Category Archives: Customers

Multipliers

Posted by

0

There’s an old adage that an unhappy customer will tell ten people about the bad service they have received. If that was ever true, it is startling how quickly and comprehensively it is untrue now.

Here’s a little story unfolding in front of our eyes. The starting point is Helen Lippell being on the receiving end of a poor experience:

@ Hi, I had a frustrating experience at yr Victoria Stn shop. 4 staff stacking chocolate bars while big queue waiting
17 May 2013 2:56 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@octodude
Helen Lippell

Note that that’s directly addressed to @WHsmithcouk so wouldn’t ordinarily be visible except to the intersection of their followers. It seems a safe bet that, to a rough approximation, that’s nobody.

Back comes the reply. Whoever is behind @WHSmithcouk is apparently unable to take note of feedback given on twitter and do anything useful with it. How foolish their customers are who do not know that such messages should be emailed instead.

@ please send your complaint to our team at whsmith.co.uk">customer.relations@whsmith.co.uk. Thank you
17 May 2013 2:57 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@WHSmithcouk
WHSmith.co.uk

Helen, perfectly reasonably takes exception to that. And this time a dot goes at the beginning of her tweet.

.@ Tks 4 prompt answer but telling me to email defeats pointt of having Twitter feed! Yr senior mgrs shld come &see 4 themselves
17 May 2013 3:01 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@octodude
Helen Lippell

The effect of that is that the audience for the exchange leaps from approximately nobody to Helen’s 731 followers. One of whom happens to be me, whiling away a few minutes on the top of a bus.

A more perfect lesson from @ to @ in how not to respond graciously to feedback is hard to imagine. http://t.co/QktTpqPnLY
17 May 2013 3:47 pm via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite
@pubstrat
Stefan Czerniawski

That adds another thousand or so people to the watching crowd. And now it gets really interesting. That tweet has been retweeted nine times in less than an hour to a notional audience of 24,368 more people.

So the cack-handed response has had the result of changing some effectively private feedback into negative publicity shared with 25,000 people.1

There are some important lessons there. It’s always interesting to see how far the learning still has to go.

  1. And yes, there is almost certainly some double counting among the followers. And not all those people will see, still less register, these particular tweets. But the amplification effect is still dramatic. ↩

Design integrity

Posted by

0

Designing complex systems is complicated. Sometimes there are interactions between the pieces which don’t quite join up, customer journeys which turn out to have structural obstacles. Some of that can be obscured or avoided through good interface design, but sometimes the underlying ugliness just pokes through.

This screen marks the successful end of a transaction. This screen irritates me immensely. This screen is an inadvertent illustration of last week’s post – swimming ducks and ungainly paddling cannot easily be separated.

Transport for London ticket machine showing "Your Oyster card has now been updated. Thankyou for using oyster. Next time why not top up online?"

There is nothing particularly wrong with this screen as a screen, but it makes an offer which it cannot fulfil. The transaction which the screen acknowledges and suggests would be done better online – the renewal of a bus pass – is in fact one which can’t be done online at all. So there are two pretty obvious questions. The important one is why it can’t be done online, the intriguing one is why it suggests it can.

The superficial answer to the first question is that bus passes can’t be bought online because buses are not equipped to load a season ticket on to an oyster card. There’s no terribly obvious reason why that should be so. There would be a data storage requirement to hold details of pending tickets, but a fairly minor one, and the functionality otherwise needed is already contained in the ticket machines on buses. But though it could work that way, it doesn’t. I have no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect that there is a gap in the system architecture somewhere, that the basic design wasn’t fully thought through, and that now it feels too hard to fix that gap, pretty minor though it ought to be.

So it can’t be done. Why then add insult to injury by patronisingly suggesting that it can? Pretty obviously because that’s a completely generic end of transaction screen, which lacks the basic logic to use the transaction which has actually been undertaken to drive what gets put on the screen. Maybe the people who do ticket machine design have no connection with the people who do web design. Maybe a train-focused organisation (and ticket machine) has forgotten that they run rather a lot of buses too.

Trivial though all this is, I think it it tells us something important. There are smarter ways than TfL so far seems to have found for glossing over a hole in the service. But no amount of gloss can get round the fact that the hole exists. In the end, the only way of fixing the hole is to fix it. Design is not a veneer – and just as important, veneer is not a design.

 

Putting the spare tyre on an Airbus

Posted by

1

It’s a holiday cliché. The car is packed, the boot is full, the journey is under way – and then there is a flat tyre. Luggage is piled on the hard shoulder until the spare wheel is finally unearthed.

