Gov2.0 is a buzzword
Today I was inspired by This post about the aims of Gov2.0 rather than a definition (the subject of this linked article at GovLoop) as it is written in a language that is opaque to citizens. It appears to me that citizens most likely care about:
- Availability and value of services they actually receive (and the associated cost)
- Information that helps them live their lives
- Representation and involvement in the formation of policy/decisions
In some order or other. And for each the set of questions and answers is different. I initially found myself putting forward an argument for distinguishing between e-Gov, Open Gov and Gov 2.0 (corresponding to the bullets above respectively) before a rethink where I want to argue for actually making this stuff important to citizens. This in turn will make it important to decision makers in government, elected representatives and other government employees.
“Good government engages in processes that are as open and democratic as possible form and execute policy; it is as transparent as possible in making public data public; andas effective as possible in executing it’s duties to deliver the services citizens require in the most efficient way.”
The outcome is more important than the process, and certainly more important than the buzzwords.
Gov2.0 is NOT a Social Media Strategery
What is Government 2.0?
Gov2.0 is Government run for Citizens. Each citizen must be able engage with the daily activity to government to satisfy their personal self-interest. It is about citizens getting what they want when and how they want it, and being able to converse with individual Government employees directly and with each other.
What Gov 2.0 is NOT
I am fairly sure Gov2.0 is NOT a departmental twitter account, a Facebook page run by the PR Team, a LinkedIn ‘presence’, a Social Media ’strategy’ (You do however need a real strategy), SecondLife Avatar, or Anything-with-an-Approval-Step. Social media tools are great, and the social bit implies individual choice – not corporate guidelines or instructions. So stop trying to create policies and rules, and just let people choose, and remember the ability to choose to do something is the same as the ability to choose not to do something.
Specifics:
So we need some specifics to enact, something that we have to do . I guess saying “find your soul, and live honestly” doesn’t necessarily help. Some vaguely concrete things:
Clear goals
The organisation must know what it is really about; the thing that makes you get up every day. Why does the organization exist and why does anybody care? If this identity is missing it doesn’t matter how much you engage with citizens, you still suck. If you have purpose and your team feels it then your customer has a chance of feeling it too. Share enjoyment, meaning and engagement.
Trust
Assuming that the team is engaged in the purpose of the organisation and is genuinely engaged in trying to help citizens, give them the tools and let them get on with it. Empowered individuals communicating directly on a personal level is pretty much the definition of anything 2.0
Identity
For meaningful human exchange to take place both parties need a robust identity that fits the transaction. Even for an online discussion I cannot understand the validity of what you say unless I know who you are. For transactions that require personalisation, fulfillment, or an ongoing relationship identity is important for both parties. I feel strongly that I own my identity – you just need to know who I am so that we can have a meaningful exchange over a period.
Fulfillment
This is the bit about doing what you say. If you make a committment you need to be able to follow through, if you are unable to make a commitment your service is probably insufficient. This is very much a 1.0/1.5 (or earlier) concept – the ability to execute on your word.
Openness
Making something transparent is harder than keeping it private – so this is extra work, and part of modern. I have the right to expect this for specific enquiries (what is the current status of my FOIA request? when can i expect a response?), and to be engaged during policy formation.
Joined-up information
Where possible and relevant it should be possible to have a single view. This allows personalisation which is a key part of human communication. If I said this on your forum and made this comment on your blog, you probably want to know that when you are talking to me. If I have an outstanding Service Request for this thing, you probably want to know that and it’s status when I talk to you.
Human scale community
Community is between actual people with personalities and opinions. If you lost yours somewhere you probably will not be having many conversations anyhow. The idea of departmental communications is married to the old need to control. There are good reasons for group accounts, but communication during a conversation is personal.
Community involves meeting people where they are, on their terms, not being judgemetnal and all that stuff – I cannot give you guidance on how to be more human, I am still working on that myself.
Effectiveness and efficiency
Hardly a 2.0 question and always pressing, as things go faster and more communication happens we need to have the tools and methods to be able to manage it. Strangely non-sexy, but really important to be able to get things done.
Is that all?
Probably not. Let me know if I missed something, or you agree, or especially if you disagree.
