Educating travelers about security checks

Security checks at airports have become quite a hassle but for frequent travellers who know which items are prohibited and that you have to take out your laptop of your bag it is still a manageable process. The problem is usually with travellers who are not regulars at an airport and who slow down security checks. Even though there are signs that clearly tell you what you should do, for some reason they go mostly unnoticed.

At this critical moment the virtual assistants come in and educate travellers what to do. There are obvious benefits such as 24/7 availability and the ability to change the message in real-time depending on the situation at the airport.

In order to confirm my hypothesis I have reached out to the team at Tensator and they have shared some insights with me. Based on the trial at Luton airport  77% of passengers noticed the Virtual Assistants in the security area at LLA, two thirds of passengers at LLA said the Virtual Assistants clearly explained how to prepare for the security search and since the Virtual Assistants were introduced at LLA in February the number of searched bags has already been reduced by 4%.

Additional use cases could be shopping malls, retail stores or other critical touch points where this technology could substitute traditional signage and combine it with a human touch to increase awareness. It would be interesting to see if this approach is able to substitute a real human interaction and if consumers perceive it as an authentic interaction or just as an eye-catching marketing tool. I think there is the potential, maybe we get to see more use cases with real-life business metrics in the future.

The boulevard of broken promises

Broken promises to customers are certainly not a new phenomenon, they have happened for decades but with the shift from seller-markets to buyer-markets in the last century and the rise of online social networks in the last decade has changed the way organizations have to respond to service failures.

The latest case study comes from BlackBerry, who is compensating its customers for the service outage in early October, but they are not the first company to do so. Skype has offered its customers free credits after they experienced a downtime when the Skype servers crashed in December 2010. In April 2011, Sony was facing serious backlash due to the security problems and the corresponding shutdown of the Sony Playstation Network. Sony compensated frustrated customers with free games and access to premium content.

Where were you at the big BlackBerry outage of 2011?

BlackBerry has experienced a severe service outage in early October when the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) was unavailable for up to four days. For those who are not familiar with this service: BIS is the email infrastructure that is used to send emails to a BlackBerry device. This increases security compared to traditional ways of accessing emails on mobile devices and supports real-time notifications. The key difference from a consumer perspective is that every BlackBerry owner has to pay a monthly fee in order to access this service – otherwise they will be unable to receive emails own their device. As a consequence, the BlackBerry outage left millions of users without their emails on their BlackBerry and turned BlackBerry devices into plain phones again.

The outcry was understandably very loud, a large part was due to the crisis management from Research in Motion: If millions of your customers are without BlackBerry E-Mail delivery service, then you cannot update your website every 12 hours – 18 hours as it has been the case in the early stages of this outage. After three days RIM increased their updates, hosted conference calls and co-Founder and CEO Mike Lazaridis posted a video online apologizing about the problems.

RIM sets a new standard: compensating all customers for the service outage

In the aftermath it has become clear that RIM and the BlackBerry brand have taken severe damage and customers and the media started to demand a compensation. BlackBerry announced that they will offer free BlackBerry Apps worth more than 100 USD to each BlackBerry user as well as extended service contracts for existing business customers. This is the right procedure and it will certainly calm the initial criticism, if it will help to reverse the long-term damage is something one cannot predict right now.

Service recovery is not just a buzzword anymore

All these examples are an indicator of a trend that I have been observing for quite a while: If a company is not delivering on its promises, it has to compensate its customers for the service problems. The cases of Skype, Sony and RIM all set examples that consumers will remember next time their broadband connection is not available, their newspaper gets not delivered or their flights are delayed.

Whenever a company uses service recovery to rebuild customer satisfaction and loyalty, it implicitly sets a new service standard customers take for granted next time a service problem occurs.

Service recovery as an opportunity

Service Recovery is not necessarily a bad thing that needs to be prevented. If it is done correctly, which means that the customers problems are fixed in a timely manner, there is clear and honest communication and the service recovery has a personal touch, then customer loyalty can actually increase to levels higher than before the incident. This phenomenon is called service recovery paradox and can be an opportunity to build customer loyalty.

