The Human Experience: First Chapter

Hello

In case you somehow missed the social media onslaught yesterday, my first book is now available to buy (albeit with some ironic delivery delays due to demand being a little higher than anticipated!). If you're more of a try-before-you-buy person, here are some interesting statistics, and the first chapter to read for free:

Last week, I asked a few thousand customers across the U.K. what they thought about customer experience in the UK at the moment. Here’s what they said:

• 85% - organisations feel impersonal and have lost their 'human' touch
• 83% - organisations take customers for granted
• 81% -?organisations?are more interested in cutting costs than giving a good service
• 78% - organisations send too many emails and requests asking for feedback
• 61% -?organisations?do not empower their frontline employees to make decisions
• 64% - organisations do not take ownership of problems
• 62% - organisations are not straightforward to deal with?
• 57% - organisations do not respect their customers and frontline employees
• 46% - organisations do not care about giving a good customer experience

Not good news (well, unless you’ve just written a book about how to make this situation better).

Below is the introduction chapter to the book. I really hope you enjoy it enough to want to read the rest - and maybe even recommend it to your friends and family if you do.

Thank you for all the support

John

You can buy the book here

Introduction?

Like most people on moving day, we were stressed. Boxes were half-packed, books were heavier than anticipated and the overly keen future owners were making regular drive-bys to see if we were gone yet. Amid all this, having a four-year-old son to entertain and keep calm was a daunting task.?

Not all heroes wear capes and in this case they wore Tripps Removal Company overalls. They did exactly what we paid them to do: they took everything we owned, packed it in big boxes and placed it on a huge lorry. That’s not what made the experience so special, though.

As soon as they arrived, they spotted our biggest concern and set about making our son a central part of their job. They asked him to help pack – the excitement of a ‘teddy bear prison’ was worryingly appealing to him – let him draw and scribble over any boxes he wanted to and gave him a tiny toy version of their big removal van to play with. For us, it made the moving day experience far calmer than it might otherwise have been, allowing us to focus on feeling excited rather than anxious. For them, it made the process more efficient, distracting a potentially disruptive tiny person and letting them get on with the job in hand without unplanned interruption. It was a simple yet impactful human customer experience.?

And yet it’s an experience that, sadly, we’re at risk of seeing less and less of.

I started my career on a market stall in Essex, UK, and since then I’ve worked in and with companies around the world to make things better for customers. I’ve been in frontline teams delivering the experience, innovation teams designing the propositions and global teams creating the strategy. I’ve been a bank manager during the financial crisis (not fun), launched a mobile app to millions of people (great fun), and regularly visit strangers’ houses to ask very personal questions (incredible fun). I even signed up to be a mystery shopper when I was 21. I was a cool 21-year-old.

There are three things I’ve learnt throughout this time and which, hopefully, you’ll learn from reading this book: The world is perfecting the functional experience at the expense of the human experience. Organizations are full of humans who are not allowed to act in a human way. Yet, the best way for companies to increase their efficiency is to make things better for customers.?

Oh, and I spend far, far too much time on trains.?

‘Superb… A revelatory book’ - Rory Sutherland , Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy UK and Author of Alchemy

Let’s start with a character from a slightly more famous book, the Tin Man from L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. A well-mannered, wellfunctioning chap who could, with some regular oiling, make his way along The Yellow Brick Road. While the Tin Man was able to get to where he wanted to go, he was miserable. He didn’t have the one thing that would have made him (and, I’d imagine, his venturing companions) truly happy – a heart. Many companies and customer experiences nowadays have something of that Tin Man feel about them: functionally fine, delivering a service seamlessly and repetitively, but desperately short of humanity, the very thing that can make a real connection with customers.

In the past few years, as a partner at independent customer-led consultancy The Foundation, I’ve listened to a call from a mother to her energy provider while sitting in a supermarket car park with her four children, in floods of tears because a wrongly cancelled direct debit had blocked her bank card and left no way of her buying food for the family. I’ve heard the story of a woman whose house move fell through at the last minute, leaving her to pay for both a mortgage and rent, with her bank refusing to help until she’d missed enough payments to trigger their ‘financial support’ process. I’ve watched open-mouthed as a customer whose son had recently died was told that the only way for an account to be closed was for their son to call up himself and confirm the reason for closure.?

