When I set out to build my startup in January, we moved to Spain to immerse in the culture, learn the language and extend my startup runway by 4 month. I knew I would have to revisit how I would fund our continued stay in Spain and how I might continue to explore my startup. Quite fortuitously, one of my close consulting partners offered me a coaching engagement in my old haunt – Galway.
So here I am, in Galway Ireland , doing something I am very comfortable doing (and arguably pretty good at it too). I shall be here for 5 weeks working with people who are very good at what they do and trying to help them harness that goodness and focus it on greatness.
Here is my check in:
Sad that I’m not in Spain. I’m in Galway, on my own, far from my loves.
Glad that I will focus on startup tasks as my night job – once the initial chaos of training and fatigue wear out.
Sad that there do not appear to be any Spanish language meetups over the summer in Galway.
Glad that I have 50mb/sec internet in my accommodation.
Glad that I reached out to a few people about reviewing my blog post on Customer Service and Social Media – why it sucks. Thank you @joneversett and @joshkehn for taking the time to read the early draft and offer such rich and considered feedback which helped me improve the post.
I’m grateful for the abundance of learning all around and the capacity to learn from it.
I’m in.
Improve On…
Writing this blog in a timely fashion
Today
Write the next customer service related post
Buffer up some of of my twumps and Bizbuzz tweets /li>
Reach, responsiveness, engagement, resolution, impact, journey – these are all buzzwords in the brave new world of customer service meets social media.
Undoubtedly, it has all the excitement of a first date – all that uncertainty of how to behave and what to say. Despite being a new platform, the same rules apply – being authentic, demonstrating genuine interest and representing something beyond profit.
Great customer service for any business on any platform consists of 3 things in different measure – responsiveness, engagement and resolution. Let me break it down:
Responsiveness: How quickly is the business responding to enquiries? How long does a customer have to wait for some attention at the till, on the phone , via email and even a reply from a tweet!
Engagement: When they do respond, how well are they at listening, asking relevant questions, being helpful and demonstrating empathy? Do they make the customer feel like they genuinely care about their enquiry?
Resolution: How well do they successfully address the enquiry? For example, refunds, exchanges, apologies. What are they prepared to do to keep their customers happy.
It is a growing practice to think of customer service as applicable not simply after sales, but at every part of the the customers’ interaction with the business. This is great and I want to see more of it. However it is a long way from being customer-driven which is far more about culture than it is about senior management pronouncements and marketing flim flam.
Imagine you ordered some tickets for a concert and they didn’t arrive. A day before the concert, you are panicking. You call the ticket vendor but, because they are slow to respond, it takes ages for your call to be answered.
Someone finally picks up the phone and you carefully explain you haven’t received your tickets, which incidentally were a birthday present for your partner, whose birthday is on the same day as her favorite band’s concert date – so an extremely special occasion!
After carefully listening – they have pretty good engagement – they explain that their policy is not to offer refunds or exchanges of tickets this close to the event. Never mind about the importance of the occasion. They apologise but there is nothing they can do. You end the call feeling deeply frustrated, angry and dissatisfied because their resolution is poor.
On what basis do you think you might ever buy another ticket from this vendor again? The fact that they listened? Or the fact that, despite good engagement, they didn’t help you out in this most important of situations. Most importantly you thought they ought to be able to help.
I have and continue to interview end customers of businesses like these, in unofficial surveys triggered by data I find on bizbuzzapp. The stories are interesting and the emotions generated by resolution are big and typically extreme. Successful resolution – where the customer is happy with what the business is going to do to address their enquiry – generates feelings of delight, satisfaction and increased loyalty. Unsuccessful resolution often generates feelings of anger, hopelessness, dissatisfaction, aggression and betrayal.
Clearly, resolution is a huge thing. It is full of promise and opportunity for the businesses that can consistently be great at it. It is also the hardest to achieve. Not because of some divine unchangeable rule – although there are truly unavoidable things like death or natural disasters – but mostly because of a problem of value assessment.
When I was 17, I went from Nigeria to St Kitts with my sister and my dad. Whilst we were there, my Dad took ill and died.
