Something I’ve always been critical of is the overly simplistic, lazy and fasle measure that is Customer Satisfaction.

Asking customers how satisfied they are on an 11, 7, 5 whatever point scale is a question they just don’t ever consider.

I’m not even sure about NPS anymore either. The mythical BBQ conversation (somehow an Australian-specific market research analogy) of ‘which bank would you talk to people at BBQs about” is stupid – no one speaks about banks at BBQs, people. They talk about their life, their kids, their jobs, their holidays, not banks, insurance companies, utilities. They might talk about experiences, but not the brands or banks themselves. I don’t think so, anyway – its not something we can keep bringing up in meetings anymore.

Let’s rephrase it simple customer centric terms:

• How happy are you with the service you receive from the bank?
• Or perhaps more importantly, are you not unhappy?
• Did the experience you had meet your expectations? Why or why not?
• Did you get done what you needed to get done? Do you need to go in again??
• Are you better off financially being with this bank? Are you making more interest on your savings or saving on your loans and fees?
• Did the bank make you want to do more business with them?

Ask customers to help you create measures around Customer Success not Customer Satisfaction:

• TASK COMPLETION – Did the customer complete the task they started?
• CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS - Did the customer experience meet expectations?
• WEALTH CREATION - Is the customer creating better financial outcomes for themselves?
• REPEAT BUSINESS – Is this new business or repeat business?

Don’t get caught up in the miniscule percentages, the 0.3% movement in your customer sat. That’s not real, accurate or something you can lean on as real change.

Concentrate on the real customer outcomes – they got done what they needed to, had an ok time doing it, it benefitted them financially either in the short or long term, and if all goes well, they might come back and give you more business.

Let’s face it, in this current environment, you’ll be grateful for that right?

Some of you may not know that I have a dirty secret. Some of you may know that I’ve decided to join, for a short fleeting moment, a group of people that others find … odd, or perhaps obsessed. I’ve decided, for one bleary eyed Sunday morning, to do a triathlon.

I know what you’re thinking. Lycra, sunglasses, cut to the hilt, chugging Gatorade, doing 100km practice runs, swimming across oceans and riding in volcano fields.

Well, you’d be wrong.

I’m doing the smallest triathlon you can do, so small that I actually wonder if I can wade out to the buoys rather than swim (I really hope so), so small that I fear it’s actually the category 8 year old kids do. You’ll see me crossing the line, then collapsing. Like a winner should.

Still, it’s a target.

And in the spirit of ‘training’ I’ve started using the Nike + app and online training tool. There are many more, possibly better training tools out there, but for me, this will do fine. Fancy graphics and a female voiceover motivates enough, as did the fun of buying new trainers for the little GPS thingy.

Using the system made me think about some of the customer experience lessons this little system taught me – I needed the distraction. Here are the 6 things I can come up with.

Its not about Nike or Apple
No doubt its branded NIKE, and incorporates your ipod or iphone, and that’s part of the reason why you buy it (perhaps the whole reason). But once you use it, it could be made by anyone (who can design a good UI that is) because all of a sudden its you who is driving every aspect – settings, content, data. The tool is merely an empty vessel that you fill with your data. It just works, pretty much out of the pack Adding a GPS transponder in your shoe is simple. Downloading and setting up the app is no worse than the better apps out there. And somehow, I was expecting some sort of link or calibration between the GPS unit and the iPhone, but no. You start a workout on the app, get running, and its captured. Whilst this is a fairly simple function compared to getting a new credit card or internet banking app to work, sometimes we need to keep it this simple.

It connects you to people like you
Yep the standard ‘social’ bit goes in here. But this isn’t the normal application of social that we’re used to. Many social ideas and models rely on the number of participants to correlate with the success of the model – Facebook a good example. But with Nike +, you can have 0 friends, 1 friend or 1000. It doesn’t exactly matter, as long as you go running. Motivation and competition are obvious benefits here. And you can find people who run like you do, as fast as you, near you, or even like the same music.

