where I saw half of the customers turn away because the door was designed to be pushed rather than pulled open. Embarrassed customers tried the door and when it didn't work the way they expected, they turned and walked. If the proprietors reversed the door they would double their trade.

Food for thought for CX and UX designers.

Customers want to get closer to the wizard, not the curtain

Image via www.joelafferty.com

The kerfufle over horse meat being passed off as beef in a variety of processed foods in the UK will prove yet another driver towards market authenticity for consumers whose trust in the centre (media, politics, show biz heroes) is being eroded on a daily basis.
While brands try every trick to get closer to their customers (who doesn't want to be 'customer-centric'?), customers are demanding a closer relationship with the wizard behind the curtain of the brand.
They want to get ever closer to the source and are finding ways around the middle men to have their own more direct relationship with that source. I recently suggested the decline of the High Street could be traced to this, at least in part.

A brand is an illusion created by the source, the interpretation of the receiver and the interaction between the two and other receivers.

So what happens when you take the authenticity of the source away? It looks like Findus is about to find out. Because it has revealed it uses third party suppliers in a buck-passing exercise which I doubt will find favour with the British public. They've pulled back the curtain and revealed... nothing is there. The source is long gone.

Some brands exist as arbiters of quality - curators. M&S is a good example. Distributed source - in which the curtain is everything.
But most brand illusions are at risk of disappearing as consumers become more and more savvy about pulling back the curtain and more and more demanding about having a direct relationship with what is behind.

Which takes us back to horse meat. Worries about what enters your food chain should have been quoshed by brands we can rely on (alongside governance regimes we expect to protect us). Both have failed us.
Fixing this requires radical action. As radical as the action that saw the beginnings of the co-operative movement in the dark days of the industrial revolution.

The co-op was founded, fundamentally, to give the working people of Britain a source of food they could rely upon to be unadulterated. In these times flour was often cut with chalk, for example - beer watered down., and much worse that would make horse meat in your lasagne look heaven sent. Yes there were political motivations - but food safety was paramount.

You could trust your co-operative for this as much because the customers were often the same people who grew the food, who processed the food and sold the food. At the very least they would have known people involved. They were local.

Today the co-op owns more farm land in the UK than anyone else. One simple (but big) way to reconnect and to rebuild that trust would be to place its 'out of town' stores on those farms and build farming and processing experiences around them.

It would be one clear example of a brand lifting the curtain, allowing its customers to get closer to its source.

Our trust in one another needs to be rebuilt. And that starts at the source.

IBM's evolution of business - expert views

Here's the fifth in the series of videos provided by IBM on the future of 'Social Business'. I'm delighted that this time around they've included at least some reference to OPEN business and to my role not only as a 'thought leader' (ie blogger) but also as a practitioner (Co-Founder of the Ninety10 Group)

You can see the previously released versions here, at least those featuring my contributions.

Just to reiterate - I'm very keen on making the distinction betweeen 'Social' Business and 'Open' Business for positive reasons. This from a previous post on the subject:

"There's little wrong with social business and much that is good. But it rarely inspires business leaders. In fact I know a very senior business journalist who has never even heard the term.
And when I was invited in to IBM to talk about Social Business in London... I made the point that few CEOs will feel comfortable with turning their business into a social one. The term creates unhelpful mental blocks. IBM folk reported similar concerns.
Why make life more difficult when what we all want is change for the better?

"So what's the difference between Social and Open Business?
Here's three distinctions I see:

1. It's not about the tools - it is about Behaviours:
Often social business conversations focus on implementing software. Open Business urges you to think Behaviours first. What are people doing, what can and will they do? If you are starting with tools you'll likely starting in the wrong place.

2. Think less about messages and more about products. Open Business urges you to consider ways of making things with the people for whom they are intended; for the best possible fit with real need; for efficiency; for results people care about. Messages are an outcome of this process - not its purpose. Talk 'social' and all roads will lead you back to messages.