UK Government data sharing
I was at CapitolCamp Today in Albany, New York. A great event for many reasons – especially the forward looking nature of the State Senate, @ahoppin, and all of the great people there. Now I said some things about OpenID and data protection that probably need a bit more explanation. Some things are just too nuanced to explain in a twitter post – so I figured that an explanation of the correct quotes needed a bit more flesh
1. OpenID is not permitted for many services in the UK
For most central government services that are provided online (where authentication is needed) the UK specific http://www.gateway.gov.uk/ is mandated. The mechanism has some similarity to OpenID, apart from the open bit. I do not own my ID, and portability does not enter my thoughts, as it would with my own OpenID.
I am sorry for telling this truth – it is tragically true. The level of mandate is not legislative in most cases – but sufficiently politically focused that OpenID is unlikely, ever. Even where it is an optional to choose either or neither, nither is most likely, followed by gateway. Politics…
2. Government departments are often not legally allowed to share data
The Data Protection Act specifically describes how data can be shared. Some significant points are
- You can only use the data for the purpose provided
- You can only share data with the citizens signified consent (signified here has big connotations)
- If information is collected under statute, you cannot share it even with signified consent
The upshot of this is that if I go and change my address with the DVLA (they issue driving licences and car ownership documents) or with the Inland Revenue (they verify that I paid the correct tax) I provide them my address for that purpose under statute. Changing an address with one cannot update the other – even though I log into both systems with the same ID. Even if this were not a technology challenge currently – it would be legally not permitted.
This prevents an OAuth like sharing of data. A workaround, as weird as it seems, would be to set up a change of address service, which in turn could notify both of the departments. This is absurd – but true last I checked. I would like this to be not true as well – and I am not a lawyer, so other interpretations are possible – this is my best understanding.
3. Few people are sure who owns UK map data
Even though the UK is years ahead in terms of mapping data it is very confusing as to who owns the data, like this:
- Postcodes belong to the PostOffice – if you use them without sublicence from the Post Office you are responsible for paying a fee, depending on how you read the law
- Data derived from Ordnance Survey geo references cannot be displayed on a GoogleMap according to recent OS guidance; what constitutes derived data and whether the Ordnance Survey actually care is unclear.
- The local authority collates data within it’s boundary, and may have a licence to use it. It may or may not have ability to use the data for the bordering organisations, but most likely does not.
It is theoritically simple to do an interesting set of cool stuff with maps and government data – and you could just do it, and wait to see if there were consequences – or you could wait until you found certainty. The latter is optimism.
Summary
Using OpenID is unlikely for UK central government services, and sometime unlawful. Using OAuth is impractical and possibly unlawful in most central government cases, and even non-personal data (like mapping) has constraints.
Fortunately most of the work that our organisation does is at the municipality level – where we would happily advocate using OpenId, OAuth and GoogleMaps. Each of these for each customer on a optional basis is desirable – I certainly hope to do my bit in promoting these technologies where I can.
Regenerating this site
New look coming soon… and some new content. Creative destruction. Rebuild from within. The same mission and goals prevail – it is time to put bigger ideas here and to be slightly more abrasive.
Stay subscribed.
Death to all websites.
So you create a simple message, and make sure that all of the information that everybody want is easily found. There is a call to action, and easy contact methods. This is the best website you can make. And it still sucks. It just sucks the least that it could.
As a prospective customer I want more.
- I want to get specific facts, without being sold to
- I want to interact with a human, on my terms
- I want to hear what other customers are saying and interact with them.
- I want to be treated as a human, not a revenue source
As a customer I want more.
- I want to get access to my personal information
- I want to be recognized as an individual, and get information in real time
- I want to be interact with other customers
- I want to be able to get access to experts who talk human
As an employee I want more.
- I want to be able to easily add infomration that can be found easily
- I want to respond to the needs of customers and prospective customers.
- I want to interact with customers and prospective customers
- I want to represent my company in its best light
The problem is the notion of the website itself. Adding a blog, and a forum are good small steps. Neither will shift the needle. Adding social tools is tempting, but this is a nice value-add, rather than an in the flow improvement…
What can we do differently?
“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it” (Attributed to Einstein; it must be relevant, and universally applicable)
Rethink fully. The objective should not be the best website, but the best interaction to remove friction and allow the greatest flow of information.
