Standing Out From The Crowd

Stop right there!

If you were looking for some “how to improve your love life” article, you came to the wrong place. Rather, I would like to explore how the emotions involved in customer relationships are strangely similar to those you have with your loved ones.
…
Well, customers may be willing to share the object of their affection with a couple million other people, but the difference ends there… Like in romances, customers will become jealous if you favor others over them. If your company sees more value in acquiring new customers than in keeping a current one, the current one will leave.

Take for example wireless companies. To get into the proverbial bed with you, they lie and say they’ll treat you right. They offer you free phones, cash back, gifts and promise to take care of you and make you happy forever after. However, as soon as the sun comes up, or you’ve signed a two-year contract, you are tossed aside and simply added to the list of their many conquests. You, as an individual customer, don’t matter anymore.

Being treated this way is bad enough but then, adding insult to injury, the company continues to flirt with others right in front of you; making the same empty promises they made to you.

If your girlfriend or boyfriend treated you this way, how would you respond? Exactly!
Now, how do you think your customers will respond?

Oh sure, you may be able to fool a few and keep them with you for a while. But, as soon as the competition starts making its move and offering better perks, your customers are as good as gone.

Long romance or one-night stand?

Does offering all these perks to attract new customers really pay off when you treat them like that and they leave you in two years? Why not reward loyal current customers by giving them special offers or at least the same advantages as new customers when they renew their contracts. Better yet, why not offer them incremental benefits throughout the years?

It costs six times more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.¹

So, investing in customer retention not only saves your company money, it also leads to loyal, life-long customers and a higher return on investment.

In simple language: Set the right expectations, and be ready to invest as much in retention as you do in acquisition!

After all, one of the most basic rules of relationships is that if you are happy with what you have, you will be less tempted or willing to risk your relationship for instant gratification.

Is it time to break-up?

SPRINT has taken a somewhat unique approach to the customer relationship; they’ve flipped the table and are dumping their unhappy customers, (SPRINT is starting to cancel customers’ contracts when they call customer service too often).

I wrote an article about this topic last year (Bad, Bad Customer… No Soup for You!), explaining how companies were starting to identify customers who don’t measure up or are deemed too high maintenance.

I am not taking sides on this matter², but you can bet that outraged high maintenance customer is going to tell everyone she knows about your service and your company has a lot more to lose in brand awareness and public image than she does.

Having said all this, I ask again: Is it worth losing the one you’re with?

^{1 - Stevens, M. Extreme Management: What They Teach At Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program. Warner Business Books, March, 2002.
2 - You can read views of both sides on Seth Godin’s Blog “Treating different customers differently” and “The first thing“, and also at the consumerist.com.}

Originally published at Vox Inc Customer Experience Articles

Security has always been placed in the opposite side of usability.  By default, when you think about adding security measures to a website, you are talking about creating extra processes or at least adding an extra layer or complexity to existing process, so invariably the site usability suffers.  Several promising researches were conducted in the past few years using graphical passwords, nonverbal memory systems and biometrics, but nothing seemed quite ready for immediate, cost-effective or practical use.

Well, ready or not it seems we are about to witness those solutions coming to market very soon.  Vidoop, a technology innovation company, is rattling the security cage by promising to definitely merge security and usability with their new product, soon to be launched on a Fortune 500 bank website not yet disclosed.  If they deliver what they are promising (and demonstrating on a 12 minutes video presentation), it will surely be a big step on the right direction.

Of course, after seeing the video and testing the Demo, I realize that the solution is not perfect (how could it be?).  Although they’ve probably addressed 9 out of 10 of the common usability problems and close to all - if not all - security known issues, from a customer experience perspective there are still 3 main unaddressed concerns.

Accessibility - I can’t say for sure, but I saw no practical option for users with disabilities (impaired vision).  A work around can be devised, but not without impact to the usability and somehow disregarding the use of images, thus throwing away the main advantages of the solution.

Cross-Channel Consistency – The solution works perfectly for the web channel and could be easily adapted for ATMs and Face-to-Face Interactions, but is moot over the phone.  That means one needs to have different passwords for those channels, so the phone will still be the weakest link of the security chain.  Given the old maxim that a system is only as safe as its weakest link, Vidoop may guarantee a better easier web security process, but not a safer process overall (not to mention the fact that one still have to memorize two sets of passwords for the same bank). 

Password Portability – Graphical passwords are way easier to memorize, even with long gaps between uses, but it is still something one have to commit to memory. If each website adopts a different password process (graphical or not), at some point the users won’t be able to remember all sets of passwords for individual sites and will start writing them down, thus eliminating the point of having a safer/easier to remember password (they are already working with OpenID, which might just be the solution for that).  Anyway, for this to work as projected,  Vidoop’s solution (or OpenID) must become a standard rather quickly, but I don’t think they mind that part. 

All in all, it is a great step in the right direction and opens a lot of new possibilities. If Vidoop keeps working on those points and acts quickly on their users’ feedback, they should be able to rapidly change the bank industry scenario.

In my opinion, a little bit of change is always a good thing. 

A few days ago, I was reading a Tom Vander Well’s blog post titled “When Customers are Co-Workers” on QAQnA.

