CEM Awards - Telecoms, last chance to nominate your favorites

At the end of March  prestigious awards will be given to deserving individuals, teams or organizations who excel in promoting and providing superior customer experiences. This award on excellence in Customer Experience Management will be handed during the CEM Telecom Middle East Summit in Dubai. There are several categories which you can nominate your favorite entries:

 Like any award there are criteria:

Best CEM Brand I think should go to a company who give the best impression of proving excellent Customer Experiences, where their brand alone echos of satisfied customers. Of course winners are not up to me but a group of judges  

--> from the CMO Council Middle East, Peppers & Rogers and First Gulf Bank. So I will be submitting my entries but not going to tell you who I am nominating :-D but definitely not SAS and not Apple Store in Helsingborg, Sweden. 

Apple is losing its edge in delivering a good customer experience at Apple Stores

Last weekend I was at the Apple Store in Väla centrum, in my home town of Helsingborg in Southern Sweden with 3 kids all wanting to buy apple products.  My previous experience at the Apple Store when they just opened was chaotic, store employees that are chatting with each other instead of helping customers and payment systems that does not work. OK that was the opening day, I can cut Apple some slack with the 20 minute wait. Apple Stores used to be the model of very good customer experiences but now I have that questioned… even the Phone House store on the same shopping complex now offer a better experience.

Back to last weekend… getting into the store the first thing kids did  is go after the iPads on display and starts exploring. Great.. Two kids less to manage… but my daughter who is desperate to buy a replacement iPhone charger is very desperate so she went around the entire shop looking for the right item. I quietly observed a  few feet away. No Apple Store personnel approached her or greeted her, or not even me… we seem to be invisible to so many Apple store employees as usual chatting to each other and busy looking down their own iPads.

10 minutes later my daughter found the items she wanted and looking around for someone to help.. I did the same, had eye contact with 4 employees in the Store but all immediately avoided my gaze.. Is there something wrong with trying to buy something? Another 10 minutes later we were still waiting, clearly frustrated  I went to approach an employee who is fiddling with his iPad, and saw he is playing a game.. A Game while working on a Apple Store! Are they all playing games on their iPads now instead of attending to customers? Is that the new Apple mantra? After another 10 minutes of coaxing an Apple Store employee about paying for the item we were finally out of the shop… In total I wasted 45 minutes in an Apple Store just to buy an iPhone charger…  Well Apple missed potential sales of 2 iPhone 5S and an iPad Air with the other 2 kids since we did not want to wait longer for Apple Store employees to provide any form of service.

With this bad experience on the same Apple Store I can only say that Apple is now on a death spiral. They lost their edge, they lost their customer experience edge. I will go back to that store in a few weeks just to check and verify how bad is Apple's customer service spiraling down… If it's an isolated incident on this particular Apple Store then Apple better put its act together on this store since they are losing customer. Last  weekend Väla was busy but Apple Store is empty.. Something that never happens in other Apple Stores I have seen on a busy day in the mall.

Talking about Customer Experience Edge there is a book "The Customer Experience Edge", its well written and good insight on delivering excellent customer experience from RoI to actual satisfaction of delivering excellent customer Service. At the end of March in Dubai the CEM Telecom Summit is going to take place where topics on how to improve customer experiences are going to discussed and lessons learned in various programs are to be presented. Its a very good one to attend even if you are not in the Telco industry since there are technologies that can used outside Telco…. Remember that the hardest customer to please are Telco customers, its not only the service delivered, or the product sold but the overall experience from choosing a phone or tablet to the right subscriptions to the actual experience when using voice and data services and using the device it self….

On "Customer Experience Management in Telcoms: Middle East Summit" One things catches my attention immediately upon looking at the brochure….The topic goes "How do you improve the customer experience of your high value customers to maximize revenue generation".  Delivering Excellent Customer Experience is not always about revenue generation, it is about excellent experience and the value or Returns of Investments it brings.  I would argue that it is better to look at it as Returns of Investments than maximizing revenue. Think of this, with bad customer experience your customers will go away… Putting the  an effective customer experience program should keep customers but the main should be delivering excellent service and not maximizing revenue… while the correct metric to see use in determine success of that program is returns of investment and not necessarily revenue. Do you agree?

Zappos is a very good example. They deliver WOW and by delivering WOW they in return become very profitable… the WOW delivered turns into TRUST and that trust into ADVOCACY thus not only increasing their revenues but also their profits.. More importantly they aim for an excellent customer experience and high profitability comes as an additional benefit. Can your company deliver WOW to your customers?

Great Customer Experience is all about Consistency

On the flight from Istanbul to Copenhagen I had the pleasure to have a very meaningful conversation with Lalit Soi. Lalit  established and operated his highly successful manufacturing company under one mantra. "Provide good customer service". With that principle he managed to create a monopoly in manufacturing.

Looking at today's world there is one company that stands out in providing a good customer service. Apple. If you look the phones, they don't have the best devices, not the best screens not even the latest technologies available. And to that end they only have a single model,  iPhone in various versions, the hottest selling iPhone is not even the latest version. Having said that Apple has a huge following and very loyal customer base for the first quarter of 2013 they posted revenue of  43.6B$ with profit of 9.5B$ and pays investor 11B$ in dividends every year.

 

Compared to Samsung's profit of 6.5B$ from various product groups it is easy to see that Apple is much more profitable. Product by Product Apple by far generates the most revenue and best profit.

Looking at phones Apple shipped 37M iPhones while Samsung shipped 71M phones during the same quarter, however profitability is where Apple differentiates itself from the competition.

So why is Apple so profitable? Why do their customer base pay for more expensive iPhones compared to brilliant Samsung Android phones?

One of the most glaring example I can find in my own little world is CUSTOMER SERVICE. I have visited Apple stores and Samsung shops in various countries and was amazed by how Apple in shop experience is much better than Samsung. This might be bias since in an Apple store there is huge focus on the iPhone while on Samsung shops your attention are directed towards Televisions with their monstrous screens. In an Apple store the customer experience is the same anywhere in the world you go, well at least in cities where I have been (excluding Australia, its pretty much the entire planet). The worse Apple store I have been to is at the city where I live, however that is more of a reflection of Swedish non-service and not a reflection of Apple store service. Another glaring example is how consistent the experience is from an older iPhone to the newest one, a reminiscent of the old Nokia Feature phones where the experience is consistent across the various devices…. If this consistent customer experience is worth 44B$ per quarter then Apple must be doing something right….