We had never been to St Kitts before and, even though it is where Dad was born, we were in an unfamiliar place. We had to rely entirely on the kindness of friends to get through. With no idea how we would pay for his funeral, it was an extremely stressful time. Then we discovered that my Dad had a bank account in the UK with NatWest.
My mum contacted them and spoke with the manager (in the days you could still speak to the manager) and although he didn’t know my dad personally – he saw he was a long standing account holder and had either had funds in his account that could be used to bury him or had some kind of life insurance policy. The manager asked for the contact details of the Funeral director in St Kitts and between them, they sorted everything out.
To this day I have a NatWest account and hold them in high regard. When I first set out as a consultant I opened my business account with them and put over £250K in revenue through their bank. That is the power of resolution.
This bank manager could have made things very difficult. He could have cited some policy that would have made a sad situation desperate. But he didn’t, he valued my Dad’s established custom over all those things and he had the authority to resolve it successfully. In reality I don’t think it cost them very much because they were covered by insurance or by what was in Dad’s account – but it was hugely valuable to us.
It should come as no surprise that satisfaction increases the further you go down my ABCs.
In the early 1990s, I walked into a Richer Sounds store to enquire about upgrading my entertainment equipment for my new apartment.
As soon as I walked in, a really friendly sales person named Simon walked up and asked how he might assist me. I explained I had just moved into a new apartment and that I wanted to upgrade my equipment.
Simon listened intently, asking relevant questions about my current entertainment kit, how much I wanted to spend and what I wanted to experience from my entertainment unit. We talked through the options and I finally went with his recommendation which was both surprising and delightful. Simon recommended that I not buy any more equipment, instead to invest in some better cabling. I had a few hundred to spend and I left that store with perhaps £50 worth of gold plated chunky audio cable.
He was absolutely right – it made a huge difference to my enjoyment.
On the face of it, Simon cost Richer Sounds a few hundred pounds by losing them a bigger sale. But in reality, he gained Richer Sounds a lifelong customer by demonstrating excellence at each of my ABCs. I was satisfied at how quickly Simon responded to my presence in his store, happier still that he engaged with me intently, asking relevant questions and collaborating with me through the options. Finally I was totally satisfied by his help in getting me the experience I wanted from my entertainment equipment and unexpectedly saving me money.
When I did finally upgrade my equipment a few years later, I spent a couple of thousand pounds at the same Richer Sounds store!
Many companies, perhaps through ineffective leadership, policies and/or a culture of disempowerment consistently undervalue the ongoing satisfaction of their customers. They do so whilst playing lip service to the ‘highest levels of customer service’. What is this thing that always seems to be considered more important than satisfying customers?
Cost. There, I said it. Time and again, businesses choose to not do things that would satisfy their customers because they think it costs more than they are prepared to accept. I say ‘think’ because actually what they are basing this decision on is a short term perceived cost. When the few companies that even consciously do any kind of cost/benefit assessment of what it might take to satisfy the customer, they almost always undervalue the benefit.
Resolution challenges the business with the fundamental question of “what are you prepared to do to keep a customer happy?”. This question bumps straight up against the elephant in the room – that which no one likes to talk about because it feels ‘dirty’ to say you didn’t do the ‘decent’ thing because it would have cost more than you are permitted to spend.
Most companies I know and know of, at least those with run-of-the-mill typical MBA educated executives, believe they should track cost. Keeping it low is paramount. Unfortunately, this focus on keeping costs low is often at the expense of other things -namely value!.
A vast industry has grownup around cost-driven customer service. There are experts in offshore call centers, IVR software focuses on ‘intelligent’ routing and queuing. Passionate employees are replaced by cheaper outsourced agencies – who might know the product catalog by heart and may be great at the script, but can hardly talk passionately about the business, the products or the vision. I am sad at how cost driven customer service is so prevalent as to seem like the only way customers can be supported.
