Maak ambassadeurs van je klanten (NL)

De unieke aanpak van het telecombedrijf Mobile Vikings maakt van hun klanten geen promotors, maar ware ambassadeurs. Mobile Vikings evangelist, Hans Similion, kwam met passie hun speciale aanpak uit de doeken doen.

Mobile Vikings

Tijdens een change agent event kwam Mobile Vikings evangelist, Hans Similon, spreken over de unieke aanpak van Mobile Vikings. Mobile Vikings is een klein bedrijfje met grote ambities, namelijk gratis mobiel Internet aanbieden voor iedereen. Ze zijn opgestart na enkele ambitieuze pogingen van Frank Bekkers en Hans om gratis mobiel Internet te verkrijgen via onderhandelingen met de bekende Belgische telecom operatoren, Proximus, Mobistar en Base. Omdat de bekende telecomreuzen geen heil zagen in gratis mobiel Internet voor iedereen zagen Frank en Hans als enige oplossing om zelf een bedrijfje op te starten.

Mobile Vikings is geen gewoon bedrijf op gebied van klantenwerving, marketing en management. Het heeft zich ontdaan (onthouden) van de gladde verkopers, flashship stores en grote marketing budgetten.

Mobile Vikings zet minder in op marketing en verkoop, maar meer op het helpen van klanten en klantenretentie. Zo is hun helpdesk een echte HELPdesk en wordt er niet stiekem aan verkoop gedaan. Ze proberen alle klanten binnen de 24u een antwoord te bieden, ongeacht het gebruikte communicatiekanaal (telefoon, email, Twitter, Facebook, …). Ze zetten hiervoor ook hun hele team in; in het weekend durft Hans ook wel eens achter het keyboard te kruipen.

De werving van nieuwe klanten wordt voor vooral gedaan door hun klanten zelf, als ambassadeur. Elke nieuwe klant krijgt extra belkrediet als ze een andere klant aanbrengen. Ze waren hiermee de eersten op de markt die er een werkend business model mee maakten en het heeft hun geen windeieren gelegd nu ze tussen de 2 en 5% marktaandeel hebben. Trouwe klanten worden verder extra beloond op events zoals een BBQ voor het Pukkelpop festival. Dat Mobile Vikings een ware aanhang heeft, bewijzen de statistieken op Facebook: het bedrijf bevindt zich in de top van de meest besproken bedrijven naast grote multinationals. Dat deze aanhang werkelijk trouwe volgers zijn uit zich in real life events die ze regelmatig organiseren.

Ik zag in een uurtje een sneak preview van een ondernemer die met passie zijn werkwijze kwam uitleggen aan een geïnteresseerd publiek. Het werd zo overtuigend gebracht dat het aanstekelijk werkte: op het eind van de sessie hadden we allemaal een viking helm op. Mobile Vikings is een modern bedrijfje dat van de meest moderne technieken gebruikt maakt: crowdsourcing, co-creation, pop-up stores en conversation management. De andere telecomoperatoren hebben ondertussen al door dat ze er ook voordeel uit halen een deel van de Mobile Vikings aanpak te kopiëren.

De ambitie van Mobile Vikings is 2 tot 5% van de markt te halen … maar dan wereldwijd, grapt Hans nog even.

To be continued!

Meer weten

https://www.mobilevikings.com

http://limburg.jongeondernemervanhetjaar.be/nl/genomineerden/d/detail/hans-similon

Boek: The Conversation Manager

Boek: The Conversation Company

Gold plating – not all gold is wanted

Gold plating with coffee

On a cold winter morning when the train had a big delay, I decided to have a coffee in the railway station and pass the time a bit more warm than planned. There was a coffee shop, The Coffee Club, which I’d never been there before, so in the spirit of the “Holy Coffee Week” I decided to give it a try.A quick look at my watch showed that I still had 7 minutes to get the coffee and make it back to the platform, which should be plenty. Further I was the only customer at the moment, so it shouldn’t give a trouble.

