Air France, The Airline that always say NO.

I travel a lot and with that a lot of flights every week. I have good experiences and bad experiences. Good experiences primarily on Asian airlines where the service is superb. In the past I never like flying Air France since their service is really bad, both ground and air. On the flight to Singapore I had to take Air France since its half the price of flying with Singapore Air. Although I should have known that price is directly proportional to price when it comes to Air France.

Transiting via Paris Charles De Gaulle airport was OK, no queues late at night, although the entire airport smells of new wood and new carpets, a smell so bad it gives you headache. My horror did not stop there. In most airlines I sample their customer service by throwing random questions. So I went to the lounge and inquire about changing my seat, and the lounge attendants best answer was go to the gate I have a colleague there, even with Platinum membership on my frequent flyer there was no service. That is something that never happens if you take any Star Alliance flight, where the lounge personnel will be more than happy to assist you change your seat.

So I went to the gate, approached a grumpy looking attendant who can only muster the words the flight is full, no seat on economy, no seat in business, no seat for you. I implored that he might be able to do something or upgrade me an I pay for it, but to do avail, no Platinum status in their frequent flyer program can help either. Not even offering to put me in a queue if another seat vacates…

Inflight services was horrible. When asking for coffee during the morning meal services the stewardess said  no for no valid reason twice. It also took several tries to get a cup of coffee.

 This is simply the one of the worse customer service I have seen… and very typical of Air France. The return flight from Singapore will be the last time I will ever fly Air France again out of my own choice.. Sorry Air France but you lose one frequent flyer and many more will stop flying with you on this kind of customer service. Perhaps it will help for their customer service managers to attend some good CEM Seminars… or Perhaps they should fly Singapore airlines once in a while to experience good customer service.

Streamlining Voice of the Customer

In today's world the voice of the customer is very important for service providers and product manufacturers in ensuring they deliver and design the best. However giving the customer a voice is still primitive in its implementation since we still do surveys via cold calls, paper surveys sent to home or office, physical surveys where some stops customers on location to ask for feedback. The closest we have to an advance type of surveys are online. Can it be improved? How?

As humans we don't want to be unnecessarily bothered on what we are doing, even if we are doing nothing… so what's the best way to get customer feedback? If we think about it, online feedback was created because we spend a considerable amount of time with our computers and laptops. Having said that the world has changed, today the most commonly used device is something we carry around all the time, a mobile device, be it a mobile phone or tablet. To ensure the smoothest way to get customers or feedback is through the easiest way for them directly on their devices. Having said that it should be done with the most minimum effort by the customer, like simply selecting answer instead of typing it (SMS surveys). With a survey being shown directly on the device screen based on various pre-defined triggers the effort for the consumer to provide feedback becomes minimal considering that device is being carried around everywhere and in use 24X7.

Do you know of  a better way to capture voice of the customer? Some will be presented in discussed on the CEM event in Singapore this week.

Who needs customer centric transformation?

Today Blackberry announced that the market should expect 1B$ loss...

and more to come with its smartphones not selling very well and a burn rate of 500M$ per quarter. Its 2.6B$ cash will be gone in a year.  What will they do?  What went wrong with Blackberry? What did they forgot? Why did they not transform their business?

 

For BlackBerry the end of the road is very close indeed. For those who still have time to turn around they must do so and avoid the same pitfalls.


On my previous post I mentioned that companies who care about good customer experiences performs better than the ones who do not. Having said that how can a company turn it self around and become more customer centric? Such a transition would mean several changes, first and foremost with the organizational strategy, its thinking and more importantly for employees who will have to have to provide a better customer experience. For any organization to adopt a customer centric approach, that has to start from the very top. Company executives must be the sponsors of such transformation programs and more importantly for the program to succeed executive pay should be tied to customer experiences. It is also important to have customer experience champions within the organization, this are company directors who takes the lead in driving the entire workforce toward customer centric thinking.

