FirstCuts ezine Issue 10.0

FirstCuts A Framework Consulting Online eZine High-Stake Interventions -- New Ideas Issue 10 April 15, 2007 A Caribbean Branded Experience by Francis Wade

Editorial For better or worse, the Cricket World Cup has put our region firmly on the world stage as a united entity, jointly accountable for the success of the event. It is the first time that we are coming together to host an event of this magnitude, and I felt proud of us as a region after the Opening Ceremony in March. Since then, I have only wished that we had taken a stand for making it more of OUR world cup in every dimension, rather than something that feels imported. This issue is devoted to one element that we could have made our won, but didn't -- the customer experience. I find that we as a region are sometimes too shy to promote ourselves and our strengths on the world stage, and don't appreciate the value and impact of our own brand in the world. Hopefully, after the matches are over we will have learned how to better harness our own strengths, especially outside of the realm of sun, sea and sand. Until next month, Francis

A Caribbean Branded Experience There is a quiet revolution underway in which leading companies are changing the way they’re thinking about customer service. Since the advent of the “total quality” movement in the 1980s, companies have been happy designing customer service to “meet or exceed customers’ needs or expectations” and to provide “excellent service.” Marketers are now saying that this approach is not sufficient and that they want customer service that fulfills an important role in brand building. In other words, they’re saying that service quality must do more than meet expectations. It must also create a “branded experience” that the company can use to clearly differentiate itself from competitors and deeply embed itself in the customer’s psyche. When companies fail to create a branded experience, they run the risk of either providing a bland experience that customers do not value or even creating a negative experience that customers actively avoid. Such is the case of the ICC Cricket World Cup currently underway across the West Indies. The promise seemed simple: create a world-class event and cricket lovers the world over would come. Unfortunately, the delivered experience has driven away local fans and turned off visitors, and there is universal recognition that something must be done to correct this. What could the ICC Cricket World Cup organisers have done to prevent the fallout that’s now occurring? What went wrong in their planning? What can regional companies do to prevent their own customers from abandoning them at key moments? In our most recent endeavor at Framework, we have been looking at this question for several clients—and we think that the ICC could have followed a simple process to craft a precise experience from inside the world of their customers, create channels to deliver the experience consistently, and ensure that interventions to restore the desired experience are timely and authentic. Customer's Experience vs. Customer's Expectations As companies change the way they think about the customer’s experience, savvy firms are focusing on creating specific “experiences” comprised of actual emotions they want their customers to retain after an encounter with the company. For example, customers of an excellent hotel may leave their weekend stint having had experiences of “care, opulence, and comfort.” In this context, the experience is a possible differentiating factor, built by the hotel, based on an understanding of what its target customers want—and what the hotel can actually deliver. Obviously, no set of experiences are universal and apply to all customers. Equally obvious is the fact that not all hotels are interested in delivering the same experience. A different hotel might be interested in creating an experience of “adventure, thrift, and practicality” for its customers. If both hotels were effective in creating these experiences, they would appeal to very different segments, with brands that overlap only rarely. In the case of the ICC Cricket World Cup, the “world-class” experience that’s associated with sporting events in developed countries has done much to turn away local lovers of the game. The truth is, although half of the world lives on less than US$2.00 per day, the idea of what is world-class probably wasn’t defined with the “lower half” in mind. Instead, it most likely came from feedback gained from the 20% of the world’s population in the developed nations who consume 86% of the world’s goods (and perhaps even more of the global, live sporting events.) Here in the Caribbean, with our developing economies, we are hardly a part of the influential 20%. A conversation with the average man in the street, or a visitor to the region, would reveal that our cricketing customers are very different from those envisioned by the typical customers of world-class events. The experiences we value are very different— more noisy, spontaneous, and reliant on people interacting with one another. The ICC seems to have realized that a mistake was made and that the experience they were intent on delivering is not the one that customers are interested in having—even if it is “world-class.” Unfortunately, companies in the region often assume that world-class is better. This is an excellent example where that thinking is just plain wrong. The problem was created when the term “world-class” was not translated into specific experiences. For example, a great deal has been made of the fact that local customers have not appreciated that tickets have been available online for several months. In a world-class event, an e-commerce channel is usually experienced as “helpful.” In the Caribbean, where less than 20% of our citizens have Internet access, the experience was one that was “exclusionary” and “difficult.” Furthermore, foreigners have been complaining that the cricket experience they are having is sterile, and "not Caribbean enough." One visitor quipped that if he wanted that kind of experience he would just have stayed home in England. Shifting from vague ideals such as “world-class” to specific experiences is more than just a cosmetic play of words. When experiences can be understood as a combination of critical emotional outcomes, practices can be customized to produce them. Take, as an example, interactions between the flight crew and customers in the airline industry. A company that intends to create the experience of “peace and quiet” would train the staff in very different practices from one that creates the experience of “spontaneity.” The practices would contrast in tone, length, volume, and warmth. To illustrate, Southwest Airlines is well known for the jokes, contests, and songs that its flight crew (including the captain) tell over the intercom at different points in the flight. As a customer of Southwest, which specializes in short-haul flights, I can report from the experience that it was fun. However, I also truly appreciate the peace and quiet provided by a British Airways business-class seat on a long trans-Atlantic flight. As another example, here in the Caribbean, a company that tries to deliver the same experience to its clients, regardless of the culture of each client’s home country, can run into serious trouble. A Trinidadian customer may respond very differently to an invitation to go out for drinks and a lime after work compared to a Barbadian in the same situation. A savvy company accounts for regional differences and customizes its practices to carefully produce the desired experience, while monitoring the actual experience its customers are having. Unfortunately, international research conducted by Bain & Co. shows that most companies are in the dark. Some 80% of companies believe that they are delivering “a superior customer experience,” while only 8% of their customers agree. The best companies go further than customizing their practices, however. They also define what happens for customers at each point at which the company interacts with the customer. Delivering the Experience Through Touch Points Critical to delivering the experience and customizing practices is understanding that customers build up their experience of companies through what are called “touch points.” Recently I made my first visit to a new bicycle shop here in Kingston, Jamaica. The outside looks rather ordinary, as the shop is tucked away between other stores behind a very shallow parking lot. However, when I entered it for the first time, I had only one thought: “This feels like America!” The layout was superb, the store was air-conditioned, and the merchandise was well lit and attractively displayed. It was a vivid touch point, and I have not visited another bicycle shop since then, as this one is a clear step above any others in terms of its environment. Perhaps the owner designed the store’s interior with a particular experience in mind: “inviting.” If so, he has succeeded—the layout invites the customer to linger, and, in my opinion, it’s the only bicycle shop in Kingston that comes close to accomplishing this feeling. The first entrance into the store is a powerful touch point. We at Framework have developed tools to help companies define the desired experience, inventory the touch points, and define standards of behaviour and process that deliver the experience. (See the footnote to this ezine about how to obtain more information on one of these tools.) When I first did this exercise for Framework Consulting, the insights I gained were stunning. When I stepped into our customer’s shoes, seemingly trivial details became critical. When I made the first list of touch points, I realized that the firm’s brand was being experienced through multiple channels, some of which were as follows: • A visit to the company website • How long it took to get