I ordered a cappuccino to go and was stunned by the spectacle playing out right before my eyes. The attendant was doing his very best (and I’m really serious about this) to stun me with the coffee. The coffee (and milk foam) was ready in a jiffy, but then it started: added cacao powder, adding some sort of liquid chocolate and creating a figure on it. On the picture on the right you can see which piece of art resulted on top of my coffee.

I must admit: it’s a great piece of work and it might be impressive in the right context, but at that moment I was in a rush to catch my train. My body language was sending many signals that I didn’t have time for this (his?) performance, but the attendant had only eye for creating the one best cappuccino.  In the mean time customers were piling up behind me and they also didn’t appreciate the extra waiting time.

Anyway, after he handed over the cappuccino I paid, said thanks and put the plastic top on the coffee to protect it from spilling. It was like wiping the dirty floor with a Da Vinci.

Gold plating

So what’s about the gold (in the title)? The performance the attendant did for me is also known as “gold plating”. Gold plating is when you’re delivering extra features, extra work, extra enhancements of which you think the customer is waiting for. It’s creating a pixel perfect website. It’s adding an extra GPS power plug-in the back of your vehicle. Summarized: gold plating is adding extra stuff the customer didn’t ask for or is not expecting.

The problem with gold plating is that it’s always at the expense of some thing else. If you can remember the project management triangle which has three constraints: scope, time and budget (remark: there is actually a fourth one, quality, often put in the middle of the triangle). In the case of gold plating you’re adding more scope. Scope that the customer didn’t ask for, but still has to pay one way or another.

Project Management Triangle

Customer needs vs wants

So how can you avoid this? How can you know more about your customers, their needs and their expectations? These blog entries will help you on the way:

• The Voice Of the Customer process in practice
• Using the Johari Window for your customer strategy
• Difference between VOC and VOB
• What does your customer want?
• What does your customer need?

A Voice Of the Customer without meeting the customer

With the Voice Of the Customer (VOC) technique you try to capture the wants and needs from your customer(s). There are many ways to capture this: interviews, surveys, etc, and also many techniques to process it: the Kano model, Critical-To-Quality, etc

Sometimes it’s not possible to meet, interview and attune with your customer, but you still want to make sure his wishes are covered. In a seminar I attended, the two speakers, Sue and Nancy, described two techniques for this:

1. Create personas

Personas are fictional characters which you use to evaluate the content you create (independent of the medium used). You could for example create a retired citizen persona, a young child persona, a hipster persona, … During the process you can ask yourself: “How would … use this page?”.

Personas can also be used to test the end project. With the Agile technique for example, they can be used in user stories, that is possible scenarios about the application being used.

The BBC is known for testing their website with this method.

2. Create an empathy map

With an empathy map you can try to get inside the head of your customer: what will he see, hear, think, but also what is his pain and gain from your content?

In the picture below you can find an empathy map we created for the communication of a new corporate strategy project. You can find many tutorials and example cases for empathy maps online, but when we created it, I still had the feeling that we weren’t there.

Empathy map

So we added a second circle (area) to the map: what we as team want the customer be seeing, hearing, thinking, etc. The next step is to compare the actual with the desired behavior and you have a gap which you can close with actions. This way you can make your empathy map actionable.

Empathy map with gap

So if you would ask me “Is a Voice Of the Customer is possible without meeting the customer?”, I would say yes.
What do you think?

Find your best fit KPIs

During a KPI workshop we were thinking about which KPIs we could measure. Typical KPIs for measuring the project management triangle (scope, time, budget; aka. project management triple constraints) were easy found. The fourth one, quality, often put in the middle of the triangle, gave us a harder time.

What defines quality?

I always say (or quote?): “Quality is in the eye of the beholder”.

This means: if you want to measure quality, you need consult the one evaluating it. In most cases this will mean you need to consult your customer (VOC), but also your superior or his superior (VOB).

What does “doing good” mean?

And then it hit me: we were having a hard time to find best fit KPIs, because we were doing it wrong. Before we can measure how the project is doing, we first need to find out what “doing good” means for every party.

