Customerspective

It's not what you say, it's how you say it.

I just ordered the new book by Danny Meyer called Setting the Table: The Tranforming Power of Hospitality in Business. For those of you who aren't restaurateurs or New Yorkers, Meyer is something of the golden child in the progressive (but not too progressive) restaurant industry. His first establishment, Union Square Cafe, was voted the most popular eatery in New York for some multiple of years in a row, and now there are a hefty handful of other hip and diverse Meyer restaurants sprinkled through that city.

My wife and I gave Union Square Cafe a try our last time in New York, despite my aversion to things labeled "most popular" anything. (It makes me think of "the world's largest Bennigans!" on Times Square). To my surprise the experience was wonderful. Far from being knocked about at a crowded bar waiting for a table, or worse, feeling inferior to the snooty, sublime environment, we felt welcomed and apppreciated in a very human way. The service was, well...warm and professional. The food was fantastic, and we lingered at the table with overt approval from the staff.

The experience caused us to seek out a second of his restaurants, Tabla, which offered modern American fare imbued with Indian accents, or maybe vice versa. Anyways, it was a different but no less impressive meal and evening. In fact, given the table we were at, and the service, I wondered if we had been mistaken for some couple of note.

So, what is Danny Meyer's secret?

It really comes down to that one word: hospitality. That is his business model, in all the word encompasses. It's not "quality" or "service." It's hospitality. It's how he sets up his restaurants, how he communicates to his team.

But here's the distinction in strategy: it's how he hires. His main point is that - if your raison d'etre is hospitality - you can't hire somebody with all the right skills and the wrong attitude. Attitude can't really be trained, skills can. If you start with a person who doesn't understand some of the processes in the restaurant but possesses an attitude focused naturally on helping people, you'll beat the other guy everytime. It's something we believe and try to live here as well.

Customer experience for time-pressed consumers

I've been reflecting on Luis' blog entry about Information Overload. I concur that it is a complex and ever-expanding phenomenon. We at Vox encounter Information Overload in our own lives as well as that of the Customers for which we advocate.

However, I controversially postulate that the real problem isn't actually too much information. There is really no such thing as too much information. The problem is one of organization. It takes too much time and effort to get to the information we want and need, whether it's to get a 1-800 number, to find out how much our insurance will cost, or to find out when our favorite movie comes out on DVD.

Therefore, we realize that from the Customer’s perspective, it's imperative for us to accomplish two objectives: one, to create a clear path to their goal and two, to set expectations of time and effort.

Creating a clear path to Customer goals involves building experiences based on what the Customer wants to do versus what the company wants the Customer to do. It is about--to give just a few touchpoint examples--automated phone systems that tell the holding Customer where they are in the que, websites that always let Customers know when they have received or are sending out an item and written customer communications that speak to the customer instead of at them.

Setting Customer expectations involves answering the questions they ask themselves when trying to access information. Customers want to know "How long will this take?" "What steps will I need to complete to accomplish this?" "Will I need to process a ton of information and make a complex decision, or will this be straightforward?" The more accurately we answer these internal questions of Customers, the less "Info-intensive" we will make their experience.

What else can we do to help Customers accomplish their goals?

Road trip to nowhere (or "just hang on, we are almost there").

Yesterday I've learned two important lessons:

1. Some habits are forced upon you and others are very hard to give up.

2. If you are doing something different from everyone else, you are either remarkable or just plain dumb.

If I'd knew that, it would have completely changed my day...

Having lived my whole life in a tropical country, I find very difficult to remember to turn on the TV everyday to see the weather forecast before leaving to work. In my mind, it should be enough to check it once a week.

(Matter of fact, I still have the habit of looking outside the window to "guess" the weather for the day).

Yesterday here in Chicago the forecast was for a huge snowstorm, so unless one had a "life or death" kind of appointment, every wise person stayed at home and waited to see what Mother Nature would decide to throw our way.  Well, I didn't.  Nothing was said about a storm on the day before yesterday's forecast, and my window guess told me that the snow outside didn't appear to be that bad, so I ventured out and faced the road.

After driving for 15 minutes, I could already tell that it wasn't going to be a fun trip.  It was slick and slushy, not a single snowplow in sight, and the wind was starting to blow–HARD.  I could see many people turning back, but I am not one to give up easily, so I thought: "Everything will flow after I get to the highway..."

The highway came and the traffic slowed to almost a stop.  Still, not a single snowplower in sight.  The maximum velocity was about 15mph.  The road was extremely slippery and the only way to keep driving straight was to stay precisely on the tracks left by the car before you.

All that white around didn't help alleviate my feeling of sleep deprivation and anxiety.  I had no idea how long it would take to get to work or if the storm would still go on for hours.  Other cars started to stop in the curb or look for the exit to go back.  I kept thinking that everything would be all right if I just insisted for another ten miles and, in the end, I found myself turning back after 2.5 hours without even reaching half way to my office.