The conclusion for consumer service companies

The conclusion from these events is that organizations need to be prepared for such service problems, not just from a technical perspective with procedures how to restore the service but also from an organizational perspective to communicate directly and in real-time to consumers. Once the service is restored they can work on a service recovery package and communicate the service recovery efforts. It is probably a good idea to start to think about ideas for service recovery, estimate their costs and benefits and create guidelines to be prepared when the inevitable problem occurs.

Or you don’t, in which case you better prepare your social media team to monitor the anger and customer frustration on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

There is tremendous opportunity for organizations that understand the strategic opportunity of remarkable customer service with the consequence that better customer service does not necessarily mean to increase headcounts.

Several trends and changes in consumer behavior create new opportunities to redefine customer service and find ways to deliver better customer service at reduced costs. Based on my experience of setting up and scaling the customer service for some of my own ventures I would like to share my insights.

No customer service is the best service

When customers are contacting your customer service department it is already too late. The ultimate goal is that your customers never need to contact your customer service department because either they don’t have questions or they are answered already somewhere else.

The best customer service is no customer service but this also requires that this is kept in mind already from the moment a new product or service is created. Analyzing the current call center statistics will give the first starting points to understand where the biggest areas for improvement are and with the discipline to incorporate improvements the calls to the customer care center can be dramatically improved.

Nobody denies that this is the most difficult opportunity, but it is also the one with the highest potential.

Ignoring service recovery is unacceptable

Sometimes things just go wrong. Maybe there is a sudden problem problem with a your car due to a mistake made during maintenance, or an outage due to human errors with your Internet connection or you just bought a new computer and it just wont boot due to a glitch during production.

Situations like these are extremely annoying to consumers but these are the essential “moments of truth” that can break or strengthen a customer’s relationship with a brand. The service recovery paradox states that even in situations where customer loyalty is negatively impacted, the right service recovery activities can restore customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. It can even be increased to levels higher than they where before the incident if the service recovery is done fast, honestly and really aims to solve the customers problems.

As a consequence businesses need to ensure that if these events happen, they need to be frank and admit that this is a problem and apologize to customers. Consumers don’t just accept that a problem is solved, they also want to taken serious and be reassured that this will not happen again in the future. If that is not the case, customers will just start to look for other companies that offer the same service. Especially in mature markets there is always another competitor with a new and better offer to win over customers from companies who don’t take their customers serious.

Ask happy customer to spread the word

The goal of customer service is to have satisfied customers and we try all kinds of things to achieve that. If this has been achieved, very often companies stop and do not leverage the moment when customers are happy and satisfied. A sentence: “Thank you, I really appreciate your great service.” should not go unnoticed. The standard reply should be “It was our pleasure and we hope you tell your friends and family about it!”

If it is something very specific and you are corresponding via E-Mail, you can just add a sentence and ask “If you liked our service it would be great if you could leave a comment on our website or become our friend on Facebook. Here is the link: Have a great day!”. If you don’t believe me, just try a small scale experiment in your customer service department and see for yourself what impact this will have.

Surprise customers with innovative customer service tools

It’s the little secret of early-stage startups to connect with customers, surprise them and instantly connect with them: Integrating a live chat on your website and allowing customer to quickly reach out to you and also to pro-actively reach out them and ask them if they have any questions. I have used live chat software myself on several of my websites and I am doing it whenever I would like to quickly connect with customers. This way you can not only deliver a very responsive customer service but you will realize that calls and emails to the customer care center will be significantly reduced while in many situations an agent can handle multiple interactions at the same time.

Customer service from customers for customers

Outsourcing customer service to customers? A few years ago people would have thought this is a crazy idea but with the rise of online forums the internet has become an important place for customer service. In online customer support forums passionate customers help other customers with their problems and therefore reduce the inbound calls to customer care departments. The “helping customers” certainly need to be passionate about a product or brand but passion alone is not enough. These forums also need to communicate “helper status” through the form of leaderboards, kudos points or other incentives that reward customers who help other customers. Of course you don’t want people to do it for the money but you want it to be fair for everyone involved.

Customer communities can work but they need moderation. Just setting up a forum and hoping that users will go there will backfire, especially in critical situations when there is a major problem. A long term view on the support forums is essential as well, because products will change and information in the forum will be outdated. If it is not possible to exclude this information from searches, customers will find outdated information and will be left without help as well.