a reply to an email • The length of the voice mail message I heard when I called • The fit between my proposals and the client’s budget • A casual encounter in the mall or on an airplane • A speech heard at a conference These are all valid touch points, and they all work together to create our company's particular brand and some overall experience for our customers. I found that I was managing a mere subset of all potential touch points. Unfortunately, in the case of the ICC Cricket World Cup, the touch points that I personally encountered were a mixed bag of positive and negative experiences: • The press was full of reports of things that we West Indians were not allowed to do on match day • When I called to order tickets, I was told quite unprofessionally that "they were sold out" • When I bought a ticket online the following day, the website was confusing and would not allow me to pick the row or seat, just the “section” • When I picked up the ticket, the agent appeared unconcerned that I was given incorrect information • It was amazingly easy to be transferred from the parking lot to the ground itself • The degree of security (in crime-ridden Jamaica) was wonderful to behold • I was told I could bring in no food or drinks, but I saw people do both • The ground's vendors ran out of decent meals, and my family ended up eating something awful for lunch • Sabina Park never looked more beautiful, or better prepared, as a physical facility • There was none of the noise that’s always a part of cricket in the Caribbean • The brand name of the toilets was neatly (and bizarrely) covered with duct tape . . . All of these touch points together—good and bad—helped to make the total experience. A note about the duct tape on the toilets: While covering the brand name on a toilet may have something to do with a world-class standard (i.e., ambush marketing), the feeling of outrage that I felt at that moment has stayed with me. (Apparently, the manufacturer declined to be a sponsor, hence the peculiar need to hide its name from the public.) I cannot imagine that too many West Indians would take this particular tactic lightly, and many sportswriters have written about the greed and selfishness that it exemplifies. Clearly, this touch point created an experience that was foreign to the majority of the ICC Cricket World Cup customers. Taken together, the mixed bag of experiences, via different touch points, has resulted in empty stadiums (to date) and a bitter taste in the mouths of many fans—a bad taste that the organisers are now desperately trying to correct. Unfortunately, some recent public pronouncements by the executives of the ICC Cricket World Cup have only added more negative experiences. Apparently, they deliberately decided to overlook the customer’s experience and instead tried something bolder—to “change Caribbean culture,” in the words of Stephen Price, the tournament’s commercial director. Needless to say, it’s much more difficult to “change” customers than it is to provide a particular experience that customers value, and more recent actions seem to indicate a course correction. This is not to say that there aren’t aspects of the Caribbean culture that work against us, but the customer is the wrong element to try to change. Instead, the tournament staff—those who deliver the bulk of the experiences to the customer—should be the real point of focus. Interventions to Deliver the Desired Experience Companies that decide to transform themselves to deliver a consistent customer experience must start with the people who deliver the experience. Coaching and training interventions are the best way to change the knowledge, skills, and motivation required. Unfortunately, the average employee in the Caribbean region is at a severe disadvantage. One benefit of being a service worker in a First World country is simply having consistent exposure to companies that deliver better service, or even world-class service. Contrasted with the average Caribbean employee, First World employees can more easily become savvy service providers as a result of having had a direct experience. Here in the Caribbean, however, the average service provider just hasn’t had that same experience. In fact, the average Caribbean national is hard-pressed to identify a single company with which they interact that provides excellent service. That doesn’t mean that Sandals, for example, isn’t providing excellent service. However, the income gap between our average service worker (earning perhaps US$200 per week) and the average Sandals customer (paying $US200 per night) means that the majority of workers will never spend a night at Sandals. Caribbean service workers are therefore in a bind—How do they meet customers’ expectations when theirs have never been met? How do they provide a service level that they’ve never personally witnessed? How do they effect behaviours that deliver an experience that they’ve never had? This question is not an easy one to answer, as we at Framework are finding, but we have had some success by taking the following two steps. 1. Use Specific, Familiar Language Managers must define the customer experience in terms that the service worker can appreciate and understand. This may mean using language that’s colloquial, based in patois or local jargon. The point here is to make it easy for the service worker to remember and focus on delivering the experience. The benefit derived from making the experience explicit is that the service worker is better able to judge whether or not the experience is being delivered. When general terms such as “world-class” are used, that actually communicates very little to the service workers—leaving them unable to correct their behaviour, even if they want to. This is quite different from a situation in which a manager asks his worker whether or not a particular customer was “delighted, inspired, and energized.” A manager who uses such terms is more likely to get an intelligent response than one who asks whether or not the customer was merely “satisfied.” Using specific language is the key to communicating what the goal of each interaction actually is. 2. Develop Emotional Intelligence Managers must train workers to develop aspects of their emotional intelligence that emphasize the ability to recognize, and respond to, the emotions of customers—especially when those emotions might be negative. At one extreme is the kind of worker who cannot recognize the emotions of others, even when those emotions are obvious. These workers probably should not be in the service industry at all. Further along the spectrum are those who recognize the feelings of others, but react in a way that’s inappropriate because they cannot control their reactions. The emotional intelligence needed to consistently deliver a customer experience can be learned. With consistent coaching, an employee with a basic level of empathetic skills can learn how to use touch points to accomplish the company’s goals. Most are not able to turn themselves into experts overnight, however. Managers must make time to not only train, but to serve as role models for the standards it takes to create a desired experience. The best managers believe this rule: service workers will not deliver an experience to a customer that exceeds the experience that they’ve had with their own management. The best managers give enough of the “right” experience to their front-line workers in order for those workers, in turn, to be able to give that experience to others. For this reason, the first-level, or front-line manager’s role is a critical one. Summary Long after the ICC Cricket World Cup has come and gone, companies in the region will be able to use the example of its citizens direct experience to see that delivering good service is not merely a matter of repeating what is done elsewhere. Instead, it takes the precise application of touch point standards and interventions in every case—and when the job is done well, the customer’s experience is assured. * P.S. We would like to offer you a paper with more details on Framework's Service Inventory -- a tool to capture critical information at company touch-points. To receive the paper, send email to fwc-serv-inv@aweber.com Useful Stuff Tips, Ads and Links I will be speaking at the upcoming Jamaica Employees Federation conference from May 3-6 in Ocho Rios on the topic: Building Bridges across the region: Networking Strategies and Techniques for the New Breed of Caribbean Managers. We are on the lookout for possible contributors to FirstCuts. If you are interested, send email to francis@fwconsulting.com to be included in a future mailing. Please send this request along to others. Back Issues of FirstCuts can be found at http://tinyurl.com/pw7fa To manage this newsletter, we use an excellent programme called AWeber that you can explore here:- http://www.aweber.com/?213577 Subscriber Q&A None this month General and Newsletter Subscription Info To contact us with feedback, questions or praise, email newsletter@fwconsulting.com To subscribe, please send email to firstcuts@aweber.com from the email address that you which to be subscribed from Please feel free to use excerpts from this newsletter as long as you give credit with a link to our page: www.fwconsulting.com FirstCuts © Copyright 2007, Framework Consulting, except where indicated otherwise. All rights reserved worldwide. Reprint only with permission from copyright holder(s). All trademarks are property of their respective owners. All contents provided as is. No express or implied income claims made herein. Your business success is dependent on many factors, including your own abilities. 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Creating the Customer Experience - Practice

The idea of training customer-facing personnel in the Caribbean to create specific experiences might seem like a tall order, and a highly subjective goal.