We need to find our goal for using KPIs. Why are you measuring? Because you want…, you need …, your customer needs, … Once you have defined the goal for measuring, you can start with the how of measuring (ie. which KPIs).

The goal for measuring

Back to quality. Since the customer defines quality, you need to do a Voice Of the Customer and check what is important to him. Will it be timely delivery, zero incidents or a 24/7 service with answer by email in 1 hour?

Next step is to find out what quality means for your organization (Voice Of the Business). What is important for your organization? Do you get carte blanche for servicing your customer in every possible way? Probably not: you will need to balance the needs or the organization versus the needs of the customer. No need to rack your brain over it: just ask. Ask your superior. Check the strategy of your entity.

Use KPIs that inspire

When you did a VOC and VOB survey you know what is important for your customer and your organization. But you are not there yet. I recommend adding a flavor of team motivation to your KPIs. KPIs like cost/income ratio, customer satisfaction, project budget, on-time-in-full, … will not motivate your team. (Remark: I’ve actually seen customer satisfaction as an exception to this when working with a mature, customer focused team.)

Find out what makes your team go the extra mile. What really, truly motivates them?

For example, in an ICT project environment, we typically define KPIs like project budget, number of defects, percentage of reopened defects, customer satisfaction, … But these KPIs will not keep your team awake at night.

In a mature ICT team the goal of the project was to optimize the currently used custom tailored software. They studied the customer’s vision statement and picked up that cost transparency and production costs are important. So they started measuring them.

The costs were measured by the bill that was send each month.

For measuring production costs they went a step deeper and selected KPIs like CPU time, number of database transactions and data traffic in Megabytes. These KPIs are leading for the cost KPI, but even more: these KPIs express how good the IT people are doing their job.

These KPIs were good motivators for the team because it really meant something to them.

Budget or production incidents will not inspire them, but measuring the core aspects of the job they liked did.

Summary

To summarize: when selecting your KPIs:

1. Do a VOC: what is important for my customer?
2. Do a VOB: what is important for my organization?
3. Pick KPIs that motivate your team

Dealing with a customer complaint

During a training I gave, I was suddenly interrupted by a participant with a rather harsh remark:

“What is this all about? I thought we were here for X, but all I can find in the slides is Y! I expected to learn about X”

I was actually startled. A lean as we try to work, we did a Voice Of the Customer (VOC) survey in advance to check which topics they wanted to discuss. We didn’t receive much response, but with the answers received we composed a slide set which was suited for purpose.

The remark triggered me to react rather defensive:

“The main topics and objects were spread way in advance and you could decide for yourself to participate or not. Further, we did a survey in the week before this training and it was possible to add topics to the agenda. You do are in a training about X, you know.”

The remarks of the participant were taken along in the remainder of the training, but it kept me wondering if it was the best approach to address the issue. I will use the benefit of hindsight to reflect on the issue.

Understand

With the remark of the participant I was driven out of my comfort zone. I felt almost personally charged at in front of the group. I actually was attempting to let the participant understand me instead of trying to understand him. So I broke an important rule:

            Seek first to understand, then to be understood. (Steven Covey, habit #5)

While I was studying on the topic of customer intimacy, it became clear to me: I didn’t put myself in the position of the customer. Even if you do a VOC survey in advance, the customer can still be unsatisfied and express his opinion or complaints.

Power to the customer

A customer complaint is actually a very powerful thing to work with, but it isn’t that easy.

The literature learns us:

• Listen. Seek to understand.
• Put yourself in the position of the customer.
• Don’t defend yourself.
• Reformulate the complaint to check if you’re on the same page.
• Give priority to the customer and his complaint.
• Find a solution together.

This fits the nonviolent communication framework very well. We learn there:

• All human beings share the same needs .
• All actions are attempts to meet needs.
• Feelings point to needs being met or unmet.

