Blunden’s crucible

Service with a smile

British people, in general, don’t like to make complaints in restaurants. There are two reasons why. The first is that most Brits were brought up to believe that it is best to disappear in to the background rather than make a fuss. The second is that when taking out their revenge on another they would do it in a way that meant the other may not ever know about it. Therefore, complaining in a restaurant must mean that the chef is exacting some sort of gruesome revenge out of sight in the kitchen and this is a good reason not to complain. It is with this in mind that I came across the launch of a new website last week called “iWantGreatCare.org“. This new website gives patients the opportunity to provide feedback about the care they have received and in particular about the Doctor that cared for them.

Working in the area of customer experience myself I am a firm believer in the need for and value of feedback. Organisations crave it and when properly gathered and analysed is can provide a level of insight that is often otherwise impossible to get. My wife just received an order from Tesco Direct that had no packing material in the box at all so everything had been thrown around and one item was very badly damaged. Not ideal as it was a birthday present. A quick phone call and an email and the complaint was dealt with and although there was no anonymity the complaint was about an organisation and the person responsible will probably never know who it was that complained.

It seems to me that there are so many ways this new service can be abused that it is hard to know where to start. You have to leave your email address to register and although it is claimed you can leave feedback anonymously it was hard to work out how from my review. Also the site is most effective when it reaches critical mass and I am not sure it will ever reach its tipping point when most Doctors have absolutely no feedback. Who will ever be the first? Is the correlation between treatment and complaint going to be obvious and if so what is the outcome?

Surely Patients will never trust that their identity and their complaint will remain separate, unconnected entries. Won’t they be worried about the likelihood of their next Doctor or carer being forewarned that they are a trouble maker and won’t this impact the level of care? Isn’t that just human nature?

Score draw

To score your victim Doctor, you are given three sliding bars that represent ‘trust’, ‘listening’ and whether you would ‘recommend them’. However, by far the biggest challenge is identifying the correct Doctor in the first place.

What I particularly like is the tick box at the bottom where you can opt in to receive “occasional news and updates”. Will this be like Twitter for Doctors? It really feels like the convergence of old and new with the application of these very ‘web’ practices in the old fashioned health service. I wonder if one day ‘Amazon-like’ capability will be added and behavioural data used so that you can expect a message that says “Patients who had surgery for a duodenal ulcer also had surgery for psoriasis of the liver”? That’s great to know!

It will never last...

I was speaking with David Pickering, CEO of Charteris at a breakfast briefing recently when the subject of Jessops came up. We both agreed that we didn’t want Jessops to go out of business as we found their stores a really useful source of advice and information but were equally worried about how they would survive given the financial performance they had been experiencing [when we spoke]. So yesterday when I read that Bloomberg reported Jessops losses had widened my concern increased and I decided to carry out some desk research of my own.

Sales in store have fallen 11% in the past three weeks. That is not that surprising when you consider the prevailing market conditions and gross profit percentage is up. A year ago the company announced that it would close 81 stores, 31 of which were loss making and with these changes in place the company still expects to report improved EBITDA figures on last year. A big problem however is the level of debt they need to service. Borrowings are at £52.26m and although they managed to restructure the debt with HSBC they will have to make a payment against the £49m of senior by spring next year according to FT.com. Even a year ago Jessops was being referred to as a ‘Private Equity Disaster‘ although despite the results Chief Executive David Adams is optimistic about the future.

So they have a lot of big problems and have taken extreme measures to cut costs and do the normal things companies do when they are going slowly down the toilet. But in my view, they are still worth saving. Why? Because they are one of the few high street retailers that are truly specialist. If you visit Jessops and you are interested in photography you will be met by employees who on the whole are passionate about photography and happy to spend time with you helping you. The problem is this doesn’t make you any money when the product has become commoditised and online competition is fierce. And it is this, the multi-channel elements of their retail strategy that in my view they get most wrong.

On Saturday I tried to do my bit to save Jessops. I had 3 digital photos to print: two 10″ x 12″ and one 7″ x 5″. Online, including delivery in 24 hours (which is real as I have used photobox before) the price £4.09. At Jessops each of the large photos was over £4 (the 3 day services £3.49 and 1 hour £6.99). These prices are available on the website as the link in the last sentence indicates.