Can a company charge its front-line workers with doing whatever it takes to create experiences it decides are important for its customers?

For example, what if a bank decides to create an experience of caring, careful and creative with its customers? How would it train its employees to produce that experience reliably?

Well, they could begin by allowing the employee to internalize the definition of the experiences: caring, careful and creative. They would need to do so by looking in two places -- their own experience as customers in day to day life, and their experience as employees in the company.


Surprisingly, the latter is perhaps more important than the former.

Employees who don't look for the experience of caring, careful and creative in their experience in the workplace are going to have a difficult time delivering it to customers. Workplaces that rarely produce the experience will simply fail, and should instead look to implement a culture change programme that results in a different customer experience altogether.

Without it, employees will not have what it takes to produce the experience with their customers, as they will be too busy trying to have some of it for themselves.

Once the experience is internalized, and distinguished clearly in the experience of employees, the company can go the next step and train them to deliver it. The assumption here is that employees who are overflowing with an experience need do little at some level, because their experience will naturally overflow into the customer's experience. In this sense, customer experience is quite a contagious phenomena.

How do employees get trained to deliver a set of experiences such as caring, careful and creative?

Do they receive a set of rules to follow? Do they follow a script?

Some companies have tried this approach, but it is imply insufficient.

In addition to guidelines, what employees need more than anything else is time to practise.

Producing a specific experience is not as simple as merely mouthing the correct words, or going through the right motions.

Instead, it requires an element of emotional intelligence, due to the need to quickly appreciate the experience that another person is having in any moment. This ability to "read experiences" can be developed through consistent practice.

"Reading the experience" can perhaps be as easy as carefully observing the changes in someone's face. Some interesting research into couples, and their communication, has revealed that a trained observer can predict with 90% accuracy, the future of the couple's marriage, after only a couple of minutes.

They are trained to observe the minute changes in muscle motion that we tend to overlook each day.

Perhaps the same kind of training could be given to front-line customer-service workers, so that they can discover the clues that tell them the experience that a customer is having. This of course, would take some amount of practice in order to master, but it sure seems like an interesting place to start.

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There are three sources of information that I can recommend on this topic-- one is the book Blink by Macolm Gladwell, and here is an excerpt from the book: http://www.hachettebookgroupusa.com/books/68/0316010669/
chapter_excerpt24301.html

In the December 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review, there is an article entitled: Making Relationships Work by John Gottman. He is the psychologist who is the originator of the University of Washington study.

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The Customer-Supplier Fallacy

The time has come for the business world to retire the customer-supplier model, and this is especially true of Caribbean companies.

There was a time when companies were more interested in making short-term profits, than they were in serving customers.

Until the early 1980's, Western companies were quite complacent in the way in which they served, or did not serve customers. The rise of the Japanese manufacturer, however, forced a level of competition that created an entirely new paradigm of customer focus. The Quality Movement was born, with gurus such as Deming and Juran taking the lead in helping customers to create a new focus on serving customers.

However, as useful as the model was when it was introduced, it had its limitations. It was primarily created as a way to transform the relationship between the paying customer and the employees of the company. By thinking about the customer differently, employees could begin to put their needs at a higher priority than before, and therefore ensure that the company's efforts were focused on the end-customer needs.

Problems arose as the model was stretched beyond its limits when it was applied to internal relationships between departments, and employees within departments. The "customer-supplier" model was applied to all kinds of relationships, and to this day it is still being mis-applied.

The mistake came when two departments or employees that are interdependent were forced into the model’s relationship and one party had to be seen as the customer and the other seen as the supplier. In a neat, artificial world of linear processes it was possible to force the distinction to apply, but in most real-world working relationships the optimal way to achieve combined goals is not to think of the relationship as linear.

Instead, the relationship should be seen as more of a partnership between equals, where an objective is shared, as are the means to accomplish it. In this kind of relationship, the customer - supplier model is not useful, and can even be damaging.

For example, in some companies in which my colleagues and I have worked, we have observed individuals fighting over who should assume the role of supplier versus customer. The fight would typically take place over who the customer is, and therefore who had the power to set the precise terms of the relationship.

In other companies, there has even been a struggle to turn a productive, non-linear relationship into unproductive, linear relationships with an emphasis on formality and bureaucracy. Attempts to turn the New Product Design process in numerous companies into something that resembled an assembly line are good examples of trying to force a creative process into a mould that it should never be forced to fit.

Thankfully, the newest thinking from the marketing world related to the customer’s experience offers a way out.

In our work here in the Caribbean we face a situation that is not unique, but is quite pronounced relative to that of developed countries. In short, the average customer service professional in the region has at most an idea of what excellent service is. At the same time, they have very little direct experience of excellent customer service.

In other words, they have heard about, read about and seen excellent customer service in the movies and on television and from those who have traveled. However, they have not actually experienced it themselves on a systematic basis.

This is quite different from their counterparts in the North America, for example, who are much more likely to have experienced service that is consistently professional through a variety of national chains or nationally known companies. In the Caribbean, the regional examples such as KFC, HiLo or local public transportation companies for example, are not examples to emulate in the least.

The new employee, therefore, enters the workplace with this lack of experience serving as their only point of reference.

Furthermore, they enter workplaces that are characterized by a deep mistrust, if Jamaica is an example through which region-wide behaviours can be broadly understood.

Studies by Carl Stone in his 1982 study for the Jamaican government entitled Worker Attitude Survey, and the book Why Workers Won’t Work (1997) by Kenneth Carter show clearly that most workers are demotivated, and that their de-motivation has its roots in distrust of management.

It can be argues that this distrust has its roots in slavery, and the perverse worker-management relationships that prevailed in that institution for almost 400 years.

Regardless of the source, this lack of mistrust in today’s workplace begins with worker-manager relationships and continues in the employee-customer relationship. There is an old axiom: “an employee will never treat their customer better than they themselves are treated.”

I would update that axiom to say that an employee will never provide an experience for their customer that they themselves are not experiencing on the job. I would even go further to day that an employee will show no more interest in the customer’s experience, than their manager is demonstrating in the employee’s experience. In other words, a manager who does not care will produce employees who do not care.

