Amazing customer service from Flightcentre!

I thought that I had written my last post of 2010. I thought that by this time I would be in New Zealand on my honeymoon. Sadly the weather, airports and airlines have conspired against me and, like 1m other travellers hoping to get away for Christmas, I’ve been stuck in London for the last few days waiting for a rescheduled flight.

Having spent nearly 15 years working with Marketing, Sales and Customer Service organisations I’ve seen my fair share of good and bad customer experiences. A crisis is often the best way to stress test a customer-facing organisation; it can shake Customer Service to its core. It would be easy to write a post describing how over the last few days I’ve seen many examples of customer service organisations being totally unprepared for a crisis and delivering appalling service to their customers, but I wanted to take a moment to describe one of the best customer experiences I think I’ve seen.

I’ve always said that its people that make the difference within Customer Service. Sure you can buy expensive technology (and that can help) but if your people are not motivated to help customers then your investment is probably wasted (see my previous post “Software doesn’t build relationships; people do”). People certainly made the difference in the recent chaos at Heathrow. Let me take a step back and explain how Flightcentre dealt with the crisis.

I had booked my flight with Flightcentre nearly 12 months ago and had been looking forward to going on honeymoon and catching up with old friends in New Zealand. The fact that I had booked at a high street travel agent at all (rather than direct online) had originally surprised me. But Flightcentre had been able to get me a much better deal than I could find myself online and Dave Lister, the manager at Flightcentre in Richmond had personally visited some of the destinations I was planning to go to and had made some great recommendations on hotels and restaurants.

Fast forward 12 months and on Saturday evening I arrived at Heathrow to find what could only be described as total chaos. A sudden, heavy snowfall had brought the airport to a complete standstill and unsurprisingly I received a text message from my airline telling me that my flight was cancelled. Within 60 SECONDS of receiving that news my phone rang - It was Dave from Flight Centre. He remembered that I was off on honeymoon and phoned me out of office hours to check if I needed any help re-booking my flights. I was shocked. It would have been so easy for the travel agent to simply pass the buck on to the airline and ask me to deal with the airline direct.

In the end we couldn’t find anything to re-book on Saturday night so Dave and his colleague Jois Christie came into their Richmond office on Sunday morning (their day off!) to help us (and of course their other customers) find alternative flights. In the end they spent around 2 hours with us working through different options until we found a flight that (I hope!) leaves tomorrow. Their knowledge, customer focus and passion for helping their customers was truly outstanding. I certainly won’t be booking my travel anywhere else in the future and I hope Flightcentre recognise what great people they have!

My learning from this - you only get moments of customer delight within Customer Service when people make the effort to go the extra mile.

Disclaimer and disclosure: Flightcentre have no idea that I write a blog on customer-centricty. They have not paid or incentivised me in any way to write this post and have not contributed anything to the content.

The fast & easy path to social media success

You could take any number of easy decisions with Social Media, all of which you could get up and running fast. You could, for example try any of the following:

1. Ignore it and hope that your customers will too

2. Outsource it to a Social Media agency and marvel at the pretty weekly sentiment dashboards that they send to you

3. Set up a Twitter account and Tweet out special offers and press releases

4. Hire a social media guru and pay them to find you more Twitter followers

5. Ask your CEO to write a blog

6. Set up a Facebook fan page so that your customers can “like” you

7. Siphon off a small team of contact centre agents and have them monitor Twitter and reply to angry complaints

8. Create a video of a donkey water-skiing up the River Thames and post that onto YouTube

Sure... you could make any of those easy decisions and implement them pretty quickly. But what happens if:

1. Your customers start to use your Facebook fan page to post customer support issues

2. An environmental movement launches an orchestrated attack on your social sites

3. People start to question the accuracy and usefulness of the weekly sentiment dashboards from your agency and begin to “file them away”

4. Your competitors use insight gained from social listening and analytics to actually improve their core propositions and better tailor those to target your customers

5. Your competitors start to provide their customers with tools that actually help them to do the jobs that they are trying to do

6. The small team of agents you set up to monitor Twitter starts to grow into a much bigger team

7. Your customers start to learn that the only way to get great service from you is to shout loudly at their friends on social networking sites

8. No one forwards the video of your water-skiing donkey

An easy decision is not always a sound decision. Just because you can do something fast, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right thing to do. The speed, ease and transparency of social media bring both opportunity and threat.

