Author Archive

Challenge to say no

Here I am at the lunch restaurant and for the first time I realise what has been bothering me when I pay. It's that question: "would you like to have a receipt?". Why does that question bother me? It is perfectly normal and fits in the context. My take on this is that I am one of those many consumers who in our fast moving world simply cannot take on another thing to make a decision about. That combined with the fear of losing out on something and our not being in the mood for more confrontation makes me stare at the person at the till in strange confusion. I mumble: "errr yes... uh o no, that's OK". So I think it through while I am having lunch, and come to the conclusion that there is more to this. We are simply overloaded with decisions to make just because we have the opportunity to say yes or no. The possibility to have or have not, the right to choose. Now consumers some 50 years ago had the challenge to be able to say "yes". Money and availability had to be forthcoming to say "yes" to something and make a purchase or take receipt of anything, really. In today's developed world, many of us have plenty of access to money and products or services are available in an abundance. That's the challenge. We can have it all. Cheaply. Right now. And then, when we get bored, we can replace it. Cheaper and better. The challenge is not to say 'yes' anymore. The challenge is to say 'no', the challenge is to be selective and focus on the important things available to us consumers. Many of us spend time considering these alternatives. New car, change of phone, what about that satnav? I need a new mp3 player. Where to get it? Who offers the best price? Shall I wait until I can get cheaper and better but later? We have become customers with so many choices and we are at risk of becoming bothered customers who forget to enjoy the ride. A good friend of mine once deliberately moved country and cut all ties to start up a new life elsewhere. I, bewildered at his strength and, in my view, madness, wanted to know why he would deliberately limit his choices so rigorously. His reply was simple and very provoking especially in a world which drives to expand our possibilities and our accessibility to anything our customer hearts may desire. "Choice is choice" he said. Draw your own conclusions[ READ MORE ]

The Interactive Voice Response Blunder

Sure it has happened to us all. We've all been the victim of the Interactive Voice Response system, the gatekeepers to the 'real people'. An Interactive Voice Response system is that automated voice that you hear when you call your energy supplier, your local council or any other organisation dealing with many incoming calls. They are meant to be a two-way winning setup. The company wins because they save money and allow the customer to select options so that the call is correctly routed for queueing and handling. The customer wins because supposedly the call can be handled more efficiently.... To me, any customer arriving in an IVR curses under his or her breath. It is a necessary evil, grudgingly accepted because the product or service is competitively priced. No study shows that you can really only ask your customer to make an IVR selection twice, with a maximum number of options of 3 in each. Go beyond that, and the abandon rate (when the customer hangs up out of sheer frustration) skyrockets. Yet the temptation to automate talking to your customer is strong. I baffle at that variation which tries to answer before I even asked my question. 'If your call is regarding your invoice, press 1', 'If your call is regarding a service outage, press 2', If your call .... Some of them have the nerve to state: "Please listen to all options" before they present all eight of them. You finally make a choice and if you are unlucky the automated voice responds: 'We are experiencing high call volumes right now and cannot be of service at this point. Please call back later'. Don't you just love that one? Or the other classic in which a serious male voice explains the entire terms and conditions regarding your question without actually answering anything, finishing off with 'for more information, please visit our website, www.answeryourownquestion.com... Ever been through three levels of IVR menu, hanging by the fingernails only reach one of these dead ends? It makes you wonder who put these together and whether they ever, ever put themselves into the customers' position and walked through the scenarios. I find this fascinating and wonder what motivates large, professional organisations to make blunders like this and then not even ever correct them. "So what do you do when the customer has a question?" "Yeah, we send them into our IVR maze, tire them out until they give up in the end". The tip for today is that if you cannot build a customer friendly IVR, which in most cases leads to a human being, then don't do it at all. The money that you save by getting rid of a handful of warm customer service agents you will lose many times over on the effort you send on customer retention and sales efforts to counter your disproportionately high churn rate. And you know, I don't even think it is technology that creates these Monster IVR setups. It is the organisations who implement them without thinking through the paths, the options and anticipating the customer experience. Call into your own customer service, pretend you have a real problem and see how it feels. Then do it again with a different problem, and another problem, and another. Exhaust the possibilities. Still feel happy? Then please forgive me for publishing this blog post. Not so happy anymore? Then get in some good business analysts, map out the paths, clean them up and reimplement. Quickly[ READ MORE ]