I cannot say to what degree the above “updated axiom” is true of companies based outside the region. However, I am confident in saying that our background of workplace de-motivation and distrust makes it more (not less) likely that an unskilled manager will do serious damage to the customer’s experience by mismanaging employees.

The symptoms are rife across the region. "Res a Dem" treatment, sullen faces, workers standing around waiting for something to happen, “service with a scowl” according to a colleague of mine.

The enterprising worker is unable to rise above the norm, and quickly learns to do as little as possible to keep the job, without being committed to a high standard of anything. Eventually, he or she moves on to a different job, hoping that it will be different, and generally encountering the same situation.

While I have no empirical evidence, I believe that there is a difference when that same worker migrates to North America and encounters very different management style, in general. The change in behaviour may not be immediate, but it does take place. If this could be investigated with actual research, it might show that the worker himself is not the problem, as they are quite able to adapt to the demands of their new job.

Instead, the problem would seem to be one of management, and ownership. Company leadership takes the primary role to create the environment in which the workers serve customers. In other words, the onus is on them to create the experience that is desired, provide an environment that is abundantly manifests it, and train themselves and employees to produce it consistently.

This focus on producing experience is the gift that the marketing world has given to those who must transform their companies to be customer-oriented. These experiences go beyond the mere meeting of needs and the provision of outputs, and include as well the psychological feelings that ensue from good service.

For managers, this is a far departure from the old customer-supplier model, and for Caribbean managers it means finding ways to overcome destructive relationships and experiences that damage the bottom-line.

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Customer Experience Programmes Falling Through the Cracks

Customer Experience programmes are some of the most difficult for large corporations to manage, and many end up falling through the proverbial cracks.

I remember when I first heard the concept a few years ago, and applied it to my company newsletter, FirstCuts.

I found myself undertaking an out of body experience that was difficult. I had to imagine what it was like for a subscriber to go through all the touch-points that they would encounter, regardless of whether or not I had control over them or not.

Luckily, I subscribe to many newsletters, so I had a way of thinking about the service I was providing in terms of what I would have liked to see someone provide to me. It still was not easy, however, and resulted in my having a to create a tool to understand the different experiences that a customer could have at each touch-point (The Service Inventory.)

The problem is compounded tremendously in corporations.

Unfortunately, the touch-points that a customer experiences don't all fall into one nice department called "customer experience". In fact, most customers' first touch-point has nothing to do with service in many cases. Instead, people's first impression might be through the company's advertising, a speech given by the CEO, what their cousin told them about the company, or the fact that they couldn't find parking when they made their first visit.

These are all critical touch-points that help to create the emotional bundle of experiences that customers are left with at the end of the day.

What makes this all hard for companies, and for the heads of customer experience departments, is that they must somehow find a way to influence the entire company to provide a different set of touch-points for customers.

And this is why customer experience programmes often fail -- companies either reduce them to mere customer service, or they fail to get the entire company to buy in on the importance of looking at all the touch-points, from the CEO on down.

It takes a total commitment to deal with all the touch-points that customers experience, and the truth is that customers don't care which department is failing to give them the experience they want at the moment, all they know is that the company is bad.

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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."

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Training Beyond Customer Service

Training Beyond Customer Service

It’s interesting the effect that pressure has.

I’ve been bouncing around some ideas related to customer service in my head for a few months, but it was not until I HAD to write them down in the form of a paper for a conference that I was pushed to form them into some coherent whole. Of course, that was easier said than done, especially when I realized that I was working with some compound insights. In other words, I had insights that I had been using for some time, that have themselves been assembled into compound insights. But I had never written the original insights down… so I had to go back and lay the groundwork, and this I found somewhat annoying, although necessary.

Make sense? :-)

One idea I finally had to explain is how little customer service training in the Caribbean is directed towards generating a particular customer experience.

If anything, I would say that our front-line staff in the Caribbean is only trained to follow the “right” process, and little else (with notable exceptions). What does that mean, exactly?

It simply means that as a customer, over and over, it seems as if customer service representatives (CSR’s) are only expected by their managers to say and do the required actions that they have been told to say and do. CSR’s are quite satisfied when they have done so, and seem to have either an ignorance of, or indifference to the experience that I and other customers are having.

I recently noticed this phenomena with three companies in different settings, and for the sake of competitive fairness, I’ll use three companies that offer services in the same industry – Digicel, Cable and Wireless and TSTT (Trinidad’s monopoly telephone provider).

As mentioned in a prior post, I have been waiting for basic fixed line service from Cable and Wireless here in Jamaica from Aug 8th, and as of today, Sep 27th, I have not received service. When I call to complain/beg/cajole, which I do almost every other day now, I receive a uniform response – “We don’t know.” That is the fixed response that my wife and I have gotten to every question that we’ve asked. There has been not a single show of concern, regret or apology.

I can tell by the response that they are “following the party line.” We’ve also tried the tactic of asking for a supervisor, only to be told that “they are just going to tell you the same thing.”

Once, I did get through to a supervisor, who told us that he’d check into it and call us back. We’re still waiting almost 4 weeks later.

In Trinidad, TSTT, in which Cable and Wireless holds a minority stake, has an awful habit of taking down their network for days at a time. It’s an amazing piece of monopoly-driven behaviour that has generated significant ill-will among Trinidadians who, from all indications, are even more eager than we Jamaicans were to bring in cellular phone competition. This is due to start in early 2006, which is not a moment too soon for most Trinis.

The joke is that with a likely and immediate drop in revenue on the near horizon, TSTT’s customer service remains painful to experience. When TSTT introduced GSM service I was told by everyone who switched over ( i.e. lured by false promises) to hold on to my old TDMA service. Three years later, I was being told the same thing, except that at this point, my TDMA phone was falling apart. I was forced into an upgrade, and had to make three trips to TSTT to get a new chip and a new number (transfers of old numbers were “backordered’ and would take weeks to accomplish).

I happened to go on a day on which “the system was down” and when I returned later that day, I was told by 3 CSR’s that I recognized (they were casually strolling around Trincity mall) that the system was still down.

Undaunted, I went up to check for myself and was told that the system was back up. About fifteen minutes later, the 3 CSR’s casually strolled in and started taking customers from what was by now a considerable line of people. They may have been on a sanctioned break for all I know, but the truth is that they must have been idle for several hours before that break due to the system being down. They were oblivious to all around them…

And, to add insult to injury, the entire cell-phone system went down for two whole days starting the day after (this occurrence is inconceivable to us in Jamaica).

Digicel, for its part, came to Jamaica as a breath of fresh air and has been able to capture over 50% of the cellular phone market in just three short years. Their trademark has been a combination of better pricing, better service and wide availability (going to a Cable and Wireless office used to be seen as one of the worst evils imaginable).

Lately, however, Digicel customer service operators have clearly been “trained.”

Every conversation with a Digicel CSR goes something like this:

“Can I have your name please?”