Customer Service is Fundamentally Simple
Bizarrely all this is rather simple. Humans desire attention, many crave it. We want to connect with other people – even for information that is readily available in non-human form, humans generally choose to receive the information from another human. We desire attention for many different reasons – to feel less alone, to have our anxieties reassured, to feel heard, to connect with another human being. Whatever the reasons (and they can be quite complex), we mostly value human to human interaction over other forms.
The trouble is, in the world of business, attention costs money. To have people on standby to talk to other people (customers and potential customers) is costly. Businesses have tried to mitigate this with all kinds of strategies. Great examples are contact centers. First they started onshore, but as pressure mounted to reduce costs, the jobs were moved offshore to where labor was cheaper. This was done at the expense of the customer experience – language and cultural misunderstanding.
Another example is IVR – that annoying ‘interactive voice routing’ that exploded in the late 80s and 90s. Routing customers through a maze of options with the intention of ‘getting them to the right department’, in practice all it mostly succeeded in doing was to frustrate customers even further. Again, an attempt at appearing to be responsive and feign engagement. With IVR, every customer call was answered in three or four rings and you were kept busy trying to navigate the maze until you either gave up in frustration or had spent a sufficient amount of time to have made it to the top of the queue.
Each one of these strategies focuses on one or two aspects of my ABCs – ignoring that you really need all three (of course , in different measures) to be consistently successful.
I don’t mean to trivialise the challenge of keeping customers happy. In some industries – like the Funeral Services or health sector – it is tremendously hard workand emotionally wearing. But the customers’ needs are fundamentally the same, albeit more amplified. Also, I recognise that there are some customers who expect and often demand what appears to be an unreasonable amount of attention, but without the skills to really understand the needs that are driving such customer ‘demand’ and a more effective way of valuing both satisfied customers and the opportunity cost of dissatisfaction, I don’t know how a business can truly understand what ‘unreasonable’ means.
The Bottom Line
Current ideas of Social Media Customer Service suck because they are leading businesses to measure ineffective things and simultaneously directing investment and focus away from the more effective things. Too much focus is placed on responsiveness (incidentally because it is, in terms of cost and effort, the cheapest and easiest to fix) and relatively very little is done to improve engagement and resolution.
What does it all mean? Well for one thing, it strongly establishes ‘Customer Service’ as one of the last great frontiers of competitiveness. What value you place on having happy and satisfied customers and how your entire operation – people, products and processes – demonstrate that value, is increasingly becoming the biggest business differentiator.
Once there is parity of production, costs, pricing, logistics and content – the last thing we have left to differentiate businesses is how they make us feel when we do business with them.
Now it’s your turn
What aspects of this post resonate with you? What did you find challenging or disagreeable?
I would really love your feedback and experiences and look forward to your comments on how I might improve on this.
Thanks for reading!
I recently saw ‘Tangled’ – an animated movie of the Rapunzel story. Very enjoyable.
As it often happens, a funny visual came to mind and an even funnier caption that I would love to match with an illustration to make a single panel comic.
To have maximum effect, I don’t want to reveal the caption until it is paired with just the right illustration.
As a starting point – I had a Larson-esque style comic in mind, but I’m open to other styles.
Have you got illustrative skills or do you know someone who does and who might be willing to do this for free? Drop me a comment or tweet me.
What is in it for the artist?
Well, you get to collaborate on something fairly hilarious.
Lots of people will see it (well, a few really cool people at least)
Also, you get to co-own its copyright (if that floats your boat – although I’m happy to make it CC with attribution)
And if it works out we could make it a regular thing. Who knows where it might lead and who doubts it will be fun getting there?
As I explore the social media customer service space – trying to discover and connect, I am learning quite a bit.
Should I join the fray and blog about what I am learning in order to share and establish some sort of profile or authority? I’m concerned that there is so much of the same crap out there that what I have to add – which I consider to be quite disruptive/provocative ideas – will simply get drowned out.
Also, each new blogger is making the problem of finding the useful stuff even harder – a self defeating act. There is a need for some really intelligent curation that helps people find useful and actionable content.
