Following on from yesterday’s insight from Andy Hornby, we promised you a first look today at some exciting developments. So here goes. Well firstly, there are four big ideas. No, make that four and a half.
1 – Cut the distance between our customers and us.
2 – Ambassadorise everyone
3 – Ban incentives
4 – Go public!
4.5 – Personal Service
Cut the distance between our customers and us.
By the time customer feedback makes it from the front line to the policy makers, it has passed through so many filters that it bears little resemblance to its original self. We then go ahead and make policy decisions based on this distorted view. Devolve the decision making close to the edge of the organisation. Speed up.
Ambassadorise everyone
You know when you are down the pub and someone asks “who do you work for?” I think I’ll keep that to myself in case the next question is “well my phone line/broadband/mobile etc etc ain’t working, who do I call?” Use knowledge management to enable me to find the answer and get back to my drinking buddy and solve his problem with him. If 100,000 BT people did that for 5 of their friends….that’s a lot of great customer experiences!
Ban incentives
Are we actually paying people to do dumb things? Everyone comes to work wanting to do a good job and intrinsically they know what’s right. Then we go and spoil it all by offering financial incentives which drive the wrong behaviour. How can that be good for us and our customers?
Go public!
Use the power of social media to share stuff with, and learn stuff from, our customers! Get blogging, facebooking, myspaceing, whatever. Set up a problem blog on BT.com, be open and encourage customers and BT people to answer the questions. The blog you are reading right now came about as a direct response to this idea. We’ve seen evidence of Twitter being used as a means of improving the customer experience too.
Personal Service
Something else that came up repeatedly was the power of the single point of contact. Most of our positive experiences involved the personal touch. So why not replicate that in BT. When you have a customer contact you, it is your responsibility to deal with it, own it and fix it, on behalf of your customer. Personal service from BT – how powerful.
We had great fun coming up with these ideas and we’re working on bringing them to life.
Can we make them work…what do you think?