“Francis”

“Mr. Francis, thank you for calling Mr. Francis, how can we help you today Mr. Francis?”

“My voicemail cannot be reached”

“Mr. Francis, I’m sorry to hear that Mr. Francis, and let me see what the problem is Mr. Francis.”

While I’m exaggerating to demonstrate the point, the effect of the CSR using my name over and over again in this unnatural way makes me think I’m dealing with some kind of machine, worse than any I encountered while living in the U.S.

But this is only annoying.

Clearly, Digicel, has also trained its CSR’s to keep the phone conversations short, and they might even be measured on the amount of calls they accept per CSR.

How did I arrive at this conclusion? Well, in each case that I’ve called, I’ve had to struggle to keep the CSR on the phone, and to prevent them from hanging up on me before I was finished asking my questions, and long before the issue was resolved.

Throw in a “Mr. Francis” here and a “Mr. Francis” there and the conversation is comical:

“I would suggest that you call back later Mr. Francis, and I’d like to thank you for calling Mr. Francis, and have a nice….”

“WAIT, I’m not finished yet!!!!”

“Yes, Mr. Francis?” (in an exasperated tone)

“How do I know that I’ll be able to fix this next time I call? What will be different then?”

“Well Mr. Francis, perhaps by then we will have a solution, but I’d like to thank you for calling Mr. Francis, and hope that it gets resolved next time Mr. Francis, and have a nice…”

“WAIT, Hold on, I’m not finished yet!!!!”

And so it goes, on and on -- with me desperately trying to keep them on the phone, and them rushing to get off.

The thing that Cable and Wireless, Digicel and TSTT have not understood is that their employees were probably trained to be “good students” or what we in Jamaica would call “nice students.” In other words, they are very-well trained to follow orders and follow procedures. You cannot get through our Caribbean education system, with its do-or-die examinations at different levels, without being proficient at following sometimes mindless routines.

In fact, Caribbean slavery and indentureship were all about doing as little work as possible under duress, and just enough to avoid punishment. In Barbados, (where my observation is that this behaviour has reached an apogee,) I’ve heard this called “malicious compliance.”

The employee is trained to follow the rules, and does so, against what I believe are some of his/her natural instincts.

Thankfully, there is a new standard of customer service that is more appropriate for Caribbean customers – training in producing a particular customer experience (also called a “branded customer experience").

This approach takes much more focused effort to both define the experience, and to train employees in producing it. The definition requires senior management involvement, and for the benefit of Caribbean employees be put into song, verse and script in order to get the definition across. The experience might be as simple as “Customers feel cared for in every interaction” or “Customers are able to get on with their day as soon as possible.”

One benefit of focusing on a particular experience, is that is puts the employee squarely in the world of the customer, so that instead of wondering whether or not their boss will be mad at them, they focus their energy on how to produce the desired customer experience.

Clearly, the CSR’s that I encountered from Digicel, C&W and TSTT did not care about my experience, as they would probably say that that was just not a part of their job. Their job was to follow the instructions they had been given (as good students would) and to do as they were told.

The fact is, providing a particular customer experience takes more than following the rules, and in many cases the rules that work in places like North America do not work here in the Caribbean (and even have the opposite effect). Instead, it takes a different level of awareness of what’s occurring in the customer’s world, combined with some ingenuity to determine how to provide it given the business constraints that the company must operate within.

The good news is that the Caribbean has no shortage of people who are tuned into the experience of others, and an over-abundance of ingenuity… if only these could be combined in some unique ways we could go well beyond dealing with people who are just “following the process” and come to know our companies by the quality experiences that they offer.

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Creating the Customer Experience Is Easy

Meeting customer needs is hard, compared to creating a particular customer experience.

Unfortunately, human nature is such that when customer needs are met, but the experience is one that is negative, what is remembered is only the experience. Emotion trumps reason every single time.

In fact, a skilled listener can tell a customer no, and still leave them with an experience that is positive, warm and caring.

Here in the Caribbean, this is a rare skill.

In fact, there seem to be many more who meet the customer's need, but leave a negative experience -- and this I have seen across the region, with some countries much worse than others.

At the same time, it seems that the company that is able to provide a good customer experience should do well, and it's not because our local service is so bad region-wide.

Instead, the reason is that we take service personally. After a positive interaction, we talk about "how nice that lady was". After a poor experience, we talk about "disrespect".

In other parts of the world, they talk about the service that the company provides, but here it's about the individual and what they did to us that was good or bad.

It's personal.

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Saying "No Way" but Still Providing an Experience

In customer experience programmes across the region, a real difficulty lies in getting the job done, while creating the intended experience at the same time.

At the very low standards of service we experience across the Caribbean region, it's safe to say that the average service professional, in the process of delivering service to a local customer, does a poor job of creating any conscious experience.

On the other hand, the very best service professionals I have ever encountered are able to take even a denial of service, and turn it into a positive experience. How is that possible?

Well, I am no surgeon, but the idea of undergoing surgery freaks most people out. Yet, as undesirable as it is, a patient who survives can indeed regard the entire experience as a useful and important one in their lives. Childbirth is similar in this regard.

Not that this is easy. It takes practice, skill and awareness, and also the will to serve people in this most sacred of ways.

There are not too many fresh graduates of high schools and colleges who are able to perform this particular trick. Instead, they learn from their management how to disregard experience, and to use force to get the job done. Then, predictably, the professional can blame the circumstances for the customer's experience, and remove themselves from a position of any accountability.

They simply are providing the worst customer experience possible.

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Throw Away Customer Service Training

Yes, that's right. Throw away Customer Service Training.

That's the new mantra of companies that are thinking seriously about delivering a particular brand promise to their customers.

The truth is that companies have become chained to a vague commitment to "better service" without this "better service" being defined in way that ensures that definite progress can be made. Instead, "bad customer service" is used as an accusation that is used to blame companies at all levels for not providing service... at all levels. Yes, that's right.... companies are blamed for not providing service at ALL levels.

Small companies are blamed for not providing the consistent service of larger companies.

Large companies are blamed for acting as if they do not care.

Low-priced companies are blamed for being cheap, and not supplying the luxuries that people want.

High-end companies are blamed for charging too much.

What's going on here? Are customers being unreasonable to ask for so much? Are the complaints just a matter of the impossibility to trying to please everyone?

In Port of Spain, should the doubles vendor on Long Circular Road be asked provide the same level of service as Hot Shoppe? In Kingston, should the pan chicken vendor on Red Hills Road be asked to provide the same level of service as KFC up the road? In Bridgetown, should Jus' Grilling provide the same levels of service as Champers?

The vague quality of these questions leave us all in a quandry, that pushes most of us to nostrums such as "You get what you pay for," implying that the issue has something to do with the price that the consumer is willing to pay.

