dancingmango

Marketing may be a touchy-feely occupation, but the language that marketeers use is far from it.  Campaigns, strategy, tactics, targets…  all out of the military handbook.  That might be OK within the organisation, but it shouldn’t be exposed to your customers.  An email sent by BA inviting customers to register to a special deal results in a page informing the customer; “Thank You, [name] Your pre-registration for this campaign has been successful”.  Now what is that all about?  They’ve spent so much time creating the campaign, how it fits into their overall strategy that they’ve overlooked the details around what really matters - fullfillment, wording and how the customer feels about BA at the end of the process.  I feel a little cooler than when I clicked on the promotion. 

Today is one of those days. A meeting in Zhuhai at 11am. Take the 08:40 ferry from Hong Kong, no problem. I’d researched the ferry times, got to the ferry port with loads of time to spare and went up to the ticket counter. “Ticket to Zhuhai please”. Suddenly there was an earlier 8am ferry leaving in five minutes, if I run I could catch it. “You’re sure this goes to Zhu…” I started to ask, but the man behind the counter cut me off. “Yes it goes to zhunzen, now hurry!” but I didn’t hear him correctly, I was focussed on a boat leaving earlier than expected, and that would definitely get me to my meeting on time. Communication Breakdown. It was only as the ferry left Hong Kong and turned right rather than left I realised my mistake. I was on the boat to Shenzen.

But that is not the purpose of this post. Arriving in China, when going through passport control, under the glass window there is a little box with three buttons on it, inviting you to rate your experience - green for perfect, yellow for satisfactory and red for unsatisfactory. Capturing customer feedback at the time of the experience. Howe much more valuable is that than asking customers to complete a lengthy questionnaire some time later, after the event. I think that websites could learn from this. Rather than a pop-up inviting customers to complete a questionnaire of a number of pages (often this appears just as you start your experience at the site), why not get customers to “rate this page” or “rate your experience” as a simple thumbs up or down (as you might Digg comments). This will provide instant feedback, maybe not qualitative, but quick and simple quantative data.

And if I had the ability to rate today? Right now, as I sit in a dingy cafe waiting the two hours for the next ferry back to Hong Kong, with a rapidly flattening laptop battery, I’d have to press the thumbs down, unsatisfactory red light on my current experience.

When VW beetles, kombi vans, or any Volkswagen air-cooled motor pass each other, their owner’s wave. There’s an unofficial community around the product. How cool is that to have people passionate about product?

Do your customers wave each other? Do your products inspire a bond, knowingness amongst their owners, a community?

Maybe you’d like to experience that VW passion. Look no further than the baddest bus in town; my head-turning 15 window is for sale on ebay!

They’ve thought about the customer at Hong Kong airport. At every MTR station on the express route to the aiport, the trolleys have been lined up so that they are in front of the passengers getting off the train. No hunting for a free trolley - they are waiting for you! Nice!

But stop to think about that. Someone is employed to line up the trolleys. Given the hours the station is open (18 hours) it is going to be more than one person every day, more likely two; three to cover shifts across the whole week. Trains arrive every 15 minutes, so there will be other tasks for this role to do, but if they are offering a consistent customer experience then the focus will be this role.

So let’s work a UK equivalent, we need to employ three additional employees at, say, £8 per hour. Once Employers National Insurance is factored in (and not including sick pay or any benefits) that’s about £15k for each individual, or an optimistic £45,000 pa for the customer experience of having the trolleys lined up.

Justify that to the beancounters…

After a month living out of a suitcase, circumnavigating the globe I’m homeward bound. I’m flying with Oasis… going to be interesting how the words “budget” and “longhaul” reconcile with each other. So far the experience is promising, a nice touch with their e-ticket (the date which I have subsequently changed). The plane flies at 00:50. BA fly back from Hong Kong a little earlier; on their e-ticket they don’t make it clear that the flight is a post-midnight one. Last time I did this trip I arrived at the airport on the Sunday night beleiving my flight was late on Sunday. Only it was a few minutes after midnight… on the Monday morning. I’d missed my flight by 24 hours. An easy, and expensive mistake to make. Oasis have gone out of their way to help me not make this mistake.

