What business needs to learn from the Billy Ray Harris Story

You may have heard the interview on the radio this morning with Sam Laidlaw, Chief Executive of Centrica, in which he defends the 11% increase in profits in the residential arm of British Gas.  If not, and you want to listen to it, it's here.  The criticism levelled at Centrica, in this interview and more broadly in the press today, is that this level of profits illustrates that the 6% rise in prices to UK customers during the last year was unnecessary, and unfair given the squeeze in disposable income than many people are experiencing.

Mr Laidlaw defends the increase and explains why increased profits are important.  During the interview he refers to (admittedly in a slightly different context) it being about a balance and whether you or I agree with his explanations and believe that the balance is right, it's clear that many are questionning it directly as a result of the size of the increase.

And it's yet another example of disquiet about the morality of big business and indeed about society in general.  You just have to think back over the last few years to numerous examples: PPI mis-selling, LIBOR fixing, MP's expenses, MP's cash for questions, NoTW phone hacking, the BBC Jimmy Saville affair, Mid-Staff NHS Trust and of course just last week the Chris Huhne's belated guilty plea for perverting the course of justice over a 10 year old driving offence - examples that I could think of off the top of my head in a couple of minutes, and all of which have damaged the level of trust people have in an institution and the engagement they feel with it.

In direct contrast to the negative feelings associated with such stories I came across the story of Billy Ray Harris earlier this week.  Billy Ray is the homeless man who has become the centre of a global fundraising campaign after returning a platinum and diamond engagement ring to a bride to be who accidentally dropped it in the cup he was using to collect coins.

After realising it was gone she rushed back to the scene the next day and was overjoyed when Harris had kept the ring and returned it to her.  The lady's fianceé Bill Krejci, then set up an online fundraising page to raise money to reward Billy Ray's honesty and people from around the world, warmed by the story, have since been contributing.  When I checked a few minutes ago over $164,000 had been donated.

The act of honesty has been described as a 'miracle' by Bill.  And yet, Harris himself simply said: "I thank the good Lord for his blessing that I do still have some character".

You can see a video about the story here.  It truly is a heart-warming tale and one that has struck a chord with thousands of people, from all over the world.  Over 7,000 people have taken the trouble to donate on the GiveForward page that Bill set up.

Whilst all of that is true I do wonder why it has become world news.  I don't want to appear cynical (and I'm as touched by the story as anyone else) but I'm sure there are many more people out there who have done similar things and have the same degree of honesty and morality as Billy Ray Harris.  Somehow I doubt this would have been such big news in times past.  What makes is so special right now is that it's happened at a time when people around the world have become conditioned to expect dishonesty but still desperately want honesty and integrity from people and organisations they want to trust and respect.

Honesty, integrity and doing what's right - the challenge for people and the organisations they are a part of and the opportunity.

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/timhadfield
Twitter: @accordengage
Telephone: (0044) 07906650019

Valentines Day - How your people can genuinely love your customers

It's St. Valentines day, so a blog about love almost seemed obligatory.

There are various theories on the origins of Valentine's Day, but the most popular goes back to the time of the Roman Empire when in 270AD the emperor Claudius II didn't want soldiers to marry because he believed single men made better warriors.  Bishop Valentine went against his orders and performed secret marriage ceremonies.  When Claudius found out Valentine was first jailed and then executed for his disobedience.  Prior to his execution of February 14th he wrote a love note to the jailor's daughter, signing it "From your Valentine".  Awwww.

It's now a well established tradition of course to express your love for someone special on this day.  And it's big business.  It's celebrated in numerous countries around the world, from the US to Italy, Canada to Denmark, Mexico to France and the UK to Australia.  Around 150 million cards and gifts will be given in the US today!  And over £500m will be spent in the UK.

The love theme has also been used by businesses who have used Valentine's day to exhort their people to "love your customer".  But really - is that likely?  Is the relationship employees have with their customers ever strong enough?  Love is a feeling that is deep, profound, passionate, having a strong impact and influence on us, so is it realistic to ask employees to manufacture those feelings towards customers?  I don't think so.