Predicting the next step in Customer Management

So what happens once all the companies where customers matter have implemented their state of the art CRM platforms? All interfaced, 360 degree customer view, complete control over structured, transparent customer data.... what a beautiful position to be in. What's next? Where lies the the next challenge then? Of course, companies will still have to innovate in terms of products and remaining competitive. But the next real challenge lies in reverse customer management. It's enabling the customer to manage the relationship with its supplier. Self service is part of that - often that afterthought in projects, almost a necessary evil from a company's perspective: 'Oh yes, we have to enable the customer to do this and that himself too'... Reverse Customer Management goes further than that. In years to come, customers will want complete control over their suppliers, preferably in one interface, in their own CRM system. Whereas companies create 'customer accounts', customers will want to create 'supplier' accounts and keep control over their supplier relations. The customer will manage the relationship. Combine this with Gardner's predictions about the future power of social networks in evaluating products, services, organisations and the power balance will experience a major shift from push to pull. We are really just at the start of the customer revolution. [ READ MORE ]

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-31

After a long winter break Customersrcool started blogging again. The drive to bring the customer back in focus continues. # Powered by Twitter Tools [ READ MORE ]

Treat everyone as your customer for just one day

Just bear with me on this one. Around 10 years ago I learned about stakeholder mapping. A stakeholder map, for those of you who don't know, is a big old spider web with you in the middle and everyone who has a stake in your life mapped somewhere around you in the web. Those with a big stake are mapped close to the center, those with a smaller stake further to the outside. Now, just see what happens if you treat all your stakeholders as if they were your customer. In a sense, if they have a stake in your life, they can influence it. In the same way that customers can influence a company they engage with. [ READ MORE ]

Social networks or cyberspace anonymity: those who do and those who don’t

The world of social media seems to be dividing up into two groups: Those who do and those who don’t. Those who do are happy to be out there, presenting themselves, promoting themselves, adding this new medium to their portfolio of communication. They leverage perceived risk with opportunity. Those who don’t prefer to remain cyberspace-anonymous, worry about misrepresenting themselves, prefer traditional means of communication, resist with all their might. Perhaps they even resist against better judgement. Perhaps[ READ MORE ]

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-12-13

Thinking of an editiorial schedule for my blog customersarecool.com with a subject area for each publishing day. Monday Wednesday Friday. # Anyway, publishing blog "Applying teleportation theory to customer data" later on today, 7th December 2009 # Business blogs that write themselves and customer data teleportation for your CRM systems. Sometimes you need fantasy to end-point vision. [ READ MORE ]

Organisations in Cyberspace: Permission Asset CRM considerations

One of the changes that Cyberspace has brought about is building a permission asset for your organisation. It's the basic principle of asking for permission to approach your customer regarding future commercial opportunities. We have all seen it before: "May we please contact you regarding the following in future:". And then follows list with topics such as customer feedback, new product evaluations, Christmas cards, updates regarding your offering, newsletters, blogs and such. In my opinion, there is intentional permission and circumstantial permission. This article is about how deal with this important distinction[ READ MORE ]

Amazon.com: Mitigating fear of losing…… control

Doing business has come a long way in the past 20 years or so. Only two decades ago Cash was King and there were no credit cards to speak of. Really, we were all still in the stone age. Buying something meant handing over your money and taking home your product. Today, at the end of 2009, most of us don't even see our money anymore. It might as well be Monopoly money. Many households pay their bills by direct debit or internet banking. Some of the products or services received are of abstract nature such as mortgages, electricity bills, council tax and such. Electronic money for abstract products. Now in the early stages of internet trade, Amazon.com understood very wel[ READ MORE ]

Teleportation of customer data for CRM

CRM is all about matching what is in the head of your customer in your CRM architecture. You need to be able to get to the right customer data when you need it. This could be information regarding quotations, orders, complaints. service outages, moves, contact persons just to name a few. Phew.... I was joking the other day with a friend of mine how great it would be if you could just teleport the information in your customer's head into your own CRM databases. All information about ongoing orders, quotations, previous conversations, the customer's likes and dislikes, his perception of sales conversations, the way he felt when your order was delivered. Just like that. Teleportation of customer data. Break it down on one end, build it back up in the other. Now we all know this is not possible. But it's a good end-point vision. After all, if we had all customer data available at our fingertips, an intelligent conversation with the customer would be relatively easy. There would be opportunity for upsell of other products, there would be opportunity to anticipate the customer's wishes and surprise instead of disappoint. [ READ MORE ]

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