What set of services does a customer want, and what is the best way to present them. Start with the blue sky stuff, and then don’t comprimise. If you want to see an early release of the new and improved interface for customer service during March send me an email.
I can describe it, but it looks better when you see it.
Intersting Enterprise2.0 News
This week I noted these interesting posts, amongst many:
Six ways to make Web2.0 work:
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Business_Technology/Application_Management/Six_ways_to_make_Web_20_work_2294
(thanks to Lee Bryant of Headshift for pointing this one out)
60 different How to guides:
http://mashable.com/2009/02/18/how-to-guide/
TIME top 25 blogs:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1879276,00.html
Interesting musing on social networks:
http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2009/02/16/monday-morning-musing-about-social-networks/
Design for everybody…
This weekend I was lucky enough to join in a session of SF folks with a passing interest in Cognitive Science talking with Keith Lang of skitch, who put forward an interesting premise:
Most software is designed by men. It is precise, evaluates yes and no in binary, and relies on thinking in hierarchy. He had been referred (by Professor Stephen Pinker no less) to this book about the differences between how men and women think and had some interesting insights about how an interface built for different styles of thinking may have different characteristics…
- more ambiguity
- more concurrent activity
- more emotional engagement
- more interest in the user as a person rather than a task-doer
There was some controversial stuff that made up the premise Firstly that people involved in system creation are typically men with brain patterns that tend towards the highly structured/mathematical – out of necessity because early computers required heavy math. So what would an interface designed by, and for, a broader range of mindsets work.
During the session I was pleased to (personally, I cannot speak for the groups conclusion) arrive at a synthesis of design patterns as metaphor built on metaphor (in the same way that Stephen Pinker describes metaphor in language toward the end of Stuff of Thought) and that early design patterns were necessarily boxed and binary. Listening to the members of the group who were not computer industry guys was quite interesting, it certainly suggests that we need some new patterns.
So let me ask you…
If you were designing an interface for the entire spectrum of how people think/interact – what would it do differently to current applications?
A simple problem: The Web Platform for Customers
We are creating a solution that enables a company to engage better with it’s customers, and allows customers to serve themselves. Customers get what they want either directly Or by engaging in conversation with each other with company employees.
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This post was inpired by “1. Start with a simple problem…. ” #1 of #50 essential strategies from 50 Essential Strategies for creating a successful Web 2.0 Product
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ROI for SaaS/Cloud offerings
I was asked yesterday about ROI for SaaS based solutions. Until yesterday it had seemed obvious to me that SaaS had little or no upfront costs, and most solutions have zero or little upfront costs in order to try them out that this was the equivalent of dividing by zero. Personally I made the shift long ago to working out the net monthly cost saving/extra revenue attributable adopting a particular SaaS offering – as the investment is negligible.
Using this calculation made it easy for us to decide on using these SaaS offerings:
paymo.biz for time tracking for our consultants (reduced time spent logging and collating, transparency such that small deviances are easily caught early are worth more than $4 month/user),
google for our mail (the effort of continuously improving spam filtering, and occasional server glitches costs more than $50 year/user). The additional benefits that we get from the other GoogleApps was is an unexpected bonus.
Firmstep – our own platform for customer service portals – we had to build it after searching for a solution good enough for our customers turned up nothing for a sensible level of investment. We can run our own platform at a reasonable per-user cost, and are launching it this quarter for third party use. (entire service, for less than the lifetime cost of losing a single customer)
Using this simpler model – I found myself wondering “are there circumstances in which the ROI will be better for installed software than for SaaS?”
I have been ruminating for a while and have come up with little in the way of good, logical scenarios about when SaaS would be the lesser choice for ROI and came up with only two scenarios – the SaaS version unavailable or it isn’t even possible. For everything else – SaaS must have a better ROI. This leads to an obvious conclusion that many people select software without regard for alternatives.
Circumstances where a larger return is created BECAUSE OF A LARGER INVESTMENT:
1. huge investment leads to higher levels of attention at board level which mean that the focus on adoption has top level support, where a smaller investment would not gather such focus.
