The "Map My Run" customer experience

Exercising has always had an element of geek about it with specialist shops and clothing for every sport from horse riding to ice hockey. People as they become more immersed in a sport can readily find more excuses for buying more kit while trying to avoid the tragic "all the gear and no idea" label. Running is no exception with particularly long distance running open to the masses as anyone with a pair of trainers has the scope to head out onto their local pavements and pound out some serious mileage. This casual entrance often falling into the kit buying trap in the same way as any other sport. Aside from spanky trainers and extensive Lycra the tech options were more limited in the past as GPS watches with heart monitors were expensive and serious contenders only going that far. That is until the advent of the smart phone. A device that included GPS and mp3's so you can rock out while on your run. Additionally the memory in these devices gives a way to record all those great victories. This unlocked "map my run" to the masses which had previously been more of runners web site to record runs and times and effectively upload this data after the event. Smart phones now mean this is all real time and your efforts are fed in through GPS giving far more accurate records of where runners were performing. This is now a competitive area with many alternatives to map my run giving runners real analysis at no cost. The customer experience is epic and addictive as social media plays a part as you share your running with your friends and compete for the fastest and furthest. Technology augmenting your exercise experience. Feel the burn!  

The Facebook customer experience

Facebook (www.facebook.com) with its 1 billion users is a Goliath in the world of social media with us since it was founded in 2004. The customer experience divides consumer opinion with many fearful of the influence Facebook now has and the motives behind its data usage.  For those addicted to status updates and sharing their life moments it is a part of daily life from dusk to dawn. Facebook works through a secure web site where logged in users connect and share content. In addition to the secure web site is a dedicated mobile application with a limited degree of functionality compared to the desktop site. Facebook has more to do in understanding the customer journey from a mobile as the limited functionally also removes their opportunity to advertise, their primary revenue stream. Arguably a more epic experience. Facebook via a mobile with less function and no advertising, a more epic experience? 

The BT customer experience - still an epic failure

As an ex-BT customer I have experienced the pain of their customer service first hand that lead to it appearing in an article in the telegraph (www.telegraph.co.uk) being named "worst customer service provider". The study by Internet market research firm www.onepoll.com named and shamed BT as the worst offender. My own lack of epic customer experience leading to me cancelling all my BT services many years ago to avoid having to waste time on hold or in calls where I would result in a call for more than thirty minutes without any resolution.  It is a real missed opportunity for BT (www.bt.com) who have some great broadband and television services but support these with useless customer service channels.

My recent return to this customer nightmare was the result of one of my email accounts being a btinternet one. This seemingly causes BT some problem when I have no service with them meaning they notified me that they would be cancelling the account with 4 weeks notice. A trifle harsh but I guess all in the small print I previously ignored. Resolution?  Sign up to premium email account at £1.60 per month to keep your account. With so many email options offering free services the prospect of entering a contract once more with BT filled me with dread but in the short term poses few choices. So sign up online and ignore the realities of dealing with BT. Not that simple. Online form = epic fail. So head for the phone number customer support, after one hour 20 minutes on hold finally get through to spend 40 minutes persuading the customer service rep to let me pay for the service. Not having any account and not being a BT customer clearly a challenge. In the course of this how many times did the words "cancel the whole thing" flag in my mind?  Plenty. Eventually convincing them they could deviate from the call sheet with some OFCOM references and paying for the privilege. Epic fail. When will BT wake up and invest in better customer service that matches up to their products. 

The British pub lunch experience

As the working masses flood back onto the commuter routes after a UK bank holiday weekend normality returns. After a weekend of DIY and family frustrations a high point for many will no doubt have been a proper pub lunch. Blessed with the sunshine on bank holiday Monday the pub lunch ventured into the outdoors as families enjoyed some sunning while musing over their locals menu. With pubs offering everything from a ploughman's (for any foreign readers check Wikipedia)  to a full blown Sunday roast with all the trimmings most tastes should find something to suit their needs. As we have seen some warm weather this year the customer experience also sees the delights of wasps joining you as an unwanted dinner guest while you negotiate a plate of bangers and mash sat at a picnic table. Wasps seeming to fall into one of two types -

1) Angry ninja wasp. Not conforming to any of the usual rules of engagement and ignoring everything but you. Kamikaze dive bombing your face at any opportunity. 

2) Domestic sugar obsessed wasp. Easily distracted by sugar and readily caught or killed by a route one approach to sugar. 

The summer pub lunch aside from the wasps is a delight for all even where the food is somewhat average. No washing up. Beautiful outdoors and a quintessential British experience. Unusually this weekend without the rain dodging moments!  Pub lunch = epic customer experience.  