On the same website I can link to Snapfish, Jessops online photo business and be offerd an 8″ x 10″ print for £1.25. Snapfish is in fact an HP business and the arrangement with Jessops has existed since 2006. Jessops have actually done something quite innovative by connecting the web with stores and providing a ‘reserve and collect’ services. The problem is the pricing and also the lack of specialism. Why would you pay a premium to order one day and pick up in store when it is cheaper to order and have a home delivery where they have no differentiation?

The website is completely “off” brand experience. There is no content beyond products for sale. If you type ‘advice’ in the site search you get a message that “nothing was found matching your search criteria”. The only link with the store are the prices of products or so it would seem. In fact when I navigated to the photos tab and then once in selected ‘photos home’ I was presented with a range of specialist in-store services. The usability of the website surrounding this content is so poor however that I can’t believe many find it. Interestingly there is listed here a further service that I have experience of.

I wanted my wedding video transferred from VHS to DVD. I went to Jessops (another opportunity to save them) and was told by the incredibly helpful and knowledgeable assistant that a store round the corner did it and Jessops didn’t. Thanks I said and took my £40 round the corner. According to the website this is a specialist service provided in store and a further demonstration of multi-channel strategy being poorly implemented.

Nor is the website well marketed and I wonder if this is an indication that where online is concerned, Jessops are not expansive in their thinking about what business they are in. If you search for “photography” in Google.co.uk, Jessops don’t appear on the first page at all. Changing the search phrase to “camera” and they come second in natural search, but have no paid for advertising. It is no coincidence that there is no photography content on the site.

In 2007, when commenting about the cuts Jessops were making David Adams, said: “The strategy allows us to re-position Jessops as a true multi-channel retailer, building on our core strengths in the digital imaging market place.”

It appears to me they have precious little strength in the digital imaging space and are not a multi-channel retailer. For sure they have multiple channels but they may as well be two separate businesses. I want to save Jessops but as a consumer I am struggling to work out what I can do to keep them alive.

The Economist this week (The Economist July 12th 2008 ) reported that driving behaviour had changed as a result of higher fuel prices. Garages report that there has been a 5-10% drop in in fuel sales and this is as a result of fuel prices rising at their highest rate ever in June. The Economist also reports on data from Footfall, a research firm that tracks customer numbers, that indicates visits to out of town shops have fallen and at a higher rate than the drop in visits to town centres.The suggestion is that consumer behaviour is altering as a result of fuel price inflation.

At the same time Internet Retailing, an online retail website, reported increased sales to online grocery websites. Value retailers have experienced growth of between 30 to 40% in the four weeks to June 7th and visitor numbers for both Morrisons and Asda were up by more than 48% for the 3 months March to May 2008.

Meanwhile on June 30th 2008, ASOS, the UK’s largest online retail store attracting over 1 million visitors per week, were reported by Retail Exec, an online publication aimed at Retail Executives, to have achieved a 90% increase in revenues to £81 million and post pre-tax profits of £7.3 million up £3.4 million on last year.

I was asked to contribute to a book recently called “winners and losers in a troubled economy” and to offer my views on whether ‘online’ would be effected by an economic downturn. The answer to me is clear: Not if executives take on board the data available to them about changing consumer behaviour and the benefits the online channel offers. Having done so, they need to determine to make their online property best of breed.

Not everyone will do this of course and it is easy to predict that in 18 months time when the down turn is becoming a recovery there will be a number of high profile casualties that did not make the right investment decisions and were not able to maximise the opportunity that a down turn presented to their business.

We have all learned over the past decade or so, sometimes painfully, that the Internet is not the answer to all of our problems. However, where the case is dropping high street sales due to altering consumer behaviour as a direct result of high fuel prices there does seem to be a strong positive correlation and maybe this time, it is.

An article this week in HBS revealed that Starbuck’s is to close some 600 US stores. HBS put it down to 3 reasons: disenfranchise early adopters,  too many products and superficial growth from too many stores and products, which in many ways boils down to this: “they delivered a lousy customer experience”. More importantly they made the mistake that Facebook are making - they forgot who really owned the brand.

Starbuck’s thought they owned the brand and in pursuit of earnings to satisfy the markets they grew like crazy and changed the brand and therefore user experience. Soon getting a coffee in Starbuck’s was no longer about the laugh and joke with the Barista, the remembered regular order and the great coffee sipped at a well positioned table from a comfy chair. Rapid service and more choice than you can remember took precedence in the pursuit of growth.