Customer Service Anywhere

Social Media has given a voice to consumers that can be broadcasted in real time on the internet and the right messages will be picked up and will spread like wild fire. Got a bad customer experience with an Airline? Just create a song and millions of people might see it on YouTube. Do you think you have been treated unfair at the hotline? You can find out in real-time what customers are saying about your brand on Twitter.

The most important rule when developing a social media strategy is that it is not a one-way channel but a two-way channel. This means that companies need to listen and they need to listen not just to the praise and “Likes” on Facebook but also to the questions and complaints that customers have.

Does this mean you have to solve peoples problems with 140 characters through Twitter? No. You can guide them to your hotline (maybe you even have a special hotline for contacts through social media) and they will take care of it. But you have to listen and guide them, not ignore them and just send them marketing messages.

These trends will further influence customer service and how it is organized and delivered. There will certainly be companies that will keep struggling with low-quality products and will not make up lost ground with better customer service. But many companies are in situations where they have great products and with the right strategy these companies are able to deliver not just average service experiences but indeed remarkable service experiences.

I am sure that in the next 18 – 36 months we will increasingly see that large corporations use the web to drive down costs for customer service  while at the same providing the same or an even improved customer service experience.

One approach to provide online customer service are online communities. These have emerged around companies and their products together with discussion forums have long been a source for customers to get answers to their questions without the need to interact with the company directly.

One example is crackberry.com, an independent site about the BlackBerry smartphone that has already 30% of the visitors that the original Blackberry.com site has (see compete.com statistics). From my own experience the crackberry.com forum is a really valuable and helpful source for customer service.

While many of these sites are independent and do not represent an organization, companies increasingly understand the potential of online communities to offer customer service. 

The New York Times has published an article titled “Customer Service? Ask A Volunteer” which explains the story, motivation and success factors of a online community for customer services that has been created by Verizon.

Mr. McMurry is part of an emerging corps of Web-savvy helpers that large corporations, start-up companies and venture capitalists are betting will transform the field of customer service.

[…] Verizon needed to find a smart way to try to tap into that potential resource for customer service.

In talking to people and surveying the research on voluntary online communities, Verizon concluded that super-users would be crucial to success.

There is also a statement from Verizon about the success of the experiment.

At Verizon, Mr. Studness says he is pleased with the experiment so far. He calls the company-sponsored customer-service site “a very productive tool,” partly because it absorbs many thousands of questions that would otherwise be expensive calls to a Verizon call center.

Read the full article “Customer Service? Ask A Volunteer” in the New York Times.

An article in the Wall Street Journal from September 2008 titled “Making the Most of Customer Complaints” from Prof. Stefan Michel, IMD Lausanne, David Bowen, Thunderbird School of Global Management and Robert Johnston, Warwick Business School summarizes challenges and strategies to ensure the successful management of customer complaints.

Here is an excerpt:

Nobody’s perfect. That’s a fact, not an excuse. Which is why it’s crucial for companies to realize that the way they handle customer complaints is every bit as important as trying to provide great service in the first place. Because things happen.

Customers are constantly judging companies for service failures large and small, from a glitch-ridden business-software program to a hamburger served cold. They judge the company first on how it handles the problem, then on its willingness to make sure similar problems don’t happen in the future. And they are far less forgiving when it comes to the latter. Fixing breakdowns in service — we call this service recovery — has enormous impact on customer satisfaction, repeat business, and, ultimately, profits and growth.

But unfortunately, most companies limit service recovery to the staff who deal directly with customers. All too often, companies have customer service sort out the immediate problem, offer an apology or some compensation, and then assume all is well. This approach is particularly damaging because it does nothing to address the underlying problem, practically guaranteeing similar failures and complaints.

Read the full article “Making the Most of Customer Complaints”.

[…] for several years, Xerox has polled 480,000 customers per year regarding product and service satisfaction using a five-point scale from 5 (high) to 1 (low). Until two years ago, Xerox’s goal was to achieve 100% 4s (satisfied) and 5s (very satisfied) by the end of 1993. But in 1991, an analysis of customers who gave Xerox 4s and 5s on satisfaction found that the relationship between the scores and actual loyalty differed greatly depending on whether the customers were very satisfied or satisfied. Customers giving Xerox 5s were six times more likely to repurchase Xerox equipment than those giving 4s.