2. The system selection is part of a huge organizational shift, based around a particular technology stack or solution focus
3. A significant change that fundamentally affects the workforce – of the type “automating this activity will reduce our administration staff by half” and needs a big change program to bring it about
Circumstances where people lie:
1. Make this investment, and you will save your company a gazillion dollars and be a hero
2. My career will advance better if I roll out this specific technology stack
3. the vendor provides pre-built ROI materials, where justifying something else means more work for me
4. Not wanting to stick my neck out or do something unpredictable.
5. Lack of knowledge of SaaS alternatives, or no real awareness of how to measure ROI on something without an investment
Real scenarios, where the return is better for non-SaaS:
1. The SaaS alternative is not yet available, not yet perceived to be available,
2. SaaS is not achievable, such as with physical operations, like factory floor terminals/warehouse gate systems.
What do you think?
Thanks to @drjerryasmith question yesterday “do you have any thoughts regarding the details of SaaS-based ROI?” until which I had never thought about writing this down.
Choosing SaaS.
The key point in any software choice is the difference in Total Cost of Ownership and risk regardless of how they are developed and delivered.
Any company delivering software or services incurs costs and risks that have to be charged somewhere – whether it is in the form of charging for premium services, charged support or simply charging for service provision at a cost that is attractive when compared to alternatives. SaaS makes it possible to reduce the short term costs of adopting new technology, usually to around the same or less than the cost of adopting the OpenSource alternative, where investments need to be made in technology and skills.
The risk profile of SaaS is different to alternatives in that the costs of making a wrong decision are low, trying before making a large investment is easier, and the obligations for maintaining continued support sit clearly with the vendor.
This all adds up to it being the wisest choice for most business operations when adopting new technology. This same logic probably applies for switching technologies – just that the maths, justification, and politics get harder.
The biggest principle for me is about business focus – robust organizations should stick solely to core business – if maintaining tech is not your business, switch to a SaaS provider who specialises in doing just that thing.
(Originally written as a response to http://www.cloudave.com/link/has-saas-killed-oss but I felt worthy of it’s own conversation)
744: Great Enterprise 2.0 Insights
Today my twitter feed told me about http://web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com/50_essential_strategies_for_creating_a_successful_web_20_pr.htm which is a great 50 point guide to building a Web2.0 offering. It is brilliant, insightful and it was interesting to see how many different ideas contribute to a single offering.
Inspired by this list – We will be describing how we address each one on each of the next 50 days.
Also interesting reading on 2.0 matters came to my attention today were:
http://andrewmcafee.org/blog/?p=584
http://web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com/the_state_of_web_20.htm
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_ways_social_media_will_change_in_2009.php
This one had me revisit a lot of great material on readwriteweb including a great reminder “Web 2.0 is about people”:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_tech_help_with_innovation_management.php
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/crowdsourced_workforce_guide.php
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/enterprise_20_nature_of_the_firm.php
750 days: New website launched with new design
The new website has been live for a couple of weeks now at http://www.firmstep.com which is a great design done by Scott Mallinson, who we heartily recommend for any design project you have. We have now also recommissioned him to restyle this blog amongst other things. So expect to see this blog get a makeover in the next few weeks.
On the site we had some last minute changes to the home page to emphasise the web platform nature of Firmstep – previously the copy had focused only on the Citizen self-service (Firmstep for Government) and Customer Service (Firmstep for Customer Service) aspects.
751 days left… (500andsomething working days)
751 days remaining
This is not a mathematical error – just a switch to calendar days rather than working days for looking forwards.
Back in September 08 we set ourselves the goal of 600 working days to achieve our objectives, putting the deadline date at Feb 11th 2011. This is the date we are still aiming for.
The math just got too hard to keep up with – so as of right now, we are changing the way we count the days to be number of elapsed days. This includes bank holidays and weekends, but makes it far easier to keep track using http://www.timeanddate.com/date/duration.html and http://www.timeanddate.com/date/dateadd.html
We also recently fixed the subscribe link on the top of the page – so if you didn’t already, please subscribe to our email feed. The pace is just about to start…
Free Customer Service report
Customer Experience Matters reports on this report on Customer experience (available free – just by registering) from Forrester research – I found the spread of rankings in different indutries interesting. How is it that some industries have a more significant range than others – I will be trying to work out if that is just the nature of the selection of companies, or if there is more pressure in some industries that can be meaningfully inferred from the data.