Amazon email design quality challenges affecting customer experience

Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk) may be a monster in the world of e-commerce offering everything from iPads to surf boards but their email design has fallen well behind in terms of delivering a quality experience. In an earlier blog I wrote about the unexpected gift concept from Amazon which sought to delight (http://goo.gl/2mnKmY) but with their email notification they strive to fail. The emails when read on a mobile device have the most basic design with poor structure and result in the recipient having no desire to open and read the content.  With a boxy design and mismatched colours and fonts it easily gets dismissed. With the company investing so hard in a responsive web site and dedicated native mobile applications to follow this up with the most basic of emails seems a waste. For epic customer experience Amazon need to invest in a better email provision to hold the customer post purchase. 

The Eurocamp family holiday customer experience

Families with school aged kids face the annual ransom by holiday companies to book a summer holiday while the kids are off school. Your standard pricing points spiked for the glorious six weeks of summer while we all try and achieve the same result of a memorable family break. For those who have previously avoided this holiday window the prices can be alarming as a budget holiday can mean spending more than £2000 if looking to venture outside the UK. Forget your Caribbean all inclusive blow out and think more close to home and less luxury.  So short of selling some vital body part what makes a good option worth leaving the comfort of our own castle?  Eurocamp (www.eurocamp.co.uk) offers family holidays that compared to a conventional hotel break offer good value. Eurocamp is essentially the same company as keycamp (www.keycamp.co.uk) although both have their own branding and web sites to confuse matters. The experience and facilities are broadly the same though with a range of static caravan and pre-pitched tents at various European holiday destinations.  The campsites generally being modern with good facilities and British reps awaiting your arrival. If you like freedom to do your own thing it is a good fit for a holiday but don't expect anyone making your bed or clearing the breakfast dishes. It is basic but with kids free to play and safe to do so it does have its merits. Many people are repeat bookers coming back year after year so it is clearly a model that works. For an epic customer experience in the summer holidays you might have the answer. 

The customer experience of smart phones abroad

There are 30.9 million smart phone users currently in the UK (according to a recent survey www.newmediatrendwatch.com). We are addicted to them with the majority of email and social media activity centred on these portable devices. With this addiction comes dependency so the prospect of losing our connected lives comes as a shock to many when they travel abroad. The advise is clear if you use data services abroad you will be charged extra. Often starting from £2 per day assuming you have made some arrangements and spiralling up fast. Best bet for a good experience minus the scary prospect of a huge bill on your return is switch 3G off!  Go old school and bask in the glory of 2G and technical wizardry such as text messaging. To manage costs just piggy back off some free wifi services at local bars and establishments to get your data fix. Epic experience means going native and finding wifi making sure data network settings are OFF!  Your phone should be feeling the love for looking like this.....

The unchanging customer experience of a street cafe in French France

A visit to France is incomplete without a drink in a street cafe. The smells and surroundings seem to be quintessentially French irrespective of where you are in the country. While the north and south have a very different feel culturally they still both share the cafe culture experience. The experience is memorable and enjoyable albeit very different to other countries. You may be rubbing elbows with someone tucking into a glass of Bordeaux while smoking a cigarette as the hustle bustle of street life rushes by your feet. The prices may be high with the economy still stalling but If you are only planning the odd cheeky one check out a cafe next time you are there and soak up the epic customer experience.  Even better if you can double it up with some bread and mussels to totally feel the French France flavours. 

The not very modern customer experience of CD's

Modern music is dominated by the download with fewer people experiencing the feeling of owning, touching and feeling their music when buying it.  The realities of today are that if I want a tune I'm going online and downloading it in that instant or I am adding it to my spotify (www.spotify.com) list and listening to it on demand.  The ifpi published their report on global figures this year - http://www.ifpi.org/content/library/dmr2013.pdf that makes interesting reading not least finding that all is not doom and gloom as you might believe from the many media reports on this subject.  I am less worried about the financial implications of the download than I am about what it means for the customer experience.  Listening to music while it may have changed dramatically in terms of the technology available to listen to it through the physical experience of zoning out to your favourite tune has been with us for hundreds of years.  Yes I no longer need to chase up my local harpist to play that fine new ditty I heard in the courtyard but the resultant experience of listening to your favourite tune is unchanged.  Although I doubt Kings of the past or present would likely refer to it as "banging".  The whole emersive experience no longer includes the physical attachment and ownership of the music as an MP3 file doesn't carry the same presence as a box set of your favourite pop combo complete with collectable memorabilia.  So are we missing something.  Are the music freaks of tomorrow going to be robbed this essence of music.  I think for the experience of music to remain epic it must keep a thread of this physical real deliverable.  I love downloads but give me something real for those special tunes so I have something I can really feel to make it a truly epic customer experience.