Almost 5 hours after leaving my home, I was back.  I didn't reach my destination and didn't accomplish anything at all for first half of my day.  I went on a road trip to nowhere for no apparent reason.  On hindsight, I could have worked from the comfort of my home, attended to any meetings via conference call.  It might not be ideal, but would definitely be a better experience.

Like me in that story, customers sometimes are slow to react to a bad experience.  By pure habit, they hang on to a bad service for longer than anyone would consider possible.  But that's an illusion!  If you ignore a customer experience problem until your customers start to leave, you may be waiting too long and now the damage may be irreversible, or just too expensive to fix.

Don't make a habit of overlooking your customers' complaints and suggestions.  If you ignore the signs around you, chances are that you're going the wrong way.

By the way, this morning, before leaving, I opened my window, took a good look outside... and turned on the TV!

Guiness Offers Consumers a Chance to Create their Commercial

Talk about getting the customer involved...Guinness is inviting the public to have their hand in creating their new commercial.  The owner of Guinness, Diageo, is launching a site on Monday that will allow the public creative freedom to use software tools to switch around the soundtrack and footage to create their own commercial.

According to an article in FT.com, "Users will be able to post the finished commercial on the site or email it to friends. They can also compare their version with that produced by the professional creatives at AMV BBDO when the latter appears on television from February 12."

Information Overload: Drowning in a Sea of Inspiration

Everyone around me is overwhelmed by information and I am no exception.

My desk is overflowing with invoices, statements, memos, meeting minutes, reports, articles and books. Post-its® decorate my computer at work and at home. Somewhere in there, I have a paper calendar that I stopped updating long ago. I try to concentrate on the electronic part of my life, hoping that my computer's processor will magically sort out this mess for me...

Not a chance! My desktop background is hidden behind an army of icons, shortcuts, gadgets, widgets, and, of course, digital Post-its®. Microsoft Outlook practically attacks me with meeting alarms every time I open it; my inbox now has 86 new emails (not counting the already filtered spam and junk mail) and at least the same amount of old emails that I should answer, but I know I am not. On top of that, I'm stacking up more than a thousand unread feeds from my favorite news websites and blogs.

All my potentially good ideas seem to be adrift in this vast virtual pool of information. They are just there, below the surface, waiting for some essential fact to jumpstart my brain into a feverish state of creativity.

Just within my sight, but still beyond my grasp, I can identify a few good candidates for inspiration:

• Jacob Nielsen’s "Seniors Usability Study" stares at me everyday when I come to the office. Unlike the half-read and overlooked "Intranet Design Annual Report" from 2006, this one still acts as if it could draw me to it by sheer force. 
• Tom Vander Wells post from last week has some compelling links and examples that I believe relate to one of my previous blog posts.
• I am still hoping to read the report "Mouse Rage," released last month by the Social Issues Research Centre and available at Rackspace.com.
  
• I definitely need to know more about Illinois' teen-driving reform act, since it may affect some of my client projects.
  
• And of course, Seth Godin and Scott Adams are still there, sending their everyday drop of wisdom, wit or contradiction to feed my hungry mind.

After all, if I don't read other people's works and opinions, how can I write my own?

If a solution for my problem is available anywhere out there, I haven't found it yet. It is probably in article number 875 in the list of blog posts I will never read, or chapter 11 in the 100th book from my Amazon wish list.

The real problem is that I am already so numb from information overload that I don't realize I have a problem (and I am supposed to evaluate processes and usability in my job!). I have some vague notion that I need to do something about it some day, but the endless list of tight deadlines keeps pushing it down the priority list.

And it all gets worse. One issue of the New York Times now contains more information than a 17th century man or woman would have encountered in a lifetime. In the last 30 years, humanity has produced more information than in the previous 5,000. The world's produced information is increasing at a rate of 30% per year, and it doesn't show any sign of slowing down.

Now you would say, "Yeah, that's pretty interesting, but what does it have to do with customer experience?"

Well, imagine that your customer is most probably suffering from the same predicament. What can you do to make your products or services stand out and emerge above all others?

You will find at least 6,020,000 "answers" to that question in Google.

Now, if you excuse me, my brain just froze and I need to reboot.

Please Don't Touch the Merchandise

In my last post, I told you how much I disliked shopping in stores before the holidays. After the holidays, I had a few gift cards to dispose of, so I reluctantly made the rounds. The stores seemed to be just as crowded as before, probably due to people taking advantage of the post-holiday sales and their days off of work.

I actually gave up and didn’t even try anything on while I was in the mall, but I did browse a few stores on my way out. Sadly, the store that made the largest impression on me did so only because it was full of unhappy little signs. Each sign was a stern command not allowing something—no cell phones, no trying on earrings, no more than three children at a time in the store, no stuffing merchandise into your pockets. Well, ok, the last one wasn’t written exactly that way, but that was the gist of it.