Conversely, when you experience real humanity – which can be delivered by a person or a pre-programmed machine – you feel the impact immediately.

It’s the electrician turning off his radio when our toddler is going down for a nap. It’s Octopus Energy personalizing their hold music to play the song that was No.1 when you were 14. It’s Metro Bank having baby changing rooms and dog biscuits. It’s Google Maps asking if you want to send feedback when you shake your phone in frustration. It’s Barilla Pasta creating a Spotify playlist of songs that play for the exact time you should cook different types of pasta for. It’s my financial adviser putting a stamp on any envelope that needs sending back. It’s DHL letting you track your parcel on a little map, knowing you have other things to be getting on with. It’s Apple auto-filling security codes that get sent to your messages to save you switching apps. It’s the estate agency changing their ‘For Sale’ signs to ‘Buy Me’ and ‘I’m Taken’. It’s South Korean supermarkets packaging together seven bananas of different ripeness so you have the perfect one for each day of the week. It’s the Swiss Federal Railways guard personally accompanying a group of passengers to a new train with a hastily reserved carriage and free tea and coffee when the original train unexpectedly broke down.

It’s not, however, Apple emailing you at 5 a.m. on New Year’s Day to tell you your trade-in is now worth ￡0 rather than ￡300. Happy New Year – you’re broke.

The impact of this loss of humanity is often worse for those customers most in need of support. If you can afford it, or are seen as ‘valuable’, you can get a better service. Or if you have the right network and influence, you can speak to someone who knows someone to get a problem sorted (or know the right way to circumnavigate the complaints process and be connected directly to the CEO). Sadly, many others are left to deal with online FAQs, long call-waiting times and unresolved problems. It’s a microcosm of wealth and opportunity inequality played out in contact centres across countries around the world.

‘There is no business “growth hack” greater than loving and caring for your customers. John shows you how and reminds you why'. Lauren Currie OBE OBE, Founder of UPFRONT

Ultimately, the only thing that really matters is how you make people feel. Companies should be there to help make life as easy and enjoyable as possible, not to create extra worry, stress and wasted time and energy for people who’d rather be watching Netflix, going for long walks or even spending quality time with their families. Increasingly, this humanity seems to be pushed to one side in favour of the illusion of efficiency.?

Yet in reality, investing time and effort in creating a human customer experience will in turn lead to a more efficient organization. Not just happier customers who’ll instinctively buy and recommend more, or a stronger brand that will be more attractive to potential customers, but a reduction in costs through fewer calls, fewer surveys, fewer errors, fewer complaints and the vastly reduced attrition of employees.?

Therefore, in this book I’ll argue that restoring humanity to customer experience – balancing the human and the functional experience – is better for both customers and for businesses.

We’ll start, in Part One, by exploring in more depth what causes this lack of humanity and dispel three myths that get in the way – the myth of customer loyalty, the myth of customer feedback and the myth of ‘return on investment’ (ROI).?

In Part Two, we’ll be introduced to eight companies from across sectors and countries who are leading the way in providing a human customer experience and being commercially successful because of it: AO.com, Bendigo Bank, Chiltern Railways, Citymapper, NHS Blood and Transplant, Octopus Energy, Riverford and Workday. In the rest of the book, we’ll then look at these organizations in more detail, understanding the behaviours and enablers that make them a human organization to deal with.

In Part Three, we’ll explore the seven behaviours that each of these companies exhibit when creating their customer experience: Accessibility, Consistency, Flexibility, Proactivity, Respect, Responsibility and being Straightforward. Then in Part Four, we’ll investigate the five enablers that each of these companies has to allow this human customer experience to flourish and the ways of working they commit to that make this approach commercially successful: Ambition, Connection, Empowerment, Focus and Perspective.

Throughout the book, I’ll argue that adopting these behaviours and enablers will mean that customers can stop wasting their lives dealing with the stress caused by uncaring companies and start to enjoy the experience of being a customer again. And I’ll argue that it will also help companies save and make money, having customers that recommend them for real (rather than just in hypothetical questionnaires) and reducing the work caused by not getting it right the first time.

Just like the Tin Man, organizations already have everything they need to be more human. They’re full of brilliant humans who often just aren’t allowed to act in a human way. Perhaps all that’s needed is to set those people free, to act like the humans they’ve spent their whole lives training to be.