For these reasons, I’m not convinced of the effectiveness of blogging. For each of the most successful, most widely read blogs out there , there are hundreds of thousands that are churning out content that either no one cares about or no one can find. And blogging is deceptive – it feels good to express your ideas (for me , most of the time , this is all I want – pah! who needs readers) – but with my startup, I want people to consider these disruptive ideas and collaborate with me to bring them to fruition, test them and help everyone.
But if I don’t blog – what shall I do instead? I’m open to ideas.
Not sure what to make of this week. It’s a bit like being in the Tom Hanks movie ‘The Terminal’. I’m stuck but actually while I’m in this state of suspension there are really interesting things happening, but mostly I’m still stuck. Unlike Tom Hanks, my becoming unstuck is in my hands, I just don’t know how or I’m currently too scared to try – perhaps a bit of both. The former I can learn and the latter I will outgrow in time and by taking small risks.
Here is my check in:
Glad that my Spanish language exchange is really going well. Duolingo is great, but it is no substitute for actually getting into really interesting conversations with a native speaker.
Sad that I will be away from my family for 5 weeks while go do some coaching work.
Glad that there are Spanish language meetups where I’ll be, so I can keep up
Mad that I have not cracked this sales thing. I think I need to get a mentor/coach. That will be my task today – understand what I want help with!
Glad that I will have 5 weeks of doing something else primarily and some focused time in a different location to put into overcoming what is currently got me stuck.
I’m grateful for being able to reflect on things, sometimes too deeply – but that is a small price to pay for being able to reflect and learn.
I’m confused and stuck and in.
Improve On…
Completing blog posts I have started
Being more patient with this journey. Overnight successes take a long time to make.
Today
Blog. I’m trying to do 3 a day (this one, a personal one and one for ServiceChat about customer service).
Talk to more customers
Continue with the promo work for Twumps and BizBuzz. Not quite 20 hits/day but getting there (easier on Bizbuzz than Twumps).
This is a notice to my Skype contacts:
Skype (and others) have been spying on their users on behalf of the United States security apparatus for a long time. I do not want to be spied on any longer, so I’m closing my account, it will remain dormant and unused from today (15/July/2013) and cancelled on 01/August/2013.
I am currently researching alternatives, however you may contact me on Twitter or by email in the meantime and we can arrange a voice call (all of which are also compromised, I’m sure!).
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about an experiment to see if I could consistently and sustainably fund good causes through an online product/service.
I’m delighted to release the first version of Twumps – my social network trading game, built for social good. Right now it is beta – which means it works (pretty well actually) but is actively being tested and might break. It also means that I’m on standby to fix it pretty quickly if it breaks and that I’m super ready to chat to people to make it better.
Inspiration
Twumps is inspired by Top Trumps – the card trading series of games. In Twumps, instead of super heroes, you have your followers from Twitter (who have stats!). I’ve varied it a little to make it faster to play and perhaps a little more interesting.
Each player builds a stash of cards created from upto 100 of their twitter followers
Each game is between 2 players and a deck made up of 10 of their cards. They play until they have turned over all their cards. Each turn is played by the ‘turn starter’ picking a statistic from their displayed card that they believe can beat the equivalent statistic on their opponents drawn card. A player wins the turn by having a higher stat than their opponent’s card. A game is won by the person who won most cards.
The winning player gets to keep those followers (only in Twumps – not in Twitter – sorry!). The losing player does not keep the cards they won in the game.
A player’s total wins are used to determine their place in the leaderboard:
Easy to Play
Twumps is really easy to play and I have taken feedback from early players that they would appreciate a tour of how to use get about in the game. There is only one view in the game – your current card. I may add a little more complexity later, but for now, you simply select a stat from the next card in your game deck. Check out bits of the tour:
What Next?
Building what I have is only the first step – getting something out there that people can play, derive some enjoyment from. The next steps are getting as many people playing it as possible, getting their feedback to improve it and beginning to discover what I can charge for (it’s all donation based – but I think there should be minimums).
I really need your help
Twumps is a novel idea, to my knowledge there is nothing like this online anywhere. I’m going to do my best to get people to play and enjoy it.
But I really need your help with this.
If you are on Twitter, play it and challenge others.
Regardless, please tell everyone you know who uses Twitter, ask them to play it and tell their friends.