These kinds of vague non-answers seem to let companies off the hook, but they are just a mistake on the part of companies that refuse to do the much more difficult work of defining a brand experience for their customers that is precise and clear.

Clarity and precision have nothing to do with price. They also have nothing to do with the size of a business in terms of total revenue, or profit.

For example, the pan chicken vendor on Red Hills Road is not providing the consistency of KFC, and he (or she) should not try to. Instead, he should focus on the brand experience that he wants his customers to have -- one that consists of:

• a home-cooked taste that changes with people's tastes
• the pungent smell of the chicken that pervades the air
• all-night availability
• friendly and fast service and gets better with repeat purchases
• the convenience of not having to leave the car
• the low cost that comes from buying on the street in an "unsecured" environment

Instead, the drum-pan chicken vendor should seek to provide an experience that is uniquely the "Red Hills pan chicken experience" .... and nothing else. The same principle applies to KFC, which should also try to provide a unique experience.

Neither outfit should try to provide "good customer service." In doing so, they hold themselves hostage to customers' (and employees') complaints that only come about because companies are insufficiently courageous enough to define unique service that is clear. The emotional challenge comes from the fact that when a company defines itself in a unique way, then they immediately must define themselves as "not-everything."

My observation is that executives of Caribbean companies (with whom I have the most experience) are downright scared to define their companies as "not-everything". Declaring that your company is a unique "something" actually defines it as "not-everything" when it's done well. Sticking to your guns and defining yourself as "not-everything" takes courage and are not for the faint of heart, especially when contracts and business opportunities seem to be abundant in the areas that are outside the defined zone of expertise.

Recently, I had the opportunity to take my own company down this path. In 2005 we made the decision to use the tagline, "High-Stakes Interventions." One of my partners-in-crime (but not an employee) shared with me that the tagline made him feel as if he were a CEO, that he would not want to give the company a call. He was right, and I knew it in the moment.

I gulped, and after thinking about it for a minute I realized that CEO's would only call me when they needed to, not when they wanted to. In this sense, my firm was willing to create a brand experience that is similar to that of surgeon or a skilled mechanic -- someone that you call for help when you absolutely needed that particular kind of expertise (and not just for a good lime). This little interchange helped make my company's brand just a bit more clear and precise, and it grew into the truth that I now have embraced and included in my marketing copy, which is that "High-Stakes Interventions are not for Everyone."

The downside of failing to define the company as "not-everything" is a kind of superficiality that creates a blurriness in the mind of the customer that is the very opposite of a brand experience that is clear and precise.

The upside is that a company that sticks to its guns can do the following differently:

• distinguish the branded experience at a deep level, and define the experience in way that makes it clear when the experience is present, and when it's not
• define in depth the unique combination of People, Processes and Products/Services that together provide the experience
• decide how much to invest in making the experience real, and also what the costs are for not committing to an alternate experience

For the customer, this only helps. I go to KFC when I want one kind of experience, and I can choose a different kind of experience by visiting Cheffette, Royal Castle, Pollo Tropical or Island Grille. Rather than being told that I get what I pay for, I can make my choice based on the brand I choose to experience.

The job of the proprietor is to ensure that they have accurately defined their own brand experience, and have the internal brand to deliver it over and over again.

In this sense, generic customer service training needs to be thrown away, and replaced by very specific, clear and precise brand-oriented "experience training."

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Service Standards -- no more

The days are gone when employees will be trained to follow customer service standards.

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with the idea of creating standards.

While the intention of creating standards for employees to follow is an honorable one, the very idea of standards can devolve quickly into "doing what the company wants so that I can avoid being fired".

This is not the best frame of mind to be in when it comes to trying to create a particular experience in the mind of customers.

However, it is quite easy to shift the focus from the internal need to "follow standards" to engaging in "Experience Practices" that are designed to produce a particular experience in the world of the customer. The term was recently coined by my colleague, Scott Hilton-Clarke, after some research that he did on the most recent thinking in the field.

I thought this was particularly brilliant innovation, as it changes the focus completely from compliance to creation.

These Experience Practices (or ExP's) can be designed for an entire company, a business unit and even for individual job functions.

But that is not even the beginning.

The first step is that a company must define the Experience it is trying to create in explicit terms. It is just not enough to say that the Experience should be good, or excellent or top class. These mean nothing anymore, especially in the Caribbean when the average employee has not experienced anything more than the best of "Frien' Service."

Instead, the Experience must be defined, and here I use my own firm as an example. Early in 2005, I decided to create a particular experience for my clients:

• bring sunshine and hope to dark places
• create new thinking and innovations
• be relentless
• speak truth to power
  

In short, I wanted my clients to experience all the above, and to do so at the major points of contact with the company or any of its representatives. The best way to do this would be to create Experience Practices at each point of contact.

In a larger company, this would mean training employees in the following:

• what the experience is
• how to recognize it
• how to use the Practices to create them in the customer's experience
• how to depart from the Practices when necessary
  

We know that the initial training could be modelled on the video-based feedback training outlined in our white paper available for download from our site: Lights! Camera! Action! During this experiential training, the employee would learn how to create the experience by being coached by a facilitator and his/her peers based on a handful of difficult cases or scenarios.

On an ongoing basis, however, the biggest difference would come from the kind of coaching that the employee receives from his / her manager in whether or not the experience is being created.

Customers that come into contact with employees that have been trained to "follow a customer service standard" often complain that the employees are robotic, and do not show the respect or flexibility that is necessary when the customers are real people with real needs that do not fall in line with a company's pre-planned process.

However, when the purpose is to create a particular experience, employees are able to focus on the right thing, and can then be trusted to create the right outcome for their customers.

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Waiting and the Customer Experience

One of our recent clients is a financial institution serving Caribbean customers. Their interest is in boosting customer service levels, and hopefully gaining a competitive advantage that will result in greater market-share, margins and profits.

This shouldn't be too hard.

The service rendered by the financial houses in the region is seen by most as mediocre at best, and no company stands out in either the research or in anecdotes in the level of service provided. Our job is to find clues that will assist the client in gaining all that it can to break out of the pack.

One clue that we have found has to do with waiting.

Waiting times, according to the research conducted by De Man, Vandaele and Gemmel of the University of Gent, can be seen to be made up of two parts that seem to be approximately equal in weight: the actual wait, as measured in minutes and hours, and the perceived wait as determined by the experience of the customer. It is becoming clear from the research that if a company is committed to providing better service in this area, then it must become skillful in reducing both kinds of waiting time simultaneously.

To put it simply, at the end of the day it is the customer's experience that counts, and little else, in defining the level of service delivered.

As a formally trained Operations Researcher, I learned a multiplicity of of tools that can be used to tackle the problem of reducing measured waiting times, ranging from queuing theory to digital simulation, to stochastic modeling. Fortunately for me, I have completely forgotten how to use them!

These tools are helpful, but when used in isolation they are less than useful. Millions of dollars can be spent on process changes that end up making no difference to the customer's perception.

