Are We Going "App-Happy"?
I read once “somewhere” that apparently 80% of a business’ users will look to access its services or products on their mobile (read smartphone) device. Small wonder then that the development of apps has grown exponentially over the past years.
There are apps, however, and there are apps.
Rather like those department stores that promise to sell us (almost) anything and everything apps are now doing the same job. As I go through life, I find more organisations, businesses and such like who “have an app for that”. Sooner or later, I suspect that even our tiny little six-person business will be forced to pay someone to develop an app for us (we don’t have the expertise to do it ourselves).
What I've found in a number of cases though is that when interacting with an app, firstly I risk tapping in the wrong place with my (some might call them large) fingers. Many apps also seem to require at least two levels of security. These are usually a username and/or password and/or One Time Password (OTP) sent to the user. Often the OTP is sent to their mobile phone number. That’s great if that user doesn’t travel outside their country or keeps their SIM in their mobile device even when travelling (incurring the sometimes outrageous data costs that this entails). Luckily, smartphone manufacturers have found a partial way around this through using facial recognition (although there are still some suppliers with whom I deal who insist on sending an OTP to my phone).
My real question is: how many apps can we truly deal with? In the end, I suspect that people will stop dealing with certain suppliers if they don’t buy their products regularly or if they’re just fed up with so many apps on their phones.
My personal experience is that, as I’ve aged, I prefer (and indeed need to!) access apps or services from a larger screen, such as a tablet or desktop computer. For young people with good eyesight and slim, nimble fingers, the mobile phone is great. For others it may be a curse.
Worse still are organisations who insist on transacting only through their app (they don’t even have a website). Again, if they’re interacting with the younger generation this shouldn’t be a problem but I wonder whether they’ll start to lose business as customers advance in years. No doubt there'll be others to take their place.
In the end, I suspect the decision will boil down to “Do I really value this product, service or supplier and, if so, is it worth continuing using their particular app?”
Only time will tell. Meanwhile, if we as businesses want to develop our own app, how are we going to make sure that it will be as “user-friendly” as possible?
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.
Labels: Customer Care, Productivity, Selling, Strategy
When is “Good Enough” “Good Enough”?
I’ve had the privilege of watching several entrepreneurs building their businesses over the years. What interests me most is their approach to what we might call “getting it right“.
For some, “perfection” is the only standard. For others, “good enough” will do and they then refine the product or service.
Both have their pros and cons. “Perfection” means that a lot of work will go into producing a product or service that genuinely meets customer needs. Inevitably, a number of elements have to be combined to make this happen: concept, assembly (if it concerns an actual product), delivery to customer and after sales service.
The downside is that getting to that final stage of perfection can take an awfully long time and delay product or service launches.
In some cases, perfection must be mandatory. We see this in buildings, automobiles, aircraft, bridges where if the product fails, a considerable number of lives can be lost.
On the other hand, especially in the IT industry, “good enough” will do. A programme or service can be launched and then, as customer feedback filters back, it can be “tweaked” to refine the product or service until it meets needs.
In some cases, “good enough” may be preferable both to take the market lead and to make sure that the product can be scaled or changed as needed. A very simple example would be the Apple Watch. Apple were by no means the first in the smart watch market, but when they entered some years after competitors such as Pebble and Samsung, they brought a totally superior product to the table. They’ve continued refining it as well (although battery life still seems to be their main hurdle).
For every entrepreneur among us, deciding when “good enough” is “good enough” and when to strive for perfection is very much a personal and business decision. For example, can Ford afford to aim for perfection every time? When should it do so? Power and transmission (engines) and safety issues such as indicators, lights, airbags, brakes and seatbelts need to be perfect. However, “small” refinements like tone of dashboard colour may mean they miss taking the market lead by getting the product out there faster, earning some money, and then improving it based on feedback. Look at every iteration of the same model every year – does the basic design change? Of course!
My personal view is that it depends on circumstances. If one has the resources and time available to achieve perfection, why not? In a fast-changing business and competitive landscape, being “second past the post’ may be the difference between success and failure. It will be for each and every business owner to decide for themselves.
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.
Labels: Customer Care, Leadership, Productivity, Selling, Strategy
Hard Customer Service Facts?
I spotted an infographic developed by Rapid Answers that listed five key points that we need to think about during our interactions with our customers.