If we put it in steps:

1. State the observations that you would like to talk about.
2. State the feeling that the observation is triggering in you. Or, guess what the other person is feeling and ask.
3. State the need that is the cause of that feeling. Or, guess the need that caused the feeling in the other person, and ask.
4. Make a concrete request for action to meet the need just identified.

So if we would apply it to the situation, it could have gone something like this:

Participant: “What is this all about? I thought we were here for X, but all I can find in the slides is Y! I expected to learn about X”

Teacher: “I notice that you’re very interested in X. Do I understand you correct that you expected something else?”

Participant: “Yes, I didn’t come for Y, but for X.”

Teacher: “I feel a little uncomfortable because I really tried to adjust the course to the needs of the groups. Which topics and viewpoints do you want to see discussed in group?”

Participant: “I certainly want to know how to apply X in the context of Y.” 

Teacher: “I agree, it looks interesting to me too to take that angle. Is it OK for you that we continue further and take these topics along and apply them where possible?”

Participant: “OK, thanks.”

 

With this approach we combine handling a customer complaint with the lessons learned from the nonviolent communication framework. We’re not pushing the customer away anymore, but we’re trying to understand his needs and make sure they are met. Further, we just defused a potential harmful situation in front of a full class room.

RCA: there’s more meat to this fish

The Root Cause Analysis (RCA) problem solving technique is typically used for studying a specific problem to get to its root causes and to find solutions that solves the real causes and not only the symptoms.

The RCA technique makes use of the Ishikawa or fish bone diagram and this fish bone makes it possible to use as framework for other workshops.

Positive RCA

As said before, the RCA starts from a SMART problem, but you can also use it to brainstorm solutions. Put the wanted result in the head of the fish and use the bones to capture ideas.

I often refer to this technique as the positive analysis.

Brainstorm

We can take the brainstorming one step further: the fish bone is also handy when brainstorming solutions, issues and risks. For example when creating a project charter and you want to identify all possible risks of your project.

Other categories

Why limit yourself to the default categories of process, people, organization, equipment, measurement and procedure? (I actually had to look up the default categories again)

Just use what fits the purpose. If you’re discussing an IT failure in the production environment you can apply for categories like database, front end, infrastructure, network, catalogue and so forth.

Voice Of the Customer survey

You can use the RCA framework even for a VOC survey. At the head of the fish you  put the area you want to evaluate and together with the customer you capture positive and negative remarks for each bone to evaluate.

The advantage of this technique is that you can receive feedback you would never have heard when providing a fixed list of questions. The disadvantage is that the survey (workshop) requires more energy and participation of your customer, and not all customers are willing to participate in such a workshop.

So there’s more to this fish than just getting to the root causes! Why not try it next time?

Using the Johari Window for your customer strategy

The Johari Window is a psychological tool that is used to help people understand their own interpersonal communication and relation with others.

A typical Johari Window exercise would ask the subject to describe their personality and the same for peers of the subject.

The result of the exercise is mapped into 4 areas:

	Known to self	Not know to self
Known to others	Arena	Blind spot
Not known to others	Facade	Unknown

The Johari Window can also be used for giving people feedback during their yearly/quarterly performance review talks or even just after an activity they have participated in.

But we can also use the Johari Window for creating our customer strategy.

Collect customer feedback

The customer feedback can be collected in different ways: surveys, interviews, release evaluations etc.

This feedback can be mapped to the different areas of the Johari Window. Use the feedback for working improving your Arena area and use the feedback to discover your Blind Spot area. Internal assessments of customer interaction can be placed in the Facade Area.

Create customer vision

Since the vision, mission and strategy of an organization should be attuned to the customer, the customer feedback can be used to check if we are doing the right things.

This vision can be used to create a Dream Johari Window. The Dream Johari Window is the projection of what you want to be and how you want to be perceived. It is not the actual situation, but it is suited for setting your targets, your ideal picture.

When used in this context, the Dream Johari Window can be compared with a vision statement: “we see ourselves at…”, “we try to be…”, “we want to accomplish…”, …

An example from PepsiCo:

PepsiCo’s responsibility is to continually improve all aspects of the world in which we operate – environment, social, economic – creating a better tomorrow than today.

