How a poor customer relationship management capability can reflect badly on a company

In an ever increasing digital age all companies are desperate to get greater stickiness with their customers seeking all manner of personal contact info and asking you to like their Facebook page and retweet their least catalogue but all this insight requires sophistication. Recently I blogged about a company where I was thrilled with their customer experience and could see an opportunity for them to market this capability harder to differentiate. I tagged a twitter link with the companies twitter ID so they would have the opportunity to hear my feedback and use as they wish. A few days later they send out a generic feedback request with links scattered all over it to social media sites but it is clear they are not listening. Eagerly scrabbling about for customer insight and failing to maintain the channels. Social media is a tough nut to crack corporately but if your going to join in the game then you really need to think through what that means to your other customer touchpoints and manage the customer journey. What was epic unfortunately becomes somewhat tainted. 

Bupa delivering when it matters

Private medical is something many of us have but are never really sure if its worth it renewing each year not quite brave enough to cancel. One provider of stealth medical to rival the UK nhs is Bupa (www.bupa.co.uk). They deliver private medical cover for an annual premium seeking to deliver where the nhs can't. Having never previously used the service I have been doubting if it were worthwhile having in the same period on occasion been genuinely pleased with the nhs on dealing with things. This week the customer experience of Bupa I can 100% confirm is worth it and absolutely epic. A member of family who had been ill for some time had the opportunity for surgery that could be exactly the remedy required but due to waiting times would have to wait until next year. The consultant pointed out that with private healthcare that time frame could be a few weeks wait instead. So phoning Bupa not sure what to expect got straight through to an agent who could verify who I was and confirm I was covered under my policy. Moreover they could authorise the surgery with a confirmation code for the surgeon and get the procedure booked in there and then. Amazing. Bupa literally to the rescue. No forms to fill in. No quibble over cover. No changes needed in terms of medical care. Just quick clear support. I may have been a doubter but will not question my renewal now. Epic. 

Top 10 epic fails

My top 10 epic fails in customer experience where the customer journey becomes shockingly bad. 

1) impossible contact options. Hidden in the depths is a contact number for a telephone locked away in a cupboard nobody will ever hear ring. Fail. 

2) over promised offers that fail to deliver. The hard sell enticement that lures you in only to mystically disappear upon entry. Fail. 

3) complexity to baffle even the most nerdy customer. Where am I in the digital journey and what am I supposed to do next?  Fail. 

4) love you then leave you. Huge attention right up to the point of purchase closely followed by absolutely nothing. Fail. 

5) spamming you for feedback after every touch point. Having made some effort to use their service you are then battered for feedback on how much you loved it even if you haven't done anything yet. Fail. 

6) Monday to Friday 9-5 with an hour for lunch and finish early every other Friday. When the opportunity to get some customer service is so restricted that you can never be around to use it. Fail. 

7) personalised journeys that completely miss the point. Offer me a discount on a new car when I am looking at bicycles. Fail. 

8) pricing that has a life of its own changing seemingly at random with little or no explanation and certainly nothing that could be understood by any normal individual. Fail. 

9) style over substance. Websites that swoosh and dazzle your eyes only to offer utter rubbish and tell you nothing meaningful about what your looking for. Fail. 

10) like me buttons on everything. Ooh you used our next page option. Like me! You looked at our page on opening times. Like me!  Fail. 

Heart rate based fitness

Conventional fitness training sees us pounding out the miles in order to achieve fitness anchored in achieving a distance at a target speed where we feel little motivation and even less when we are slower. An alternative is to use heart rate monitors to control your training and discipline yourself with this and a timeframe rather than distance. So for example on heading out for a run you will do an hours running at an aerobic rate (110 - 150 beats per minute) and build on this. It takes your training to a different level and you stop thinking so much about miles and speed and more about maintaining a controlled heart rate over a set timeframe. This ensures you are delivering the right aerobic or anaerobic training rather than pounding out the miles and probably sitting somewhere in between these and not really delivering much benefit. So how to monitor your heart rate?  I would recommend polar watches with a heart rate strap for accuracy (www.polar.com). They give you continuous heart rate reading that is wirelessly synchronised to your watch from the heart rate strap. Interesting samsung are keen on such thinking and announced the S5 with heart rate monitoring capabilities. Shift your fitness training to epic. 