Fact number one: more than 60% of consumers are influenced by other consumers’ comments. How often have I looked up reviews on Amazon or other sites before making a purchase? How often have you? The 60% figure also looks very precise and nicely rounded – wonder how they got that.
Fact number two: repeat customers spend 67% more and are more profitable. I can’t comment on the 67% figure (again, it seems very precise) but it is fair to say that repeat customers generally will spend more than those who come only once. It’s logical.
Fact 3: 40% of organisations cite “complexity” as the greatest barrier to improving “multi-channel customer experience” - whatever that is. Again, without knowing on which survey the 40% figure is based I can’t comment on its accuracy. There’s no denying, however, that we live in an increasingly complex world and consumers don’t like complexity when accessing services (I’m one of them!).
Fact 4: 78% of consumers have bailed on (abandoned) a transaction because of a poor service experience. Again, can’t comment on the 78% figure but personal experience tells me that bailing on a transaction because of poor service happens. I’ve done it myself. Not only will people abandon the transaction, but they’re also likely to go online and tell millions about it.
Finally, it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience. Another way of putting this is that it takes a long time to build trust but very little time to lose it. I have no hard data on how many positive experiences it takes to make up for a bad one, but I can say that one has to work a lot harder to build and then maintain that bond of trust. If, though, one does make a mistake after building up a substantial or sufficient “emotional credit balance”, customers can be a lot more forgiving than if we constantly provide poor experiences.
The long and short of this seems to be that organisations that genuinely focus on great customer experience will be the ones who succeeded where their competitors don’t. Their prices may be higher, their product range may be more limited, but they will still get the business because of their "service experience". In short, we need to focus on:
- Attitude and service to generate positive comments on our services/products.
- “Bringing them back for more”.
- How easily we can deliver our product/service and how easy is it for customers to obtain it.
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.
Labels: Customer Care, Leadership, Selling, Strategy
Customer Perception = Reality
Kate Zabriskie coined the above term which neatly encapsulates what is often the main cause of tension between customers and suppliers.
We’ve all heard phrases such as “The customer is not an interruption of your work, they are the reason you have work,” and so on but it was only when I saw this that light dawned for me.
Many businesses are organised “Around themselves”, that is, they produce goods or services according to processes that they have designed to deliver those goods or services.
Only a few think about how the customer may want to obtain or access those goods or services. This is where the “customer experience” concept comes in. Its objective is to make life as good as possible for customers using the following criteria:
- The product or service must meet the customer’s needs.
- It must be easy to use.
- The customer should enjoy using the product or service.
The problem is that, if we’re lucky, the product or service will meet our needs.
Easy to use? How do we have to fill in? How many fields do we need to complete online? How many steps to complete the process? Does our password need a minimum of 8 characters, at least one of which should be an uppercase letter, one a number and one a "special symbol"?
Enjoyable? How do we feel after completing endless forms and waiting in a queue for 30 minutes?
Very few organisations can achieve all three.
Once we know what the customer wants, and how they want it, we’re on our way. The only way to get this information is to talk to customers themselves. Unfortunately, the way many organisations do this is to use “focus groups” or “market surveys” that aren’t designed to elicit what the customer wants so much as to reaffirm that the processes are “right”. Even the use of the latest trend – “persona” that are meant to represent the “typical buyer” (there’s no such thing, buy the way) of that product or service look at the buyer from the business’ point of view rather than the buyer’s.
Once we get our heads around the difference that’s needed, we can start to understand how customers want to engage with us, what products they need to do what, and how they want to access them.
Until business leaders realise this, there’ll always be a conflict between their perceptions and those of their customers.
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.
Labels: Customer Care, Leadership, Productivity, Selling, Strategy
Blame Games
It always interests me to see how people react when things go wrong. Do they try and shift accountability to someone else or do they accept that, perhaps, they may also have been at fault?
The phrases I most often hear are “You should have told me that,” or “That should be in your contracts”.
Every interaction involves risk. In some jurisdictions, organisations are expected to be completely “transparent” in terms of the goods or services they offer, the conditions on which they will offer them, pricing and any exceptions that may result in a different outcome.
In others, the old Latin adage “Caveat Emptor” (let the buyer beware) is more applicable. In these cases, the opposite happens: product or service providers volunteer little information and let the customer ask the questions.
