Here’s a good example of an outbound email from Ocado that uses simple data (anniversary of customer’s registration) to good effect. You don’t need to do any segmentation or anything complicated, hold the personalization engine, this is data you have by default.
When Autotrader developed their cool and innovative iPhone app, they presumedly never paused to think what the DVLA would think.
Let’s say you are waiting at the traffic lights and you see a car you like and you think to yourself ‘I’d like one of those’ With the Autrotrader app all you need do was take a photo of the reg plate. From that, details of the make and model would appear and similar cars for sale close to you your current proximity would be displayed. Sadly, this functionality has been canned. Autotrader say:
The DVLA has requested that Auto Trader remove the image recognition element of the iPhone application. Although the app in no way infringes data privacy regulations, the ‘snap’ function conflicts with the DVLA’s code of ethics, as it allows consumers to capture images of vehicle license plates.
This is the same government agency with ethics that enables it to sell drivers details. That’s an aside. Perhaps the DVLA’s is more concerned with avoiding the trouble they got over Castrol using number plate recognition for interactive advertising.
With localisation being championed as one of the hottest topics of 2010 combined with the ubiquitous use of camera phones, it is clear that technology and the opportunities that it brings are moving at a faster pace than the ‘public opinion’ (read Daily Mail Opinion) that the DVLC is clearly running scared of.
So what?
So when you are envisioning and playing innovation games, have a session where you play devils advocate and tease out what angry from Tunbridge wells would think. Kill your idea as many ways as you can. Can you identify risks you’d otherwise missed (such as DVLA’s dinosaur thinking), or does it uncover new ideas or alternative ways of doing things (to bring out a cheesy quote from Benjamin Franklin “out of adversity comes opportunity”). There is of course always another alternative, to leave the innovation to others, for others to face the wrath of Government quangos and follow fast. But that is a blog post for another time.
Interesting times in the UK retail banking industry. The public consider the banks to be pariahs; cue a number of new entrants to the market. Virgin, Tesco, the Post Office, Metro Bank, the one thing they all share is the focus upon the customer experience that is perceived to be broken with the established players.
The concept of a bank seeking ‘fans’ rather than customers is very ‘of the moment’, it speaks to the marketing buzz on all things social, to a world where ‘Facebook will rule the Web during the Next decade‘ (indeed where once all journeys started with google, now they are just as likely to start on Facebook with Facebook now surpassing google in daily traffic).
So what does it mean to strive for fans rather than customers?
Let’s leave aside the dictionary definition of a fan “an enthusiastic devotee, follower, or admirer of a sport, pastime, celebrity, etc.:” (an enthusiastic devotee of a bank? Now that’s a stretch goal) Or the fact that it’s origin is a shortened term for fanatic (what are the consequences for having customers with unquestionable loyalty when you evolve and want to do things different? Will MetroBank one day have a Glazer Manchester United moment?!)
Placing the customer at the heart of everything you do is more than just the shiny stuff at the front of house. “A friendly welcome to dogs and their owners, with water bowls and dog biscuits on hand for man’s best friend – dogs rule at Metro Bank!” said the bank’s announcement. It is more than paying lip service to a social media strategy (Rentokil thought they could get all social without taking their traditional PR along on the ride – see what happened). It is about having the right infrastructure in place; robust systems and flexible processes. It is about investing in the unsexy stuff that rarely sees the light of day, because if you don’t do this things will inevitably go wrong. When the bank upsets a customer because the systems don’t allow the customer to do what they want, or make a mistake, perceived or otherwise, no amount of doggy bowls and seven day opening hours are going to get around that one. Metrobank and the new entrants are well placed to avoid too many of the issues that the incumbents face when trying to be truly customer centric, but they will be doing themselves no favours if they don’t place as much emphasis on the back end systems that the marketing team don’t see or understand as much as the shiny stuff in the branches.
Take a look at this and tell me what information it conveys to you. Look at the order status…
Dispatched.
So five days later when I ring up Laskys to find out what has happened to my product I’m told “we’re sorry, the product is out of stock. Would you like another similar product?” I’m not exactly a happy chappy to find this out five days after the order has been placed. I’ve been to ‘my account’ to track my order and it tells me that the order has (click on the help icon) “been processed and either has a delivery date or has been delivered”. Well no actually, it is out of stock and your eCommerce system hasn’t accommodated that scenario in the customer experience. Sorry Laskys, you lied to me.
