Customer Experience

Front of wallet

  • Monday, 15 September, 2008
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Credit card companies talk about “front of wallet”. With customers having a number of cards at their disposal, how does a credit card issuer ensure that their card is the customer’s card of choice; the card they will pull out first because it is at the front of the customer’s wallet?

How do you make sure that your website is “front of wallet”? One solution is to become the wallet. In Web 1.0 many organisations tried this, branding themselves as “portals” trying to be a one stop shop to do everything. The reality was that people liked to “jam jar” their experiences. They didn’t trust one one provider who did one thing well to sell them unrelated products; that just didn’t fit in their mental jam jar. They buy insurance from an insurance site, cars from a car site. So if they wanted to buy a car they would go to Autotrader. It was not a banks place to offer car sales in their portal offering. (The value proposition to the bank of course looked good on PowerPoint, sell people cars on the banks portal web and there was a ripe market for cross selling finance and insurance at the same time).

Web 2.0 brings a new “portal” to the playground. A concept rather than a product. Thus we have iGoogle and netvibes and mash-ups. No company can become the wallet, they must resign themselves to being the cards inside. They can do this by offering rss feeds and widgets. Making their content and functionality promiscuous, divorcing it from their site and allowing the customer to consume it how and when they want it. Sadly the banks have yet to grasp this concept. Their technically savvy customers would love to have their balances and recent transactions displayed on a widget or as a feed. Sadly they listen to the masses and their inherent conservatism prevents them from such offerings, killing it with what-ifs and unfounded security concerns (“what if a husband and wife shared the home computer and the wife saw suspicious transactions…” yawn).

Anyway, so there’s Twitter. I’ve signed up to it and for a long time it just sat there I had a subscription, but out of sight and out of mind. It wasn’t at the front of my wallet. It wasn’t even in my wallet. Until I got round to putting it on iGoogle. Suddenly it is visible to me. I see it every time I log in. I get bothered by the inane, uninteresting tweets that most of the people I follow burble, but I also update my status on it (and it updates my facebook status as well). Twitter is now part of my on-line experience. It is now front of my wallet.

Unlike the banks who I visit periodically to check my balance and pay bills (in-out, no lingering). Now if my bank balance was a feed on iGoogle I’d have more of an interest to drill down into more detail. I could manage my money better. I could establish a better on-line relationship with my bank. If they gave a little away, I’d give them so much more. But for now, they are back of my wallet.

Where’s the vision

  • Wednesday, 10 September, 2008
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Experience suggests that a project without a vision is like a rudderless ship. A clear vision from the start is essential to the success of a project. It is like the corporate mission statement. It is not the project objectives (objectives are generally SMART – you shouldn’t be looking to measure the vision), rather an articulation of how the end goal of the project will touch the lives of it’s ultimate recipients; the customer or the user. What the project will do for them (not the business, not for IT, but the customer, consumer or user).

The first step then is to get the vision agreed on. Luke Hohmann’s innovation games such as product in a box are a good way of distilling the vision. Next step is to keep it live and visible. Don’t just have it buried away in the project Wiki, but have it stuck on the walls where the team work. And then use it as a frame of reference when those difficult questions arise around scope and priorities.

Why is this important? (Via Leisa Reichelt), Peter Merholz shows how Google started out with a vision for their calendar.

The vision…

The google calendar vision

And what it meant for the product when it went to market…

Google didn’t start with a bunch of features of functionality (“Drop dead simple to get information into the calendar” – that’s hardly a requirement any BA would be proud of), but by having this vision, a statement of what the product would mean to the end user, and referrring back to it when scope or design decisions had to be made, they ensured that the end product delivered real quantifiable value.

Do you know what you are doing?

  • Wednesday, 27 August, 2008
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Recently I was told of a Blue Chip company whose IT organisation, in the guise of cost cutting, has recently disbanded its QA function. From now on, testing will be conducted by the developers themselves. Since when have developers relished the role of testing? It is inevitable that this cost cutting solution will end up costing the organisation more than it saves.

