Graham Kingma

Graham joined The Shopping Channel in May of 2001. As the Vice-President of Customer Experience, he is responsible for all aspects of Customer Satisfaction for the Rogers Media division. Significant projects include one of Canada 's first voice activated automated ordering systems, a home based agent program and reduction in turnover from 63% to 11% as well as the Call Centre Employer of Choice Gold Certification. Graham is currently focused on a company wide plan to ensure The Shopping Channel is a leader in Customer Experience in Canada. Prior to The Shopping Channel, Graham was responsible for the creation of Grocery Gateway's Customer Response Centre and industry leading Customer Satisfaction initiatives. While building the Customer Care Centre from the ground up, Graham was responsible for establishing and maintaining Customer Satisfaction standards for the entire organization.

Other positions include Director of Client Services for Telespectrum Worldwide with a responsibility for $45 million in client revenue and Laidlaw where he headed up the recycling and confidential shredding divisions for the Greater Toronto Area.

Graham graduated in 1992 with a B.A. in Law.

Starbucks makes some moves

The founder and CEO of Starbucks (Howard Schultz) realized that the organization was headed in the wrong direction. He recognized that the experience that made Starbucks the most popular coffee house in the U.S. was dwindling away.

About a year ago, I wrote about how Mr. Schultz had admitted that the original reasons why customers were coming into their coffee shops were now being ignored The company was slowly commercializing the coffee experience for their customers. Consumer Reports even indicated that McDonald's coffee was better than Starbucks.

In the last few months Mr. Schultz has taken some drastic steps to improve the experience for their loyal customers.

In a bold move on Tuesday February 26th 2008, Starbucks closed all 7,100 stores in the U.S. for a 3 hour training session on what each of the 135,000 associates must do to ensure a great experience for their customers. This is really unheard of in the retail and food services sectors. Mr. Schultz showed some real commitment by telling his Customers we need some time to make things better for you. Dunkin' Donuts took action by offering 99 cent coffees on the day Starbucks was closed.

Starbucks has also launched a quasi-social network website to garner feedback and ideas from their loyal Customer base. They estimated that they would get a few hundred responses in the few days after the launch of the new website. Within the first week they had over 100,000 votes and ideas on what Starbucks should do to improve the experience for their customers.

There are very few companies that have a leader that is comfortable to stand up and admit their failings. It is rare to see a company react with moves that are fairly unprecedented.

We'll have to wait and see whether Mr. Schultz can get his massive organization back on the track he feels they need to be.

Kudos to him and the entire organization for committing to a bold plan and staying the course.

IQPC Customer Feedback Summit

I recently attended the 4th Annual Executive Customer Feedback Summit put on by IQPC in Las Vegas.

The summit was attended by those that are responsible for collecting and analyzing customer feedback as well as how to use that feedback to improve the overall quality of the customer experience. The quality of topics and speakers were exceptional.

We heard from representatives of companies such as JetBlu, Coca-Cola, Ebay, CitiGroup, Harrahs, Zappos, Microsoft and even the NBA’s Seattle SuperSonics among many others.

The common themes from some of the more advanced customer experience companies was to determine the Net Promoter Score of your customers. In its simplest form, taking the results of a 1-10 scale question to their customers of "would you recommend this company to others". Then determining your NPS by doing the following calculation:

Those who scored 9&10's
divided by
Those who scored 0-6's

We also learned how JetBlu used some new data mining technology to search through the 16,000+ e-mails they received in one day in January 2007 when their planes were grounded. The data mining helped them quickly determine what their customers were really saying and ultimately helped them design their Customer Bill of Rights.

Zappos talked about their leading edge customer policies such as free shipping both ways (returns included) and a 365 day return policy. There is a reason they are one of the fastest growing retailers in North America (projected to do over $1 billion in 2008)

A great quote out of the conference was said by David Norton (Senior Vice President, Relationship Marketing at Harrah’s Entertainment).

"The number one driver of dissatisfaction is a lack of respect for your customer's time".

The high price of mail-in rebates

If you have ever gone through the process of sending in a "mail-in rebate" form, you know what level of frustration this can cause.

There is fine print to read, and deadlines to meet. You must remember to include everything that is required, or you will not receive the money. You invest your own time and energy, not to mention the postage stamp. However when you've finally completed all the work, you mail off your forms and expect a cheque back. In most cases you wait 8 weeks at a minimum. 8 weeks in a time when anyone can order almost anything from anywhere and receive it within a week.

I went through this process with a mail-in rebate offer from a major home improvement company. I had to purchase some paint one weekend and decided to go with a particular brand because the nice lady behind the counter suggested that there was a mail-in rebate offer of $20 if I bought 2 cans. Frustrations started when I received a letter back from the mail-in rebate company suggesting I was past the due date. I sent a letter back reminding them that I had sent it in on time and that even the date of their letter was, in fact, within the rebate due date. I received another letter stating that I had not included the correct information. I sent them a letter back reminding them that they had kept my original letter with all the correct information and proof of purchases. I received nothing in response.