On the other hand perhaps the problem is the meaning we attach to the word.  What if we made it mean something slightly different?  What if, for example we adopt the various meanings that the ancient Greeks had for love?

They described four types of love: agápe, éros, philia and storgé.

• Agápe described unconditional love, a general affection for someone else, a sense of holding them in high regard.  It was described by some as benevolent love and Christians used it to describe the love that God has for people.
• Éros was love in the sense of being in love with someone.  It was passionate love with sensual desire and longing (although not necessarily sexual in nature).  Plato suggested that: "Although éros is initially felt for a person, with contemplation it becomes an appreciation of the beauty within that person, or even becomes appreciation of beauty itself."
• Philia is the love that exists between friends.  It requires virtue, equality and familiarity.  It's the love that leads to a bond between people who share the enjoyment of common interests and activities.
• Storgé is natural affection, an enduring fondness like that felt between family members or sometimes perhaps between others who find themselves together and develop affection which lasts over time.

These words are still used by Greeks to attach greater meaning and add greater clarity about the nature of love felt between people.

If we adopt these definitions of love then perhaps employees really could love their customers.  Could you agápe and maybe over time philia your customers?

LinedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/timhadfield

Twitter: @accordengage

Telephone: (0044) 07906650019

What we could all learn about customer experience from the mountain men

Last Saturday we celebrated my daughter's tenth birthday by having a party for her at Wolf Mountain in Wolverhampton.  For the uninitiated, the folk at Wolf Mountain describe it as an 'indoor climbing and caving centre' although they seem to offer far more activities, both indoors and outdoors, than that.  This might seem like an unusual party venue for young girls - but my daughter is quite adventurous and likes to try new and different activities.

The party was a big success.  The girls climbed a variety of climbing walls - and loved the guide from the centre who was there to support them and look after their safety.  After completing their climbing they moved on to archery and once again enjoyed the relationship with their guide who kept them safe, helped them to hit the target (surprisingly regularly actually) and did it in a way that meant they had a constant smile on their faces.  The same guide then sat with them whilst they had party food in one of the 'party rooms' at the venue.

As I said, the event was a big success.  All the kids went home happy and smiling.  Not too much to ask I know, but it was nevertheless a surprise to me.

You see the guys at Wolf Mountain are obviously skilled at the activities they lead and they're clearly knowledgeable and experienced.  You need only look at them to see it, they look like they've been around, they've done everything you'll be doing - and far more.  They even looked as you would expect mountaineers and cavers to look.  A bit worn and well.....weathered.  And because of that it was a bit of surprise when the experience we had was .......excellent.

It was all about their focus on the experience their customers had whilst they were there.  They encouraged parents and other family members to also 'have a go', free of charge.  I did by the way!  They communicated in a way that made you realise that the activities difficult and made parents and children alike feel good about what they achieved.  And if there was anything customers couldn't do it was ok because of how tough it is. They were infectiously enthusiastic. And they cleverly involved other, more experienced customers (Wolf Mountain seems to get lots of customers who go there regularly) to interact with the new ones, offer their help and add further enthusiasm.  They didn't watch the clock, actually they took a bit longer than anticipated to ensure that everyone was able to participate fully and succeed.  And they invited people back.

It really was a fantastic experience and we're already planning our next visit as a family.

The experience reinforced my view on three things:

1. Make sure that people who are customer facing are enthusiastic about the product or service.  It's a given that they're knowledgeable about it, but does their experience of it go beyond that?  Do they use it?  And is their enthusiasm for it obvious?
2. Design the experience around the customer, not the organisation.  Better to take a little longer and achieve the desired experience than cut it short, and fail.
3. It's about the experience the customer has, not the service the business offers.  The product at Wolf Mountain is good and the service is ok too, but the value added bits that make the overall experience brilliant are about how the people there make you feel.

Replicate Wolf Mountain somewhere else and it would be good.  But it wouldn't necessarily be excellent, because as great businesses know, the brilliance comes from people.

To anyone within travelling distance of Wolverhampton - try it out, I recommend it!

LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/timhadfield
Twitter: @accordengage
Telephone: 0044 07906650019

The value of good deeds in a naughty world

I did a lot of reading during the Christmas and New Year break and some of the stuff I read really stimulated my thinking.  One article particularly resonated with me - and I wanted to share it with you in my first post of 2013. 