The Enterprise 2.0 Manifesto (making the case for the open organization)
I also gave this it’s own page so that it persists as a top level item…
The Enterprise 2.0 Manifesto (making the case for the open organization)
0.verview
The death of the mass-produced product for the mass-market is widely documented. The need for extraordinary customer service widely understood. We can make the kinds of organization and communication that work for individual’s passions, interests and convenience.
Changing how companies and individuals interact and work together has been talked about for years. The organization must stop being apart from customers and include customers and employees directly in business activity (also in strategy formation and product roadmaps).
Every customer should be able to engage however they want to, with whomever they want to, and so can every person in every company. Interactions are between individuals having honest conversation – there isn’t really room for the official party line and big pronouncements.
Big changes:
- Customers are the company
- Organizations do not communicate, people do
- Trust depends on an ongoing dialogue
- Customers are experts on themselves
- Engaging involves doing; it is more than just talking
- Sharing control is inevitable for the long term success of companies
- Procedures are less important than people (outside factories)
1. Customers are the company
Companies that work more closely with customers will have more relevant products and have greater success. The strong dividing line between company and customer will become less distinct.
Organizations and customers need to be jointly involved in the things that matter, like strategy, direction, operations, and future product development of the company (Is there anything else you do that customers should not be involved in? Why?)
Customers want to form long term relationships with several individuals inside the organization, and ensure that the company will continue to be relevant to them tomorrow, ensuring future benefits from existing investments.
We are not simply talking about an extranet with a blog, forums, and some online support, this goes to the core of operational attitude. A real-life honest communication between customers and employees about things that matter and the availability of tools that let customers get involved with decision making, the ability to question and to challenge, and directly influence the company.
What specifically happens:
- Customers and employees share the same information
- Customers and employees understand and directly impact company strategy
- Customers and employees have a direct say in products and features
- Customers and employees point out where a company is not walking the talk and it gets fixed quickly.
Customers need to be involved “in the flow” of every business, and to self-serve at every opportunity.
2. Organizations do not communicate, people do
Individuals want to communicate directly with the person that knows facts, and receive it unfiltered. Everybody should be able to communicate with the most relevant person to get the information that they need.
Connecting is straightforward – the company needs to get out the way of individual communication – and let people get on with doing it for themselves. The challenge is getting the communication into the core of activity, rather than just extra information outside of the flow.
Customers might like to…
- Have a guest post on your extranet,
- Start a forum.
- What about live chat… …directly with the developer who wrote the code?
- And access to my documents about my projects. even the ones that I wouldn’t normally see.
- How about letting customers directly update facts themselves?
- Add a comment to the official documentation for review, update some parts of it
- Have the same information as the person on the other end of the telephone, before calling
- Can I have an RSS feed of my updates please?
- Suggest a new product feature
- Tell you how they want to work with you next year
- Assist other customers with your product
- Tell you what they want to do that is not on the above list
Whatever the means of communication, it needs to happen. If you are not talking, you are not listening.
This extends beyond simple conversations into things that directly and materially affect products, services, and what the people in the company do on a daily basis. Information behind he firewall has less value than that shared with customers.
3. Trust depends on an ongoing dialogue
Ongoing open dialogue shifts allows for long term trust. New customers can see how you work with existing customers. Existing customers can share your successful history with new customers, and point out issues that get fixed quickly for everyone’s benefit.
Placing value in the long term relationship means that nobody is just this quarter’s sales target. It seems obvious, and you have to pay-it-forward. We can have a conversation based on who we are and our aspirations – what are we going to achieve.
Staff retention, and repeat custom are obvious benefits, as is having a soul. And a sense of humor and personality.
Beyond community and chatter there is a commitment to ongoing engagement in the core business activity. Building a reputation for reliably listening and doing is a matter of trust.
Companies should be able to say
- This is how we have paid attention to what customers wanted in the product
- This is a change we made to how we work to satisfy this customer,
- This is what we will do for you
4. Customers are experts on themselves
There is no “the market”. The market is a chaotic collection of customer organizations and employees all know what they want, individually. The skill of a company is delivering solutions that satisfy the highest number of wants by getting to the patterns, and making decisions that lead to satisfied individual customers.
We need to talk directly and honestly. Sure we also need the tools to find the patterns, aggregate, and prioritize (difficult, because prioritizing is deciding what to not do). Individual connection means that we work together to deliver more value.
