Welcome, Andrew, to Team Egyii.

In a nutshell, Andrew brings to clients years of hands on experience in the call centre space and in the learning and development arena, working with major banks, insurance and technology companies, to name a few.

Andrew helps clients with the effective sales conversation and the reinforcement behind it. His focus is on solutions for front line service, sales teams and management:

Frontline sales and acquisition

Frontline customer experience

Leadership and coaching development

For more on Andrew, see Andrew Sidwell and for more on the programmes he has delivered to banking, finance and the tech sector, see the following.

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Customer Experience and Loyalty

The main driver behind customer experience for companies is building and maintaining customer loyalty. Happy, loyal customers tend to buy more products at higher margins with less associated costs (vs the banks’ cost acquisition of new customers). Loyal customers are also great marketing channels for the banks- word of mouth marketing (and therefore referrals) are the best way to attain well-qualified prospects.  

Customer Experience and Loyalty in Banking- 5 Key Factors

“In banking, every 1% increase in loyalty is associated with a 17% higher likelihood of repurchasing. “ (Lariviere, 2008 banking study)

According to Market Force Information Inc, there are 5 contributing factors that enhance the customer experience and therefore loyalty in banking :

Efficiency

Problem Experience

Knowledge

Relevancy

Trust

(Efficiency and Problem Experience are “the critical and necessary factors,” and Knowledge, Relevancy and Trust are “the factors that drive truly loyalty”)

So what is it that bank clients want?

The Market Force studies showed that customers wanted a knowledgeable banker (“value”) who is engaging (“relationship”).  “Being enthusiastic, sincere, and having a good rapport with customers has the highest impact on customer satisfaction, reinforcing the need to build knowledge, relevancy, and trust.” (Why the Bank Customer Experience Matters. Market Force Information 2008) This will help drive loyalty.

Building Trust to Build Loyalty- One Piece to the Customer Experience Puzzle

There is a lot of talk around building trust, but there is very little action. How to build trust and trustworthiness? It is not simple and it takes time.

Trust in banking needs to be inherently absorbed both internally and externally. Internally is within the organization- front office, back office and management. Externally is between the customer facing individuals and the customers. Without both forces at work, trust does not work.

Trusted Advisor Associates uses the Trust Equation, which consists of building trustworthiness:

Credibility

Reliability

Intimacy

Self orientation

So building trust and trustworthiness is one of the key factors in customer experience and therefore customer loyalty. Live it and breathe it to increase your business.

For more information on trust, see: Egyii- trusted advisor edge and Egyii’s partner in crime-Trusted Advisor Associates

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Let’s simplify an overused, sometimes “overcomplicated” term: customer experience.

There are three important drivers of customer experience:

Technology: Technology is the IT systems in place to track and gather the data that is necessary to understand who the client is, the client satisfaction points, their history, Etc. This would be CRM systems, call centre operations and unified communications as examples. Often companies rely too much on this driver- it cannot stand alone.

Design: Design gives us the “look, smell & feel” of customer experience. We leave this to the web designers, interior and industrial designers who enhance the “click,” the bank lobbies and the Apple iPhones.

Connect: This is the interface to the customer and the most difficult of all three, as it involves direct contact with “fickle” humans and requires a behavioural change in the company delivering the experience, to be effective.

Both Technology and Design play an important role in Connect and without Connect, you lose  the overall customer experience.

Customer service, ease of use on the company’s website and face to face interactions are the heart and soul of Connect and customer experience. It is where most companies fail and where they should be focusing,

Overall, if you use Technology, Design and Connect you will deliver great customer experience, which  drives…

word of mouth marketing

loyalty

higher profits

…and more business.

Do or die.

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Some Get it and Some Don’t. Why?

There has been  a lot of recent news and write ups of success (and failures) on retail customer service/experience programmes. 

A few success stories:

Tony Hsieh of Zappos (of course!).

Nordstrom’s department stores.

Wegman’s supermarkets.

Why are some retailers more successful than others and generally more successful than other industries at customer experience?

Because the successful ones focus on and reach out to the customer. The customer is King. The service culture is instilled in the business and comes from top down.

They engage and focus on the client and all aspects around the client.

To back this up, a recent retail survey by the Retail Council of Canada (along with Wharton and Verde) titled “Discovering WOW,”  shows that, of the top five categories of great shopping experiences, the top priority for loyalty and customer experience is ENGAGEMENT.

Statistics and Gaps 

The following statistics and information from a CMO Council  study tells us something….

“38 percent said their companies have no programs in place to track or propagate positive word of mouth among customers.”