Bathstore in house design service quietly delivers

Fitting out a bathroom is a vast array of complicated choices and design decisions that can leave you dithering between free standing baths and integrated shower heads until you ultimately give up. The bathstore (www.bathstore.com) has an in house design team who can take your room dimensions and help you model the bathroom there and then. Walk in with a vague idea of what you want and you could be walking out with bathroom picked and ready for install. The service goes beyond merely 2D overhead views of your room to a 3D walk in flavour of your bathroom complete with flooring choices, tiles, mirrors and walls painted to your preferred colours. This helps convert a maybe into a sale as you have confidence in what you are getting which is even more relevant where you are comparing different layout choices. This brilliant service is not hugely advertised and is free so no obligation to buy. It is an epic aid in the purchase process and something they could really market harder as it makes a huge difference for those this side of employing an interior design to make their feng shui informed room designs.  

When things go wrong with LoveFilm

LoveFilm (www.lovefilm.com) offers a number of levels of service from conventional movies on a disk to your home through to on demand download services. For movies sent to you at home this model started the death of the high street rental proposition with customers finding it far easier to manage an online list and have these sent to them at their leisure to be returned when they were ready. The thought of venturing out to your blockbuster hiring a film then held to ransom for return the next day seemed outdated. There is a flaw in the customer service for LoveFilm with this postal model. What happens if you don't get the film. If the postal service squirrels away this diamond of entertainment and is watching your cherished copy of "piranha 3DD" in a back room somewhere while you scour the TV guide for an episode of "extreme fishing" you have not already seen three times. The service is pretty simple. You get an email telling you what the film is that is on the way and you wait by your post box for it to come through. When it doesn't it would make sense for a call to action on the email for you to flag a problem. A "press this button if it doesn't who up" piece of customer support. This simple step could improve customer experience significantly. 

The experience of having your email account hacked

On a seemingly more regular basis inboxes are being peppered with viral mails from the most unlikely senders. Why would your sweet old auntie want to send you a link to make your biceps bigger with a miracle pill (and that is one of the more tame ones). The reality is that our personal email accounts are under a constant attack from computer nasties that are trying to get access to your contacts and spread their evil further through the connectivity of the web. As ever this is a strong reminder that anti-virus software is a must and keeping our online profiles secure ever more difficult. When your account has been hacked unless someone lets you know you may well be ignorant to the fact you are firing off naughty messages to everyone you ever knew. Finding out is irritating and frustrating as you have to unpick the mess and heighten your security with a password so ransom there is a good chance you will get it wrong on a daily basis. Email hacking spells pain for the foreseeable future. 

LinkedIn for social selling

LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) has dominated the professional social network space and retained this position in spite of a strong challenge from google+ to lure people away with professional circles that has failed to ignite appetite. The value of LinkedIn is widely under utilised with people maintaining a lose network that they pay little attention to with the occasional endorsement to a past colleague. But is there more opportunity?  Could individuals and indeed firms use this further?  B2B selling is all about relationships and connecting to the right people where LinkedIn can up the value of any interaction. So should firms pay more attention to the Linkedin profiles of their key sales staff? Absolutely. Using tools within LinkedIn to connect your organisations networks means that all those disparate connections can be joined and used for insights.  Finding the husband of the marketing person you are trying to contact is an ex-colleague of your boss is a relationship to get you through the door so your bosses profile could be key to developing that lead, it could be damaged by a profile picture of them in fancy dress.  This process of social selling yields much more success than conventional cold calling that delivers returns of less than 5%. We have been working in this way for many years but have we really been understanding this as social selling and improving the levers that influence this?  Not yet but we are learning and developing this further, as are linkedin who are developing this business model to increase revenue and increase the number of users beyond the current 277 million. 

The Lloyd's TSB split from a customers experience

Lloyd's banking group merged with TSB in the 90's with the two banks adopting the Lloyd's branding and products. Nearly 20 years later and the banks are now split with TSB trying to position themselves as the peoples bank on the high street although in reality coming across more as a throwback from when they were last trading. The Lloyd's arm of the business continues much in the same manner as we have been accustomed to with a slight refresh of the brand and sites. For the customers they have been dumped on whichever half of the business they were linked to from their original sort code. The net result is frustrated customers left with no choice who if they are unhappy with the deal must apply as a new customer. This choice no different to being a new customer at any branch. You can't help feel that the banks will as a result lose customers to other banks as people take advantage of the choice to look for a new bank. Epic fail. It would have been more sensible to ask customers their opinion before dumping them without a choice. 

The valentines day experience

Top 10 things to remember for a successful valentines. 

1) Don't forget. 

2) Really. Don't forget! 

3) Plan ahead avoiding the need for a garage based purchase on your way home. 

4) Go for everything and don't just limit it to a card. Throw the kitchen sink at it as more is definitely more. 