Surveys and market research and aggregated data, and MIS, and analytics are all useful, though less than communicating directly. Providing the tools that allow customers to influence actions means that action can be based on real wants identified by experts.
Co-creating new products, improving existing products, tuning operations and sharing strategy with customers means less guessing, and more exact-fit.
5. Engaging involves doing; it is more than just talking
Adding substantial value involves introducing the appropriate tools, committing to take action on customer and employee wants, and being honest. We need a common understanding of things that people feel passionate about, the things that they will drive through, and tell their friends about, and help each other to use.
This is difficult, worthwhile work. We expect power distribution curves and adoption difficulties. We expect it to take a while, and we expect to continually modify our tools and methods until we get it right.
6. Sharing control is inevitable for the long term success of companies
Sharing control means giving more of a voice to customers, and then acting. Acting on customer wants using real information beats guesswork. A competitive advantage exists for every company that is able to communicate with customers better. Getting the right product to market quickly, and fewer wrong guesses.
This is shared control, and pushes inwardly as well towards employees as well as customers causing real direct change inside the business, towards honesty from command and control, as well as being open to the possibility that the crowd knows better. You could be wrong now rather than having to wait until later – you don’t have to wait for the results of the survey, or anything else.
This also means that everybody has to be available to serve the customer better. If the easiest way to get this change made is for Bob to do it, we need to get Bob involved now.
7. Procedures are less important than people
In many environments procedures are a straightjacket that constrain individuals from acting in the customers best interest (submit for approval, all documents go through marketing). Knowledge workers are hired for their brains. Let them be applied for better serving customer wants.
Factories and high volume activities demand processes to ensure consistency, and where they add value to the product and customer obviously assist. We need to trust employees and customers to point out where these processes can be improved. “That is just how we work” is usually an incorrect answer.
If we can do something better then we should. If it involves circumventing broken processes and is in the customer interest great, and better still is fixing the broken procedure.
Where a procedure exists it must be the easiest and best way of doing something, and not a stick or constraint, or guideline for reigning people in.
Summary
It is fashionable to put 2.0 at the end of everything where a greater level of individualism and conversation takes place. The concepts of empowerment, engagement and providing the tools for better working are key. We don’t really mind what you call it.
Open organizations, open innovation, Enterprise2.0 – the conclusion is the same:
Giving individuals the ability to engage easily in sharing passions and interests leads to better work environments, better products and service, and a better sense of being. The individual is at the centre of these new ways of working and that should be in the workplace as well as in our personal lives.
Latest great post on co-creation from ConfusedofCalcutta
On ConfusedofCalcutta I recently came across this great article http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2008/11/15/whoa-reining-in-the-faster-horses/ that alone empahises the importance of what JP Rangaswami has to say, but more importantly the importance of what customers have to say.
As always walking-the-talk is the next most obvious thing to do…
If you are not yet familiar with Confused of Calcutta, you can find it at www.confusedofcalcutta.com – I recommend subsribing to the feed – my favourite part of the site is this sentence fragment “enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing, search, fulfilment and conversation”.
Customer Service Blogs
I went out looking to extend the blogroll on customer service and and found…
- http://www.serviceuntitled.com/
- http://flooringtheconsumer.blogspot.com/
- http://customersrock.net/
- http://tips-customer-service.blogspot.com/
- http://customerservicevoodoo.wordpress.com/
- http://www.allbusiness.com/sales/customer-service/10783-1.html
- http://clearaction.biz/blog/
- http://custserv.gbwatch.com/
- http://www.customersarealways.com/
- http://www.qaqna.com/
- http://www.returncustomer.com/
- http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/
- http://shephyken.blogspot.com/
- http://customerservicereader.typepad.com/
- http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
- http://consumerist.com/
- http://customeru.wordpress.com/
- http://lovethemup.com/
- http://makeitgreat.typepad.com/
- http://podcast.amanet.org/edgewise/category/customer-service/
- http://www.thecustomercarenetwork.com/
- http://www.customerthink.com/
- http://www.mycustomer.com/customer_service_and_experience/
- http://www.simplenomics.com/
- http://www.yourcustomersmatter.com/
- http://www.evilgeniusmarketing.com/ice/
- http://www.callcenterscript.com/
- http://www.customerservicemanager.com/customer-service-articles.htm
- http://www.bazaarblog.com/
- http://arc.typepad.com/customercrossroads/
- http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/
- http://www.freedyourmind.com/
- http://nextup.wordpress.com/
- http://thecustomerinstitute.blogspot.com/
- http://contextrules.typepad.com/transformer/
- http://maximumcustomerexperience.com/
- http://www.goodexperience.com/
- http://betuitive.blogs.com/beconnected/
- http://netpromoter.typepad.com/
- http://customerworld.typepad.com/swami_weblog/
- http://cem.blogware.com/blog
- http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?q=customer+satisfaction&submit=post
- http://www.600days.com
How many minutes did you spend today thinking about customer service?