To achieve a sustainable and constantly improving profitability a company's products and services should evolve to cater for its customer and take market share from its competition. At the end of the day increasing profitability means better market penetration and positioning. This can be achieved by addressing customer needs starting from product or service design and most importantly when providing customer support services. Any new Products and Services should be designed to ensure that it  is better than the competition not only on pricing but also on how customers will experience the product and the services. The question is how can you offer a value proposition that competitors can not match? For most of us that unmatched value preposition is the holy grail. When it comes to mobile communication technology, the world I know most   where for some time Nokia knew that advantage then lost it  and  more recently Apple knew that secret until Samsung figured it out and starting to match it…. In my little world it is an excellent customer experience that provides that unmatched value proposition. Great customer experience is embedded in a product, it is entrenched in a service delivered, it is the main difference maker…

In the Customer Experience Summit Asia,  there is a panel discussions that focus on embarking on a customer centric transformation. The aim is to improve customer experience, achieve sustainable growth and above average profitability. Some highly respective executives will be in the panel headed by Mahesh Fernando   of Airtel, and Rimzie Ismail   of Dubai Airport and Ritesh Chatterjee   of SKS Microfinance. They will explore he impact of customer centricity on revenues, profitability and growth. They will also impart their knowledge in identifying, measuring and making the most of all customer channels for long-term profitability.

Transformation as I mentioned above starts from the organization it self, from the top. Once that happens the top executives can sponsor various programs to get the organization to put customers first, all the time. Customers first from product design to delivery of support services. Having said that putting customers first is not enough, we need to give them the best customer experience they can ever have on the product we sell and the services we provide. Once we do that then we are truly a customer centric organization.

Profiting from Implementation of an Effective CEM Strategy

Customer Experience Management  CEM is a practice as old as the oldest form of service or trade. However the term in itself was only coined this century. If we look back in history even before currency was invented when humans exchanged good and services, back then the concept of satisfying the customer already exist. Same concept as it is now, a customer will not buy a product or a service if they are not happy with it, nor they will barter their goods for another if they are not happy with what they will be getting.

Now a days there are multiple strategies on how to implement a CEM program. Tied to each strategy are multiple methodologies developed through the years of interacting with customers. For each company in a particular industry, sector or niche to implement a CEM program they must know how and where they interact with their customers, hence they should know their customer touch points. Each touch point varies between service and products. Now if we take Telecoms as an example, the touch points are as varied as every thing we interact with that has to do with technology, such as phones, TV, radio, tablets, printed materials, social media but central to that experience is the human customer.  Below is an example of a mobile telecoms touch point also highlighting the customer life cycle

Continuing with a mobile network provider as an example there are various strategies that can be deployed in monitoring customer experiences such as

• Network based monitoring 
• Device based monitoring
• Customer surveys
• Text analytic and web crawlers
• Social media listeners

Each strategy has their own advantages and fit falls. Having said that having an effective CEM program in place will improve customer satisfaction, in a lot of cases will improve revenue and more importantly profitability. In this age of cut-throat competition customer experience as a differentiation factor is very important. Back in 2012 watermark consulting identified that there is a very big gap in profitability between companies with good customer experience management programs compared to those who do not.

If we select various industries  and look at how an effective CEM programs impact their business taking from Forrester Research we will see that for some business sectors the difference  in bottom line is very big for a single company.

The question is what can your company profit from an effective CEM program? When you quantify the impact does it justify the effort and cost of putting a CEM program in the first place? There are several experts on this field and I came to learn that they will converge in Singapore on the first week of October. There is the Customer Experience Management Summit Asia in Oct 2 to 3 organized by IQPC and there is the Customer Experience Management in Telecoms World Summit on October 3 to 4 organized by Symphony Global. If you are now confused,  the two conferences are different in such a way that the Customer Experience Management Summit Asia is very general covering CEM in many industries. While the Customer Experience Management in Telecoms World Summit is very focused on Telecoms.

To be fair I am attending both events in one as a speaker and in the other as a writer in both cases I will be imparting knowledge gained and experience learned from various companies about implementation of various CEM programs.