Our vision is put into action through programs and a focus on environmental stewardship, activities to benefit society, and a commitment to build shareholder value by making PepsiCo a truly sustainable company.

Create customer strategy

If you have your vision, your ideal picture, and have feedback from your customer about your actual performance, you can create a customer strategy!

Which are the improvement areas? Which do matter most? What is your focus? What is your action plan?

Attuning vision

Next to developing and attuning your strategy, you can also [use the feedback to] attune your vision.

If the customer feedback leads to conflicting interests and conflicting values: is it still the right vision you as organization are willing to pursue? Is the feedback just not in line and can you ignore it? Or do you need to drop the customer from your target customers?

Make every customer count

A team, department, organization has in most, not to say all, cases more than one customer. When you use techniques like the oignon diagram to identify your customers and discuss the results with your peer(s), you will get to know all of your direct customers. You’ll even get to the customers they are representing, your indirect customers.

When you know all your customers, you can attune your Voice Of the Customer strategy to evaluate the opinion and improve your product and service.

But how would you divide your time and attention among all these customers?

The best customers get the most of your time

According to the Pareto principle probably 80% of your profits are made by 20% of your customers. If you would take this into account for customer interaction, evaluation and measurement, it means that you will be spending more time with that 20%.

Customer satisfaction feedback could be attuned and you could weigh in these important customers more.

For example:

Customer	Satisfaction score	Weight (based on eg. sales or profit)	Weighted satisfaction score
Customer ABC	70,00%	80,00%	56,00%
Customer XYZ	20,00%	8,00%	1,60%
Customer DEF	30,00%	12,00%	3,60%
	Total	100,00%	61,20%

From the perspective of profits and finances, this is the most suited customer strategy.

Organizations that follow this strategy are typically finance institutes (private banking), companies that target big market players, niche industries, etc

The disadvantage of this technique is that bad customer satisfaction scores will not make it to your dashboards. In this case 66% (2 of the 3) of the customers is actually very dissatisfied, but you won’t see it in the weighted satisfaction score: they only count for 20% (8 + 12%) of the total based on sales or profit numbers.

If these dissatisfied customers are not dealt with (please read: “helped” or “supported”) your Net Promoter Score will not lie about it.

Each customer is important

Another customer strategy is giving each customer the time and attention they deserve: each customer is equal and is equal important. No matter how much sales and profits they contribute to, your time and attention is divided among all of them.

For example:

Customer	Satisfaction score
Customer ABC	70,00%
Customer XYZ	20,00%
Customer DEF	30,00%
Total	40,00%

From the perspective of sustainability and long-term customer relationships this is the most suited customer strategy.

Organizations that follow this strategy are typically not-for-profit organizations, public health care, hospitals, etc

The disadvantage of this strategy is the fact that the KPIs you use to steer your organization are very sensitive and will immediately react on negative satisfaction scores, no matter what or who the customer is representing.

So how are you dividing your attention?

The Voice Of the Customer process in practice

According to SurveyMethods.com “Voice Of the Customer” means:

The Voice Of the Customer are the needs, wants, expectations, and preferences, both spoken and unspoken, of business’s customers, whether internal or external. 

Examples of customer needs are a fast service, 24/7 support, no down time, 6 liter per 100 km gas usage, …

The customer is central to lean and the focus is set to adding value (and eliminating waste). When you’re in doubt at any point in time, just ask yourself:

Is the customer willing to pay for this?
Am I ready to go to the customer and just say: “Dear, we are spending x hours/euros at …, does that make sense to you?”.

So if you are up for the challenge: how can you start?

The VOC process

The main process flow for doing a VOC goes something like this:

1. Define your value proposition

The value proposition is the reason why you exist as an organization. Which added value does your company bring to the world? What are you adding to the masses? How do you make a difference?

An example:

When you’re running a computer shop, ask: what is your added value? What are you doing different from the other 1001 computer shops in your area? What’s your thing? Where are you good at?