You set the perameters of success
Everyone has a different idea of what success looks like, what their goals are. So setting your objectives is easy (simple goals like number of kms, time running, etc) and of course can change over time, rather than being locked in. This means your program can respond to how lazy or motivated you are, or towards a specific goal (like a sodding triathlon)

It gets better the more you use it…
The more data you contribute, the more the system might learn about you. Understanding your best or worst times, where you run the best, what time of day, what conditions, what music you’re listening to, what music makes you run faster, all these things can help you create a better ‘athlete’ (use that term loosely folks)

And then Nike creates CRM gold!
Of course NIKE is currently harvesting all that data, and no doubt flogging to the record companies, back to Apple, who sell it back to NIKE and via the iTunes store. Something like that anyway. Again, Apple is creating an ecosystem that connects data, handphones, music, nike apparel, and the lifestyle around all of it.

In the end, it creates good, positive customer behavior
Any piece of gadgetry that captures my data, possibly for unscrupulous reasons (“if it’s free, you’re the product not the customer” someone once said), but gets me out running and getting fitter is fine for me. Means to an end and all that.

“He took the iGoogle idea a bit too literally”

Photo – Incase, Flickr

Think about your favorite coffee shop and the reasons you like it – its probably small, local, comfortable and welcoming.

When you’re there, you enjoy not just the product, or the interaction you have with the staff, but perhaps the time to sit and think, reflect, chat. Its an emotional experience because it taps directly into some of the warmer cockles of our hearts, and cosier parts of our subconscious.

It’s your time, how you like it, in a place that might as well be your other living room.

And then Starbucks came along, and you hated them.

You hated them because they tried to template and franchise that whole notion of the cosy coffee corner, only it was the same as every Starbucks. It had cosy chairs, hand drawn menus, pleasant music, and a buzz where people were coming together.

How dare they pretend to be my local coffee shop.

The retail experience, on a very localised and personalised level, is hard to get right. Starbucks has probably done the hardest work at creating a local or community feel, but have created a footprint that perhaps threatens that ‘artfiical intimacy’ a little.

What’s the opposite – a format that is extremely predictable, formulated and templated.

McDonalds & Apple are probably 2 good examples. This works for them, because this is what customers all over the world expect when they open the door. They expect to see the same surfaces, images, products, etc.

This is why the internet will win.

It’s the perfect machine that scales and offer personalisation at the same time, in (virtual) ways that can’t be matched.

A bank can have millions of customers, but everyone could have an individual, powerful and meaningful experience.

How can we get the balance of personalised enough for customers to feel understood and appreciated, but scalable enough for it to be able to grow to large numbers?

What industries prefer personalised over scale? And vice versa? Let me know.

Why can’t banks communicate this way?

Video is an easy, quick, cheap way to effectively communicate complex products. If the Khan Academy can do it in 1000′s of videos across dozens of freaky complex issues, why can’t banks?

We can’t because creating simplicity, clarity and understanding may just be too hard to take.

P.S. Favourite quote from this video – “It (the bank buidling) looks like an old greek or roman temple … I think that’s not an accidental appearance”

Photo – Incase, Flickr

If you work in the microcosm of a bank, or the slightly larger ecosystem of the financial services industry, you are a unique and special individual.

I don’t mean in the ‘you can do anything if you put your mind to it, son’ kind of way (although you should believe that if you can). I mean that we work and breathe inside a unique cultural and mechanical context.

We know banking, we know financial services, we build products.

We speak the language. And this can sometimes be the problem.

I had an interesting meeting today about small business customers using business internet banking tools, and how one size does not fit all.

A small business person can be the individual who runs the business after hours, by themselves, from say 10pm to midnight. They’re not an accountant, they’re not business qualified. But they know their subject matter, and how to sell to people who want it.