Customer Experiences when Business is Unusual

The world we are today is highly connected from mobile phones, social media, micro blogging, games, services, etc... Even little children are now so connected that a new segment is being exploited by the gaming industry. This inter-connection is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing for us who gets connected to our friends, even finding new friends on line, being in touch and always available... A curse for those of us needed to ensure that this interconnection is perfect and working all the time., like in the image below showing how we are connected globally:

But that happens when business is not business as usual? How do we ensure that customer experiences are not affected when there are business problems? With so many potential channels customer experience product and service where do we prioritize? How do we handle those?

In the world where we are at every second experience services or products either we acquire, we see, we touch, we interact that builds our impression of who provides them and thus influences our consuming habits. Even at rest or when we sleep we still experience products and services we use. Having said that to companies who provide us with these products and services it is no longer the usual 8 to 5 business operations... It is an unusual 24X7 business. How do we ensure good customer experience consistently all the time?

The key to good customer experiences is consistency on every channel used by the customer. Be that the actual product acquired or service used or the various channels to complain and to gather support when needed. In today's connected world customer experience should be the same whether they use their mobile devices, personal computers, kiosk or service desk. It is important that a consistently good experience is provided in all channels.



Let's take a simple example of buying shoes... say you go and buy  expensive shoes  something like Stuart Weitzman.. and when you get home and found out that the shoes where worn.

 

What will you do? Will you go back and return the shoes? For most of us we would likely complain, and to do that we use the most convenient channel we have at that time. It can be a phone call, a self-service web page, a phone application. What is important to us as customer is the feeling that we are being listened to, that we are not being ignored.  Secondly the experience we had while shopping should be consistent to the service we experience we get on all other channels. The challenge is how can we design that?

In Singapore during Customer Experience Asia, this questions will get some answers for example Vijay Venugopalan of BT is presenting  The rise of connected, multichannel customer: Transforming customer experience in an Era of Business as Unusual.

Improving Customer Experiences starts with Human Resources

Recently I blogged about negative experience at Parking spaces in Oslo, of which Europark immediately responded to waive the parking fine. This shows two things in the way Europark is improving their customer experiences.

• They empower their staff to immediately resolve issues
• They did not fully train their staff to provide good customer experience from the beginning

Steven Khor of ePay will be presenting a concept during the CEM Asia summit in Singapore about moving from customer service to customer experience.

Although I am not aware of what he will be presenting let me use the Europark incident to point out why Customer Experiences starts with the Human Resources we employ. In every service industry the main interface if not the first interface of a customer is possibly human or human related.

Take into account Oslo experience. The parking attendant failed to see that parking ticket was paid and issued a fine which lead to a very unhappy customer. If only the parking attendant was trained to be more vigilant then there will be no unhappy customer. However this exercise also exposed that the customer service organization was able to turn a bad experience to a good one by recognizing the mistakes made and waiving the parking fine.

The human resource we employ can reflect loudly on what expectations our customers perceived and more importantly what experience we give them. For example Four Seasons Hotel has very friendly staff compared to say Hilton Hotel (at least comparing experiences in Singapore). Having said that since the price point is very similar returning guest will flock to Four Seasons first before they consider Hilton. what does the avertising below tells you about customer experiences provided by each hotel's staff?

In the services industry a good customer experience comes from how friendly and accommodating the human resources are. Today I had lunch with a friend who mentioned that his IT company wants to increase revenue and margin so they are planning to take multiple support calls at a time by putting one customer on hold while addressing another customer. Just imagine the nightmare that it will bring to the customer who was put on hold for several minutes.  If I was that customer I will take my business elsewhere.

If you happen to be in Singapore try visiting the IQPC CEM Asia event, there are a lot of things to learn from those who have implemented sucessful CEM programs from various industries...

Stealing Nokia

Microsoft acquired Nokia very recently.. and it is a steal with Microsoft paying less for Nokia than what it pays for Skype. Does this mean that Microsoft is about to kill the Nokia brand and position itself to better compete with Apple?

Although one thing Microsoft can learn from Google and Apple is that  that having a lot of money is not enough to succeed in the mobile OS wars. Another thing it can learn from Blackberry is that the enterprise mobile segment is dead.

If Nokia was purchased by Microsoft for 7.5B$, what value can be made of out Blackberry? 1$ for Blackberry, anyone?