5) Juggle the rest of your diary so valentines doesn't look like number 9 on your list of priorities. 

6) Make it personal as a new Hoover while expensive doesn't really say I love you and know you better than anyone. Same goes for a gift card. Don't expect huge love for an amazon £10 gift card. 

7) Remember what you did last year as you don't want to be beaten by yourself from a previous year. 

8) Start it early. Don't wait for after work and kick it off from first thing and get the ball rolling. 

9) Don't expect anything in return. Anything you get can therefore be considered a bonus. 

10) If all else fails. There's always next year to try again!

Parcel 2 go keeping it simple

Parcel 2 go (www.parcel2 go.com) offers a great alternative to Royal Mail for parcel delivery. The service uses a website to allow customers to enter the details of their parcel and then delivers an aggregator view of parcel delivery with levels of service and corresponding costs. The services include home collection saving you the embarrassment of having to take your life size badger cuddly toy parcel to your local post office queuing with the masses with your irregular sized object. The service from parcel 2 go provides a competitive price and an improved service through home collection and label printing from home. The service could become epic if it gave a more precise time for collection than a whole day but other than this it is a real alternative to fighting it out in your post office. 

Revenge of the cookies

When using many e-commerce enabled web sites cookies are sitting behind the scenes to help you along your purchase path storing nuggets of information that make this a more fluid customer experience. An easily identifiable example of this occurring where you use a virtual basket dropping your favourites into this as you charge around the site looking for more bargains and must have items. A cookie helps your browser remember and have a memory of this as it stores this with your session potentially saving people from needing to be in a logged on state but merely a one time visitor. This genius piece of computer witchcraft came under some scrutiny when companies deployed these cookies to follow you around the internet and trigger placement adverts in later sites and provide analytics back on your interweb movements. As a result all firms have to publish there cookie policy much more openly now and ensure you opt into any such evil plotting. On visiting a site recently I found a website had such dedicated and hard working cookies that it would not allow me to remove things from the basket but kept putting then back. You will buy that polka dot bow tie even though you've changed your mind. Ha. See, it's back in your shopping basket. Now buy it!  Epic commitment from the cookie and demons in the system. 

The slow lingering death of the iPad 1

When the iPad was released into the world 4 years ago critics initially rejected it as the answer to a problem we didnt know we had. In spite of a glamourous Steve Jobs pitch it was slammed as a piece of noise with the iPhone the real story. Within weeks those experts and critics were eating their words as the iPad became the must have piece of tech for home and office use. This revolutionary tablet opened the door for the numerous tablets that we have now and has seen an annual update from Apple (www.apple.com) bringing out ever lighter, thinner and faster machines to lure us into a purchase. So what of the iPad 1?  The founder of this revolution?  Is it still as desirable now almost drifting into cult status?  Alas no as Apple have long since turned their back on this cutting edge piece of kit. The iPad 1 will only run on iOS 5 with no newer versions of the system accepted by the dated hardware which in turn means that apps are slowly no longer being supported and becoming redundant. Indeed the internet browser (safari) has become so slow it is almost too painful to even use. Poor iPad 1. We pity you and shame on you Apple for not looking after your own. iPad 1 an epic revolution in tech. 

Multi sport punters get your goodies at Wiggle

Multi sport past times such as triathlon require all manner of exciting products that your standard high street sports shop may struggle to supply. Where to go for a pair of pro jammers and similar daily challenges. There are a number of specialist shops dotted about the country but if a trip to one of these isn't likely to get a pass from home then you are left with online suppliers for your sport addictions. Wiggle are just a supplier (www.wiggle.co.uk) who offer everything from socks to time trial bikes. In addition to a mobile optimised site that supports its shopping basket with a favourites and wish list function it also has customer reviews directly referenced per product which can be a life saver for buying a new item that you have not seen in the flesh before. This customer reive system also suppliers customer profiling so you can relate your own needs and experience levels against those providing your review. Great range of products but even more valuable epic review information available. 