At the end of last summer I was working with a bank on their on-line retail banking strategy. During a workshop with representatives from their mortgage business they made it clear that they saw the biggest sector for growth in 2008 was the buy-to-let market. I left the workshop shaking my head, were they not reading the same newspapers I was? Even then I didn’t need a crystal ball to tell them that they were putting their eggs into the wrong basket.

Clearing out old paperwork, I came across a document describing the technology strategy for a blue chip organisation that I’d worked with in the past.

There is a guiding principle that is being applied to product technology selection that says we do not follow a ‘best-of-breed’ approach, but rather select a major technology leader (IBM) and ride their product development cycle. This means we explicitly seek and accept the “80% solution” rather than trying to optimise for each and every possible requirement. [We are] emphatic on this point. What this means in practice is that, following the selection of IBM WebSphere Application Server… add-on functionality should be sought from the IBM WebSphere family of products first. Shortcomings will be made explicit in order that we can escalate with IBM, and influence their product strategy.

No rationale was given for their preference for going with a single vendor rather than a best of breed solution, but talk to developers who have used best of breed products and the above mentioned vendor product and they will almost certainly come down on the side of the “best of breed” (that is why they are best).

During the dot-com boom I worked with bank who were developing a WAP mobile banking platform. Trouble was it could only be accessed via a Nokia 7110 (the first mobile phone with a WAP browser), the experience sucked – “Worthless Application Protocol” and the market penetration was never going to reach beyond the most hard-core (and GUI-patient) of early adopters.

At the time the same bank was intent on closing as many branches as possible – branch banking was considered unprofitable; on-line was the way forward… yet several years later I was back in the same bank helping them with their in-branch customer experience.

We all must have examples of times when we have shaken our heads and asked of others do they really know what do are doing? Whose interests are their decisions in aid of? You may not be able to do anything proactive about it at the time, but the question is, what can you learn from these encounters and how can you use them to teach others in the future.

Cross cultural considerations at the Sandwich bar

  • Tuesday, 12 August, 2008
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In their paper Content preparation for cross-cultural e-commerce: a review and a model, Liao et al. conclude that (1) Westerners pay more attention to information about product components or contents than East Asians and (2) East Asians pay more attention to information about price… than westerners. This is in the context of eCommerce in “present[ing] appropriate information content to facilitate consumers’ decision making”.

A practical example of this in the bricks and morter world can be seen at this Sandwich bar in Hong Kong.

Sandwich bar counter

Clearly modeled on the western way of buying sandwiches, the counter layout supports the customer selecting the product (sandwiches and fillings on display) moving on to the cashier at the end of the counter to pay.

This isn’t the way things are done in Hong Kong where money comes first before the product. “Please place your order at the cashier”… before dwelling in front of the display cabinet. This results is congestion around the cashier counter and poor workflow and a slow and tedious customer experience.

Sandwich bar or internet offering, consider cultural differences before transferring the concept and content.

Let common sense prevail

  • Friday, 25 July, 2008
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Me: “Hello, I’d like to book a flight back to London on Thursday please”.

BA: “Certainly. BA 28. Midnight Thirty Five.”

And that was it. No friendly warning, so close to doing this again.

If I ask for a flight on Thursday, common sense suggests that the fact that the plane is scheduled to depart 35 minutes into Thursday, and I need to be at the airport at 10pm on Wednesday, then it really isn’t a Thursday flight. Not being explicit and clear with this is rude business.

Banks don’t want you emailing their staff

  • Wednesday, 2 July, 2008
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You went to the local branch of your bank and spoke to a really helpful person there. In the few minutes you were with her you established a relationship with her. You felt comfortable and confident that she would take ownership of your request. But before she could deal with your query, disaster! You left some critical information at home.

Can I email it to you later you asked her?

Silly question.

Have you ever tried emailing someone in the branch network? Chances are the frontline staff don’t have external email. What sort of business is it that doesn’t give its staff email and the ability to communicate on a personal level with its customers? the same sort of business that has centralised all its customer contact and put it behind IVR.

So you give up on email.

Can I give you a ring with the details later you asked her?

She shakes her head. She doesn’t have a number. you see the branch doesn’t give out its number to the public. Go through the 0845 central switchboard, and let someone in the call centre pass a message to the person in the branch. (With no formal process to get this to happen, good luck if your messages ever gets passed on).