It was entitled 'Why kindness can help businesses grow' and was essentially about Henrietta Lovell, a UK based entrepreneur who is gaining quite a reputation as she grows her business: the Rare Tea Company.  It tells the story of how, after an experience of drinking a wonderful tea in Hong Kong, she began to question the quality of the big brand teas available in UK supermarkets and realised that the tea she had fallen for in Hong Kong was simply not available in the UK.

She travelled to tea-growing places in China and Africa, and "fell in love with tea and the people who grew it."  And as a result she started her Rare Tea Company to sell some of the enticing teas she bought straight from the growers in exotic places.

Much of the rest of the article details how, as a result of extraordinary acts of kindness, she has been able to rapidly grow the Rare Tea Company brand and her own reputation.

The author of the article, Peter Day, then goes on to comment on the "business of kindness", as he calls it.  He writes:
"Why shouldn't this be another way of doing business, far removed from the brash competitiveness that businesses think they are all about? There is, surely, far more to running a company than the preposterous cut-throat competition of the TV challenge show, The Apprentice.

Why can't businesses be run with a generosity of spirit and a lot of goodwill? Henrietta Lovell says it can be done, but hers may be just a good deed in a naughty world.
I would like to think not. It may be the start of a trend. Companies have got away with nominal good behaviour for years. They do what their lawyers and their marketing people tell them they are obligated to do, and nothing much more.

As the banking crisis demonstrated, they did what they could get away with, driven by what they maintained was the interests of their shareholders, and the bosses revelling in the status symbol of their bonuses.

Now blinking in the glare of publicity - businesses may be waking up to other, more deep-seated, obligations. Good people may in the end decide they do not want to work for inhuman or merely operationally effective companies. They will want more from work than pay and promotion. They will want to be nice. They will want the organisations they work for to be kind.

That is what customers are discovering they want, too. They want to deal with businesses that work in decent ways, that reflect their own feelings about the world."

There's no doubt in my mind that he's right.  This trend has been underway for some time already, and I'm convinced it's going to accelerate in the coming years.  It's the big opportunity for businesses that respond to it, and a huge risk for those that don't.

Peter Day goes on to write: "It would be nice to think that the business of kindness will not be captured by professional marketeers and become just another device for paying lip service to how people think business ought to behave.

It would be nice to be un-cynical about it. It would be nice to think that kindness is a way of doing business that might infect lots of big business rather than just a few pioneers."

I guess we'll see.....

The full article can be found here: Why kindness can help businesses grow

LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/timhadfield

Twitter: @accordengage
Telephone: 0044 07906650019

Big banks - customers complain every seven seconds!

According to figures released over the weekend a record 2.2 million customers complained to Britain’s biggest banks during the first six months of this year.  Or, put another way, a customer complained every seven seconds!

The banks were deluged with complaints about mis-sold insurance, investments and mortgages - pretty much the things that are core to their business.

This prompted Justin Modray of the financial website CandidMoney to comment: "Banks seem to have a total disregard for their customers.  They might project a friendly face, but behind the scenes they're pressuring staff to hit ambitious sales targets which inevitably leads to mis-selling, a key cause for complaint."

It all paints a sorry picture, reinforced further by the LIBOR scandal - which is likely to escalate as investigations continue.

And yet the banks claim that the problems are exceptions and that customers are at the heart of their culture.  It just doesn't add up.

So the question is whether Boards and Executives don't understand their culture and how it influences the behaviours of their people or they understand it but they really do have a disregard for their customers.  My view is they genuinely want to have positive and mutually beneficial relationships with them but this is undermined by two things.  Firstly, short term thinking prevails, resulting in an unhealthy focus on the achievement of targets - at all costs.  And secondly, that they don't understand in sufficient detail how this focus translates into processes, behaviours and ways of working that damage the relationship and produce complaints.

Fundamental change is still required.  But a pre-requisite for that is a deep understanding of the current culture, its causes and its implications.

LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/timhadfield
Twitter: @accordengage
Telephone: 0044 07906650019

Integrity crisis? Employees moral compass and the #customerexperience

I was talking to my father in law last night and he was telling me about an experience he's had over the last few days with Homeserve, a company who position themselves as Britain's home emergency and repair experts. He isn't very 'handy' around the house so decided years ago that it was worthwhile arranging some cover so that if ever he needed help he could get it quickly and easily. So ten years ago he arranged this service with Homeserve and has paid them an annual premium of £300 ever since.

He hasn't needed to use it before but for the first time earlier this week had a problem that he needed their help with. He told me that whilst loading the dishwasher he felt a drip of water on the back of his neck and looking up, saw water dripping out of a light fitting. His inspection upstairs quickly revealed that the toilet was leaking where the trap goes through the floorboards. Unsure about what to do he rang Homeserve and they very helpfully explained how he could stop the problem from becoming any worse by turning off the stop valve. They then, again very helpfully, said that they'd arrange for a plumber to call to find the cause of the leak and put it right. He told me that at this point he was impressed and was congratulating himself on how wise he'd been to arrange the cover.

The next day the plumber called and looked at the toilet. His conclusion was ......that it would be easier to "accidentally crack the toilet bowl" and claim on his home insurance to get it replaced. Note: claim on his home insurance and not on his Homeserve cover. My father in law asked whether the colour and shape of any replacement would match perfectly with the bath and sink, and was then told that the insurance company would pay for everything to be replaced if an exact match couldn't be found.

Dubious, even with his limited knowledge of DIY, about whether this made sense my father in law thanked the man and said he'd think about it. He then called a friend, who had a friend etc who was a plumber and this new contractor visited later to take a look. His response was that it could be easily fixed and he'sactually done the work this morning for a total of £60. The outcome is that when the repair is done my father in law intends to call Homeserve to cancel the cover. I suspect that what happened was the result of a 'rogue' individual rather than a policy at Homeserve but they will obviously suffer the loss of a long term and profitable customer.

There seem to be more and more stories in the press and on TV at the moment about the dishonesty of workers and the impact of their actions on the customer relationship. It's not hard to find stories of cowboy builders, of dishonest garages, cheating plumbers and the like. And there have also been well publicised examples of bigger issues - mis-sold payment protection insurance being a prime example. I was also told of a problem at a bank in which insurance salesmen had been achieving more sales (and therefore more commission) when selling car insurance by quoting using a cheap postcode area and then changing the postcode on the live system when the policy was set up. As the quoting system didn't link to the live system it was a scam they ran to reduce premiums and thereby sell more policies. And Homeserve itself has recently been embroiled in a miss-selling scandal with suggestions that staff were selling cover without fully explaining what the customer was paying, or the package they were buying.

Set this alongside the research that Essex Univeristy did recently which concluded that Britain may be facing a future 'integrity crisis' and it's clear that the UK is experiencing a decline in moral standards. The research illustrated that lying, adultery, drug taking, breaking the speed limit, drink-driving, and handling stolen goods are all seen as more acceptable than they were at the turn of the century. The author of the report said "It appears Britons are growing more and more tolerant of low level dishonesty and less inclined to sanction activities which would have been heavily frowned on in the past.” As an aside, isn't this also the reason that there's such an issue currently with bogus claims for whiplash following non-existent car crashes? If no-one was responding to the unsolicted phone calls and text messages the companies operating the scams would stop. People must be willing to submit dishonest claims because the problem seems to be growing rather than going away?

This integrity crisis should be a consideration for organisations when thinking about their customer experience delivery. Businesses are going to need to create an organisational culture which compensates for the likelihood that the decline in integrity amongst the population as a whole will be reflected also in its employees. It's going to become more important for their culture to make any form of dishonesty unacceptable. Integrity must become a core part of it, reflected in policies and procedures, in recruitment and career progression, in reward and recognition, in product development and pricing, in sales practices, in decision making processes and in behaviours - it has to be woven through the fabric of the organisation. It's critical for delivery of a customer experience that will ultimately mean that customers trust and love the brand.

LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/timhadfield

Twitter: @accordengage

Telephone: (0044) 07906 650019