“We did actually send you an email on the 8th of March to let you know this”. So I went back through my mailbox and indeed they had sent me a mail. I use gmail. The mail was unread, but I get so many mails I don’t always open them, especially as gmail gives you the title and the first line of the mail. The mail in question from Customer Service was titled “Your Order” and the following first line; “Thank you for placing an order with Laskys. TheSEBO X4 EXTRA on order 025”. nothing there to suggest that it was out of stock. Just a generic subject and first line of copy. They had taken my phone number as part of the process; no-one thought to ring me. Overall a poor experience. I won’t be buying from Laskys again and I suggest you don’t either.
There’s a lesson here. It is easy to focus upon the shiny stuff, to get customers converting, clicking on that buy button. But if the post-buy button experience is lacking; if you haven’t factored in operational excellence into your process, in the long run it is likely to cost you.
Agile software development is inherently democratic. Choice over Prescription could be included in the Agile manifesto. We give the customer the choice, the choice to decide what is most important to them, what will deliver the greatest value and build that first. We do not prescribe that they must build a complex framework first- the software will evolve, You ain’t gonna need it (Yagni) until you need it.
The problem with this democracy, with this unleashed choice is that, if you don’t have the right mix of stakeholders, the (agile project) customer doesn’t always know what is best. They are not always the best people to choose.
There is a difference between domain knowledge and what I’ll call ‘experience’ knowledge. A banker may know the banking domain inside and out, they can tell you the difference between all the different types of balance and how (and where) they are calculated; closing balance, running balance, etc. But unless they have done any research with customers, unless they have ‘experience knowledge’, when it comes to a question such as which balance to provide as an SMS alert, their ‘domain’ knowledge is as good as your common-sense.
Imagine software were a supermarket store. IT are responsible for the construction of the store, the basic layout, the signage, the checkout, the peripherals. The business are responsible for what goes into the store, the merchanising, the planogram. The business imperative is to fill the shelves and shift the product. They want to spend their money to this goal, anything that does not directly support this will be of lower priority. That is their domain and they will prioritise that over anything else. If they could fill the store with nothing but shelves they’d probably be happy.
Now imagine visiting the store. There’s no carpark, there are no shopping trolleys, there’s no emergency exits. There’s no ramp for disabled customers. The shelves rise to eight foot high (with no steps to reach the heights), the aisles are difficult to negotiate because of promotional displays between the shelves. The business is happy, but what about the customer?
In the agile world, nobody is going to pay attention to this stuff unless it is prioritised. “Sorry, we didn’t build any shopping trolleys because you prioritised building more shelf space over them”.
This sort of thing happens all the time; functional domain requirements trump experience requirements. Why? Because no-one brings experience knowledge into prioritization and planning sessions.
When stating their choice, your stakeholder wears a commercial hat, they are thinking about their targets and those are based upon shifting product. They are living in thier operational business domain. But cold commercials are not what shifts product. It is the experience that does. Now go back to the democracy of choice on an agile project. Who is the ‘business’ specifiying requirements? Is it a balanced team? Is their an experience champion with an equal voice? Is the voice of the customer recgognised? If not, isn’t about time you got an customer experience champion onto the team.
This is a model I often see in organisations when it comes to their web presence. A product owner comes up with a commercial proposition, marketing work up the content, IT build the functionality and it is goes live. With this model, no-one actually owns the customer experience.
Worse, this little temple model is repeated across different commercial propositions so you end up with something that is not very joined up. I’ve blogged about this lack of joined up thinking before.
Now let’s construct a model where the roof of the temple is a compelling customer experience.
What are the ingredients of this new temple model? It is still going to be founded upon commercial propositions, but they are going to be overlaid by a culture of test and learn. That is a willingness and ability to experiment; to realise that what you have developed is never final and is always evolving. It is about taking the learnings of experiments to inform and improve the experience, or to rapidly refine or kill propositions that just do not work.
Then we have the five pillars. I describe these in a paper I wrote ages back (pdf here, google books here).
Unfortunately these pillars tend to sit within organisational silos; content and personality are ‘owned’ by marketing, functionality by IT, and operational excellence (that’s all about fulfilling on the customer promise and beyond) is a mixture of IT and operations. Usability is a ‘funny one’ in that might sit alone, sit in marketing or sit in IT. But ultimately it is best placed to direct the horizonal filter of Quality Control. Quality control is not an additional layer of bureaucracy, rather a cultural component that all the pillars feed into. It is about ensuring consistency and meaningfulness of the experience. It is about balancing the commercial needs of the product, with the marketing needs of the message and the delivery capability of IT.
Photo credit: K. Dafalias
What customers say they like and how they behave are not the same thing. Don’t always trust what you are told, use data and real insights to drive decisions that have major commercial implications.
So there was a skyscraper, banner and numerous MPUs across the website. A survey panel was set up and the results came back. The agency briefed the team, “Your customers really don’t like all the ads you have on the page”. The message was reiterated in focus groups. Ditch the ads. This would be a painful decision, despite customer’s not liking them they were still delivering reasonable revenue.