Airbus 321 with wheels down

It happened to me last week. Except that it was a plane not a car, and I don’t think they keep the spare wheel under the luggage. The plane was fully loaded and ready to go, until suddenly it wasn’t. There would be a short delay, they eventually said, which turned out to be two hours until we finally started moving. It was a bit irritating, but not the end of the world. But just as it’s not the lie, but the cover up, so it’s not the problem but the communication.

The blow by blow account would be tedious to write and even more tedious to read. It was ten minutes past the scheduled departure time before there was any mention of a delay. Twenty minutes after that was the first description of the problem and a forecast of an hour’s further delay. More than an hour later, it was going to take a further twenty minutes. Half an hour later, we finally got going. Updates ranged from the mildly disconcerting (“passengers can stay on board while wheels are being changed, but shouldn’t move about too much, in case the changing weight distribution destabilises the plane”) to the downright bizarre (“I’d like to give you an update, but I can’t because the people doing the work are outside the plane and we don’t have any way of communicating with them, but if I happen to see one of them, I’ll ask them how much longer they expect to be”).

What was really striking, though, was less the content, and much more the tone and attitude. Each announcement was disengaged and perfunctory: there were formulaic words of apology, but no empathy, no recognition that plans were being disrupted and time being wasted. There was no sense of responsibility being taken, of people recognising that they were speaking on behalf of the organisation, rather than as bystanders of a process in which they played no part. Keeping passengers informed was a chore to be endured, not an opportunity to engage and reassure.

There’s a really basic lesson there for any organisation. It ought to be really obvious and simple, but somehow it isn’t

And if you are reading this in the hope of finding out how actually to change the wheel on an Airbus, this might be a better place to start.

Picture by Andy Mitchell, licensed under creative commons BY-SA

Nativity scene

Posted by

0

Harry has a new baby. The baby needs a passport. Or does she?


Just used gov.uk for reals to look up passport requirements for #baby. All questions answered quickly & definitely better than the booklet
27 November 2012 12:05 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@harrym
Harry Metcalfe

It is easy to be swept away by visual design, by clarity of language, by transparency of navigation and many other things besides. It is easy to confuse those things – any of them, or all of them collectively – with effectiveness at getting things done. It is easy to praise or criticise web sites for how straightforward they are to pretend to use.

We try to get past those traps by user testing, drawing as far as possible on people characteristic of the service concerned. But all too often, we find ourselves asking testers, ‘what would you do if…?’.

In the end, there is no substitute for user testing being done by actual users trying to meet an actual need, which is one of many reasons why the idea that a web service can be finished before it is turned on is so delusional. Obstacles and difficulties will be found by actual users which the most well meaning and most realistic test users will miss altogether or respond to very differently.

So the news that Harry knows his baby needs a passport has a wider importance than it might first seem. Now all he needs to do is to remember that he probably needs to pack just a little more than he used to.


Packing. By which I mean, putting things I’ll want on a portable hard drive.
21 December 2012 2:54 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@harrym
Harry Metcalfe

 

Are you sitting comfortably?

Posted by

0

What does service mean in a public service? How do we know how good it should be, and how do we know whether that is good enough in principle or in practice?

That shouldn’t on the face of it be too hard to work out, but the answer is often more elusive than it first appears. Here for example are some easy questions. How comfortable should the chairs be in a jobcentre? Should they be more or less comfortable than chairs in GP surgeries? And, critically, how do we know whether any suggested answer is the right answer?

simple chair against neutral background

In a recent blog post, Lauren Currie reports a much more challenging and more charged version of the same question:

She believes we deserve beauty in all areas of life. Why isn’t the doctors surgery as nice as a hair salon? I believe the same ‘levels of service’ are deserved in in all areas of life. Why does dining in my local restaurant make me smile and always deliver yet the national health service make me feel stupid and fail to understand my needs?

Perhaps then these are not such easy questions after all.

One set of answers is all to do with choices: there are choices about what to spend on public services, on which services, and on how to distribute money within services. Making such choices is at the heart of what politics is about, and the reason that politics is hard has a lot to do with the relative nature of those choices, as I have argued before. But pretty obviously, that’s only one dimension of the problem. It may be part of the explanation of why hair salons are more congenial places than doctors’ surgeries, but it tells us less about why patients may feel unrecognised and misunderstood by the health service.

Another set of answers is about choice in a different sense. I have more choice about where to get my hair cut than about which GPs surgery to visit. And I have more choice about who I want as my GP than about which jobcentre to go to. Other things being equal, the success of hairdressers depends on more on their ability to attract customers than does the success of GPs, and the success of jobcentres depends on it not at all. But that too ends up being too simplistic: there are still grumpy hairdressers, and there is no shortage of examples of public service delivered with passion and humanity.