Invade my life with a customer experience survey phone call

The customer survey has been a long standing mechanism for firms to probe your customer experience and get magical insights into how they met your needs.  A common approach to this old school customer experience tool is the cold calling survey that thrusts their way into your life and calls you up to ask your opinion invariably at the most awkward moment; just settling down on the toilet; juggling three kids and a dog; solving your rubik's cube in record time, the list goes on.  So calling up the unexpecting customer to ask them a list of pre-defined questions seeking their scores from 0-5.  How much insight does this really give?  Is the customer in the best place to answer these questions assuming they can still remember the event that lead to this?  You are likely to be on the back foot from the first moment as you have intruded into our lives and we wish this call to end as quickly as possible so will furnish you with whatever answers get you back out of our lives as quickly as possible.  So when answering 3 for the first question this results in a string of related questions being asked about "what would make it a 5", we adapt our approach quickly and from then on simply cut out the middle man and provide you with a 5 from the start killing off any further questions.  Firms need to realise that even if they did achieve an epic customer experience they are unlikely to learn this from a cold calling survey three weeks later.  Lets kill off this dinosaur of the customer insight world and ensure that any feedback is done straight away and if it can't lets use technology and go digital. 

The eurotunnel customer experience

The summer holidays are upon us and the family holiday season is in full swing. As the weather in the UK has been shockingly good many of us are enjoying a stay-cation this year not venturing abroad. For those of us still venturing to enjoy new cultural experiences the eurotunnel offers a gateway to continental Europe. Arrival at the terminal is awash with roof top boxes and bike racks as caravans are packed to bursting. The departure sequence relies on a lettering identifier to determine the order of departure but it seems to be a lottery. Where do I head to get the quickest departure. Why is that lane moving first?  They were here after us!  General feelings of being hard done by as you are desperate to get your holiday underway no doubt stressed by the journey already. Customer experience is strained by the queuing system and not helped by the pressures of long drives ahead of most. Epic holidays. Hopefully. Epic customer experience. Too much to ask.  

The customer experience of your modern day barbers

For women the hairdressers is a place of pandering and social engagement as you are tempted into trying out the latest style and colour by a glamorous stylist who really wants to connect deeply with you. For men the regular schlep to the barbers does not follow quite the same path. Men's barbers have tried to adapt to the metrosexual man of the 21st century offering styling products and digital TVs tuned to any dance specialist music channel but these wannabe establishments need to work and obey the same rules as your old school barber who has a red and white sign and an array of well thumbed copies of yesterday's Sun newspaper. These rules of engagement governing our customer experience are as follows :-

1) I essentially want the same hair cut I walked in with only shorter 

2) if you are a male hair dresser, under no circumstances should my elbows connect with any part of your midriff during the proceedings 

3) I don't really want to be here so make this as quick and pain free as possible  

4) I have no idea what the back of my head looks like so tapered or square means nothing to me so just crack on and refer to rule 3

5) paying more than £10 for a haircut seems obscene to me so please don't expect tip 

6) I'm not really great at chitter chatter so please don't ask me about my holidays, work or family but concentrate on not chopping my ears off

7) any extra grooming activity beyond my hair cut needs to be first discussed and agreed before you start any form of waxing, threading, burning, stroking, or use of any form of hot towel

8) I expect to look better when leaving than when coming in

9) I'm a creature of habit so if you make a half decent fist of cutting my hair expect to see me returning until you retire 

10) and finally if I ever come in clutching a photo of any celebrity and ask for a hair cut like them please refuse and refer to rule 1 

Feel the burn - The customer experience of a sports massage

Middle Aged Men In Lycra (M.A.M.I.L) are a growing phenomenon in the UK following our recent dominance in cycling. But this exercise boom in those over 30 isn't limited to just cycling with a number of other sports also seeing a huge rise in membership numbers and participation in organised events.  Taken seriously this often results in months of training, investing more than 10 hours a week juggled alongside busy family and working life. Indeed many using their daily commute as the bulk of their training be it running or cycling. Squeezing more and more into our busy lives does not come without its difficulties as life can be stressful enough without having to consider the best approach to an intensive training session before 6am so you can still make the office for 9. The result is sports physiotherapy is also seeing an increase as these more mature athletes batter their bodies and need all the help they can get to get back from an injury or sometimes simply back from a heavy training session that has broken them. The customer experience for this is an awkward one with most of us not regular visitors to a masseuse, indeed most of us hiding from the prospect of going to the doctor unless something is actually falling off.  The experience is worth it though as more often than not a single visit can bring immediate relief and often more advise and tips on avoiding injury than you would glean from a years sports magazine reading. We aren't ready for it to be epic but seeing documentaries where the likes of Andy Murray have a sports physio as part of their permanent team is beginning to make it all feel more normal and helping us to feel epic once more.