GiffGaff – a case study of customers in control

It’s relatively easy these days to find point examples of social CRM in action across marketing, sales or customer service; but few organisations have a holistic Social CRM strategy in place. Paul Greenberg recently wrote a case study on Proctor & Gamble, who seem to come the closest (despite not calling what they do “Social CRM”).

One of the best case studies I’ve come across is a UK-based Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) called GiffGaff. I was lucky enough to recently meet some of their staff who talked me through the business model.

The GiffGaff story is one of David vs. Goliath. GiffGaff are part of the Telefonica Group. They rent their mobile network from O2 and sell pre-pay SIM cards and actively compete against the traditional Telco companies. Unlike most mobile operators with large fire-fighting call centres, GiffGaff have just 14 employees and no call centre. They challenged the traditional MVNO model by handing control over to their customers. Here’s how:

Product co-creation - right from set-up GiffGaff engaged their target market in 2 way dialogue, asking potential customers and early adopters to decide on how best to structure their tariffs. Similar to Dell IdeaStorm, GiffGaff have continued their Ideas page and at the point of writing they have implemented 112 ideas direct from their community.

Community support – the GiffGaff community is perhaps best shown within customer service. All of GiffGaff’s customer service is online. They pro-actively push information out to their notice boards page e.g. service issues. They publish customer-generated tips and tricks and FAQs. They also make extensive use of their community forum for peer to peer support (supported by intervention and moderation by GiffGaff employees when required).The community has radically cut customer support costs compared to the traditional contact centre-centric model. GiffGaff estimated that if O2 could replicate the model with just 25% of their customers participating, they could save c£20m per year.

Payback Scheme - Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the community forum is that users are incentivised to participate through the use of a payback scheme. The payback scheme rewards GiffGaff members for helping GiffGaff out with Kudos points which can either be redeemed for pre-pay credit, or donated to charity (of course a charity of the community’s choice!).

Social Marketing – GiffGaff’s above the line marketing is minimal for a Telco company. Instead they prefer their customers to spread the word on their behalf. Again they use Kudos points as an incentive - customer’s get 50 points each time they e-mail a friend or 500 points for each SIM card they send to a friend that is activated (where 1 point = 1p). That’s not a bad cost of acquisition and advocacy generates 25% of new customer connections.

GiffGaff’s results so far have been impressive and pretty interesting:

• 50% of customer questions are answered via the community (as opposed to online self service or GiffGaff employee moderation).
• The average response time for any question posted in the forum (24x7) is under 3 minutes and 95% of all questions are answered within an hour. I suspect most Telco call centre customers would still be navigating an IVR after 3 minutes, let along speaking to an agent or having their problem resolved!
• GiffGaff‘s NPS score is 75 - way above the industry average and approaching that of Google or Apple. They publish their customer satisfaction scores here.
• GiffGaff have found that the traditional 90-9-1 model of participation (See Michael Wu’s blog for an explanation) has changed with their rewards system. They estimate that they have a  1-25-74 model i.e. a much higher percentage of occasional forum users.
• GiffGaff found that their top ten super-users spend an average of 9.5 hours per day on the community site. Some super users have gone to extreme lengths to support GiffGaff; stepping in to quash negative complaints and building their own status badges for the forum. GiffGaff’s customers even built them an iPhone app.
• Because of the exceptional levels of support within the community, GiffGaff have also found that some users have started to donate their points back to the super-users who have helped out most within the forum.

Now clearly as a start-up, GiffGaff have some unique advantages. They do not have an existing large and diverse customer base or existing investments in call centres. They can afford to target a very specific niche of customers who are happy for their relationship to be conducted entirely online. However, that’s certainly not to say that traditional contact centre-centric companies cannot learn anything from the GiffGaff model.

Disclaimed and disclosure: I have no affiliation with GiffGaff, either as a customer or as a client. They have not paid me for writing this article (or given me kudos points!).

Fighting fires or building firewalls

Why is it that we often reward fighting fires rather than building firewalls?