“Only 31 percent rate their company’s commitment to customer listening highly.”

“Many companies have are discovering that they have no idea what their clients’ real customer experiences are. ”

It tells us that there are a lot of gaps when it comes to customer experience.

Filling the Gaps: Success in the Insurance Business Through Engagement and Client Focus

One insurance company has filled the gaps and understands why it is important..

Aviva (Norwich Union) are the fifth largest insurance company in the world and the largest in the UK. They deal with “real moments of truth”- floods, fires, accidents, death- and need to get customer experience right.

Aviva’s worldwide mantra is  ”Prosperity, peach of mind, health & wealth. ” They need to live up to this to survive. And during these tough times it is even more important,  since the insurance industry’s reputation  is jaded and there is lack of trust overall.

Darren Cornish, Director Customer Experience, Norwich Union, worked with Beyond Philosophy (a leading customer experience consulting firm in the UK) to help them fill the gaps.

Quoting Mr. Cornish on his work with Beyond Philosophy:  ”The best thing to do before designing any form of startegy is to go out and talk directly to the customers (and to the staff)- the front line.”

He found out that there was a degree of disconnect and it all distilled into two principles- customers want to trust us and want Norwich Union to “do what we say we do. ”

He also discovered that Norwich Union (and the insurance industry in general ) did not seem to demonstrate  that they cared- they were not interested in “me  (the client) as a person”.

Customers were often seen as a number. Customers felt like THEY were the victim. This killed the trust factor.

So what were the first steps? Engage senior management- work it from the top.

He discovered that “Our processes have been designed from the inside for efficiency and not with the customer in mind. The measurement and the incentives in place were damaging the customer experience. The IT systems needed to be shifted towards the customers. Marketing and communications were all about acquisition and not  customer connections.”

Norwich Union went on to build a successful customer experience program through engagement and client focus.

“I am a broken record when it comes to saying, ‘We have to focus on the consumer.’…I don’t think the answers are just in the numbers. You have to get out and look.” - A.G. Lafley, former CEO, Procter & Gamble

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

The Egyii team recently attended a financial services briefing in Singapore, hosted by Gartner, one of the global leaders in research and analysis.

The following is some of the advice offered to the Singapore and global banking community.

(Highlighted in Bold Italics are quotes from the analysts. The rest  are comments from Team Egyii)

Technology can help but it’s not the be all to end all. CRM systems, online support, Etc are important, but facing the client (face to face), is more important.

Banks going back to basics- focus on core business away from the peripherals. Too many complicated programmes were rolled out over the years. This caused too many problems and contributed to the  collapse. Keep it simple moving ahead.

Be more inclusive with clients as they have lost your trust. Remove yourself from siloed thinking and involve the customer in more decisions.

Best innovations come in time of bust- don’t stifle innovation. If you wait you will be left behind- you will never catch up. Be  bold- try new things, otherwise someone else will beat you to it.

Life goes on (during the crisis) so understand what your customers are doing.  Don’t put everything to a halt as business continues- keep client focused.

Internet usage and popularity in Singapore facts and stats: Facebook ranks 4^th, users spend avg 23.2 mins. DBS ranks 17^th, users spend avg. 4.1 mins. Times are changing.  How do you engage and listen to the voice of  your clients in these times?

Customers  say- “It’s my money, so listen to me.” Retailers get it & respond. Banks don’t. How do you respond to your clients needs?

Banks need to get more advice from peer groups. The web community is one way…face to face is another.

Know me (the client). Know my life. Retailers know it & get it. Banks don’t.” retailers engage well with clients why don’t financial organizations?

The client is pleading…”Please. I need a helping hand. Help.” They are calling for you- respond please.

How many helpful and meaningful  messages have been sent to customers during the crisis about what is really happening (and what to do about it)? 0- zero.” (from research of 25 major banks) Banks need to communicate better, not just from a broad sense but from a personal sense.

Customer experience is about building trust and understanding the entire customer experience process. Don’t segment it- look at the whole experience and the different ways of delivering it.

Customers want help. The financial organizations are not there- they are too internally focused. How do you focus on the client when he is crying for help?

Your customers have interests outside of banking and insurance. Look beyond the immediate financial services relationship. Look at building personal relationship where you can…

In conclusion, times are tough but you must forge on. Don’t sit back- take advantage of the situation as you will benefit long term. Keep it simple and focused on the client..

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Trust.

It remains a hot issue and will for a while.

With that, we at Egyii will be doing a series of interviews and Podcasts with the leaders in Trust, in anticipation of our August announcement on our new programme on Trust.

The second of the series is Charles H. Green, one of the founding fathers of the “trust movement ” and founder/CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates. He is the author of Trust Based Selling and co-author of The Trusted Advisor. His expertise is in trusted relationships in business. For more on Charlie, click here.

Here is Part 2 (a continuation of Part 1).

The following is transcribed from a recorded session.

Trip Allen: Moving on to 2006, the theme of your second book called “Trust Based Selling,” encompasses two words: sales and trust.

These terms together have a bad reputation and don’t mix well with the business world, a little like oil and water.  Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

Charlie Green:  Well, you are exactly right and I was completely conscious of that when I wrote it that way. In fact one major firm told me if you write a book with “sales” in the title we are not buying it.  The phenomena you just mentioned is that strong, and I wrote that way any way because I wanted to play off the tension.

I think the word sales or selling is a four letter word.  We all have these negative feelings about it, and the whole sales function in many ways has gotten a bad name, too.

What fascinated me about is that sales is where the person and the business come together. When a company buys from one and sells to another, with the exception of reverse online auctions, there are people doing “the deal,” and that is where institutions come together, where they connect. That is what fascinated me – how do people behave when there is serious money at stake and they are doing business? That is the essence of commercial relationship; commerce, in the old sense of the word.

I am happy with the choice I made, because I think it intrigues people. They say “how can you put those two together?” Well, you examine why they don’t fit, and it turns out to be a very interesting way of looking at it.

In a nutshell, there is nothing that sells better than being trusted – period. That’s the power of trust in the commercial relationship. I just find it fascinating.

Trip Allen:  Charlie, what’s the biggest thing you see wrong with selling today? You just mentioned that the reputation of a salesperson is bad, but what else do you see out there? What’s happening?

Charlie Green:  Well, it’s a great question because 10 to 15 years ago the biggest problem was salespeople selling and really not understanding the customer very well.  I think we have come to have a different problem and that is, let me call it the “mechanisation” of selling or the overdoing of “process reengineering” and the overuse of sales management systems.

Because of that we have broken the personal relationship and we have taken that “commercial” personal relationship (that I mentioned) and broken into a thousand mechanistic, metrics based, measurable behaviour based process. We have taken something that is, ought to be and can be very personal and have essentially depersonalised it. We have gotten to a level of detail where too often metrics have taken over from what the metrics were supposed to be measuring. People have therefore long ago “lost the forest for the trees” and have gotten deep in sequentially linked behaviours, so there is no relationship left.

I would actually say that is the biggest problem in selling today. We have lost the long term interpersonal relationship component of it. Every business I can think of out there still has an enormous amount of room for an increase in the level of relationships, and again, nothing is still better than that.

Trip Allen:  Great Charlie. One thing I am going to pull specifically from the book and one of the many activities I use – and I believe is very powerful,  is called “selling by doing and not telling.”

Traditionally salespeople told clients about the products, the features, the benefits etc. Salespeople have pretty much controlled the conversation. Can you elaborate a little bit on “selling by doing not telling?”

Charlie Green: Yes, and thank you for raising that. I agree with you, that is one of the powerful ideas in the book. If you think of it this way, with “selling by doing and not telling,” the more complicated the product, the more intangible the service, the longer relationship,  the more difficult  the whole sales process is, the less it is likely to be about snap decision and product qualities and so forth.

It’s complicated.

What you don’t want if you are buying a jet engine or if you are buying an audit or buying a brand advertising campaign, is to “out the expert the expert.”  That is an endless game that you will never win as a client or a customer.

What you really want to do is to be able to sleep at the night knowing you made the right decision about the person you deal with. And that is not going to come through PowerPoint presentations, Etc.; people are human beings and not persuaded of the trustworthiness of another human being by overused tools such as PowerPoint decks.  We’d like to think they are, and they will tell us they are, but they are not.

We are all human beings and profoundly make trust judgments based on much more of a “gut feel,” emotional feelings through connectivity and emotional feelings of safety. And that’s simply the way it is. I think we sort of rationalize it with all the logic and the data because, after all, we are supposed to be able to justify things.

That’s all true. But “selling by doing” basically says, instead of telling somebody about all the other past clients and all the wonderful things you have done, leave that behind and “just do it.” Deal with the person in front of you and deal with their issues, with their concerns and bring to them all the wonderful things and experiences you can deliver for them.

Just to simplify, I like to say it is like going out on a blind date with somebody. If they were to talk about the last seventeen people they went out with, you would be bored and offended.

