Customer Experience and Channel Shift Public Sector Forums – Channel Shift Camp North June 2014 Andrew White

Aims □ Summarise discussion of customer experience and channel shift in session at Channel Shift Camp North 5 June 2014 □ Discussion of planned work, and where customer experience and channel shift might overlap over the next few years □ Suggestions for low cost/no-cost actions, more demanding changes □ Complement slides and discussion provoked by Lynley Meyers, Netcall Product Marketing Manager    Tel □ My contact details are at the end of the slides

Addressing barriers to channel shift Our session followed on from Lynley’s discussion of channel shift, channel slide, channel shove, and covered the following as big ideas or themes: □ Audience concerns – barriers to good channel Shift □ Customer experience factors (from Nunwood) □ Digging deeper  Empathy  Time and Effort  Managing expectations □ Summary

Some context – Leeds City Council Customer Access Strategy themes □ Our strategy on a page is on the next slide □ I’m assuming most authorities have something similar □ Our ambitions are to improve the customer experience and save money

Customer experience and good channel shift Current barriers include: □ Adoption – how do we know what channels customers will adopt □ Shove factor – how much to shove – can we be brutal and what is the impact □ Lack of clear objectives – when deciding to channel shift – need to clarify expectations □ Service design – how to gain maximum success from any service offered □  Internal culture – how to increase success of adoption and roll out □ Consistent process – is required to be successful – how to ensure process can be automated

Customer experience and good channel shift More barriers: □ Staff buy in to the reasons for the need to create the shift □ Blockers from stakeholders – who does not want it to succeed? □ Technological sustainability - will the technology adopted last into the future and will it integrate? □ Funds to make the changes □ Accessibility for the customers – will everyone’s needs be supported? □ Who will be excluded? □  When do you start and when do you stop?

Customer experience ‘test’ □ Good channel shift should not happen at the expense of good (or ‘good enough’) customer experiences □ Customer experience can provide a useful test of whether your channel shift plans are likely to succeed  Win for customers  Win for staff  Win for budget

Customer experience model □ Leeds are looking at Nunwood model □ More at customer-experience-excellence-centre/ customer-experience-excellence-centre/ □ Other models are available…

What it involvesActions PERSONALISATION Using individualised attention to drive an emotional connection Personalisation involves demonstrating that you understand the customer’s specific needs and circumstances and will adapt the experience accordingly. Use of name, individualised attention, knowledge of preferences and past interactions all add up to an experience that feels personal. It makes the customer feel important and valued and begins to build an emotional connection. Not discussed at Channel Shift Camp, you could: Implement a clear and consistent approach to gathering customer insight Have a unique and consistent view of the customer Ensure fair and equal access is key to our performance framework. INTEGRITY Being trustworthy and engendering trust Trust is an outcome of consistent organisational behaviour that demonstrates trustworthiness. There are trust building events where organisations have the need to publicly react to a difficult situation, and trust building moments where individual actions by staff add up to create trust in the organisation as a whole. Behavioural economics teaches us that we trust people we like. The ability to build rapport is therefore critical in creating trust. Not discussed at Channel Shift Camp, you could: Publish annual measurable corporate customer service standards, developed with customers themselves. Publish satisfaction levels against those standards. Where appropriate, give control to the community to deliver services…

What it involvesActions EXPECTATION Managing, meeting and exceeding customer expectations Customers have needs and they also have expectations about how these needs will be delivered. Customer satisfaction is the difference between expectation and actual delivery. Understanding, delivering and, if possible,- exceeding expectations is a key skill of great organisations. Some organisations are able to make statements of clear intent that set expectations (e.g. “never knowingly undersold”), others set the expectation accurately (“delivery in 48 hours”). And then delight the customer when they exceed it. Channel Shift Camp suggestions: Meet the needs of special customers Promise, process, technology to deliver? Or are responses different by geography or department as interpreted by staff Can our staff provide a consistency of approach - quality framework? Or are processes different, as processes differ it makes it increasingly hard to meet expectations as the output from one department will be different to another department (or the same department in a different location) How can we standardise output? There is always political influence in local government Can we signpost the location of information or what to expect form a service more clearly on the website Can we ensure we take proactive control? TIME AND EFFORT Minimising customer effort and creating frictionless processes Customers are time poor and increasingly are looking for instant gratification. Removing unnecessary obstacles, impediments and bureaucracy to enable the customer to achieve their objectives quickly and easily have been shown to increase loyalty. Many companies are discovering how to use time as a source of competitive advantage. Channel Shift Camp suggestions: Frictionless process – can we offer an easy to use process? Do we supply service from 9 to 5 when most customers are at work? Do we reuse information we request form them (remember me) Do we make decision answers easy to find on our website Is all the top stuff (Pareto of top 20%) easy to find quickly and do we provide relevant quality information Do we allow completion on the same channel or do customers have to change channel Do we take the outside in view or do we think FOR the customer

What it involvesActions RESOLUTION Turning a poor experience into a great one. Customer recovery is highly important. Even with the best processes and procedures things will go wrong. Great companies have a process that not only puts the customer back in the position they should have been in as rapidly as possible, but they also make the customer feel really good about the experience. A sincere apology and acting with urgency are two crucial elements of successful resolution. Not discussed at Channel Shift Camp, you could: Put customer satisfaction at the heart of our performance management framework. Customer satisfaction at the heart of our commissioning framework. Resolution at the first point of contact. EMPATHY Achieving an understanding of the customer’s circumstances to drive deep rapport. Empathy is the art of letting the customer know that you can genuinely understand what it is like to be in their shoes. Empathy creating behaviours are key to establishing a strong relationship and involve the telling of personal stories that reflect back to the customer how you felt when in similar circumstances. Then going the extra step because you understand how they feel. Channel Shift Camp suggestions: Relationship building Telling stories – using the story to create the empathy Developing profiles to understand the different challenges of customers

Have we met our aims? Customer experience a helpful test or check – □ Is your channel shift engagement or discussion driven by a focus on customer experience? □ Usefulness of challenge events to draw in customer experience. □ Customer experience model may help you to cover key factors (inputs, outputs, outcomes) and to consider no-cost and low- cost channel shift, as well as major changes. □ I’m happy to share, where possible, our story, as it takes place. □