In a culture where “fairness” rules, one expects more of the “transparency ethic”. In that most recently described, one must learn fast or be disappointed/lose money until one learns better.
Going back to how I started, when we deal with a new party, we need to:
- Understand exactly what we want.
- Understand what expectations we have concerning service standards from the other side.
- Develop a list of questions designed to elicit from the other party that what we want is achievable.
- Be ready to ask the questions and to continue probing until satisfactory answers are received.
In our business, we’ve seen a few episodes where, in hindsight (that marvellous thing!) we could or should have asked certain questions. In these cases, all we can do is “chalk it up to experience” and learn our lesson for the next time.
What many fail to accept is that, whatever happens, there will always be new situations and new suppliers with whom we deal who may not understand or appreciate the standards we expect. Some larger organisations have developed a complex process to assess any new supplier, usually one that revolves around asking a lot of intrusive questions. Such processes are cumbersome and time-consuming both for new suppliers and for the organisation that then has to go through the answers to ensure that their standards will be met.
Where does this leave us? Honestly, the more experience we gain in dealing with new suppliers, the better. Most of them are looking for profitable and (they hope) long-lasting relationships. A minority are out to grab whatever they can get before moving onto the next “victim”.
As long as one does not become the latter in too many cases, I’d consider that a win.
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.
Labels: Customer Care, Leadership, Productivity, Risk, Strategy
Managing Meetings
There’s an African saying, “if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.”
Meetings, as we’ve often found to our cost, can be value destroyers by taking up too much of our time.
Since COVID ended, more meetings may be held “virtually” with attendees from all parts of the world joining in from different time zones. This means that collaboration gets more difficult as not only are people more spread out than they used to be in the past, they’re also “cognitively disconnected”, meaning they don’t necessarily “think the same way” and see others as "faces on a screen".
Not only do we have team meetings, we also have one-to-one meetings with our managers (and our direct reports) to discuss our individual objectives and status of current projects that we’re working on.
I read recently that office workers can spend up to almost 15 hours a week in meetings (reclaim.AI). That’s almost 2 full working days out of five.
The modern office worker is increasingly asked to work on different projects with different people. This results in them feeling that they’re constantly being pulled in too many different directions. It's also mentally taxing. Science has proven that the human brain isn't really designed to multitask in the way that many organisations require.
The result? People maintain a semblance of productivity by focusing on small quick tasks that don’t require too much concentration (e.g. dealing with emails, answering the phone, updating lists). This is what we call “busy work” but what it does is prevent our teams from focusing on their more challenging tasks – the ones that are strategically important for the organisation.
How can we as leaders make sure that meetings are well spent? The first priority is define the objectives of meetings to make sure our people don’t feel they’re wasting their time.
Ensuring the efficient spread of internal knowledge and information is also vital. Rumours are one thing; facts are another. In a modern world it’s even more difficult to find the information we may need to be effective (there’s just so much!).
Finally, we need to look at how much we’re putting on peoples’ shoulders. There are “humans” in “Human Resources”, not just “resources” …
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.
Labels: Leadership, Productivity, Teamwork
What Causes Substandard Behaviour?
I recently commented on a four-step procedure to address poor behaviour by workers in a team.
Apart from someone “trying it on” we, as leaders, need to be aware that there could be other genuine issues causing the behaviour.
As Ashleigh Warner said, “Behind every behaviour is an emotion and behind every emotion is a need. If we address the need, we can address the behaviour.”
In other words, if we were to take the common example I used in my article about someone being persistently late, is there a reason? For example, are they a single parent who has to get their child or children to school or care? Do they have to tend to a poorly relative before they can safely leave home?
We have to bear in mind as leaders that all our people are different with different needs and with different motivations. One quality of a good leader is that they care as much about their workers well-being as their work.
Before launching into dire warnings of disciplinary procedures to follow, it’s worth taking the time to find out whether that worker’s experiencing personal problems that, perhaps, they are ashamed to talk about. They may have confided in a colleague (have they got a “close pal” in the team?)?
If we as leaders are doing our jobss correctly, our people should be confident enough to share their personal ambitions, problems and fears with us. The key is trust.
What can we do to earn our people’s trust?
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.
Labels: Leadership, Productivity, Teamwork