There is a third set of answers which at first sight look like no answer at all. Service is what we collectively expect it to be. I don’t mean by that what we individually want it to be: there is no magic force which tweaks a service to our precise desires as we walk through the door, as we all know all too well. But our expectations of what constitutes service and how it should be experienced shift in ways we don’t always notice. Self-service supermarkets and automatic ticket gates at stations each once needed careful explanation in ways which now seen faintly ludicrous. Those service expectations change over time in less obvious ways as well. The way jobcentres (and their predecessors) look have unintended but not accidental parallels with changes in other organisations.

Thirty years ago, both banks and benefit offices put strong physical barriers between staff and those whom they were serving and (albeit in different ways) stressed formality and seriousness over humanity and interaction.

Twenty years ago, banks started to move away from that model – counters were pushed more to the edge, screens got smaller and then often vanished altogether. The differences between front office and back office started to soften, partly because much of the pure back office work was moved elsewhere. Potted plants got larger and and became more important features of the environment

Ten years ago, benefit offices started to move away from that model. All the same things happened, up to and including the recalibration of the significance of potted plants. Some of the immediate reasons for that were very different – though others were very much the same.

My assertion, though, for which I am not aware of the existemce of any evidence, is that somewhere under the surface of many of those design decisions was a set of expectations that emerged from, were reshaped by, were adapted to and were updated and re-created by a broad and amorphous sense of how services should work, not by the experience or expectations of any one service

In that sense, service quality is an emergent property of environment.

Take a seat. It’s as comfortable as we all think it should be.

Picture by Haldane Martin licensed under creative commons CC-BY

It’s bad to talk

Posted by

1

I phoned a bank today. It was a call I didn’t need to make and which created no value for me. The bank may or may not care about that. It was a call which the bank didn’t need to receive and which cost them money they didn’t need to spend to deal with. The bank really ought to care about that.

The reason for making the call was that the process worked as it should have done from the bank’s point of view. The reason for making the call was that the bank didn’t seem to have realised that working for them wasn’t the same as working for me.

Start with needs* as the GDS design principles have it. The asterisk leads to a snarky footnote, *user needs not government needs. But it isn’t just government which needs to pay attention to that.

This is a story about opening an online bank account. The online bit was fine, but wasn’t enough actually to open the account, because banks legally and prudentially like to know who their customers are, and on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog. So they want to see some pieces of paper. The recommended approach is to take the relevant documents to a branch of the bank where they copy and return them, then send the copies on to their processing centre. Perfectly straightforward, so that’s what I did.

A week passed without hearing from them. Perhaps they are just a bit slow. Two weeks passed without hearing from them. Maybe something has gone wrong. Towards the end of the third week, a letter arrives: they are still waiting for the documents. That’s both irritating and worrying. Irritating to have to repeat the process, worrying that they seem to have lost documents – albeit copies – the whole point of which is that they are sufficient to support a claim to an identity. To say nothing of the fact that losing things is really not what you want a bank to be doing.

And so the phone call. After a little toing and froing I talked to somebody doing his best to be helpful and largely succeeding. There is, it turns out, no record of an account opening application under the reference number I have given, which seems more than a little odd since I have a letter in my hand with that very number on it. But one possible explanation it seems, is that the account has in fact been opened. Would I like him to check? It’ll take a moment, because that’s on a different system. Of course. And it turns out that indeed, the account was opened three days ago, or two days before I got the letter telling me that they were still waiting for the documents.

So from their point of view, everything has been fine: the right things happened in the right sequence through to a successful outcome – at least until I spoiled it by making a pointless phone call.

From my point of view, it’s not fine at all. I spent two weeks not knowing what was going on, followed by two days thinking that the process had failed altogether. A lot of that is down to the long period between their having the documents and their having the knowledge that they had the documents. The letter chasing me for the documents was dated twelve days after they had already been given them (and it took them a further six days to get that letter to me).

Amazon realised a long time ago that the most common question they had to deal with was, where’s my stuff? Overwhelmingly, they deal with that not by being able to tell you, but by making sure you never need to ask. Banks, it seems, still need to learn this lesson.

The more significant lesson though is the one I started with. Process efficiency is in the eye of the beholder. If as a service provider you don’t take the trouble to identify and address the needs of users, the best you can hope for it to meet your own needs as a provider.  And that best is not nearly good enough.