If there is something you feel can be improved tell me and I’ll most likely do it.
Share your ideas for improving it, join in. Playing Twumps is fun and you can be a part of something that will ultimately make beautiful things happen in the world.
Traction is vital, getting early customers to commit to using what I’m offering is very important. Both are vital and important for my finances and startup growth, sure – but mostly for my sanity.
I’m a maker and an artist. I make the art that is in my head. Many of the things I make are because I had a problem and I expressed a way to solve them. When I bring them to the market (as ineptly as I do) and expect some meaningful response, I am investing emotional energy into that. I care that I get a response – much more than the nature of that response. I can handle praise and rejection but much less so, apathy.
So my new strategy of trying to be found by prospective customers is off to a slow start, but a start nonetheless. Here is my check in:
Mad that I am really struggling to keep my schedule on track, my options for being flexible are limited when I start late and end later. If I start on time (9.30) , I am actually far more flexible to do other stuff (like going to the beach!) because I would have made some progress.
Glad that I can changed most things to get back to routine – this is a really valuable thing about working for myself.
Glad I had another idea and my technique for welcoming them and giving them a slot to explore them is successful at keeping me focused on finishing
I’m grateful for having different onion skins to other people and having mine not constrain me from being myself.
I’m in (onion skins and all).
Improve On…
Being a better marketeer – better meaning braver, more authentic, more dedicated, better organised. Avoid the schmoltz.
Being a better researcher – everything – my potential customers, competitors , collaborators.
Today
The trello board says it all. basically as much of the stuff I have on there as possible. Mostly blogs. But absolutely must…
Write ServiceChat blog post on ‘I am the greatest customer service expert in the world’.
Do some promotion work on Twumps and ServiceChat and get at least 20 unique visitors to each today.
The Trello board…
Ask yourself if you are doing everything* you can to be successful
* – whilst remaining congruent with your values, fair to those you love and kind to yourself
Every passing day re-affirms my fear. I have to back away from the code, close the IDE – quit doing what I love doing and start doing the other thing.
You know – the other thing, the hitting-the-phone, sell-your-vision, learn-the-problems, discover-your-customers, dine-with-rejection-and-unreturned-emails thing, you know Customer Development!
Now, I have a world of love for Eric Ries, Ash Maurya, Steve Blank and the other luminaries of the startup world. But they really could have done a better job of communicating how bloody tough it is to get to talk to customers, to handle the silence and the find the courage to carry on until you find the data you need (some might argue that the lack of feedback is plenty feedback – that is a different story).
This afternoon, I had the pleasure of 30 minutes of conversation with Kevin DeWalt, a really awesome and interesting guy with plenty of experience of creating companies and helping startups. He graciously offers 30 mins of free help to founders and startups via his site. I’ll blog more about that on a later post. Anyway, Kevin was really pragmatic and his view was really similar to @saintsal’s (from a couple of weeks ago). I have to spend most of my time out of the building, pounding the phones, the emails, knocking on doors (virtual and otherwise) and really get to meet prospects, so I can learn.
The last couple of weeks have presented some opportunities that I fully intend on exploring. So , what is my strategy?
I won’t be chasing customers. I tried that and they weren’t interested in talking to me. My new strategy is to help them find me – well at least this is my strategy for the next 3 weeks.
This means interviews, blogs and asking powerful questions about how all the businesses I am coming across do customer service. My intention is that these questions will attract the right people.
So it’s not so much ‘build it and they will come’, but more ‘ask it and the right people will answer’.
With this in mind, here is my check in.
Glad I have a plan, being lost is no fun when you got somewhere to go.
Glad there are people like Kevin DeWalt, Flavio Martins, @saintsal and Ian Golding who are open and invite you to seek their collaboration. Of course it is mutually beneficial – but their openness to connect is amazing.
Really mad that I’m succumbing to carbs – the sugary kind.
I’m grateful for the ability to reflect on my thoughts and the brilliance of others.
I’m in.
Improve On…
Consistent daily Spanish practice.
Testing my code. Recently I have been doing lots of test-free hacking.