Sainsbury's online grocery shopping improving your quality of life

Sainsbury's (www.sainsburys.co.uk) like many other supermarket brands have built a mature online grocery shopping experience allowing you to browse from your sofa and have your choice in goodies delivered straight into your kitchen. In terms of quality of life this is a no-brainer for me. You can flick through their internet pages and fill up your virtual trolley with goods at 10 o'clock at night while watching the latest episode of Breaking Bad then kick back until it is delivered the following evening while you are relaxing with a beer listening to your favouring old school club classics. Quality of life - tick. No struggling to find a parking space near the entrance where you then fear for the integrity of your car from some stray trolley to then blunder around the store grumbling at how your time could be better spent sanding down your knee caps. The online experience gives you intelligent searching and if this seems too much hassle it can import your favourites straight from your nectar card giving you direct access to all your regular purchases. The drop down menu system allows you to browse in a more free format style in case you need inspiration which is further augmented by targeted suggestions based upon your past purchases even combining options that go well with previous items. All deftly added to your virtual trolley allowing you to select a specific delivery slot to the nearest hour including evenings allowing it to work around you. It really is the future and will slash 1000's of hours off my lifetime shopping quota. Now if only someone could deliver such epic improvements to ironing I would be laughing. 

Parrot phone kits transforming your motor

When selecting your options on your shiny new car the Bluetooth phone option may startle you in how much this extra may cost.  Lost in all the other expenses though £800 for the phone may seem reasonable against a total running into the £10's of thousands. For those not able to swallow this large cost there are options and opportunity to fit a phone kit latterly to your car that need not rely on wires strewn throughout your car or irritating sync steps every time you embark upon a journey. Parrot (www.parrot.com) have a range of products that can be smartly blended into your cars interior with models such as the 9200i that even allows Bluetooth music streaming services and a broader range of wired connectivity with additional USB and iPod connections. The experience is much more akin to that of a built in system albeit with a slightly less integrated screen to contend with but against the price it is a small compromise. Indeed for many older cars the prospect of having a car phone was not available so such an option opens the door safe connectivity for these vehicles. No need to drive while holding your phone risking penalty points and more importantly danger to pedestrians and other motorists when such solutions can be installed in your car in a couple of hours. Keeping you safe and connected. Epic. 

The tube strike customer experience

Travelling into London at the best of times is a challenge with expensive commutes on packed trains and tubes. Travelling when there is a tube strike expertly planned to coincide with some fierce weather is monumentally bad. As you check for the latest updates on the transport for London website (www.tfl.gov.uk) hoping for good news you are met with a dismal forecast of what to expect but with little options you have to slug it out and hope for the best. In summer with the sun on your back a walk in London would not be too inconvenient but a walk in 50 mph rain is not for the faint hearted. The general atmosphere is sour with commuters resenting the strike as they struggle around it, there will be little support for this impact on the usual customer experience which is rarely good anyway. On a day when the weather is also epic it has to go down as nothing short of an epic fail by the tube workforce who should have looked again when seeing the weather and thought twice about a strike when so many are battling the effects of a tough start to 2014. 

The halfords fitting service customer experience

Getting after market alterations to your car has become a less straight forward exercise as cars have become more integrated with the old slot in stereo a thing of the past. Now your stereo is split across three screens with controls connecting your phone, iPod and stereo together. This has seen the demise of the in car entertainment specialist who would have whipped out your old head unit and replaced it with the latest Kenwood all singing and dancing stereo complete with colour graphic equalizer. Halfords (www.halfords.com) has found a growing gap to fill with its offering to fit your car equipment. This allows satnavs to be hardwired in or after market Bluetooth phonekits to be fitted integrated with your existing car audio equipment. With less I.C.E. Specialist there are few alternatives.  This is demonstrated in how far in advance you now need to book in such a service getting a scheduled slot to have your upgrades completed. Having booked in an eager young chap will know the inner workings of your cars electrics and proceed to with minimal fuss install your kit leaving it like a part of our cars interior. Epic.  

The customer experience of selling on eBay

The interweb has created a generation of entrepreneurs as the opportunity for anyone to set up a cottage industry from their garage and market to the world has evolved. While simple site builder websites have become more affordable and simple to use the easiest route to market for many is eBay (www.ebay.co.uk). Set up an account with a corresponding paypal account and you are ready to rock selling anything from second hand cars to home made jewellery. For the seller the website offers step by step guidance to list an item with smart detection algorithms prompting you for improved listing names and then suggested categories to list your items in maximising any search results. In addition the web site and possibly even more straight forward is the mobile app that hooks straight into your photo library allowing you to photo you items from your phone and upload directly without having to convert anything for the site. The app includes a bar code scanner to auto populate your items details and make available library images of your product if you prefer to use these. Once up and running the selling service includes secure direct messaging to answer any potential buyers queries and a mediation service if there were ever a dispute over goods. The genius of the site though is that this is rarely needed as it relies on customer feedback so suppliers have to work to earn a reputation and threaten having this risked if the deliver poor service and receive bad feedback. Epic business model for eBay.