Focus on the wow factor and the rest will follow
OPINION: In the late 1990s I was lucky enough to be part of the leadership team at AMP.
After a lengthy slumber, the ‘‘sleeping giant’’ of the Australasian mutual funds industry was waking up and seeking to show it could play tough. It recruited pugnacious exUnited States Marine George Trumbull to be global chief executive and set itself on a course to demutualise and list.
AMP in New Zealand had been in a particularly deep slumber at both management and governance level. Trumbull selected a team of enfant terribles to turn the ship around and get it in shape to list.
Rodney Cook, an irreverent gay actuary with a brain the size of a planet came in as chief executive, backed up by Geordie brawler and Indonesian scholar Peter Carr as deputy.
They bought in market anarchist Roger Greville to run the funds management business, and together they did manage to get the ship back on course, albeit with a bit of collateral damage along the way.
The cardies and roman sandals got thrown out and were replaced by chinos, brogues and even a few red Doc Martens.
Cook had a passion for putting the customer at the centre of every transaction.
He developed a philosophy that he called the ‘‘total customer experience’’, an operating model he fine tuned while running AMP in New Zealand, then put in place at Pearl Assurance and then Prudential Financial Services in the United Kingdom.
Cook was a big-brand man and rolled out the ‘‘blue sky’’ television commercials featuring nothing but seasonal weather on a landscape and Al Hunter vocals.
He was also a passionate customer-support advocate, requiring all senior managers to spend their first two weeks staffing a phone in the call centre.
He answered on the second ring and he wasn't a VOIP telematic machine. That's the first wow.
One of his mantras was ‘‘great brands wins customers slowly, bad customer service loses them fast’’.
And he challenged every customer support person to give the customer at least three ‘‘wows’’ in each contact. Things that make a person lean back and say ‘‘wow – that was pretty cool’’.
These words came back to me this week as I had an interesting customer support experience.
Wearing my professional director hat, I am a client of Diligent Boardbooks.
Diligent is a cloud-based service that moves all board papers, documents and mark-ups into a secure portal; normally accessed as an app on a iPad. I use it for four different boards and apart from being better for the planet and more secure, it’s incredibly convenient. Unless, of course, your daughter takes the iPad to school camp for a week.
In which case you are bit stuffed for the board meeting in four days’ time.
Last Sunday about 9pm this led me to using Diligent’s customer service phone line for the first time in the three years I have been a client.
From the outside it didn’t look good – they have customer service centres in Singapore, America and the UK.
I had visions of Spark’s pleasant but hopeless call centre in the Philippines. Lovely people but they tend just to blame everything on Chorus.
However, Paul, the bloke who answered the phone, was based in Christchurch.
He answered on the second ring and he wasn’t a VOIP telematic machine. That’s the first wow.
Paul was casual but professional, funny but not a ham, and calm as a pool of clear water. I had no account number or code to give, but through a series of four challenge questions he worked out that I was who I said I was.
Better yet, he reckoned he could get me live in their web app in two minutes. Second wow.
Being a bit of a geek, my laptop, browser and operating system are all a bit left of field. But Paul walked me through download, setup and navigation in three shakes of a lamb’s back end.
Better than all of that, he left me feeling that I was not a complete putz. Third wow.
Then about two hours later I got a net promoter score email from them. Not a particular wow for me, but great for them to be able to track customer engagement.
The ‘‘wow’’ school of thought isn’t restricted to customer service. It’s also a pretty handy rule of thumb for people selling experiences.
I recently spent a couple of days with a former chief executive of AJ Hacket Bungie.
She told me they valued every ‘‘wow’’ at $10 so that if a person paid $150 for a jump, they would have had 15 different ‘‘wow’’ experiences, from the first person that greeted them to the great photograph at the end.
That created an end result of walking away feeling they had had full value.
It’s an interesting metric to apply more broadly, be it telco, power company or bank.
How many wows have you had today?
❚ Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is an e-commerce manager and professional director. His Twitter handle is @modsta and he’s now got his iPad back.