This is not really a story about opening an online bank account. This is a story about how service integration is still rooted in the base as much as in the superstructure. There is still much to do.

Take a number

Posted by

1

We are not the customers of our own services. And even if we think we are, we are still not: we know too much, we cannot stop thinking as provider or designer.

Sometimes we are the customers of other people’s services and that holds up a mirror – sometimes a very distorting mirror – to our own. Even then, of course, the perspective of someone who is then tempted to blog about the experience is not wholly to be relied on.

A couple of days ago, I went to buy some parking permits from my local council. I am not going to give a blow by blow account of the experience. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. There were lots of small ways in which it could have been better: here are three where service design could be improved.

The first is a point of measurement. There is a ticket based queuing system – take a ticket and wait for your number to be called. Screens show average waiting time (with the average while I was there going up by about a minute for every minute of elapsed time, but that’s another story). But there is also a queue to talk to a receptionist to get a ticket in the first place. So the queuing time being measured is a process management view, not a customer experience view.

Having got a ticket, the next thing is to wait. That turned out to be very confusing – numbers were called apparently randomly, so both giving no indication of progress up the virtual queue and making it impossible to know whether your number had been called or not. I assume that there was a process going on of assigning cases to appropriately skilled staff members, and so in practice several queues running not just one. That’s perfectly sensible, but would be a lot less confusing for customers if the queues had distinct number ranges. To make matters worse, one of the display screens showed ticket numbers in the queue – but only some of them. If the number one higher than mine has been called, and if my number doesn’t appear on the screen, should I start worrying that I have missed my turn? As it turns out, no, I didn’t need to have worried, but it was hard to be sanguine at the time.

The final point is that ineffective innovation can be a long term burden. The time came to pay for my parking permits. There was nothing so obvious and straightforward as a normal card reader. Instead, I had to be led to a payment machine, the like of which I had never seen before and which had clearly been intended to operate on a self-service basis.

In theory you put in a reference number, a postcode and, of course the card details, and got in exchange a receipt to be exchanged for whatever it was you had paid for. In practice that had clearly proved to be too difficult, so members of staff now walk the length of the building and enter everything except the card details, then stand around waiting for the payment to go through. The net effect is the worst of both worlds, with more staff time used than necessary to deliver a more disjointed service. That neatly illustrates two important points: attempted self service which fails is more complicated and expensive than not attempting the self service in the first place; and, to adapt Jakob Nielsen, users spend most of their time making other payments, so prefer your payments to work the same way as all the others they already know.

I got what I went for, I didn’t have to wait inordinately long, the service was friendly and effective. But it could – and I think should – have been just a bit better still.

Saying goodbye

Posted by

0

Many years ago, I used to work with somebody who in a previous life had been a restaurant manager. One of the lessons she had taken from that experience was how to say goodbye.

At the beginning of a restaurant meal, people are where they want to be. They are there for an experience, and nobody expects, or even particularly wants, things to happen instantly. Understanding  and ideally matching the customer’s preferred rhythm is part of the service, but there is typically quite a lot of flexibility about exactly how and when different elements of the service are provided.

At the end of a meal, by contrast, people are in a very different mental state. At the point they decide they are ready to leave, any delay or obstacle to their actual leaving is a problem which affects their perception of the entire experience.

The lesson my colleague had taken from that is that there were precisely two steps in the entire experience of having a meal in a restaurant where it was essential to respond immediately to a customer request: when they asked for the bill, and when they were ready to pay it. Everything else had some flexibility, but not that.

In a broader sense, the maturity and self-confidence with which any kind of service provider manages the end of a relationship is one of the most powerful indicators of their overall approach to service quality. Putting effort into helping people to arrive is an obvious and easy thing to focus on (which is not at all to say easy to do well). Putting effort into helping people to leave, and to have faith that that is not only the right thing to do but that it will ultimately help rather than hinder the success of the business is neither obvious nor easy.

Meanwhile, Paul Clarke is ending his ten-year relationship with his mobile phone provider. It didn’t go well.

Customer on a journey

Posted by

0

Paul Clarke had been on a journey. Well two, actually.

The first was to get a bit of routine business done with government, updating the photograph on his driving licence. He has written a blow by blow account of how that didn’t work the way it should have done. Follow the link and read it now.

The second was to give not only that account, but a powerful message which should be heard and acted on by designers of public services – designers of any services – anywhere and everywhere. It is that it is the journey which matters, the whole package  which adds up to the complete experience of getting done what needs to be done. We need better web design. We need better form design. We need contact centres which can be human and effective. But we don’t need any of those things in isolation. They add up to a service, and it is the service we need to get right.