What do you see? Depends on who you are. In the US it’s just a row of toilet cubicles. Elsewhere in the world it is “what’s with the huge gap between the floor and cubicle wall? A gap large enough to see the legs of the person in the cubicle next to me!”

Apologies for dragging this blog to the level of the toilet, but there is a point to this observation. Things that are normal in one culture may not be quite so normal in other, even the most mundane. On distributed projects with off-shore teams it is not enough to ensure you have robust processes and open channels of communication. You need to ensure that cultural differences are understood and respected. Don’t assume everyone shares your design of toilet.

Friday evening, the train is pulling into East Croydon railway station. There’s an announcement.

We are now approaching East Croydon, please mind the gap between the train and the platform. Don’t leave any of your belongings behind…

The usual scripted stuff. Then…

Hey! I’ve just realised its Friday! The Weekend is here.

People on the carriage look up. Did he really say something, that’s something that breaks the mundane monotony of the commute.

Remember folks, drink sensibly!

I looked around and people on the carriage were smiling. An unscripted, personal touch. It wasn’t a canned message from an anodyne voice. For a brief moment South Eastern Railways became really human. It made commuters smile. And commuters travelling into East Croydon rarely have anything to smile at.

There is more to Customer Experience than homogeneity and consistency in interactions. It is more than scripting customer contacts. It is more than sheepishly adhering to the corporate line. It is about empowering employees to have the confidence to be human. It is giving employees some degrees of freedom to do things differently if it is in the interest of the customer. To be spontaneous.

There’s the story of the Ritz-Carlton bell boys being given a budget to help customers. To be spontaneous without having to jump through hoops of approval. No “I’m not really sure, wait a minute and I’ll ask my supervisor (because even though I’m grown-up enough to want to help you the Rules by which I’m employed don’t let me)”.

Maybe I’m getting a bit carried away. But customers remember these human touches. And if they have the seed of a positive emotion planted in their memory, an emotion associated with your brand, you have the seed to grow lifetime value.

Washing your hands is a two handed affair involving a pair of hands, soap and water. There are instructions on how to do it properly. I’ve not done any research on it, but my gut feel is that most people wet and rinse their hands under a running tap (faucet). With this presumption, the Boeing airline toilet wash area is not fit for purpose. I adapt my behaviour to suit the technology. I press the hot and cold buttons down with my thumbs and attempt to rinse the rest of my hands under the running water. I could fill the bowl up, but (a) that is not my habitual behaviour; (b) wouldn’t that mean rinsing in dirty water and (c) those bowls are not always the cleanest of things anyway.

Seems like the design on the airline faucet was an engineering solution to an engineering problem. You don’t want to have the tap left running. So let’s make it really difficult to use. Let’s demand our users have to learn a new technique to use it. If the designers had considered the human factor, the design would probably be quite different. If they’d prototyped and user-tested the design they would have seen that it was sub-optimal.

Yet it is easy to criticise. (There is one good thing about it, it is clear which is hot and cold – assuming you know that red = hot and blue = cold). How could it be better? Maybe a foot control or infra-red sensor. But inevitably such solutions are costly to implement and costly to maintain. Why not a spring-loaded press button that gives a timed flow of water (not fail safe?) In designing solutions there are always trade-offs and compromises and maybe other more user friendly options were considered but discounted on the grounds of cost to implement or maintain. And as a customer in coach, a little hassle in washing my hands is an acceptable price to pay. But that is not going to stop me grumbling every time I struggle with the tap on the plane. (Oh dear, am I sounding rather obsessed?)

I used to consider myself a travel snob. Certainly not a tourist and even back-backing was beneath me. I went for the authentic experience; small holdall with only the bare necessities, travelling and staying with the locals, keeping off the beaten track. So when I was in Singapore recently the question of whether to go to Raffles for a Singapore Sling agonised me. My old self would have shuddered at the idea. What a tourist cliché! I’d find a smoky café in the Arab area and drink thick coffee and puff on a hookah. What is worse, I’d preach against any way but my way- if you’d been to Singapore and stayed at Raffles you hadn’t really been to Singapore. Unless you’d eaten from street stalls and slept under a fan you were just a (spit) tourist.

