Authors Bill Price and David Jaffe On The 5 Ways To Create a Wow! Customer Experience

A business leader has to understand the drivers of contact that are indicators of friction. Examples are reason like “Where is my package?” and “Why didn’t this work the way you said?” or “Why am I on this billing scheme?”

As part of our series about the five things a business should do to create a Wow! customer experience, I had the pleasure of interviewing David Jaffe and Bill Price.

David Jaffe is the Melbourne. Australia based co-author of The Best Service is No Service, Your Customer Rules! and “The Frictionless Organization” a. He is the Consulting Director and founder of LimeBridge Australia, the specialist customer experience business and operations consultancy and chairs the Australian Chief Customer Officer Forum. He was born and educated in the UK at Oxford and had prior consulting roles as an associate Partner in Accenture and Principal at AT Kearney.

Bill Price is the Seattle based co-author of The Best Service is No Service and Your Customer Rules and “The Frictionless Organization”! He is the founder and president of Driva Solutions, LLC based in Bellevue, Washington USA . He was Amazon’s first Global Vice President of Customer Service, ran automation and consulting for MCI and worked at McKinsey after study at Stanford and Dartmouth. In 2002, he co-founded the LimeBridge Global Alliance and later formed the Global Operations Council whose members shared “Best practices and worst experiences”.

Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

Bill: I have always had a passion for working on customer facing problems from my early days at McKinsey to the work I did building self-service solutions at MCI. When Jeff Bezos was recruiting me to be his 1st WW VP of Customer service in early 1999, he asked me what my philosophy was on customer service. My answer was that “the best service is no service”, meaning that customer service should be trying to put itself out of business. Jeff, to his credit, gave me the sponsorship and backing to drive the rest of the business to fix problems and issues and reduce the need for help by 70% in three years, measured by contacts per orders shipped. Those philosophies and ideas we started documenting in our first book The Best Service is No Service and have extended and updated in our latest book, The Frictionless Organization.

David: As my consulting career progressed, I began to realise that my passion was making things work better for customers. Initially I worked on customer-facing automation such as the first multimedia platform for bank customers in Australia. When I established my own consulting business, I was lucky enough to join a global alliance of like-minded firms that Bill had co-founded. We shared ideas and clients across the world and got to visit each other’s countries and clients and had a ball doing so. For example, we’ve climbed mountains in Kashmir, sailed boats on Sydney Harbour, and had tea ceremonies in Japan. Bill wanted someone to collaborate on a book and we realised we had complementary skills: his practical experience and insights matched well with an ability I have to turn things into methods, tools, and sound bites. We have had great fun writing three books together from two different continents. I tell Bill I’m always ahead of him because I am usually at least 17 hours ahead!

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

David: One of my worst mistakes was letting a client with limited design skills drive the physical design of a self-service solution. She did great market research that told her that clients wanted privacy. Then, her answer was to put walls around the device to ensure this customer privacy, but in doing so it stopped customers understanding that this was a device for them. I couldn’t persuade her that privacy could be created in other ways. That one mistake got the solution 75% less foot traffic. I also learnt that you need effective sponsorship to tackle problems like that and that some battles are worth fighting for. It also made me think about helping customers design solutions and not expecting them to have all the answers. I understand that Apple works that way in designing things that customers have never asked for.

Bill: Mine goes back to when we set up the initial Amazon Japan customer service center operations in Sapporo. After researching other Amazon start-up sites’ experiences with customer contacts, we hired and trained a terrific crew but when the site went live, with lots of orders shipped, we got very few calls or email messages for help. At first we were worried that the systems weren’t working properly, but soon we discovered that the propensity for Japanese customers to complain was only 25% that of American or French customer. This over-staffing eventually worked when orders increased by a factor of 4, in short order, but we learned to study closely this propensity to complain before staffing teams for support.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

Bill: Two mentors come to mind, Tom Peters and Kevin Sharer. I worked closely with Tom at McKinsey including leading the global team that confirmed what became the “8 Basics” in the book that he and Bob Waterman wrote, In Search of Excellence. Tom used to preach that “If it’s not broken, break it!” meaning that you have to challenge the status quo, find and fix early cracks, and ward off competitors eager to take your customers away. I reported to Kevin at MCI and he would say, “If you don’t *&ss off someone every day here at MCI, you’re not pushing enough” which also instilled in me the need to push envelopes and even to tilt windmills. Of course, I learned huge amount from Jeff Bezos and Jeff Wilke at Amazon including their unwavering focus on customer experience.

David: Well, I’m going to pick on two. Bill, and Pete Massey (our UK business partner) were two of the founders of our LimeBridge Global Alliance in 2002 and it’s been very important for our business and the ideas we take to clients. They have always been a great sounding board for me as our businesses have evolved and both of them have been incredibly generous with their ideas and advice. Their mentorship helped us develop better consulting models, and led to things like these books. So, at the risk of embarrassing Bill and Pete, I’ll single them out.

Thank you for that. