Seven Rules For Superior Customer Satisfaction

Transcript

Berthold Trenkel:Thank you, Martin. I know I'm the last one now until you hit the bar, so I'll try to stay in time. When Martin contacted me 2 months ago to talk about 7 rules of superior client satisfaction, I said yes. I had no idea. 7. First, I was wrong. It's not 7. When I finished, I realized I had 9. So forgive me for this. Everything else in the presentation is true. I want to talk one second quickly about my background. 11 years McKinsey, which I would classify as give smart answers, tell other people what to do, but you're never in charge of actually doing it. And now I've changed. I've been now 11 years with CWT. I was running first the region. I'm running today operations, travel services. So that's 14,000 people. There's lots of opportunities to make mistakes. And when you talk about— you call it client satisfaction— for me, it's about, we as a TMC, I see ourselves as a B2B2C business, because I know if we can make the traveler happy, The travel manager is going to also be happy. So I'm going to pretty much ignore the travel manager. I'm going to talk mostly about traveler and traveler experience. And I want to start with a real experience because travel is fun. And no one talks about customer satisfaction or anything when things go right because there's not much to talk about. So I want to talk about this trip. About 1.5 years ago, I went to Peru. Peru is pretty much the furthest place away from Singapore you can go because you can actually fly these days faster to Chile, so Santiago de Chile, or to Buenos Aires than to Peru. Peru takes you about 36 hours door-to-door. So I left here in Singapore, I checked in, took my luggage off in Charles de Gaulle, changed terminals, went to the other big airline that operates out of Paris, Checked in again, went to the lounge, and I had a six-hour layover. And just a week ago, they sent me a promotional email and said, "Hey, we have this fantastic lounge, La Première, and you can either use this lounge, pay three hundred euros, which I would never do, or you could use three thousand miles." So I went to the normal business class lounge and said, "Okay, hey, you have this deal, and can I go to La Première? And I've got three thousand miles." The first answer was, no, monsieur, you can pay €300. I said, no, no, you just sent me that email. So it took them about 30 minutes to call around, figure out, actually, you can do this. And they said, okay, fine, monsieur, monsieur, just wait, just wait here, here. We'll have someone pick you up and bring you to the lounge. Okay, I had to wait 2 hours. It took them 2 hours from when I entered the lounge until someone finally came and Because that lounge is in another part of the airport, so they had to take me out. We had to walk down, get into the car. We drive around the airport, get into that other lounge. Okay, I finally made it. So I paid my 30,000 miles, and experience was good. Man, that that lounge is really something. I must say, if you've seen business class lounges, first class lounges around the world, I'm not talking about American first class lounges because they are not lounges. If you've seen the really good ones, whether that's in Hong Kong or the local ones here, this is really good. Good. It was definitely worth 3,000 miles. And since I had a total of 6-hour layover, which already was reduced to 4 hours, I enjoyed it. And I saw lots of people just coming in and out. And I spent my 4 hours eating through all the food that was there, and all the drinks, and everything they had, enjoyed, and made the maximum out of it. I had to take a shower, meaning, hey, I've been already 12, 13 hours on the road. So finally, they pick you up. This is really nice. This is like James Bond. You go down, they drive you again. Straight to the gate and so on. I go into the plane. I sit down. By that time, jet lag's already hitting me, and I'm starting to kind of slowly fall asleep. Suddenly, someone comes, keeps tapping on my shoulder. Monsieur, Monsieur, Monsieur Trinkelt. Say okay. What is it? We did not manage to load your luggage. Okay. So where is it? In the airport. In the airport. I say, okay, well, in plain French, you have no clue where it is. And I just checked it in. And they said, no problem, no problem. When you arrive there, we'll inform them in Lima and we'll have everything ready. So, okay, great. So you're sending me another 13 hours flying from Paris to Lima, and I already know I'm going to land there and I have no luggage. Arrived there, you can already guess what the answer is. Of course, it was like this. There was really no luggage. And then I went to the lost and found and said, well, I've been informed that my luggage, etc., and you already know. And said, no, of course you don't know. Okay, here we go. Just fill in the whole luggage explanation, etc. So went to the hotel, and of course I had What I was wearing. That's it. I wasn't reckoning that they don't manage to get my luggage there. Of course, when I had filled in lost luggage, I thought, because I'm an operations guy, I like to test how other people react when you have service issues, because it's all about the recovery. So I started to fill in the online form on the website. I sent it off. But then I thought, like, gee, I normally hated to escalate, but on this one, It's Monday night. I'm here until Friday, and then on Friday I'm leaving. I really gotta get my luggage. So I escalated through our supplier team to see what they can do. And I keep checking like every whatever, morning, evening, midday, the website where they have my luggage, and no status, no status. Tuesday went by, Wednesday went by, still no status. I didn't get any answer on my— Your email. Service request I put in Thursday, nothing, but then they called and said, we found it, we found it, it's on its way, but there's still nothing in the system. It's landing tonight, Thursday night, and then Friday morning they delivered it to the hotel, which was the day when I was checking out. So the problem was I had printed the boarding pass including the luggage tag, and the gate agent Packed it in a way that you couldn't see it. It was just folded the wrong way. It was all there. So 4 days the luggage was sitting in Paris. No one bothered to look at the luggage tag that was there, that was on the back, and get it out. So things like that can happen. Well, at the end it finished nice and I got my luggage and it enabled me to do this. Thank you, Berthold. It's really worth it. It was— a lot of my camera equipment was in there, so I really needed my backpack. But let's talk about what really matters when we talk about customer satisfaction, etc. And there are now 9 rules that I'm going to quickly walk you through. The first one is, what is the journey? And you heard this morning the person from Jetstar talking about the journeys that they're mapping out. And when you look at journeys, there's like, depending on what industry you're in, if you're, for example, in banking or telco, etc., there are a lot of journeys about like onboarding a client, transacting with the client, and then kind of have a purchase or repurchase journey. And when we talk about travel, CWT, we think about those steps in terms of the pre-travel, during the travel, and the post-travel. travel, and of course our service mostly involves the pre-travel portion. Usually during travel you're mostly on your own, and on the post-travel there isn't that much. Of course things can go wrong, like my luggage, and I usually refuse to take responsibility at CWT for that. That's part of the airline to make sure the luggage gets to the right place. So I mainly focused, of course, as a TMC on the pre, and then of course sometimes in the middle when we have to provide emergency services. Why does the customer satisfaction matter, and why do the journeys matter? This is a study done by my ex-colleagues from McKinsey who kind of mapped out the profitability of companies in terms of their revenue growth, which is usually what drives profits, because if you have nice revenue growth versus customer satisfaction, and there's a lot of good and strong correlation. I'll come later back to another measure and another study that was done by another consultancy That essentially implies the same. So the journeys matter and you have to figure out what the journeys are. CWT, we think like if you look at the details in terms of journey, what are all the steps, what you have to get right or what you can do wrong. In other words, where you can screw up. And there's a lot of things you can screw up. Not all of them. And we'll talk about that in a moment. Are equally important. Because some of them are deadly, some of them are kind of annoying when they happen, but they don't kill you. So when you talk first about customer satisfaction, it's really about mapping out the journeys and then deciding which of those journeys actually matter. So that's the number one. Number 2 is it's about measuring. And with the measuring comes focus. So having a metric— and a lot of people, they talk customer satisfaction is like, OK, well, let's measure on a 1 to 10 scale. Yeah. And I'm saying, what does it mean? Is 7 good? You want 7.5, 8, 9? I mean, higher is better. Everyone gets that. But what's actually the difference between a 7.5, 8, or an 8.5? Now there's an answer to that. It actually looks, looks different. Let me first look at the distribution. So this is a typical distribution that you would have that is about worth 8.0. So that's how it typically looks like. You have a lot of people very happy, and then you have the tail hopefully that looks very, very tiny. But that doesn't mean much, the distribution. And there was some research done in the mid-2000s by Fred Reichheld which came up with that term around the Net Promoter Score. And the idea was like, hey, you got to figure out which people love you and Versus which people hate you. And he simplified that concept of the voting on a 1 to 10 scale to, what are the people that are actually promoting you? And promoting is, in this case, defined as those that give you a 9 and a 10. Those are kind of the avid believers in your brand, and they go out and they spread the positive word, versus the detractors, which he defined as a 1 to 6. Right. So the long end of that scale goes from 1 to 6. And the NPS, the Net Promoter Score, is simply defined as subtract the promoters minus the detractors. Just to give you some calibration on what numbers do I get if I do that. If you're in the banking industry, somewhere at 20 to 30 NPS is pretty good. If you're a credit card company, the best credit card companies are at 40, the best airline sits maybe at 50, the best hotel sits at 60. All the numbers I gave you are for the US. That's very important. I'll come to that in a second. Now, you can correlate the NPS with the satisfaction. What it essentially does is that number that to you doesn't speak, whether it's a 7, 7.5, 8, suddenly spreads out much over a much wider scale if you look on an NPS. So suddenly your 7.5 is kind of a 10 NPS versus, what is it, 8.5, 9 suddenly means you're sitting in the 60, 70, 80% NPS. So NPS is a much tougher, harder measure because it kind of starts to stretch what really makes makes a difference. But the NPS is influenced by things, and I like this study. This was in 2012. Gallup came out with this, and it made the headlines here: Singapore is the least emotional country in the world. What they actually meant: Singaporeans experience less emotions over the course of their day, and Filipinos have just more. So in other words, what I'm saying is When you talk about customer satisfaction, you're talking about an emotional feeling. You also have to correlate it with where are you measuring it. So you cannot take a US survey and then say, okay, this is what's good in the US and I'll apply the same in Singapore or China. I'll show you some data. I've taken a client at CWT that is serviced in one service configuration Around the world. So this is truly comparable, and that's why you don't see China, because obviously China would already be a different configuration, and everyone knows why, because of TravelSky. And there are a few other countries that also are not even— these countries are serviced exactly the same way, same customer, same GDS, same desktop, everything same, same. Satisfaction? Different. So behind it is really the emotional factor, how people react even though you provide them the same product. I could show you the same for online for this client, which obviously you can expect they're on one online booking tool, and it would be also different, which again, there it's even more obvious because really that tool is the same and it doesn't matter whether you log in and you're sitting in Chicago or Or whether you try to make a booking out of Sydney, it's the same tool. So even you provide the same service, the satisfaction can differ. I've been studying over a long time— this is CWT's data— what I call mind the gap. Offline is always better than online. Some probably has to do with the human factor. All of us like to call an agent and say, hey, Help me, I've got something to do and can't book it. But some of it has to do with think how these tools look like. This is what today is kind of— and I could have picked any tool. In this case, it's KDS, how like an online experience for a hotel looks like when you want to book. And then you look at the same experience on a B2C when you look on a website like Booking.com. Yeah. And there are differences because B2B, the OBT still thinks the corporation is a captive customer. You've deployed the tool, everyone needs to book versus Booking.com. You need to close that deal. So the experience until the end, until the hotel is booked, needs to be good, needs to be fast because you as a buyer can abort at any second. You as a corporate traveler, you're stuck. Now, for me, the good news is if you actually move on, and this is, this is the tool obviously that we are promoting at CWT, the mobile experience is starting to get better. And I would argue the mobile experience is even smarter than the B2C experience. And the main reason is we're applying what I call kind of the Amazon principle. Yeah. To the booking experience, if you go someplace, I use the intelligence of all colleagues that have traveled to the same place to give you the hotels that you need because your colleagues stayed there. So same like Amazon, I buy this book and they tell me 60% of other people have bought another book. Oh, that's interesting. Let me have a look. The same problem as hotel. I never go to a city and say, "Oh, let me look at where I'm going to." stay. When you travel for corporate, it's about offices here, where are the hotels around this, because certainly, back to example, if I go to Paris, I'm not going to stay on the other side of the city and spend 60 minutes on the périphérique in a traffic jam. So that's why I think ultimately, whether you hear all the data around people already booking 60%, 70% on mobile, it's going to go all there, and the experience with some smarts behind it is actually better. What we do— and I still remind you, we're in the measurement phase— we have, of course, the whole system where we take all your transactional data, we put it through, we survey the traveler. We have to filter out companies, we have to filter out travelers. This is where corporate travel becomes complicated. And then, of course, we have to aggregate all the data, and we have to follow up, and we also have to report on all the data. So ultimately, if you want to do anything around customer satisfaction, you've got to have one metric. Just pick whatever you like and stick to it. And you need to build it out that you communicate, communicate so that everyone knows how they're doing, how they're doing relative to others around the world, how they're doing across clients, et cetera. Third topic is about speed. And speed today comes in many, many different flavors. This one was a very, very sad event, MH370. I'm, of course, as a head of operations on all these alerts. Every time anything happens, whether it was— you heard it this morning— the Radisson Blu hostage situation in Mali or anything else, usually my phone rings, I get an SMS, et cetera. This one was a situation— You know where I saw it first? On Facebook. I had friends that live in Malaysia, and they started posting something before it even hit the headlines. So the world is changing. The world is becoming faster. Not necessarily the regular news channels anymore where you're going to potentially pick up something. It's going to come through other channels. And the speed is immense. Think about what has happened with online loan applications. In the past, and many banks probably still operate with paper, you have to go, you have to and you have to do all this. Depending on what it is, you can get things online. You can get them within minutes, whether it's like opening an account or whether it's like software. The days where a new software release is like a year out is gone, meaning software, even big software releases like Microsoft or Adobe, they're pushing out releases often in weekly, monthly cycles. And it's really real. Yeah. I mean, I look at this one. Facebook Messenger. They're publishing version 48. So you can see how they've picked up the pace. They're pushing every week a new release. One of the reasons they could do that, they decoupled it from the normal Facebook app because otherwise they have to coordinate. The Facebook app is still running on biweekly release cycles. Messenger is running now on weekly. It's a completely separate business. Decoupled, the 2 apps talk to each other, but they're pumping it out every week. They don't tell us what the new features are. They just put it out and it uploads on your phone. Of course, you have this like, hey, same-day delivery, Amazon Prime. Not available unfortunately in Singapore, otherwise I would be a big customer, but I hope one day they will come here. Now, if you go to Seattle, they do this Prime Now, 1 hour. And I hope it's not like the one guy who made the other day the headline because he called the concierge service because he urgently needed some condoms. But within 1 hour. And guess what the most ordered product? Alcohol. That's what Prime Now delivers. You of course have others like Uber. In some of the cities they bring you now food, and what's pretty interesting If you actually go online, how did they find it? It tells you exactly on the city map where they deliver to and what they deliver. And it's not about kind of pre-ordering the day before what you want. They must have some of those cars on the road with some of the food preheated, whatever, because I heard stories that within like less than 10 minutes, someone pulls up. Free bikes. That's true. And, but you need to come curbside to pick it up. They do not deliver it, of course, into high-rises where it probably takes 10 minutes to go up the escalator. So things are getting faster, and this is an interesting study. There's, of course, lots of metrics out there when you look at the internet. A company, Kissmetrics, they're measuring how quickly people will check out from a website and say, this is too slow. I go on a website, if I don't get a response within 1, 2 seconds, you're out. I think this is, again, one of the disconnects where B2B is way too slow. Anyone who's using a corporate booking tool, If you get a screen refresh in 10 seconds back, it's good. If they respond at all, it's actually great. So there's a huge difference because like I said, if you go on Expedia or Booking.com, if this thing wouldn't come back within 1, 2 seconds, you'd be like, gee, try something else. And the same goes, of course, look at the right side. What the expectations are for mobile. They're as good or crazier. So optimizing mobile applications for speed and really measuring how fast a site responds is crucial. So we're now down to every second counts. So speed is extremely important when it comes to customer satisfaction. So for me, it's about, hey, speed up or shave out. There is nothing in between anymore, and whether we like it or not, that's that's how customer satisfaction does. Fourth one for me is context. Context is actually something very interesting. Have you ever called your bank or credit card company and they ask you please enter your credit card number? Da da da da da da da da da. And then you talk to someone and say oh sorry I have to connect you. Okay okay fine connect you and say could you tell me your credit card number? I just entered it. What happened? Happens a lot. Happened to me with that company. Ordered something online. A week later, I get a survey. Could you please tell us how it was and what you bought? And I'm like, excuse me? I've ordered online from you and you're asking me what I've bought? Don't do things like that. You've got to have context. So when we measure, we have maximum context. We know who you were, we know what you've bought, you know what you've booked, you know when you've booked. We have every single detail. I'm not gonna ask you, did you book online and which OVT was it? No, you have all the information. Use all that information so that when you have to do a postmortem, if something went wrong, someone's not happy, you exactly know where and why and what. I think there's a great example Big data is a huge buzzword, but there are some real applications out there. I normally hate, hate kind of these buzzwords, but I think this one is one of the smartest applications that has been around. This is a local example, the MRT system. They're optimizing their schedule, how they deploy their trains, based on us. That's going to the train station and carrying a mobile phone. Because with the mobile phone, Singtel knows where you are, where you're getting on the train, where you're getting off the train, what time you stand at the station, how long you stand at the station. And that data, Singtel and the MRT system, they're collaborating and they're optimizing that way the flow of the trains. I think that's brilliant. That's truly leveraging context because they don't ask us, they just monitor, but they actually put it to good use. And it doesn't matter whether it was Joe Adams or Susie Smith who was carrying that mobile phone, but I can optimize the flow. Now another thing they found, and I'm just waiting for that to happen, they also see people that are making the wrong connections, taking the wrong train, connecting wrongly, etc., and losing time. I hope one day you're going to tell them, hey, you shouldn't change at that station, you should change at that station. You've got to get faster home, faster to home. So capture the context. Never ask someone for information that you already have. Store it, embed it, and then leverage the hell out of it. So I have all the data on every OBT, can tell you how good they're performing and what their issues are, etc. And we're sharing that with the OBTs. 5th one has to do with pain points. What are actually the pain points in the customer service you want to solve? At CWT, we've built what we call the hierarchy of horrors. These are the things that can go wrong and how bad are they. And of course, pretty much the worst one is missed ticket. Traveler goes to the airport, no ticket. That is the worst one. A lot of the other things, not a big deal, not such a big deal. So focus on those because those are the ones that are really painful and have your metrics on those. So you can map them out again like a heat map to what are the ones you want to work on, etc. So find those pain points and then focus on the ones that really matter because not everything when it comes to customer satisfaction matters. Number 6, that was for me an interesting one, breakpoints. In your performance, there are breakpoints. Now let me show you some examples. This was exactly my lost luggage. Can you read this? We are in the process of studying it and will answer you within 10 days. I just flew to Lima, my luggage is lost, I'm leaving 4 days later, and you're going to take 10 days to tell me? What are you going to do about it? F. F, fail. Doesn't make any sense. Don't send me an email like this telling me you're going to respond to me. I'm home by that time. So figure out what the breakpoints are, because you've got to hit that breakpoint. And I'll give you a great example. This is another study. How long are people going to wait in line for the lunch? This is like on cruise ships. When are you gonna get a revolt because food's moving too slow versus how fast you need to process people through? And you can see how the customer satisfaction starts to go off the cliff. So figure out where those breakpoints are because if you're faster and there's no queue, satisfaction doesn't really improve. But if you go off that cliff, it's a really hard landing, like my 10 days. This one's a great example. Back to understand breakpoints and what matters. One of my friends, he's the head of operations for the MBS. MBS, of course, is also measuring customer satisfaction. And you know what drives customer satisfaction at the MBS? 2 things— the infinity pool and how long you have to wait at the check-in. Yeah. Infinity pool? Slam dunk, it's there. Don't need to do anything, everyone's gonna enjoy it if you stay at the hotel. So it's all about understanding exactly what's the breakpoint, how long can people wait when they have to check in, and how do you actually move people through. So they have now cameras that are measuring how long it takes for you, because of course you can't ask them, okay, so Johnny, okay, nice to have you here, how long have you been waiting? No. Yeah. You have to motion track people in the lobby so that you actually know how long people are waiting, because you need to make sure you optimize your processes. That's what breakpoints are for. So figure out what they are, and then really use them smartly, because you can overinvest. And overinvestment in servers is not good. It's just cost. Connectivity. So this is a great one. Here's a local story. I went the other day to this famous company downtown called CPF. And you go in, okay, counter 1 to 4, estimated wait time 98 minutes. I'm like, oh my God. So I went back to the office and I came later after 98 minutes and made it to the counter. What I wanted was something really trivial. I'm going to talk about connectivity. Yes. I was Singapore PR before. They have an account. I have an account with CPF from that period. I'm not PR anymore, and I wanted to get access to my account. And you know what CPF told me? Oh, you need a letter from ICA telling that you're not PR. And I'm like, but you can see I'm not paying into CPF, which means I'm not PR, or I'm not a Singaporean, or why can't you access my record telling, seeing that I'm not PR? No. You need to go to ICA. Gee, okay, so ICA. So what do I need to do? I call down and they're like, oh no, you have to come down. It's like, can you just send me a letter? All I'm doing, I'm going there and all you send me a letter. So it took me a while to convince them. My point being is like, look, hey, don't make me jump around. You have all the information. Can you not just share them? I mean, this is Singapore. I'm sure you know everything about me. There's no secrets in this place. And I compare that with— this is my hometown. You can see this real countryside. This is the city hall of my hometown. You can go there, even— this is Germany, which is really not known for great service. They are open on Saturdays. There's one counter. You can just meet them, and you can do any government business you have. And they have it. I'm sure they have different computer systems. So my main point is, hey, Change the system, connect them. If you can't change the freaking system, change the process. Don't make people jump through hoops because your systems don't talk to each other. Number 8, profit. This is an interesting one. Everyone is equal, but some are more equal. Not true. We're not equal. Everyone understands that. If you pay more, you get more. But then there are those. When you go off in many airports, Jesus Christ, these queues. This is actually Germany if you can read it. I think it is because it says in German. Everyone gets treated the same way. There are ways of treating people different, and I think the best one is this one here. If there's one advantage here in Singapore, it's that one door. From curbside taxi through check-in, boarding pass through your immigration, you can do in less than 120 seconds. Smart investments because of course they use it for the people who actually pay, but then they also reward those people which are not equal because they have status. It's unfortunately not as nice everywhere in the world, but I think this is one of the damn smartest investments. And to say, hey, we optimize for profit, we optimize for loyalty, and we reward loyalty. Because it doesn't cost them more to have you take that other immigration channel, which they probably have to put in commercially in place for the true first-class customers. So not everyone is equal. Differentiate. Your service can differentiate and figure out who matters. I'll come to the last one now. Recovery. Shit happens. Yeah. Things go wrong. Like I said, I got 14,000 people. I'm sure not every phone conversation is perfect. Not everything is always well done. And I'm sorry, I'm using another example. I don't know whether you've seen this one the other day. I didn't fully understand it either until someone explained that Sachin Tendulkar, or whatever he's pronounced— Martin, can you explain who the guy is? The best cricketer in the world. The best cricket player in the world. His family lost luggage and BA just treated him like this is another guy. And you look at the number of retweets that this thing got, immediately it should— the warning flags should have gone up and said, okay, this is not your ordinary traveler. You got to take this thing offline, not on social media, and we got to get it under control. And that is the problem when you do recovery now with social media, at least in a pure B2C context, things can really spin out of control. And I'm lucky that I'm working in B2B, that no one's going to go out and it's like, hey, you got this problem. But recovery is really, really key. Get it right, because this thing made the headlines, it's going everywhere, and probably half— I don't know, a few Indians probably here in the room— probably Indians can understand this. They had a laugh, and I'm sure the press there had a field day. And no marketing dollar can fix this. So have a recovery process and respond quick so they actually can recover and get the situation under control. And of course, in this case, social media was deadly for that poor BA person. So mistakes can happen. Let's be clear. Even computer systems can have glitches and fail, but in particular people can make mistakes, so recover and recover quickly. That's it. That's the 9 lessons, not the 7 lessons or rules for superior customer satisfaction. Well, in my case, I would more say this is traveler satisfaction, because happy travelers, happy travel managers. Thank you. Thank you, Berthold.

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