The store clearly had a shoplifting problem, but I doubt that all the mean signs reduced their losses. Frankly, if I were a prickly 15-year-old, they probably would have spurred me to get away with as much merchandise as possible. I am not a security expert, so I don’t know what steps they should be taking to protect themselves, but I can tell you that I didn’t buy anything in that store, nor will I go back there again.

In France, it is the custom to greet the store owner with a formal, "Bonjour, Monsieur" (or Madame or Mademoiselle, as appropriate)--a very friendly and old-fashioned custom. I’ve also read that if a store owner can get a customer to say “Hello” to them and look them in the eye, the likelihood of a theft plummets.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. It just makes me sad that we don’t do more to promote connecting with customers instead of chastising them.

Eye of the Beholder

I recently had an eye exam as it had been two years since my last screening and it seemed like my current prescription might not be correct any longer - too much time spent staring at a computer.

As I suspected, my eyes have changed over the past two years although much to my surprise, they have gotten better - not worse!  While this would normally please me, it has actually caused me to have a bad customer experience that I never would have anticipated.

You see, my wife and I have vision benefits as part of our health plan.  This vision coverage entails the typical benefits, such as an annual screening for free, annual lens replacement, and a "free" new frame every other year (albeit "free" only up to a rather low price point.)

I like my existing eyeglass frames, so I simply want to get a set of new lens at my updated prescription.  When I returned to my eye doctor to drop off my frame so they could create the new lenses and fit them into the frame I figured they'd be able to crank them out in a couple of hours or at most need to keep them for a day.  However, I was informed that for my new lenses to be covered by my vision plan they were required to send them in to an approved lab to do the work, which would take 2 - 3 weeks. 

At this point I asked, "Well, how am I supposed to go 2 - 3 weeks without my glasses? These are my only pair..." I was then told if I needed the lenses done right away they could be created onsite, but only for "simple" lenses with no special treatments - and I would have to pay for them out of pocket.

Were they serious?  Am I the only person that sees the absurdity of this situation? (pun intended)

So, I am now left checking if any 1-hour vision care centers are in my vision plan network... If not, I have to decide whether I want to pay out-of-pocket or be blind for 2 - 3 weeks.  Not quite what I expected from a vision plan.

The point here is not only is my vision plan provider, VSP, not providing a quality customer experience to me, it is also costing itself additional money - should I chose to go with a whole new pair of eyeglasses rather than send in my current frames.  A recommendation would be for VSP to have a different method to handle situations such as mine; maybe in this case having my lenses done at my doctor's office so I'm only without my glasses for a day or that my frames would be over-nighted to the lab, completed within a day, and then over-nighted back to me so I'm only without my glasses a maximum of 3 days.  Either would be a more understandable and acceptable experience in this case.

Motivation to Run

This weekend, I attended a seminar on what I thought was a discussion of financial management.  When I actually arrived, I realized that the “seminar” was a pitch to get people involved in selling financial products.  Given my general level of cynicism, I never would have thought that I would fall for this sort of deceptive marketing approach.  But what really surprised me was my physical reaction to this event.  After patiently sitting through lengthy presentation, I bolted from my seat and quickly left the building.  I was so uncomfortable with this sort of sales strategy that my gut reaction was to literally run away.  To me, telemarketing is the least friendly customer experience sales strategy as it never really considers what the customer’s experience is during the sales presentation.  The feeling of being taken advantage always makes me want to run far, far away.

Bearing down on good experiences

So, the Bears are going to the Superbowl! Woo hoo! Whatta game!

If you are a Chicago sports fan, you will understand the underdying devotion and frustration we have with our ball teams. It does bring the city together when we are on a winning streak.

I’ve noticed it lately when in stores. Instead of the usual grumblings at a checkout counter, there’s idle and hopeful chatter about how the team will do on Sunday. It brings a solidarity and connection between merchants and customers. Too bad this is lost on a day to day basis. We should be happy to connect with each other on any level, not just a winning football team.

That said, on to Miami! Go Bears!

Customer Experience in the Public Sector

Recently I've been interacting with our city and state governments a lot more than usual and it got me thinking about the poor customer, or should I say citizen experience I often have when I visit or call the Secretary of State’s office, a City of Chicago office, or take public transportation. It seems like every public servant has a permanent scowl on their face and I often feel like I’m being a nuisance just because I’m renewing my driver’s license or even asking a simple question.  I know the poor “citizen” support we receive from our government agencies isn’t a surprise to anyone. I guess I’m just venting, but wouldn’t it be great if these institutions put a little more effort into improving the citizen experience? After all, as citizen’s we’re forced to use (and pay for) their services.