When will brands realise that sometimes you have to sacrifice growth for sustainability? For sure the market puts enormous pressure on businesses but this is a chicken and egg scenario and greed wins out. It is certainly difficult (I imagine) to become a gozillionnaire by pitching up to a VC and saying “we won’t grow that fast but we will be profitable and our customers will love us”. But it would be nice to think that somewhere out there another Amazon exists.

The Daily Telegraph (a UK broad sheet newspaper) recorded a story on 16th June 2008 about a High Court ruling that requires an ex-employee of Hays to hand over his business contacts built up on the social networking website LinkedIn. The story has been picked up in various places including Brand Republic and Computer Weekly but none raise the obvious more expansive question of what does this mean to the rest of us? Computer Weekly does make reference to a legal specialist that advises employers to add clauses to employment contracts and to ask employees to set up business only networks but I think this misses the point.

Social networks are just that - social. The dictionary definition of ’social’ is “living or preferring to live in a community rather than alone.” The networks don’t have boundaries and certainly don’t separate colleagues from friends. In many ways, if they did it would defeat the object. But for many, the level of transparency is unnerving.

I had lunch with a customer recently who talked about her younger sister connecting with her on Facebook. I have a similar scenario where I am connected to my niece and nephew. They have very different interests and circles of friends to me being as they are about 25 years younger but what is my alternative - deny their existence or compartmentalise them?

Only five days earlier (11th June) the Times Online ran a feature that advised people to keep their social and business networks separate. This is an interesting idea and there were various suggestions made by different people - all in recruitment (or Talent Management if there is a difference). One suggested he uses a nickname on Facebook that only his friends know, and uses LinkedIn for business contacts only. I don’t see how this can work. There has to be crossovers and what happens when a family member or close friend is also in business or vice versa? The article finally ends up with a suggestion that soon software will simply track you down by making connections between you, friends and colleagues and bingo - your profiles are connected for all to see.

What this really means is we have to get ready for a time when virtually everything we put up online will be attributable to us. Potential employers will be able to see our connections with dodgy friends and family members and start judging us across a wider set of values. Is this good or bad? I am certain, their will be losers as there always are but I think this is akin to businesses getting used to corporate blogs - which many have yet to do.

There are countless examples of businesses gaining stronger brands as a result of honest information about them going up on blogs. They are measured by how they respond to negative comments about poor performance and people realise that no business is perfect and actually, if you can see them warts and all you tend to trust them more. The same will surely happen to individuals and I think it will be refreshing.

I predict that the transition will be ugly, but when we get there we may see a levelling of the playing field on a scale never seen before.

One week and two conferences on the future of stuff. The first on Wednesday run by eConsultancy and opened with the normally upbeat and insightful Ashley Friedlein with words along the lines of “when I thought about the future of digital and this years conference I realised there wasn’t much to talk about, we haven’t moved on that much and this year is more about execution”. Clearly by this point the audience was beside themselves with excitement and thankful that we had paid the full fee to be there. But as it happened, unusually Ashley was wrong. There was lots going on and whilst an awful lot was about execution the main thrust was about organisations doing things others had not already done.

Thomas Cook in particular, whose presenter Russell Gould delivered his presentation by video due to the imminent birth of his second child, demonstrated just what was possible if you have big ideas and in particular a big budget. Travel of the future is truly a multi-channel world with interactive store fronts, video catalogues and, thank the lord, no more welcome meetings - well video welcome meetings but presumably they come with a fast forward facility.

The panel that followed however seemed to miss the point entirely about the competitive threat the Web2.0 future presents. Prior to this session on travel we had heard, at length (the panel barely had time to go up on stage) about the pressures on the increasingly commoditised insurance business. The pressure is coming from aggregators who add value by offering the consumer choice. The products which are ultimately commodities are price differentiated and it is only the total confusion that consumers have that keeps them loyal. (That isn’t true I just made it up). It may as well be though with the amount of inventive thought flying around the room.

We were told that insurance policies are priced for a 3 to 4 year lifetime value and at the same time that consumers are bored with organising insurance and treat it as an annual chore which they detest. This makes it open season for aggregators as they can at least price check. It surely won’t be long before we sign up with an aggregator for 5 years and they simply provide an annual report of their market sweep and tell us which provider we will be insured with next year? This must be an opportunity for insurance providers also if they can convince their underwriters.

Surely the travel industry is going to suffer from the same problem, as technological differentiation dissapears faster than our holiday money on fuel supplements? All the travel companies tried to make out they differentiate because they sell “an experience”. What they sell is convenience - from a consumer perspective they simply will not care if an aggregator provides that convenience rather than the agent. The game was somewhat given away when one travel agent admitted they sell anothers product because “they can make money out of it”.

As Seth Godin reminds us in his blog this week “there is no such thing as price pressure”. The price you charge is based on the value you offer - as perceived by the user/customer.

I attended EDM08 on Monday which was coincidentally the 8th year the conference had run. It is a fairly small affair with perhaps 100 people (max) but they travelled far and wide to be there and on my table were people from the US, Nordic area and mainland Europe.

EDM stands for European Directories Marketplace and the event is run by Whitaker Associates. It is fair to say I had no idea about how the connection with directories worked before attending but it is of course to do with the delivery of information services and hence this years theme: mobile.

The keynote was delivered by Dr Mike Short Director of R&D at O2 and a man’s whose credentials in mobile are extensive. He is Chairman of the mobile data association (the mda) amongst other things but has spent 20 years in the mobile/telecoms industry. He shared plenty of stats and insight to research that O2 will publish in July both of which I have summarised here in a few bullet points:

• there were 2.95bn mobile subscribers at June07
• 3.3bn are forecast by end 2008 (source: The mobile world)
• There is 115% mobile penetration in the UK which equates to 69 million handsets
• There were 57 billion sms sent in the UK in 2007
• 449m picture messages were sent in the UK in 2007
• 17m accessed the mobile internet in 2007

From O2’s research:

• Most people would rather leave home without their wallet than their mobile
• Research that trialled combining mobile with Oyster and Credit card (separately and together) using near field communication technology (NFC) resulted in a greater degree of success when sim and oyster were combined than sim and credit card. It will be interesting to see what conclusions O2 draws from this as it seems to me that it is a moot point. Ultimately won’t they all be combined anyway?

Finally Mike described the phases of mobile, starting at phase one with voice and text, up to present day phase six which is the ‘Content’ phase. Mike believes that phase 7 is the ‘application’ phase.

Following the keynote there were a range of presentations and discussions and I am not going to blog them all. There were some really interesting debates and opinions that I would like to record.

There was some debate around the importance of mobile compared to pc and James Levey of Amdocs suggested that click through rates online were currently at about 2% on average but that he predicts mobile will achieve 4% click through rates in the near future. In terms of search, mobile search currently represents 2-4% of desktop search globally, where China is an exception with mobile search representing 25%. Google predict that the cross over point where mobile search overtakes desktop will be within 4 years and that not long after mobile search will double desktop search.

To put some more context on this it is worth mentioning stats presented by Russell Buckley of Admob. Admob started business in 2006 and are already the worlds largest mobile ad marketplace. Russell talked briefly about global page views on mobile and which countries had the largest global share. Currently he estimates that there are 3bn page views per month on mobile [correction: which Admob see on their network and on which they serve ads on today]. The largest contributors to that number are:

• US = 50%
• India and UK = 10% each (total 20%)
• South Africa = 5%
• Indonesia = 5%

Interestingly all the above are in English language!

Other presentations delivered nuggets such as ‘in 10 years you will be able to access the knowledge of humankind from a mobile’ and the fastest growing age of penetration of mobile phones in the UK is 7 to 8 year old’s. All exciting stuff. But then I was blown away by Simon Grice of www.Ideas.org.

Simon rattled off more concepts and ideas in 10 minutes than I have in a decade. The few I caught hold of were “Information is the new pollution”. IN a conference focussing on information services and directories he argued that in the future this will be too much and humans won’t be able to deal with the flow of info. Search will become useless because the range of results will be too difficult to filter. Simon suggests that when people get bogged down with information they ask people they know for advice and in this way sites like Twitter and facebook become the information services networks of the future.

Simon also talked about discovery as opposed to search. Search is fine if you know what you are looking for but what if you don’t? For example your local pub is holding an Italian night. If you don’t search for that you may not find out so you need to be told or have a way to discover it that is not necessarily advertising. Location based services have a role to play but it is not clear what role at this stage.

These ideas are worth exploring further, which is what I intend to do.

I read this week that SpeechUsability have been acquired (well had all their assets acquired) by PSS. Although Foviance (the company I work for) have carried out a variety of ‘usability’ work on IVR systems I wasn’t aware that their were any specialist companies. It seems to me that Speechusability is really just one person Dr. Susan Hura an “industry luminary”, according to Todd Funk, President and CEO of PSS (you can’t make this stuff up!).

Speechusability employ user centered design (UCD) principles to create better IVR experiences and Dr Hara has a strong background in the area. Here is her bio from the press release about the acquisition:

“Susan L. Hura, PhD is the founder of SpeechUsability, a consultancy focused on improving the user experience by incorporating user-centered design practices in speech technology projects. Susan started and managed the usability program at Intervoice as their Head of User Experience, and prior to that was a member of the human factors team at Lucent Technologies. She held a faculty position at Purdue University in the Department of Audiology and Speech Sciences where she cofounded a multidisciplinary research team dedicated to studying novel approaches to computer speech recognition. Susan holds a doctorate in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a frequent invited presenter at speech technology and usability conferences, and serves on the Board of Directors of AVIOS (the Applied Voice Input Output Society). Susan is also co-chair of the 2008 SpeechTek conference.”

PSS seems to be going from strength to strength and is one of the fastest growing firms in the US and is listed in Entrepreneur magazines top 100. At 48 people and $6.6m revenues after 5 years it is not a stellar grower but is in a good space. Certainly worth watching, particular if they genuinely take usability of IVR seriously, which it would seem they do.

I had the pleasure of putting the customer experience world to rights yesterday morning over a bacon roll with Steve Hurst, Editorial Director of Customer Strategy, a CMP publication. Steve has been with Customer Strategy (previously Customer Management) as long as I have been with Foviance (over 7 years) and has seen the same developments in the industry that I have observed. As a result we had a wide ranging conversation which frequently resulted in the conclusion that “customer experience only gets better if the CEO wants it to”. It seems in quite a few organisations, they simply don’t!

I recommend checking out Steve’s Blog Industry Insider as it covers ground beyond customer experience. We both agreed that actually customers are pretty much at the centre of everything organisations do - or at least they should be.

One area I was particularly interested in is an interview Steve has lined up for next week with Premier Hotels. One of the aspects he hopes to discuss is the expansion in India and I hope to hear whether they intend to include mobile booking engine as part of their expansion plans. Given the ’single screen economy’ nature of India this would seem sensible although I haven’t yet seen figures about mobile internet penetration. A ‘to do’ for me. I did read this week about the drive to produce a lower cost mobile (sub $30) and the work Motorola were doing here but I am fairly certain these devices don’t contain web access. The target market for the hotels is the growing middle class in India and these I assume will have mobile access to the web, and presumably desktop access also. Like I say, more research required.

I just cancelled my motorbike insurance having sold my RT1150. I was insured with Bennet’s who have been pretty good and handled my claim really well when someone pulled out in front of me and wrecked my previous bike (now being slowly (very) rebuilt in my garage). The experience I just had though made me wonder. It wasn’t bad, it was simply frustrating that their systems worked as they did.

I called up and cancelled the policy and on the phone the very nice lady told me I might receive a few reminders but not too worry about these as my policy was cancelled. So I wasn’t surprised when the first reminder arrived although the wording really annoyed me. It said words to the effect that “as I hadn’t been in contact my policy was not being renewed”. So it was my fault then. I hadn’t been in contact so tough on me.

Despite the warning from the “very nice lady” from Bennett’s I called again to make sure the contact I had made had been registered. You might ask “why bother” which is fair enough. The policy had been cancelled and I had nothing to gain - the danger of automatic renewal didn’t exist. I called because I didn’t want to be remembered as someone who didn’t bother to get in touch. Stupid really, and I’m ‘in the business’.

I then got to thinking about how hard it must be for organisations like Bennett’s to connect their systems together. Presumably they don’t want to send out multiple and pointless letters that cost in processor time, postage and paper, and presumably they also don’t want to appear to be disconnected with their customers. Obviously it must be very hard then right? Well no I have been around technology long enough to know that it isn’t that hard and that even if they can’t afford it manual intervention would do the job perfectly adequately. It must therefore come down to some other reason - perhaps money?

Would it make me avoid selecting Bennett’s again? no probably not, they performed well enough and I have to believe that one day they will fix this system / process error. But how long will I be prepared to believe this before I decide that actually they really don’t care. I am not sure when that point will come, if ever, but what I am sure of is that Bennett’s have less idea than me.