3. Ditch the customer.
No, really. Stop thinking about customers. Customers are people you intend to do things to. Open Business urges you to think about the long-suffering customer as partners to work with instead. It pushes those people deep into the production process - right to the start, to join with and be supported by the org in delivering the things all parties want - all partners want.

"Tools/Behaviours
Messages/Products
Customers/Partners

"There are differences: Critical ones in transforming how business is done. "

Related articles

• Ditch the customer if you want to transform business (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
• IBM's Social Business predictions for 2012 (delphineremyboutang.wordpress.com)
• Expert Perspectives On Social Business (edelman.com.au)
• 10 Biggest Social Business Stories Of 2011 (informationweek.com)

Top 5 Posts of 2011

I've written more than 50 blogposts this year. But 5 have stood out for the attention they have received.
In case you missed them, or would like a reminder. Here's the top 5: in reverse order of popularity (as measured by views).

5. We Don't Connect To Be Marketed To:
In which I posit the outrageous suggestion that we don't form groups to be, er, marketed to. And we might be wise to try to figure out why groups do form in order to engage in a process that values all parties. More.

4. Ditch The Customer If You Want To Transform Business:
An appeal to think differently about your relationship with the people you intend to serve. Open rather the Social Business; Behaviours rather than Tools, Products rather than Messages, Partners rather than Customers. More

3. How Riots Spread - Expressed Through the Medium of Dance
My attempt to explain what was really going on when London's rioters hit the streets in the summer - and the real threat their self-organising abilities pose to traditional Government. Plus a great video. More.

2. The Two Kinds of Social Media Strategy
There are two kinds of social media 'strategy'. And they service two kinds of orgs; the ones which see social media as a channel through which to sell stuff and the ones who realise that social media offers a bigger opportunity to become an Open Business - with all the benefits that apply. There's a simpler way of putting that: There are the orgs that are prepared to change, and those who are not. More

1. 'Top Stories' Reveal Facebook's Broken Strategy
What Facebook's focus on lowest common denominator news among friends (Top Stories) reveals about their strategy - and what that's headed in the wrong direction. More 

Scaling Passive and Active Customer-Centric Innovation

Those familiar with my approach to 'social media' will know I think the marcomms element is a happy outcome rather than a primary objective.

The marcomms-first approach - best characterised by the phrase 'using the channel of social media' puts the cart very much before the horse, in my view.
You get efficient, contagious and joined-in with marcomms as an outcome of the really juicy value creation bit of our digitally enabled socially connected lives.
But the juicy bit is better-fitting innovations. (Image courtesy RachelVoorhees)

If you involve the people for whom the product or service is intended you get a product or service which is a better fit with their needs. And that's customer-centric innovation.
The outcome is better for the customer and since better fit equals more sales that means better for the producer (assuming you can maintain margins, of course).

Working with small groups of customers to co-create is not new. Scaling that is.

For example just three or so years ago no one would have written a blogpost to tell the world they were having a cup of tea. Too much effort to go to.
Now, with tumbling technical barriers to entry for anyone to publish their thoughts (no matter how 'trivial' when viewed by traditional criteria) 135k conversations about tea are published in a single month in the UK alone.

All those tweets and Facebook status updates, (forums and blogposts too) reveal how people are using a product, why, where and when, and what they do and don't like about it. And how they'd make it better - if only you gave them a chance.

Gathering what they have to say, analysing it and sharing the resulting data and strategic insight with the right part of any organisation (for action) can be described as Passive Customer Centric Innovation.
You ask no questions. You require nothing more of your customers and potential customers. But from their open publication to their peers and the world, they provide you a low-cost fast track to innovation to mutual advantage.

The second, Active Customer Centric Innovation, takes the same gathered data, identifies (through nodal network analysis) the most appropriate members of communities and invites them into a process of co-creation with key stakeholders. This requires their active engagement; and rewards for their skills and knowledge.

In both cases the key outcome is a better product - one your customers like more.
The marcomms benefits are a happy bonus - and all the better for being derived this way.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone so I may have to tidy it up later ;-)

Related articles

• Customer Centric Employee Engagement (customerthink.com)
• Amazon acts exactly like a customer-centric org shouldn't (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)

Amazon acts exactly like a customer-centric org shouldn't

Amazon gets cut a lot of slack by a lot of people. It's held up as a paragon of the web2.0 age - a fabulous disruptor.

Its stated mission is to become the most customer-centric company on Earth.

Sounds wonderful.

But let's get the reality stick out.

Like so many people in a snow-affected UK, I've been let down recently by Amazon.

And when I've tried to email customer services I've found an un-usable form to fill which fails to send unless I complete an 'add your name' field - and there isn't one!!! (I generally use Mozilla Firefox for this - not exactly a rare interface with the internet...)

And when I've called, I've found a 'computer-says-no' attitude among staff - having to demand escalation to more senior people within a short but frustrating period of time.

Customer centric is as customer centric does, my friends; not as it says it does.

I'm an Amazon Prime user. At the moment.

Biggest let down for me has been a delivery of Christmas presents which I ordered to come via the 'First Class' delivery option.

Little did I know (and neither is it clear in the Amazon purchasing process) that when you order 'First Class' from Amazon they get to choose how they are going to send your item to you. I do wonder if trading standards have ever challenged this. Royal Mail ought to have a word, in my  view.

Amazon chose to send me this last package via CityLink. Now, I don't know about you, but for me and most folk I know in the UK, when I select 'First Class' delivery I expect delivery by the Royal Mail. Indeed the very last courier company I want deployed is CityLink because they have a 'local' depot furthest from me. And their website fails to record requests for redeliveries from their customers. And they don't answer the phone. And they close for pick-ups from the depot when the going gets touch. And they don't try to fix their backlogs by going out on Sundays.

No, Amazon, when I request 'First Class' I mean by Royal Mail - because if I'm not in when the the postie tries to deliver there is a depot I can go pick up from about a mile from my home.

So Amazon, I want a 'Not by CityLink (and for other folk not by x, y or z courier) option - at the very least made available to Prime users.

But why am I blogging about this rather than just dropping Amazon some customer feedback?

Well, first because that bloody email form keeps failing for me (I hate email forms with a vengeance, by the way - no record of what I sent and never a clue as to whether they are being picked up or dealt with).

Second because when I went looking for senior Amazon UK folk to make contact with they were, how can I put this, virtually absent from the internet.

The MD, one Brian McBride (you know, the chap who dropped you an email apologising for poor service a week or so ago), is not discoverable on LinkedIn even - let alone on google or any social media. It's alright for you to send your customers an email then Brian - but not to get one back?

You will find a few relevant and pertinent folk for Amazon UK on Linkedin - the Marketing Manager, for example. But their profiles are, for the most part, marked 'private' - not even a name on show.

Guys - you are operating in the exact opposite direction  of your organisation's stated aim. You cannot become customer centric when you don't listen and respond. You certainly can't listen if you don't engage in social media and you hide from contact with your customers.

No one appears to be monitoring and managing response to the deluge of outcry about your services on twitter etc right now. A real shame because there is one hell of a wikifixing opportunity happening for you right now.

You cannot become customer centric when you don't listen and respond.

Seriously, taking online payments and enabling user reviews does not a customer centric organisation make.

Step up - start listening, start responding, open your doors - then you can start leading the way to customer centricity.

In the mean time, feel free to contact me by any means you choose. I will respond.

Related articles

• Britain's Royal Mail adds routes to catch up on weather backlog (cnn.com)
• Royal Mail: First class stamps to cost an extra 5p in record price rise (dailymail.co.uk)
• Post workers make extra deliveries (mirror.co.uk)
• Royal Mail recruiting more staff (bbc.co.uk)