#SDNC11 Service Design Network, San Francisco
Damian Kernahan, protopartners and Erik Roscam Abbing, zilver discussed working with virgin to improve customer satisfaction. Protopartners describe themselves as a ‘keeping promises business’ rather than service design.
How do you embed empathy in customer service?
Question from company:
“The primary question behind the
“Intensive Care” programme is how do we
lift the customer satisfaction score from
7.XX to 8.X by Sept 2012, whilst delivering a
differentiated experience that our targeted
customers rave about.
But the key question which needs answered is:
“how do we install the internal processes
and capabilities and behaviours that will
guarantee that we’ll be able to predictably
DELIVER this customer experience.”
The key to improving customer services is to ensure that all the processes and systems are in place to deliver the service and that everyone is
Don’t need to redesign a whole customer journey, focus on the painful bits. Brand is the promise you make, customer experience (CEX) is the promise you keep (oh that Oz humour)
Told compelling story of customer running out of credit whilst calling her mother and having an asthma attack. The mother called the (offshore) helpline to put more credit on her daughters phone, but was bounced at the ‘account number/password’ details – leaving her distraught at being unable to call her daughter back. A video interview of the mother recounting the experience was used as an artifact to communicate the experience back to the Virgin board (alongside a range of quantitative and other qualitative data). This experience was a tiny part of the overall customer experience, but told such a powerful, potentially tragic tale, that it led to protocol changes in call handling. The daughter was okay. I think. You can download a .pdf of their presentation here
Then later informal chats in the Haight with Eric, Ross, Damian, Rishi, Aiden and Thomas.