This analysis led Xerox to extend its efforts to create apostles – a term coined by Scott D. Cook, CEO of software producer and distributor Intuit, describing customers so satisfied that they convert the uninitiated to a product or service.

Found in Putting the service-profit chain to work by JL Heskett, LA Schlesinger, Harvard Business Review, 1994,

Alternative download link: http://www.favaneves.org/arquivos/artigoextra6-5.pdf

IBM is a great example of a corporation that has successfully shifted from a hardware business that was faced with price erosion and increased competition towards a service business. In 2007 revenues from service business represented more than 55% of IBMs revenues compared to 32% in 1997, in the same time-span hardware revenue declined from 47% to 21% (see Annual Report 1997 and Annual Report 2007).

This shift was not without problems as the Financial Times article “Big blueprint for IBM services” shows.

At the same time, Big Blue was facing a problem experienced by many services businesses that rely on a heavy element of direct interaction with customers. The more that sales increased, the more people it had to recruit, in a linear progression that would ultimately have been unsustainable.

In order to overcome these challenges, IBM approached this from three perspectives:

Standardization

In effect, IBM set out to standardize the way it “manufactures” services, so that exactly the same processes determined how an as­signment was carried out in Egypt as in the Philippines. “The real scale comes out of doing the work in a codified way,” says Mr Daniels. “The key breakthrough was to ask ‘How do you do the work at the lowest-level components?’”

Technology

The technology IBM has applied to services comes in two parts. One involves raising productivity by automating some repetitious work. Turning repeatable processes into software that can be used widely in similar assignments has played to an IBM strength, since it is the world’s second biggest software company, after Microsoft.

The second technology development holds the greatest promise for the future, says Mr Daniels. It involves inventing new ways to solve customers’ problems, by applying the sort of deep computing skills that have long lain at the heart of IBM’s business.

Anthropology

[…] the services research arm employs anthropologists and other social scientists to investigate how to make services engagements more effective.

Overall, in spite of the increasing use of technology, Mr Morris says of services: “It is fundamentally a human enterprise.”

How does this impact your customer experience?

Designing a service that provides a remarkable experience is one thing, consistently delivering this service with the expected quality is even more important. Businesses that ignore the service delivery aspect will see themselves confronted with the problem that their services – as remarkable as they might have been on a small scale – simply don’t hold up when they need to be rolled out on a larger scale.

And if you cannot consistently deliver a service, all your efforts to create interactions that lead to remarkable experience will have been to no avail.

Read the full Financial Times article “Big blueprint for IBM services”.

Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, reported about an exercise (see article "Your Boss Really is Clueless")that one could perform to find out the degree of empathy. Just ask somebody to draw a letter on his or her forehead. In which direction does it face? Is it written so that you can read it? Or is it written so that others can read it?

More than a decade of experiments have shown that people who write the E in a way that is legible to themselves but backwards to others have not thought or cared about how others might perceive the letter. On the other hand, people who draw the E backward to them but legible to others have considered another’s point of view.

Still, this is a nice exercise, how do you make empathic employee behavior real? How can empathy contribute for a remarkable customer experience?

Xavier from Notebooks.com provides a great example of a concrete manifestation of empathic employees providing extraordinary customer service. He shares his story of a broken Apple MacBook Pro and how he was treated in the Apple Store.

I was greeted by a very friendly Swiss Apple employee who was on his last day of training in the U.S. before returning to Zurich to help open a new Apple store. […] Obviously my MacBook Pro has already had its fair share of downtime and I don’t think it’s reasonable for a notebook to be subject to three major repairs within the first four months of purchase. He said he completely understood my frustration and asked one of the Genius Bar managers to assist.

The Genius Bar manager then asked me something that I’ve NEVER heard before from any computer customer service person. “What would be a satisfactory solution for you?,” he asked.

That might seem like a simple question, but it’s something that more companies should ask to resolve customers’ issues. It shows that they’re actually trying to solve your problem rather than just run you through their standard operating procedures.