The sales person who pulls in a last-hour, unforecasted deal at the end of Q4 is treated as a hero, whereas the relationship manager who signs another deal on time with a long term customer is dull and boring.

The customer service agent who works all hours to react to customer complaints and has a brilliant ability to calm down angry customers is revered; whereas the agent who suggests making a change in a process because it keeps causing customer’s problems is often ignored.

In the world of social CRM, customers tweet, blog & post angry videos to YouTube because they have something to say and they want to be heard. You cannot possible scale to respond to the volume of social content using traditional channels and processes. So instead of constant fire-fighting, why not listen and fix the problem (or opportunity) at source.

Build firewalls instead of fighting fires.

Sailing towards the island of Social bliss

Michael Maoz wrote a terrific post this week: “You failed at Customer Service, so now try Social Processes”. As ever, his post is short, succinct and to the point: "over $75bn spent on CRM-related business applications to date", yet “over the past ten years the level of customer satisfaction has edged up only slightly – for most industries in the vicinity of 3-5 percent”. He continues “along comes everything “Social” to cure the malady of poor service...”

There are no short cuts to customer success. I wrote an article with friend and colleague Reg Price ten years ago in which we called for back to basics thinking in CRM. We wrote in 2000:

“In next generation CRM, customer relationship management practices and software solutions must reach deep into the most fundamental processes of a firm, like order entry, invoicing and ensure that promises made (whether implicit or explicit) are met. It is superficial (indeed futile!) to try for customer delight if customers are being let down by the basics.”

We commissioned a cartoonist to draw up the cartoon shown below of an organisation sailing towards the “island of customer delight” promised by their shiny new CRM system, whist of course forgetting about the basics of customer relationships:

- Understanding and meeting customer needs

- Orders being delivered on time and correct

- Bills being accurate

- Customer privacy being respected

- Front line staff having the right incentives in place

- etc

It’s interesting to note that in many respects, little has changed in the last 10 years. The cartoon above could easily be applied to Social CRM:

- Let’s not worry about customer service issues – our customers will fix problems on our behalf in our forum!

- Forget about traditional marketing – Customers will forward our blogs, re-tweet our Tweets  and “like” us on Facebook!

- Why bother generating new product ideas? – Customers will suggest ideas on our ideas site

Of course, Social CRM offers organisations huge potential to listen and respond to the direct and authentic voice of the customer. I’ve argued previously that in many ways it represents the missing piece of the CRM puzzle. And of course, there are many examples of organisations like GiffGaff, Threadless, Dell & Starbucks  who are successfully harnessing the power of the social customer to get their customers working on their behalf. But simply adopting the tools, without the mindset, the processes, the incentives is a recipe for disaster. Surely we remember that from the boom and bust of CRM?

Characterising different approaches to social media.

I gave a presentation today at the Exact Target Connections conference in London. The purpose of the presentation was to take a light-hearted look at the different approaches organisations are taking towards social media. The slides are in the slideshare presentation below:

Structures for authentic social media engagement

View more presentations from Laurence Buchanan.

In Summary, I described eight different approaches to social media. Although these could be seen as evolutionary steps, in fact, I emphasised during my presentation that there is no “right” approach per se. Different approaches will work for different organisations, with different requirements in different industries.

Approach 1- The ostrich approach

As the name suggests, the ostrich approach is one where the organisation chooses to simply ignore social media, either through fear, or simply lack of relevance or perceived value. The ostrich buries its head in the sand and hope that the danger will soon pass.

Approach 2 – The megaphone approach

This is one of the most common approaches that I see with organisations that have only dabbled with social media. Typically they start in Marketing / PR and view social media as another outbound channel to Tweet special offers, or link to press releases. Normally organisations that take this approach are poorly set up to handle two-way interactions when customers comment or complain. They assume that peer to peer simply means that people will forward on or re-tweet their broadcast content.

Approach 3 – The chameleon approach

If there’s one thing guaranteed to whip up a social media storm its deceit and a lack of transparency. Amazon incurred the wrath of bloggers when some of its product reviews were exposed as being written by authors, promoting their own books. The chameleon approach (also known as the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” approach) is one where the organisation tries to disguise itself and blend into a “public” forum, posting suspiciously positive comments and reviews...