But I’m in Singapore on business and I’m older and wiser and I hit the Long Bar in Raffles and like almost everyone else, I do the tourist thing and order the Sling. And the experience was appropriate to my circumstances.

Sometimes I wonder if this snobbery rears its head in my professional world. We choose Firefox over IE, Ubuntu over Vista, agile over waterfall. Ruby on Rails is our passion, anything else is just beneath us. Commercial success is to be looked down upon; “selling out.” Bob Dylan sold out when he went electric, right! There’s a thin line between passion, pragmatism and snobbery. The thing is to know the set, setting and circumstances. Who are you working with, what’s the context and why are you there. Keep those questions in mind and the appropriate level of snobbery you may revel in should become clear.

There once was a time that international development was all about big capital projects, building dams and the likes. Times change, now the focus is on eliminating poverty; DFID “focus [their] aid on the poorest countries and those most in need”. There is a realisation that those big projects did very little to address poverty, indeed they kept countries poor forcing them into debt (read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man for a cynical view of this). And besides, dam projects are rarely successful and before you know it they silt up.

A focus on reducing poverty requires a new approach. It requires an understanding of the root problems, it means spending time with the poor to understand their circumstances to be able to create appropriate and sustainable solutions rather than prescribed programmes that develop and maintain a dependency culture.

There are parallels here with the IT industry. Much of the IT game remains focussed upon those big projects. Software dams that can be launched with great fanfare but do little sustainable good to those most in need. The customer.

Before I wound up in IT I worked in international development. My PhD. “Ergonomics tool and methods for use in Industrially Developing Countries” was based on working with farmers in Sub Saharan Africa, looking at how technology is transferred and how it can be made more appropriate, sustainable and usable. Many of the tools and techniques I used in the bush I apply with the corporations I work with today. These came under the umbrella of “Participatory Technology Development” and “Participatory Rural Appraisal”.

Rather than the delivering the white elephants of expensive machinery that you see littered around Africa, Participatory Technology Development is an approach for developing simple low cost innovative solutions that have the ownership of the community who work with researchers to build them. The PTD framework starts with gaining a shared understanding problems and opportunities. This is followed by defining priority problems then experimentation. Experimentation is collaborative with options derived from indigenous knowledge and support from the researchers experience and expertise. The farmers own the experiments and the results. This leads to the next step of the framework; sharing the results with farmer led extension. (Traditionally dissemination of agricultural advice is done by agricultural extension officers – government employees who despite their best intentions preach too the farmers, sharing centrally defined agricultural advice rather than the more appropriate, locally developed technologies that the farming community have developed themselves). The final step to the process is the researchers withdrawing, leaving the community with the capacity to continue the process of change.

(Sounding like agile?)

If PTD is a framework, then PRA is a basket of tools and techniques that can be used to support it. These can be broken down into nine categories:

• Secondary data reviews – reviewing existing sources of information
• Workshops – getting key stakeholders round the table (or more appropriately under the banyan tree)
• Semi-structured interviewing – talking to people with a loose conversation direction
• Ranking and classification techniques – identifying “things” and ordering them according to different criteria. (Often this will involve moving pebbles around boxes drawn in the sand).
• Diagramming, illustrations and graphics – pictures to convey ideas and concepts, through “boxes and arrows”, Venn diagrams and charting to cartoons and imagery
• Mapping – drawings or models that represent the local environment
• Structured observation – watching people doing
• Timelines – What happens when, for example seasonal calendars, a line in the sand and people put pebbles down against the time to show when crops are sown, harvested, how the price fluctuates, labour migration etc.
• Community meetings – meeting the whole community rather than just the immediate stakeholders who participate in stakeholders. Showcases?

Are you building a Software Dam? Or are you focussing your aid on those most in need? PTD and PRA are approaches that have developed to help introduce appropriate, sustainable improvements to the life and wellbeing of subsistence farmers. Much of their content can be transferred to IT projects, helping introduce appropriate, sustainable improvements to the life and wellbeing of customers / users.