On the other hand, a company that systematically addresses not just measured times but psychological waiting time is marching more in time to Einstein's tune, in which time (and space) are relative phenomena. His theories were proven decades after he developed them when empirical evidence was gathered that showed that he was correct in his thinking.

The University of Gent researchers conducted the first empirical study to prove what many researcher have been saying since the early 1990's -- there are specific techniques that can be used to improve customer satisfaction. Some of the techniques include:

• telling the customer how long a wait is likely to be
• explaining why the wait will be as long as it will be
• advising and updating the customer on the progress of the activities on which they are waiting
• providing effective distractions for the customer that occupy their attention during the wait

Each of these techniques has been found to be useful in changing the customer's perception of the length of the wait, and their overall perception of the quality of service being received.

Here in the Caribbean, banking is seen as one of those exceedingly time-wasting activities, moreso than many other activities that take less measured time. People carry books, radios and family members to their lines at financial institutions -- anything to alter what for many is often a mind-numbing experience.

Most banks provide little more than an extremely sterile and secure environment, free of amenities such as bathrooms, and distractions of any kind. Many are quite proud of this fact. Some are even intent on making it hard for customers to stay in the establishment for too long a time, and are quick to usher them out the door, or encourage them to go elsewhere.

The first financial insitution in the region that is able to change this important aspect of the customer's experience would win my business, and probably that of many others.

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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.

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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.

Read more!

Swimming, Mastery and Customer Service

It struck me while swimming this morning that the method I have been using for the past 8 years or so is all about mastery.

As a triathlete, I spend a great deal of time practicing the three sports -- swimming, cycling and running. Running and cycling share one thing in common, which is that a good athlete in decent condition can do well in these sports, especially when they are blessed with some degree of physical speed and power.

Swimming, however, is quite different.

Water is 80 times as dense as air. The reason that good swimmers are not muscular is that being a good swimmer is all about technique. In particular, poor swimming technique is punished severely in the form of resistance or drag.

By contrast, poor cycling and running technique are not as important as stamina, speed and power. The movements in both these sports are much more constrained, or limited, and the air is much more forgiving than water as a medium.

This makes swimming unique -- and the repetitive drilling that goes with mastery all the more important.

At my level of swimming it is ALL about technique. In fact, the books I have read say that someone with my (slow) speed should not even worry about trying to go faster. Instead, the emphasis needs to be on cutting resistance by using better techniques.

This particular insight is one that is pioneered by Terry Laughlin, the inventor of the Total Immersion approach to mindful swimming.

Someone watching me practice would wonder what the heck I am doing... it would look like a bunch of half-swimming exercises, repeated over and over again. They might think I am trying to get my body fitter and fitter by doing different things.

The truth is quite different, however.

Whereas the typical swimming workout, and the typical swimming coach focuses on quantity -- doing lots and lots of laps with variations in length and speed and stroke, Terry's focus is on using your mind to emphasize, isolate and improve different actions of the arms, legs, torso and head and the resultant bodily sensations.

For example, he would have you swim while focusing on creating a sensation called "weightless arm" which is created by pressing the chest into the water.

Why?

It turns out that these sensations allow for a more streamlined approach that cuts resistance and improve speed. However, the speed comes when the technique is right, and the technique is right when the sensations are right, and the sensations comes when the various appendages are doing more of the right things than not.

So, there I was this morning, swimming back and froth, trying to accomplish better and better way of keeping that feeling, especially when I am fatigued.

I recognized a parallel between this kind of thinking and providing good customer service.

A company that sees the need to deliver good customer service might invest in actions such as training employees to smile, say hello and ask "How can I help you" every single time a customer walks in. However, the result might be the opposite of that intended.

In The US, for example, I got quite used to the "fake friendly" service that is delivered in stores by people who would do all of the right things, but five minutes later would ignore me outside the store as if they never knew me. I have even gotten the same greeting from the same person only minutes apart, indicating to me that they are not really meaning to be friendly -- they are meaning to do their jobs.

If the company does not focus on the experience that the customer is having, versus the one that is intended, they could well deliver something very different.

It stands to reason that the way to focus on providing the desired experience with customers is to create practices for each employee of the company in producing the desired experience with other employees -- the people that they interact with most frequently.

And this is where the analogy fit -- practicing one thing can give you another. In my swimming training, practicing fast swimming comes from focusing on becoming more streamlined in the water.

In companies, producing excellent customer experiences comes from focusing on creating superior employee experiences.

When it comes to thinking about creating the right kind of experience with employees, executives have a tremendous blind spot, and start to think immediately of how much it will cost them. Often, the assumption is that the right kind of experience equates to giving them more money, which mostly comes from the point of view that employees are merely economic animals to be "inventivized" one way or another.

Well, it does come down to that -- but only in the very worst companies.

In the better companies, employees do not retreat into monetary rewards as their sole or even most important reward. Research shows employees want much more than that, and are not so easily bought and sold.

Instead, in the case of the Jamaican worker, research from Why Workers Won't Work by Kenneth Carter shows that respect is much more important.

In some companies that we have consulted with across the Caribbean region, workers have said over and over again that an executive that does not say "Good Morning" to each employee that he/she passes is guilty of disrespect, and insulting behaviour. While this may sound extreme (and it seems so to me with my American hat on) it nevertheless is true.

These feelings are then passed on wholesale to customers, as that same employee (without necessarily being vengeful) reproduces the same treatment that they received.

My sense is that executives can get away with this kind of behaviour to some degree in North American countries, as that "fake friendly" service can continue to some degree, perhaps due to the Protestant work-ethic that the US is so famous for.

In the Caribbean, however, a worker "dat not feelin' it, not gwine give it." Transl: "a worker that is not feeling it, will not give it." Workers in our region are particularly unforgiving of such slights.

Mastery of the customer experience in our region may well start with executives mastering the kind of keen listening and sensitivity that they want employees to demonstrate.

Read more!

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.

Read more!

Basic Experience Creation

On a recent project, my partner and I attempted to come up with a set of practices that we considered to be basic to the delivery of a good customer experience. While these practices would have to be tuned to produce any particular customer experience, they seemed to be basic enough to be broadly applicable.

1. Start Strong
2. Listen for the Target Experience
3. Manage the Customer's Wait
4. Create Flashpoints
5. End Strong

I will explain each of these practices in an upcoming post.

Read more!

Delivering a Custom Experience

I’m staying at my favourite hotel in Barbados, the Accra Beach Hotel. What makes it my solid first choice is the very warm welcome I receive after 30 visits, and the high level of service delivered relative to other Bajan hotels. The service is on par with a Jamaican hotel such as the Pegasus and a Trinidadian hotel like The Kapok.

On the other hand, it comes on the heels of my visit to the Marriott in Miami’s Dadeland area (my third or fourth overall).

There is just no comparison between the standards of the two hotels – the Marriot operates at a level that is clearly higher.