Approach 4 – The dancing dad approach

I borrowed this one from a colleague of mine at Capgemini. The antithesis of the chameleon approach, the dancing dad stands out like sore thumb. Think about the industrial German manufacturer who sets up a Facebook Fan page so that its customers can “like” it. Not cool.

Approach 5 – The command and control approach

Often an approach embraced by organisations that have been burnt by social media. The command and control approach is one where only a select few can engage in social media and their participation is governed by strict guidelines of what they can say. Every blog, every Tweet, every video posted is heavily audited and in strict alignment with brand guidelines. Usually only a select few are allowed to participate.

Approach 6 – The hare and tortoise approach

This is one of the most common approaches to social media that I come across. The hare and tortoise approach is one where some parts of the organisation race ahead to set up new social channels, grab followers and “engage” with customers. Other departments lag far behind creating a disjointed customer experience both across different departments and also across new media and traditional CRM channels.

Approach 7 – The joined up approach

Clearly a tough approach to master. As its name suggests, the joined up approach demands the breaking down of silos across departments and across channels. Organisations that aspire to this aim typically show outside-in, customer-centric thinking and consider the customer’s cross-channel experience.

Approach 8 – Handing over control

A small number of organisations, typically start-ups, have found considerable success with this approach.  The organisation hands over control of product development ideas, recommendations, customer service etc to its customers via social channels. Threadless.com is probably the most famous example (t-shirts are printed based on user-generated designs and votes). GiffGaff is another good example; the UK-based MVNO in effect outsources its marketing, sales and customer service to its customers. Customers are rewarded with points that can be redeemed for pre-pay credit (or donated to a charity voted for by the community!) in exchange for their participation in the GiffGaff community.

This is far from an exhaustive list and clearly each organisation will have different needs and objectives. Can you think of any others?

Facebook Connect & Social Commerce – examples from the consumer world

Mark Zukerberg, CEO of Facebook first talked about Social Graph at the Facebook f8 conference in May 2007. Since then Facebook has quietly extended across the web, in the first instance, embedding Facebook Connect and the Facebook “Like” button into consumer web sites.

I logged onto Amazon.com the other day with Facebook Connect and it’s hard not to be impressed with the depth of Amazon’s integration into Facebook. When I logged onto the site, I gave Amazon access to my Facebook profile, from which Amazon picked up my favourite books, CDs and movies (supplementing their knowledge of my previous purchases to improve the recommendations they presented to me). I could also see what my friends had liked on the site and see recommendations from them. In addition, Amazon picked up the dates of my friend’s birthdays and gave me ideas for birthday presents to buy for them. Scary? Big brother? Maybe... However, Amazon.com is certainly one of the early examples of social commerce in action.

Similarly, on holiday last month I noticed that Tripadvisor had caught the Facebook Connect-bug. By logging in with Facebook connect I could see which cities my Facebook friends had visited, post questions to my friends, asking them to recommend a hotel or restaurant and update my own traveller profile to give back to the community. In effect I could leverage 2 networks – my direct friends and the wider, unknown peer community.

The consumer world, unsurprisingly, is currently leading the way in Social Commerce. Here are just a few other examples of social commerce in action:

Dominos Pizza offer each “Major of Foursqure” in their local branches with a free pizza each week when they spend over £10.

Futureshop.ca, the Canadian arm of Best Buy, use a video avatar called Aaron to answer questions based on knowledge summated by other customers on their Lithium customer forum.

Seesaw.com allows users to post status updates of TV content they have downloaded to Twitter and Facebook (e.g. Laurence has just downloaded “Top Gear” and rated it 8/10). They also crowd-source recommendations using Baynote e.g. “people who liked Top Gear also liked Fifth Gear”).

Levis launched a Facebook friends store on their US site, allowing users to view what jeans were popular amongst their friends.

Sephora set up a Beautytalk forum for their customers to exchange beauty tips. Customers can watch YouTube videos of how to best use their products, rate advice, vote on their favourite products and post questions to the community.

Of course this space is emerging at great speed. The examples above are accurate today, but most likely out of date tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how they evolve and how the two worlds of social collaboration and privacy collide.

If you’re interested in social commerce, Altimeter Group are hosting a conference on The Rise of Social Commerce on October 6-7^th.