But if on the other hand, what if your date is interesting, innovative and engaging and instead they ask you questions about you, we love that. We love it when people make the topic and conversation about us.

We need to take our expertise and apply it in real time to the problem at hand as it affects the person sitting in front of us. They don’t want to hear our resume or our history. They want to hear what our resume means for them.  That’s what “selling by doing and not telling” is all about.

Trip Allen: Great. Thank you for that. The next question has to do a bit with “selling by doing a not selling,” but it is all about collaboration. That is another key point you have in your book “Trust Based Selling.” How does collaboration improves trust and thereby improve the relationship?

Charlie Green: Well collaboration is one of the important elements I outlined in the book and it goes well beyond selling actually, although we will focus on the selling aspect only.

The other three key elements on the list are transparency, focus on the well being of the client (for sake of client and not just for us) and the tendency to look at the medium to long term (rather than just the short term).

Collaboration may be just the most important of the four elements. In any case, what collaboration means is a fundamental mindset. It says “I am not in this for me and dealing with you as an object. We are in this together. We are in for the sake of however long this relationship is going to be, working together for the greater outcome for both of us, but mainly for you, the client.”

So any decision we make has to be good one for both of us. We both have to be involved in it. We can’t keep too many secrets from each other. And if you begin thinking that way, you will begin behaving that way. You’ll start sharing more information with your customer, you’ll start feeling more free to ask them questions. After all, you have to know their answers in order to be collaborative, and frankly it even begins in the selling process. 

In those businesses that have process of using proposals, my “radical” suggestion is to write the next proposal, sitting next to the client in their offices. Instead of saying “great discussion” or “I’ll get back to you with the proposal later this week,” say “let’s book the conference room again and let’s work on this together. I know it is a proposal and, we may not get the job, I understand that. But if we may do this, you will have, at the end of the day, the best proposal possible from the combination of the two of us. By the way I suggest doing that with other potential vendors also. You will learn so much more about working with people if you begin working with them.’

That is an example of the power of collaboration.

End of Part 2. To be continued…

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Independent Research Firm Forrester cites Egyii in latest “Hot Banking Tech Companies to Watch in 2009: Q2 Update” report.

Senior Analyst and author, Ellen Carney, is part of  the technology industry strategy team and focuses on Product Management and Marketing professionals in banking, insurance and securities industry.

Egyii’s role in customer experience programmes played an important part of this recognition.

For more, see Forrester’ “Hot Banking tech Companies….”

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Banks just don’t get customer experience. Why?

  Hotels get it.

  Umpqua Bank in Oregon, USA gets it. But only partially…

Bank clients clearly are not happy. Banks continue to operate in the same manner.

So what are they missing?

The true client relationship. A genuine, authentic interface. Bankers are too busy pushing products, too pre-occupied with short term bank and personal results. They are too focused on the bank and the bank’s operations.

CRM, processes and the bank’s physical environment all help- but they don’t go far enough.

Hoteliers focus on the client - not the company.

That is the difference.

I spoke with the head of Customer Experience at one of the major Singapore banks the other day and she said that the banks’ staff ARE too focused on THE BANK. They are are tied up with too many regulations, compliance, rules, Etc.

Banks need to start focusing more on the personal side of the client, the relationship (the real experience),  to really add value and capture the audience.

Customer focus. Customer value. Customer Experience.

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore.

 Scenario

In today’s world, everyone is looking for the right “fix” for their business. Some examples of the fixes are:

The release of new products to fit the ‘mould” for today

Making price adjustments

Re-skilling the workforce to face today’s scenario

Or doing absolutely nothing…

All of these options have short to long term effects. So which option do we choose to make the most impact? Well doing absolutely nothing certainly stands on it own, so a combination of the others does makes the most sense.

But, if you were to prioritize, which one should be emphasized? I believe it should be your people, your front line. As your greatest asset, your client facing people can make the most memorable short, medium and long term impact in businesses.

So, from here on in, we will focus on your people.

This then leads to two big questions. Do we look at “short term” solutions and possibly sacrifice long term results? Or do we look at “medium to long term solutions” and sacrifice short term results?

These questions are not necessary. Why? Let’s build solutions for short, medium and long term results.

The Ultimate Problem

The problem is making the right decision in order to make the highest impact, and too many companies take the wrong perspective and make the wrong decision. What people think is the right decision for the solution is actually the short term, quick fix solution. Why are people choosing this route? Because it is the “easiest” option to implement and it is one that typically can be measured, so it appeases both management and shareholders as it (supposedly) brings in results now.