I mean dedicated minutes of thinking time.
- In response to specific requests from customers?
- More generally about how to improve things for customers?
- Or in small improvements to products and services, that customers will really notice?
- How about when writing a brief or design to describe it from the customer experience, and really think about how the customer feels?
Getting started is probably the hardest bit; if I were (this customer) the things I would need most is..?
Not to say that great customer service is about pandering to each and every request from a customer, but to define what you do with clarity and set precise expectation such that the customer gets what they expected, or better. And listening, really listening when there is a request, and doing the thing that will most please (this customer). Rather than some imagined gestalt entity, empathy really works when thinking about a customer at a time.
Bad news is better than no news
A couple of recent airport escapades had me siting around with no information. From my point of view what happened in the first one was:
0545 – check in luggage for 0645 flight
0645 – in line with over half of the travellers ticketed and on the stairs to the gate
0715 – everybody already ticketed gets un-ticketed – we are told to go and wait in the lounge for an announcement
0715-1030 – the board in the lounge shows “Wait in lounge”
1030 – announcement to go to gate
1100 – flight takes off
The pilot did explain the full sequence of events after we had boarded – and that actually made me feel a bit happier than spending over 3 hours with no clue what was going on. This is hardly profound customer service knowledge – keeping people informed of what to expect when, and then doing it, is a fairly straightforward tenet.
An estimated timescale would have meant that I could have worked more effectively for the 3 working hours that were created – like the time I was in Eugene, OR – and my plane was delayed by 8 hours – probably 8 of the most productive hours I ever had.
A simple old message. Set expectations and then meet them. Uncertainty is often worse than bad news, especially if the bad news is just unshared information.
Remembering our principles
In these papers we explored our own definitions and standards of customer service (‘excellent’, our minimum and ‘remarkable’, a service standard we aspire to meet as often as possible) and introduced 4 principles that we believed brought technology and customer service together.
For us, these are principles to be considered when introducing technology (and specifically, online technology) to help improve customer service. We are using them as the basis of developing our customer service platform; our technology ‘values’ if you like.
I want to briefly re-visit these principles as we dust-off our old white papers for some renewed focus and research. Despite maturing ideas and fast development, these principles are still closely tied to our mission and technology.
Self-service
Self-service is arguably the customer service ideal for many industries. It’s quick and convenient for the customer, introduces transparency to the process and gives access to other web-based services, online communities and information of interest.
Self-service isn’t always the most suitable service channel but providing it as a genuine choice is fundamental to remarkable customer service.
Personalisation
It’s fairly obvious that great customer service means a personalised service. The online experience must be at least as personalised as speaking to someone on the phone (although sometimes, that’s a pretty low threshold)
We think the customer should be immediately identified, profiled and presented with information most likely to interest them. They should only have to enter their information once, be offered a configurable experience so they can determine how they view and use the service and importantly, given the ability to access and edit their personal information. Software such as Live Chat systems can also help create a personalised, online experience and are often more efficient than using alternative assisted channels.
Centralised Delivery
Centralised delivery means providing all the necessary information required to address a customer enquiry in a single interaction.
Any information that customers can obtain from an organisation should be available through a single, transparent service point, whether its personal data tied to their account or more general information.
Customer and service information should be easy to find, understand and use, regardless of which business area maintains it.
Community
Online communities are a growing phenomenon which allows members to collaborate, share and assist one another. Supporting a collaborative customer community is a sign that an organisation trusts their customers, wants to listen and recognises that sometimes other customers can provide better service than the company itself.
Providing the tools for a customer community to grow and to feedback is fairly simple but requires an organisational attitude towards openness which, as with many of these principles, cannot be achieved by technology alone.