For example, I am sitting at my computer in my room at the Accra, and as I scan the room I can enumerate the service defects in my line of sight:

• the balcony door has putty spots on it
• there is a black mark on the wall
• the light fixture needs to be painted
• the light is blown
• I had to move my desk to the other side of the room, where the hi-speed access Ethernet port is located
• the baseboard is dirty
• there are marks on the ceiling

The overall furnishings are clearly of much lesser quality than the Marriott (or even the Hilton here in Barbados for that matter).

But that is not what got my attention initially. As a runner, I often enter a hotel after a morning run by walking through the lobby, looking like someone who just ran 6 miles or so in 80 degree weather. As I entered the Marriott’s lobby yesterday, the bellman literally ran to his desk, and pulled out a bottle of water for me to drink. This is perhaps the third time he has done so.

In my 5 or so years of staying at the Accra Beach Hotel, that has never happened; nor has anything close to it happened.

I use this example to illustrate the example of a bellman who operates to extremely high standards, although his actions are typical of the staff at the hotel.

The question I have been asking myself is, “What would it take for the staff at The Accra to meet that kind of standard?”

Incidentally, I ask myself the same question. In my career, I have had the fortune to work with and for McKinsey & Co., which is seen by many as the premier management consulting firm in the world. Working alongside some of the brightest people in the world hired from the best schools in the world was an eye-opener.

What remains is a personal goal to operate my company at the standard I witnessed at that firm. This has proven to be challenging!

It seems that the first obstacle that The Accra would have to face is how to very quickly create the standard in the first place. The average Caribbean employee in the service industry is not surrounded by the high standards of service that their colleagues in the First World are privy to. There is no mass-market company in the region that is known for excellent, world-class service (except, perhaps, in their own minds). By mass-market, I mean companies that serve the general public, therefore excluding hotels like the Ritz Carlton or Sandy Lane.

Therefore, it is impossible to tell an employee of The Accra that the service they deliver should be “world-class” like Sandy Lane’s. The truth is that the average employee would have no idea what that experience is like.

Instead, The Accra would have to start by defining the precise experience they wanted customers to have, and allow employees to create it for themselves for the customers. In other words, instead of delivering “world-class service” they would have to deliver an experience equivalent to that delivered to “my best friend” or “my favourite teacher” or “my team-mate.”

Once the desired experience is defined, then the hotel could move on to defining standards of new behaviour that match the experience.

However, there is a limit to what standards can do. The bellman who runs to give me water after a long run is obviously not following a written standard.

Instead, it strikes me that there are two requirements for service to be delivered at this level.

The first requirement is that there must be an inner motivation to deliver the experience. The easiest way to ensure that the right staff is in place is to hire people with a predisposition to serve from the very beginning. For the majority of existing and operational hotels, this is not an option as the staff would be very difficult to change wholesale.

The Accra would have to find a way to directly address and transform the culture of the existing organization.

The second requirement is that the staff would have to be trained to recognize the customer’s experience, and how to produce the desired experience at will. These are tall orders, but they are required capacities that may take a significant investment to perfect.

Interventions to produce these capacities must be developed with an understanding of the region’s peculiar realities, both historical and sociological.

With these ingredients, The Accra could improve its standards, and maybe even deliver a distinct experience that the Marriott could not duplicate.

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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.

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Tough Times in Creating the Customer Experience

Customer pees in bank

BY KRISTY RAMNARINE

An elderly woman who could no longer control her bladder, urinated in the waiting area of the Independence Square branch of RBTT yesterday afternoon.

Eyewitnesses said the woman asked a teller to use the staff washroom because she needed to go very badly.

However, the woman, who was standing fourth away from the counter in a very long line, was reportedly told she could not use the bank’s facilities but could go to the KFC outlet next door.

A few minutes later, the woman went to a corner of the room, stooped, pulled down her clothes and urinated on the floor.

Other customers who were in the bank were reportedly shocked at what the woman did, but some supported her.

The incident caused a few customers to raise their voice in defence of the woman, who, after she finished relieving herself, rejoined the line to make her transaction.

The bank’s cleaners were then called to mop up the floor.

After finishing the transaction, the woman left without being questioned by security.

Contacted yesterday, head of corporate communication at RBTT, Paul Charles, said the incident was an unfortunate one which the bank wished could have been avoided.

©2004-2005 Trinidad Publishing Company Limited


From the RBTT website:

"Welcome to the #1 ... banking group"

and

"Building and maintaining long-term customer relationships based on mutual respect, trust, a superior service and confidence therefore remains the cornerstone of RBTT's strategy."

Yikes.

P.S. Since writing this post I have come to learn that this has also happened in other banks across the region, all coming from the need for banks to maintain security by limiting access to rest-rooms located behind the tellers.

Given the damage that it causes to the customer's experience, is this really worth it?

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One Page Digest 14.0

Issue 14.0

Links Blogger (hosting site): If the word "blog" means nothing to you, then you are missing out on an interconnected world of ideas and information on the topics you care most about. See our company blog as an example, and check out our links to others and if you get inspired, create your own blog at Blogger. The cost? 5 minutes and $0. PBwiki.com (wiki service): If you also don't know what a wiki is, don't panic! Take a breath, and browse over to this site that offers a powerful tool for jointly sharing and creating information with your project colleagues sitting in Montego Bay, Port of Spain and Georgetown. The shared space you create with them will replace all the hassle of going back and forth using email. The Service Inventory (customer experience paper): The places at which your customers experience your company and make their judgements are known as touchpoints. This Framework paper describes a method for gathering and analyzing them, in order to produce a consistent and differentiated customer experience. GoogleEarth (a real time-waster!): I can think of no practical use for GoogleEarth, except to have fun. And it delivers! Find satellite pictures of the exact spots on the planet where you live, were born, went to school, got baptised, ... everything you can think of. It is all somewhat unnerving, however, in these terror-ridden times.
Did you miss the Framework blog discussion? Internet Networking: Are you proactively creating your personal brand on the internet, or waiting for other people to create it for you -- without your knowledge? Click on this link to see why you should be taking steps now to correct false information and give regional users a rounded view insight into who you really are. Click here.

About This E-mail The Framework One-Page Digest is produced monthly by Francis Wade of Framework Consulting, Inc. and is intended to provide E-level managers with a reliable source of new ideas for managing Caribbean companies. To join the mail list, visit http://urlcut.com/digest and follow the instructions to subscribe to FrameworkDigest, source of the One Page Digest. Past issues can also be found at http://urlcut.com/digesthome.

You are receiving this mailing because you are listed as a friend of Framework Consulting. To remove yourself from this mailing, send email to newsletter@fwconsulting.com with the words REMOVE in the subject line, or visit http://urlcut.com/digest. To ensure delivery, add fwconsulting.com to your address book as an approved sender. Framework Consulting Inc, 3389 Sheridan Street #434, Hollywood FL 33021

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