The organisation was striving to be more customer-centric; if the advertisements were degrading the customer experience then removing them would be a price worth paying. And so they were switched off.
The result? Nothing. Except lost revenue. Analysing the data, customer volumes remained the same. There was no difference in the successful completion of customer goals. Switching the ads off had no impact on customer behaviour on the site; when asked customers said they didn’t like them, but what they said and what they did were different things.
The moral: if you are going to use emotion and what customers say to make commercial decisions, consider A/B testing with real data before making wholesale changes.
Ability to do bulk price mark-downs? Nice to have.
Today we are looking at a large UK supermarket stock control system. At the end of the day the staff mark down prices on the short-life items (sandwiches etc). They have a hand held scanner with a belt printer. Scan item – print label – stick label on item. Well that’s what the process is supposed to be, only this takes time (20 seconds per item) and when you have a whole shelf to do is a chore (12 items takes four minutes). Far easier to just write down the new price on a ‘discount label’ with a sharpie and stick it over the barcode (do the whole shelf in less than a minute).
Where’s the problem in that? In fact three minutes of waste (waiting time) has been eliminated. Only it is a problem…
The customer takes the item to checkout and the mark-down label is covering the barcode. The checkout colleague tries to peel it off to scan, but it doesn’t peel cleanly. So she manually enters in the SKU. And the mark-down price. And this has taken 2 minutes for one item and the queue has grown and because of the ‘one in front’ policy they have to open a new checkout and suddenly that small problem at one end of the value chain is replaced by a bigger costlier one at the front end.
But had we not observed this we would never know that bulk price mark-downs on the hand-held device is not a nice to have, it is million dollar requirement.
I’ve got a query about an Account I opened with Alliance and Leicester. I’ve got a letter that provides me with an account number and a phone number, it reads “…if you have any further question [sp] please contact a member of the team on 0844 5619737“. So I ring the number.
“Please enter your eight digit ID number. This is on your welcome letter, monthly statements, or internet banking ID. It is NOT your account number.”
Hmmm. I don’t have any of those things to hand, they are not on the letter. I’ve got my debit card, but that’s obviously on a different system. I put the phone down and return to the letter, near the bottom, in bold it gives another number “if you would like us to send you information in the future in larger print…” I ring this number. It doesn’t work.
So I go to the website and look for a telephone number. I’m an existing customer. I select my product and ring the number on the page.
“Please enter your eight digit ID number. This is on your welcome letter, monthly statements, or internet banking ID. It is NOT your account number.”
I don’t have that information to hand. I choose another product. Same message. I’m getting frustrated. There’s a page titled “Other enquiries“. Lots of words, but no number. I navigate to the complaints page, it has a number. Hey! Kill two birds with the same stone, speak to someone in their complaints department, make a complaint about how my time is being wasted trying to find a number and get transferred to the relevant department.
I dial the complaints number, more IVR and the prerecorded message.
“Please enter your eight digit ID number. This is on your welcome letter, monthly statements, or internet banking ID. It is NOT your account number.”
Frustration turns to anger. I find a number for new customers. I get through the IVR and finally talk to someone. “I need to transfer you to the relevent department” she says. OK. The line goes silent. And then goes dead. Lovely. Stress. I give up and start the motions of closing the account.
There’s nothing unique about Alliance and Leicester. I hate to pick on them. But this seems like a case of a lack of joined up thinking. When you are designing processes or procedures, don’t just think about them from the business perspective, take a persona and test them with real people in roll plays. What if someone doesn’t have what you expect them to have? Customers do not always behave according to the expected happy path. What are you doing about that?
Litter bins on the street aren’t the most interesting of objects. The design is pretty standard, with variations on a couple of themes – cylindrical or rectangle and colour being the primary tool of differentiation.
“To throw rubbish in the bin instead of onto the floor shouldn’t really be so hard. Many people still fail to do so. Can we get more people to throw rubbish into the bin, rather than onto the ground”
One answer is to make it more fun. Check out The FunTheory for other ways of improving mundane products by making them fun.
Now think about that mundane product of yours. Maybe it is your on-line retail bank. It is getting tired and it is time for a technology refresh. You’re going through a process of capturing requirements. How about playing an innovation game, but base it on the concept of fun. What could you introduce to your product that would make people smile? What would make people laugh? OK, so after a while the bin would no longer be fun. What makes it fun is the element of surprise. Again, what could you drop into the product that would surprise people. What would a ‘fun’ internet bank look like? Focus on fun and surprise and you might uncover a nugget of inspiration that will make the final product.