2. Identify your direct and indirect customers

Who are your direct customers? And who are their customers? Don’t stop after the first question. Get to know your customer and make sure you know who is representing.

An example (continued)

When a customer arrives at your shop to buy a computer and asks for a “fast computer”. The first (direct) customer is obvious: he’s standing in front of you. Getting his needs & wishes is an easy one: just ask. But who is he also representing? Maybe his whole family is using the computer or he has an 18-year-old son who plays computer video games whole night long.

3. Collect VOC

Pick your strategy: how are you getting the information from the customer? Are you doing a workshop, a survey, a software release evaluation? There are many tools & techniques available:

• VOC collection: surveys, interviews, complaints, …
• VOC tools: affinity diagrams, Kano, Critical To Quality (CTQ), Quality Function Development (QFD), House Of Quality, …

An example (continued):

Why does your customer need the computer? The same for the family he represents: why do they need the computer? Further, what is important to him? A good service, quick delivery, repairs at home, …? You can get answers by asking him (survey).

If you want to know more about all the customers of your shop, you need to take more surveys and maybe even do some market research.

4. Interpret VOC

Collecting VOC is one thing, but what does it mean? Often the customer uses common statements or uses another vocabulary than you’re used to.

An example (continued):

What does a “fast” computer mean? What does a “good” service mean? What does “quick” delivery mean? Make sure you understand what the customer is asking for. Interpret his needs & wants.  Try to understand what he’s saying. Keep an eye (and ear) open for unexpressed needs and wants.

5. Translate VOC

Customers tend to want everything at the highest possible quality but at the lowest price. This is not possible without sacrificing your company, so you need to make choices. Before you can make choice, be sure that you’re aware of the priorities. For setting priorities tools like Kano analysis and Critical To Quality (CTQ) can be used.

With the Kano analysis must-haves, linear satisfiers and delighters can be identified.

An example (continued):

What is more important: the latest processor chip or a stable system? A new operating system or the old one at a discount price? How can you delight your customer?

How do i now i’m doing the right stuff? To measure is to know!

VOC metrics

Following metrics can be used for checking upon the effectiveness of your VOC actions:

• Customer survey
• Release evaluation
• Sales numbers
• Net Promoter Score
• Number of complains received each month
• Number of compliments received each month
• …

The Voice Of the Customer of Lays Bicky Crisp

As we described in article “Voice Of the Customer (VOC) vs Voice Of the Business (VOB)“, the Voice Of the Customer (VOC) technique can be use for (amongst others) product strategy moves like new markets, product innovation and discontinuation.

When I was watching television earlier this week, I can across a commercial where they took this one step further: the design and development of a new potato chips flavor by the Lays company.

The potato chip industry is one that keeps innovating and that is also very “in your face”. New products come (and disappear) quickly and you can follow trends just by walking around in your local supermarket. Let’s assume that for most new flavors the company uses surveys and interviews early in the process to determine direction, and later in the process a test audience to test the customer’s reaction.

Lays took it one step further in this case, though. For the design of their new potato chip flavor they did not suggest new flavors themselves, no, they asked their customers to do it for them. With a huge marketing campaign the commercials were created not for promoting their product, but for asking their customers to do so. They handed control into the customer’s hands.

When the new flavors were designed, they didn’t just pick one: they launched several after probably some sort of intern selection process. These new flavors were put on the market and they launched the second step of their campaign: attract the customers to vote for the new flavor. Yet again, the customer got to decide which new flavor they liked the most. The campaign had success: only in the Netherlands there were more than 400 000 votes! Lays created a competition among customers with success!

When the public picked their new flavor, which was “Lays Bicky Crisp” for Belgium, the third step of the marketing campaign was launched: promotion of the new flavor and an official thank you message for all those who cooperated, voted and tasted.

I didn’t actively participate in the competition, but the campaign worked for my family too, as were watching television with a fresh bag of “Lays Bicky Crisp” next to us.