I know that retailers "farm out" the mail-in rebate business to third-party fulfillment companies. According to this website the agreements between the two companies have a lot to do with guaranteeing the retailer that no more than a certain percentage of rebates will be mailed in. If there are more actual Customer rebate requests than the guaranteed percentage, the third party company will absorb the refund themselves. This doesn't convince me that these mail-in rebate companies are working in the best interest of the retailer or the Customer.

Retailers rely on the fact that the majority of people do not send in the rebate offer. The retailer gets the sales because of the rebate offer incentive, but is not on the hook for the full rebate amount. We are in an age where Customers are losing their patience and are looking for a retailer that can be open, honest and provide the best experience. There are too many retailers to choose from today. Those that still offer mail-in rebates are putting themselves at risk of losing those Customers in the long run for a quick one-time sale.

Is it worth it? Best Buy has decided it is not. They announced about a year ago that they will phase out all mail-in rebates. They are one of the first major retailers to realize what the rest of us have known for a long time. Mail-in rebates are good for sales in the short term, and bad for business in the long term. The long term plan is to implement the following: when you buy something at Best Buy, the "mail-in rebate" is given to you at the check-out counter. No forms, no proof of purchase requirements, no stamp and no waiting for 3 months to see if an invisible company has deemed your submission to be valid. In the mean time they have made things easier by allowing you to submit a rebate offer online, and track the progress.

If your organization offers mail-in rebates, perhaps it's time to ask your Customers what the cost is to their loyalty?

CBC Rates the Customer Experience

On November 22nd, CBC released a study on their rating of the customer service in 40 of Canada's top companies.

The methodology was interesting, taking into account many of the attributes of what may frustrate a customer on a typical call. I believe they did a reasonably good job at rating the experience from the customer point of view.

The results were also interesting; perhaps mostly because we know most of the companies on the list. Many of us will make assessments based on our own experiences and how they compare the list the CBC released.

There is one area that leads me to want to ignore the findings of this survey. The size of the sample of the survey was too small. They called the businesses once during the day, once during the evening and once during the weekend. They based their entire satisfaction rating on 3 calls. Most of these businesses will receive millions of calls each year. The sample size is simply too small to make an accurate rating on the level of service provided by these organizations.

CBC's rating the ease of navigating the IVR (the touchtone or voice response that answers most calls these days) would be accurate, as this will not change significantly from one call to the next.

The most difficult part of operating a call centre is to provide the same level of service to every customer that calls in every time. It is impossible to achieve when a company reaches a certain size. In a small call centre with 4-10 people, this can be much easier. Everyone talks to each other, training is fast and efficient and most if not all are on the same page with what to say to Customers because they can talk to each other everyday.

When you have a call centre with thousands of people you face real challenges. Just like in any workplace, you have various levels of skill and professionalism. You have new people that have been at the organization for 6 weeks and those that have been at the organization for 10 years.

Your level of satisfaction with a company has everything to do with who you reach when you call. We all hope for a minimum of fast and excellent service and are satisfied when we receive it. Unfortunately this is not realistic in many cases. Even the highest rated call centres achieve satisfaction ratings in the 80% area. That means 20% of Customers are not completely satisfied at any given time.

A secret tip that more and more customers are realizing? If the organization offers a web "chat" function within their customer service offering, try to take advantage of it. In many cases the best and most seasoned representatives are on the other end of that chat window ready to wow you with fast and great service.

A new way to advertise

On November 7th 2007, Mark Zuckerberg announced a "completely new way of advertising online" with Facebook Ads.

Facebook Ads allows organizations to create pages for their brand or product, and integrate into the social graph that is Facebook. People can become friends of the brand or product much the same way they become friends with each other. By aligning yourself with a brand in Facebook, you are telling all your friends that you recommend the brand. We all know the power of recommending a brand in viral marketing.

Focussed advertisements can then be customized to the person and show up on their Facebook home page as news feeds. Facebook has provided tools for marketers to see where their advertisements are and how they are doing within the social network.

Some powerful companies were on hand to assist in launching Facebook Ads including Blockbuster, CBS, Chase, The Coca-Cola Company, Microsoft, Sony Pictures Television.

On the first day over 100,000 new Facebook pages were published by organizations hoping to jump on the bandwagon.

So will this work? Certainly Microsoft thinks so. They recently invested $240 million dollars in Facebook. This seems like a great deal of money for an organization like Facebook since they only generate about $150 million in revenue at this point. The shock is that the $240 million dollars only gets them a 1.6% stake in Facebook. If Microsoft valued the company correctly, then Facebook is worth about $15 billion dollars.

If we follow the math, there are more than 50 million active users on Facebook as of November 2007 (and more than 250,000 new users per day). $15 billion divided by 50 million users is $300 per active Facebook member. I know it's much more complicated than this, but interesting all the same.

How big will this get? It could be very big since Mark Zuckerberg has surrounded himself with market leaders in launching Facebook Ads. Not bad for a guy who's only 23.