How are these employee based solutions implemented? Through:

Product and technical training

A new sales process or re-enforcement of an old process

Setting financial goals and measuring the behavioral targets to meet those goals (often done by micro managing)

But is the the best for the client? The one who is suffering the most? The one who actually pays the bills?

No.

Suggested Solutions

Financial organizations are “talking” trust, customer experience, customer centricity, client relationships and loyalty as the key solutions for the client, and therefore the solutions to many of the business problems. But very little is actually being done in these areas. It is all a lot of talk – blah blah blah marketing. Why? Because these require “soft skills” and are not “sexy.” Most businesses reach for “sexy” measurable fixes.

But because they are not “sexy” and mot measured, does this mean that you don’t get results?

No.

Let’s look at the facts. And let’s look at it holistically – in other words a programme that brings results across the  board.

Firstly, I suggest we take a realistic approach and look at how to deliver the right results. As Anthony Tjan, MD of The Cue Ball Group,  states “We too often focus on the desired financial performance target, rather than the inputs that drive those numbers…financial performance is a result, a by-product, a consequence of something else.”  Anthony  has written a very interesting approach to business results in his recent article in Harvard Business Publishing “The Fallacy of Financial Metrics.”

And now, let’s look at a few of the short, medium and long term results from implementing a few people focused programmes..

Loyalty. Loyalty programmes, which are a by product of client realtionships and customer expereince programmes, are very difficult to measure. The means of measurement would be similar to measuring soft skills training, in other words look at the numbers, the results. But numbers can be affected by too many variables (market swings, new product releases,  a change of the weather, Etc).

Frederick Reichold, who has made his entire 30+ year career studying customer loyalty, has measured loyalty and states in his book “The Ultimate Question,” that “A 5 percent increase in retention can equal to a twenty-five to one hundred percent increase in profitability.” Wow. What if the financial organizations had retianed more clients?

As for trust, trust is a hot topic now, from Harvard Business Review to Steven MR Covey. How do you measure trust? Again, very difficult but similar to how you would measure soft skills training and loyalty.

I recently asked Charles H. Green, of Trusted Advisor Associates and co-author of The Trusted Advisor (and a leader in the filed of trust and business) about how to respond to the constant request for short term solutions for immediate results. He responded by saying ” Short term results come from long term management. The best short term performance comes not from managing short term, but managing long term.” Enough said.

So, in summary, let’s re-adjust our attitude and look at employee/client focused programmes that can and do give a holistic solution- short, medium and long term. Although they may not be sexy, and can’t be measured with hard numbers, your greatest asset, your client facing people, can make the most memorable short, medium and long term impact in businesses by delivering upon these programmes. 

Let’s look at why the current economic fiasco happened in the first place. Wasn’t it a result of the push for immediate results? And what are we going to do, repeat what we have just done?

So forget the measurement. Focus on the client. Go with your gut.

For an abbreviated version, please see and download the following: Sizing Up Short to Long Term…

 Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Today I saw a press release advertising an online course in Customer Experience Management, emphasising its ability to show learners how to measure a set of key aspects of the customer experience.

To me the very concept of customer experience management conjours up images of organisations somehow trying to control the experience the customer has with them. It reminds me of CRM software and operational processes and metrics applied to every aspect of the idea.

Of course, it’s great if an organisation can improve the way its customers experience the process of buying and using their product or service,  but this is a very different thing from a group of executives trying to manage such a thing.

What it comes down to is the way people behave, both in carrying out tasks in the background that support the customer experience and in interacting with customers. Yes, it’ important to have efficient systems and processes. But too often executives focus on these because they are quantifiable and easy to manage, to the exclusion of creating positive change in their people.

This is the hard part. Much easier to install a new Customer Experience Management system. From my 20 years experience of helping people at work learn and change, it seems that three conditions are necessary for this to work:

We must become acutely aware of the need for change

We must look honestly at our existing behavioural patterns and the results they are producing, and feel inspired to give our customers a great experience. This inspiration can come from different sources depending on the nature of the business and its leaders.

We must know how to change

We must be given tools that enable us to change both our thinking and our behaviour in our own special way. Scripted recipes for all to follow will never work. When our individual map of the world is in line with the idea of giving a great experience to our customers, then the behaviour will follow with relative ease.

We must be given the chance to change

Expecting habitual thoughts and behaviours to change overnight is unrealistic. This takes time. We need to be given a plan where we make simple, small changes over a specified time period as we install our new patterns. This means we need reminding and supporting.

So my plea to organisations our there talking about managing their customer experience – help your people first. Help them to be the very best they can be and then let them loose. And stop measuring them!

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore