How close are your customers and front-line teams to the power in your organisation?
This week, the good lady Finance Director took me into town to replace both our company mobiles. Arriving home a couple of hours later, I unboxed my new iPhone, turned it on and immediately it spotted my old phone, asked if I that was the one that I was intending to replace, and when I said yes, it proceeded to set itself up, all by itself.
And I mean, to completely set itself up, with every app, every setting, every contact, file and folder, to the extent that, half an hour later when it seemed to have finished, I switched off the old one, swapped the SIM over, and found I had the exact same phone but with a bigger, un-scratched screen, better camera, more memory, and a battery that lasts about fifty times longer than the old one.
I can only describe the whole process as “insanely” easy. We expected it would be simple, because, well, it’s Apple. But the experience itself went far beyond our expectations.
Undoubtedly though, the most bizarre part of the day was the bit I missed out of the story – the bit between arriving in town and getting home with the phone. The guy in the O2 shop did his best to help but it turned out he wasn’t allowed to let me pay for the phones up-front, even though the website said I could.
Undeterred, he called the business hotline for me, convinced they could do the transaction over the phone. Unfortunately, they weren’t allowed to either, but helpfully suggested that if I called in at an O2 shop, they could sell me one there. You couldn’t make it up.
In the end, our gallant assistant sent us to John Lewis to buy our phones and had SIM-only contracts waiting for us when we got back to the O2 store. Despite half an hour of his best efforts on their behalf, O2 ended up with a few hundred quid of revenue spread over the next couple of years, while John Lewis got a two grand walk-in sale that took five minutes.
There’s insanely easy, and there’s just plain insane.
It’s highly improbable that our conscientious colleague is the only person in an O2 store to have faced this issue. It’s utterly implausible that we’re the only ones who ended up buying handsets elsewhere. And it’s inconceivable that any senior manager in O2 can have experienced this process and decided it was fit for purpose.
The only conclusion is that O2 has an “experience schism”: those that see the customer experience have no power to change it, and those with the power to change it, have no occasion to experience it. Perhaps O2 can live with their business-customer journey being broken; maybe the B2C market is a greater focus; but schisms like this often point to a deeper malaise in a business.
An O2 product manager created this situation; someone senior signed it off; stores implemented it and have seen the impact; the service line has heard customers’ frustrations; and yet the fault remains. Nobody is acting on the feedback from the frontline. Nobody is out there, walking in the customer’s shoes, who can make change happen as a result. Nobody is making sure that every customer gets an insanely good experience.
Perhaps that’s why O2’s owner, Telefonica is the eighth most successful company in its market, while Apple is pretty much the most successful company in any market.
How close are your customers and front-line teams to the power in your organisation? How wide is your experience schism? How simple is it for your customers to get exactly what they need, when they need it? And when was the last time you properly listened to, and walked in the shoes of, each of the different types of customer your business serves?