The article reminded me of someone I met a few years ago. She worked in the research department of a big global company and after complaining to me once too often that no one valued her work, I offered her advice on customer experience tactics. I was rewarded with the retort, “I don’t need any of this, because I don’t deal with customers!”

Then it hit me… She didn’t understand her work as providing a service to several other departments in her company.  No wonder her co-workers didn’t respect her work; she never considered them her customers and her work reflected that.

The blog author suggests that you should think of co-workers as customers, but I will go even farther and say that you should think of everyone as your customer.

Think about it!  You are always providing some type of service to someone. Your boss, your co-workers, your friends, your wife, your kids - absolutely everyone - in one way or the other, expect something from you.  It doesn’t matter if you are more than happy to give them what they want. They often count on it; they frequently demand it and most of all they will resent it if you fail to meet their expectations. But if the service you provide is good enough for them the majority of the time, they will remain with you and will pay you back in your desired currency: friendship, love, trust or respect.

Customer experience tools can be applied to everything in your life. The lesson is pretty simple: If you really care for your customers and make a sincere effort to understand their expectations, they will love you for that and will be loyal to you while you are loyal to them.

“That’s it! I’ve been on hold for the past 45 min! If you don’t transfer me right now, I will…” - CLICK - And after that, all you hear is the dreadful tone of the busy line, indicating that, despite all your threats, you were disconnected - AGAIN!
 
If you ever suspected the call-center reps to hang-up on you on purpose, or ever felt like being grounded for misbehaving, you are probably right!
 
Despite the general belief, call-center reps are people too. As humans, they sometimes can’t help but to react in despicable or selfish ways, undoing the very purpose of their work. After a while, it is just natural that a group of such individuals would develop a set of unspoken rules (not necessarily the correct ones, I must say) to shield them against bad or angry customers. So, if you fail to live up to their expectations as a customer, you may as well be immediately judged guilty and banished from receiving assistance.
 
But DON’T WORRY! Things are changing. In fact, everything I just mentioned may already be in the past.
 
No… I am not selling any new miraculous call-center training method or a clever “how to reach call-center nirvana” article. I am not even saying that call-center reps are getting more tolerant or predicting that companies’ services are becoming more reliable. Just the opposite! They are becoming more crafty and resourceful. What once were just unspoken guidelines are quickly turning into official company rules with support of up-to-date technology.
 
According to Liz Pulliam Weston in the article ‘Are you a bad customer?‘:

“Service providers are deciding some of their customers simply aren’t worth the trouble. Aided by massive computer databases (…) they figure out which customers cost them money and shunt them to the back of the line.”

Although I believe it is perfectly fine for a company to reward its premium customers, penalizing the “not so good” ones seems a little overboard. It leaves too much room for mistakes and may put too much power in the wrong hands. In addition, it’s really a bizarre role reversal when a customer is afraid of being blacklisted by the company she pays to provide her a service.
 
Now, to any company that may be considering doing something like this:

I understand that some customers can be really a nuisance. Some are loud, rude, and even unprofitable. But hey, you were the one doing almost anything to attract them in the first place. And let’s be honest here: you were probably the one that first failed to live up to expectations.
 
So, don’t give that false pretense that the service will be more efficient and all “deserving” customers will ultimately benefit. If your customers are very good, reward them and they may stay with you for a long while. If your customers are bad or unprofitable, let them go. Maybe the competition will value them more than you did.
 
However, don’t be surprised if each “unworthy” customer is able to influence others on her way out. Who knows! Maybe those others are even part of your most profitable group.
 
In fact, don’t listen to anything I am saying here. Just keep “enhancing” your systems and protocols towards customer alienation. In the end, we will see which set of rules hold more weight: yours or the market’s.
 
I know which option MY money is on…
 

See original post at Vox Inc.

I just read a entry on Seth Godin’s Blog that can be very helpful for people working with Call Centers and Customer Services.

As always, Seth’s guide is simple and obvious, as it is supposed to be. But again, it may not be so obvious, given the number of companies that still have no clue on how to do it right…

When I was a kid, I was the one who would dismantle mom’s new blender to see how it worked… Sometimes, I would even put it back together again. Then, I grew up and became a computer geek. No surprise there, but the point is: I am proud of knowing how electronic equipment works and for being able to assemble anything on my own. So, when I call some 1-800 number for technical support (especially Comcast’s), I really believe I have narrowed down all possibilities on my side of the line.

Unfortunately, there is where my trial by fire begins. Call Center people always talk as if I’d never seen a TV or a cable box before. Then they start to spit their meticulously scripted sentences to me from the beginning. Even if it is the fifth time I am calling that day! That’s when I get the feeling of being some kind of robotized, standardized, and minimalized audience. Not at all special, or worst: not any different from anyone else.

I can understand that they prepare themselves to deal with people that are even afraid of touching the TV, but 1-800 numbers should be able to identify the customer’s profile and offer different strokes for different folks. At least, they should be able to verify that it is not the first time someone is calling for the same reason and drop some lines off the script. A simple attitude change probably would be enough to gather the customer’s appreciation, a more effective support, and less time spent on the line for both sides.

“Not all customers are equal”. Everyone should already know that. I just hope it doesn’t take to long now, because I am still waiting on the line.