I told him that all I wanted was to walk out of the store with a machine that I could count on and not have bring back for yet another repair. […]

This single question is such a powerful statement and shows that employees care about the customer and that he is taken serious. They are interested in the customer’s opinion and the desired outcome that he imagines.

But wait? What if I cannot deliver the customer’s desired solution?

Well there is always the risk that you might not be able to deliver your customer’s desired solution and meet his expectations, explain why you are not able to deliver the solution. If you have valid arguments, your customers will understand. However, without asking him directly, you always have to guess what the solution might be and the process towards a solution is much more complicated.

What are the implications for your organization?

There are probably extensive handbooks and trainings for “front-line” employees in your organization. They might include guidelines about replacement policies, dress code, and how employees should talk with customer, just to name a few. If these handbooks include the guideline to ask the question “What would be a satisfactory solution for you?” you are already on the right path, if they don’t include it then it is time to update your handbooks and training manuals.

Read  the full article My Apple Curse Strikes Again, but Apple Store Saves the Day

Read the full article Your Boss Really is Clueless or the complete research paper "Power and Perspectives Not Taken".

Examples can be found at airports (check in counters), train stations (ticket counters), banks (ATMs and Internet banking) and even in selected McDonalds restaurants where you are able to order your BigMac with a self-service terminal in a restaurant.

Many customers prefer self-service over traditional service interfaces because when working properly they help to save time. When you look at it holistically, a service designer should try to reduce the number of human interactions to increase the efficiency of a service system. But while focusing on continuously increasing efficiency, service designers should not forget about effectiveness.

When “human services” fail, there is usually somebody around who could at least help you. If a self-service system fails, there is nobody around who might help (that’s the point of self-service) and customers are usually lost. Obviously you should design for self-service failures but not everyone is doing it. But how do “smart” companies solve that problem? By assigning employees that help customers with the self-service system.

Three of my personal experiences with such “workarounds” were at the Swiss Air check-in counters in Zurich, Deutsche Bahn (German railways) ticket counter in Cologne and United Airlines check-in counters in San Francisco. Why would you put a “half-baked” self-service terminal there, when you know that you probably need employees that can help customer’s to use them?

If you want to make a difference, first you have to ensure that you do everything possible to prevent self-service failures (a.k.a. user testing, user testing, user testing). Additionally you have to plan for self-service failures and design for self-service recovery through the self-service terminal.Designing a self-service terminal with “human backup” is only the last solution. If designer ignore this and something goes wrong, your customers will be lost and without any recovery efforts they will become ambassadors of negative word of mouth.

Image courtesy of [HippiHippo]

One challenge for organizations is that it is difficult to control what is happening outside their sphere of influence on blogs, forums or social networks.

Dell Hell is just one of these examples when the angry voice of customers has run out of control. The term coined by Jeff Jarvis to describe the horrible service he experienced from Dell Computers, has received a lot of attention, especially since at the time when he posted the number of customers frustrated with Dell’s customer service reach record-breaking heights.

What can a company do about these public complaints that might start an avalanche of negative publicity?

It is necessary to create a platform that gives customers a possibility to complain on the Internet. This should not just be possible in a private way (such as a complaint submission form), but instead in a public way with representatives from this organization working and documenting their efforts to fix the problem.

After the "Dell Hell" fiasco, Dell has established a few quite innovative concepts to deal with customer complaints on the Internet. Dell Community Pulse allows you to state your problem and post your tone (compliment, comment, complaint) together with a message. Take all complaints submitted to Dell globally and the result is a real time thermometer of their customer’s mood.

Complaints dominate the current mood; one reason is that such a website is always biased because of a self-selection of customers who prefer to complain rather than to compliment.

Nevertheless, such a platform creates transparency where an organization has problems, but it is also a way to show that an organization is taking unsatisfied customers serious and is not afraid to show the current state of customer satisfaction.

Even more important is that such a platform attracts people who would otherwise complain on platforms out of Dell’s control. Most customers do not want to harm an organization; they just want to be heard. That is why they write on blogs.

Providing an open, (semi-) transparent channel for your customers can help you to attract customer complaints and at least partially keep negative word-of-mouth in control.