Another small business person could work deep inside a successful family run business, managing accounts, invoices, receivables etc. They’ve been hired because they do have accounting and business skills. They get it.

A single approach to these customers will not work. Their needs are different, their experience and capabilities are different.

Importantly, they speak different languages. To each other and to us.

Language is critical. The way we in banks talk about money is in the context of banking – products and services, jargon etc. A bank rationalizes a customers behavior by putting it in banking terms – ‘attrition’; ‘acquisition’;’ cross-sell’. Often bankers are trying to find ways to make the customer more intertwined, even permanently attached to the organisation, even if its not in the customers best interest (banks call these ‘relationships’)

The way consumers and even many small business owners talk about money is in the context of life – pay for this, buy that, earn this, save that. A customer rationalizes their banking behavior by putting it in life terms – ‘I changed banks because of the service’; ‘I got this great new reward points credit card’; ‘the bank gave me a discount to buy a new car’. Often customers are trying to find ways to simplify their banking setup, at the same diversify their spread across the banks (custoemrs call this ‘keeping the bastards honest’ and ‘not putting eggs in one basket’)

These 2 positions are often at conflict.

People in banks wonder why consumers, commentators, innovators and even other bankers aren’t interested in the future of banking.

They should be analysing the future role of money in our lives instead.

Photo – Incase, Flickr

What does it take to be really customer focused as a large organisation? How do you ensure that your business is listening to customers, driving your people to think about customers, and create great customer experiences?

Focus on the following 3 core competencies:

1. Create powerful, aligned customer insight – a strong voice of the customer program sounds obvious, but ensuring your measuring the things that matter, that make a difference, and that create internal impact, both culturally and financially, is hard work. Get some great capability in your customer insight team, combining the market research, customer interview and insight, and analytics capabilities.
2. Drive the customer focus internally– through a range of initiatives, align the organisation to a central customer experience vision (aligned to the company’s purpose, values and brand) through co-ordinated internal communication, people policies such as hiring, incentives, equipping, and developing (learning and development; people management)
3. Design products and services using a user-centred design methodology– it might not seem natural to for a bank to employ a bunch of designers, but having 4-5 people in house to work on big and small projects makes a huge impact, creating powerful before-and-after stories that drive change. Plus, the experiences are just better – they look better, they run better, they’re more effective, they succeed quicker and make customers happier. Who doesn’t want that?

These 3 things are the most common things great customer focused companies have in common – and they do it explicitly and wholly. If you can say your CX team or bank has these capabilities in spades, you’ll be ahead in no time.

With this new found customer power comes a changing attitude in customers too (like me!). A sense of entitlement to the best deal, the best service, first service or preferential treatment when none is warranted is commonplace. Social media sites like twitter, where customers are and too often companies aren’t, means customers talk to each other and increasingly believe their own gripes and whines. I’m guilty here again. So don’t write in on that one!

But customers must learn that a transaction, purchase, or service rendered is still 2 human beings (or 1 human and one website!) exchanging conversation and information.

A customer in the coffee shop this morning gave a classic example of todays petulant consumer, all with a wry passive aggressive smile. He walked in and simply asked for ‘service please’, then proceeded to tap on the glass at various items, asking for a discount at the same time. This continued for a while, with the shop staff and other customers all looking at each other, knowing we’d all give him a slap if we had the chance.

Companies deserve to be kept honest, and deliver efficiently and effectively. But customers must keep them honest whilst being patient and respectful.

Let’s be nice to each other shall we?

Normally when we talk about the best hotels we talk about Ritz Carlton or Four Seasons. But of course its not just these guys that get it so right. Other resorts like Intercontinental, now part of probably the largest hotel group on the planet, have also proven that you can have both high quality indivual customer experiences and massive corporate scale at the same time. It must be a costly, complicated and unpredictable business to run but as a customer it was pretty ideal. Perhaps I’m easy to please.

Back to these important lessons.

Some quick caveats to ensure these aren’t based on some rose coloured glasses.

• Caveat 1 – anytihng next to a beach as nice as Jimbaran Bay looks good.
• Caveat 2 – anything ‘exotic’ like a foreign country, culture, food etc can hide some of the ugly stuff
• Caveat 3 – I’m on holiday, so am more forgiving. Possibly.
• Caveat 4 – I’m a bit of a cheap date when it comes to resorts – pretty much anything with the sun shining and drinks flowing will impress me.

Lesson 1 – First Impressions Count
Lets set the scene then. We arrive at the airport, to be picked up by friendly staff, driven to the hotel after being given cool towels and drinks, arrive to a gonged entrance, and welcomed by a dozen smiling friendly faces, then led  to an incredible room and balcony to see this –

Nuff said. At that point, I could have been in a tent on the lawn and I’d have still been happy. This resort has the luxury of location but I was really into the Bali ‘aesthetic’ which the resort managed to replicate in generous yet tasteful detail.

Lesson 2 – Ensure the details are perfect
In this pristine space, anything not pristine stands out more than in any other space. As a customer, you’re paying for all the details, for everything to be considered, to be cared for. Everything here was crafted, manicured, or otherwise hidden, screened, underground, somewhere else. When you’re here to relax, you don’t want to see the back of a restaurant kitchen, or a series of air conditioner boxes, or corporate offices. Given the size and breadth of this resort, given I saw none of the above, I’m not sure where all that stuff was. Presume the Resort Managers backyard is one giant, humming plant of machinery, dirty towels and dumpsters. Where else could they be??

Lesson 3 – Great people STILL make the difference
I’m sure the majority of tourists who’ve been to Bali will agree the people there have an amazingly warm approach to service that’s unending in its generosity. They’re proud of their country as they should be, as well as their role in making you enjoy your time there. I encountered one surly taxi driver across a week of dozens of itneractons with the local staff. Giving your people pride, a sense of purpose and some ownership makes them happy, which makes customers happy.

Lesson 4 – Mission & vision statements generally suck
Heres the mission statements for a few faceless corporations that are caught up in their own BS –

• “Enabling success from the center of technology” (Still too complex)
• “BLANK employees recognize the value of health and wellness, and strive towards optimal health by making healthy choices every day to better serve the community.” (Settle down tiger …)
• “… dedicated to provide products and services of such quality that our customers will receive superior value while our employees and business partners will share in our success and our stock-holders will receive a sustained superior return on their investment.” (Jesus Christ…)
• “To satisfy our customers’ desires for personal entertainment and information through total customer satisfaction” (Wha??)

then you see the simple vision the hotel has –

‘Our guests want to return’.

That’s it. Simple.

Everything they do aims to endear their resort to the hearts and minds of the guests, to make them welcome even loved, and want to come back to replicate the memories and experiences they’ve had. I must say its hard for me to consider another place, but I’m sure there are dozens like it in Bali. How simple, human and sharp is your vision statement? Or is it full of corporate crap about return to shareholders, leveraging one thing, enhancing something or maximising another? Stop talking funny.

Lesson 5 – Pool bar beer costs a lot wherever you are the world over.
But you still order it right? And its one of the best beers you’ll have, looking over the amazing pool towards a setting sun, and a sea that melts into the sky.

Blissful.

So, despite the above sounding like an ad for Intercontinental Bali, I’m sure other resorts and hotel experiences do the same, and can still run a vast global corporation based on these incredibly personal and detailed offerings.

Can your bank match this? Why not?

And most importantly…

When will the poolbar be installed in your branch??

I’ve recently had an interesting industry lunch hosted by FST and HP, and was prompted and poked by Mel, an HPer to get blogging. So Mel, thanks for the prompt. Here goes.

One of her colleagues was telling me how he’s noticed a range in maturity across various banks in Asia at their current appetite and capability when it comes to adopting new technology, business models, customer experiences.

We discussed at length, and I appreciated the HP expertise on this.

There are a couple of conclusions here for me based on this idea of varying maturity.

The definition of terms

Let’s first look at what the opposite of varying maturity looks like. If all participants in an industry are equally mature, they can be all poor, all average or all good (or god forbid even all great!). If all participants display a variety in quality and excellence, then they have varying maturity.

A highly equal maturity industry is one where all participants are equally capable. A low equal maturity model is where there is great variance in the offerings or capabilities of the participants in one industry.

A high performance industry is one where all participants perform at a high level most of the time. A low performance industry is one where all the participants perform at varying or low levels of quality.

Whats a high maturity and high performance industry look like?

There are certain industries that have a generally high performance rate amongst the participants – these industries that demand high performance often come with strong demand in quantity and quality from their customers. The consumer technology market may be one, where the volume and incermental innovation and improvement is at such a rate, that the benchmark is being set by the next guy within days or weeks, not years or decades.

Whats a low maturity and low performance industry look like?

There are certain industries that do not have the raging demand from customers, or need to truly innovate, and can surive amongst their peers by offering an average experience, or even varying wildly from the norm. This leads to varying performance, and sometimes low performance at least in customer experience delivery. But strangely, this often comes with no less performance on the P&L statement. Only in banking, where fees and margins are the main revenue source, can customer experience be so low on the list of creating value.

Of course we know this is fast becoming a thing of the past.

One of the really powerful things about the potentially fatal commodisation of an industry is that it drives crazy areas of differentiation. And in banking we cant differentiate through a cool new feature like a digital camera can (when was the last really interesting product that came from a bank?), or through a new interesting branch layout – this only affects a few people.

Banks need wholesale high maturity and high performance in all parts of their customer service and experience value chains – in non-jargon jibberish, we need to be obsessed with how the customer has to deal with us, and always look to deliver the best, seamless and appropriate experience we can.

Choice – always not enough, or simply too much. Wherever you look there are thousands of books to choose from, dozens of configurations in the PC you buy, so many different products lining the supermarket shelves that you either can’t find anything, or get so particular in your ‘settings’ that life becomes about the detail.

I do feel however, that this situation is of course more about companies creating opportunities for themselves rather than customers demanding it. Who in their right mind needs some of the things we can purchase today – the snuggie, wedgie-proof underwear, juice with Fish Oil (… just eat fish!) – they’re all out there. And yet, what is it that makes you really happy? A simple meal with real food, a good book about a human story, seeing something as old and real as the Pyramids. When we’re buying we’re in a retail environment and hence we’re being swindled.

Its not new and yet we fall for it. (Living in Singapore now, I’ve been exposed to the national sport of shopping, so my retail senses are heightened).

This leads me to the idea of bundling. The video above from the film L.A. Story shows even in the faddish 90s how ordering coffee become a degree-qualified act. Being in Starbucks recently I found myself very slowly running through 6 words in a deliberate, clear voice to ensure I understood what I was ordering let alone the overly chirpy staff member could simply shout it again towards the coffee machine crew (no ticketing system to make sure? mental).

I the next day went to another similar chain, where there were some very friendly (and calm) people. I got a smile, a coffee, a bagel and the (most excellent) Financial Times newspaper for about $6.50. A bargain.

Even better, I got the same thing again the next morning, as my loyalty behaviour kicked in.

But then, the day after that, I went to the smaller, more unique shop next door.

A handcrafted design and style, with a some more ‘alternative’ staff and ambience, and I got a simple coffee. For $4.

Which I liked. More than any other here in Singapore.

So much so that the bundle became insignificant. The core product worked and I liked it. It didnt matter what puffery and magic it came with – the coffee was good.

Their core product was good, and if I wanted more, I could have asked for it. But I didn’t need it.

My needs, as they say in the biz, were met. Not necessarily exceeded, but thats fine. It was just a coffee.

And it wasn’t a decaf half-caf with a twist of lemon.