In fact the only way you will probably get a message to the person you talked to this morning is if you send a fax. One step removed from the telex, two away from the telegram.

What is it with the banks that they don’t want their staff to have external email access?

HP – Rude and impolite

  • Monday, 2 June, 2008
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This makes me mad. I’ve got a HP all-in-one printer, scanner copier. All I want it for is to print and scan. On the Mac the printer is plug and play so no messing about with drivers for that. I just need a driver for the scanner. So I insert the disc and find myself having to download 18 applications weighing in at 55 meg. No option to just install the scanning application – I’ve got to take the whole lot, picture editing, the works. Now that is rude, it is impolite [pdf] and it is selfish. If Mr Hewlett and Packard invited me to dinner I would come alone. I wouldn’t bring my family, extended family and assorted hangers on. So why do they think they can gate crash my computer like this.

What is it that makes your product distinctive?

  • Tuesday, 20 May, 2008
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In the recent copy of the Hong Kong British Chamber of Commerce magazine there is an interview with Fergal Murray, the Master Brewer for Guinness. He is asked “what do you think it is that makes Guinness so distinctive?” He replies,

I think there are a number of elements. From the brewers point of view, we want you to have a great all round experience. We don’t just want you to have a beer that’s refreshing, we want you to have an experience, to go through the ritual and theatre of emptying that glass. We want there to be a visual impact as well, it has to look fantastic. Finally, there’s a lot of flavour…

And you thought you were buying a pint of the Black Stuff because it was refreshing and tastes good. Yet for the Master Brewer these are bottom of the pile. Most important is the experience.

This is something that is missing in much software development. There are very few master brewers who go beyond just satisfying their customers with features and functionality, to focus upon delivering “a great all round experience”. To turn the mediocre and mundane into theatre. Like Apple have done with the iPhone. Like Guinness do with their stout. Yet something gets lost as you move away from the strategic owners of the Brand, to those responsible for tactical implementations. And this loss can obviously be costly. If the Guinness Master Brewer was only responsible for a drink that is an acquired taste, would it still be the sixth top ranked global Beer brand?

What the customer wants

  • Monday, 19 May, 2008
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I’m a strong proponent of engaging the customer in all stages of the design process. But sometimes you need to be careful with what they say and not always believe their first answer.

Ask the customer “what do you want” and the chances are you will get an answer that is rooted in their experiences and expectations. Not what they really want.

“I want an intranet portal“.

No, you don’t. You want a place where your employees can share files and documents.

“I want a google search appliance“.

No you don’t. You want to be able to find documents quickly and efficiently.

Worse is when vendors try and force products onto the customer…

“You want an integrated BI toolset“.

No they don’t. What they really want is to be able to pull some specific data from a legacy application into an excel spreadsheet and insert a graph into a word document.

OK, so it is easy to say that, but how to follow though? How do you actually get the customer to create a vision of what they really want? Well I’d start by not asking them that question. Get them to articulate what their goals are. Then try to understand in what context they will try to accomplish those goals? Think in terms of customer journeys and value outcomes over features. Think about the what, not the how. Start with the “to-be” vision rather than dwelling in the “as-is” quagmire, indeed use a system obituary to kill the as-is thinking. Use visual tools to model your ideas. And don’t get bogged down in detail.

I’ll write more about this in the future…

Web 2.0, retail banks and a Slide Share presentation

  • Tuesday, 29 April, 2008
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This is nothing new, but there are still people out there to whom Web 2.0 is a bit of a mystery. What exactly is it, and more to the point, should our business care about this stuff? Or, as I have heard senior executives argue, is it just another bubble, a distraction to let others waste their time, effort and money on. In an attempt to challenge this assumption, I’ve used a model with a few sceptical clients to hang some structure on. This is central to the below presentation that I’ve given to a few financial services organisations. It discusses what Web 2.0 is, and towards the end describes what it could mean for their on-line retail bank website. (Thanks to Duncan Cragg and Prashant Gandhi for some insights).

[slideshare id=377944&doc=web20public-1209431680446543-9&w=425]

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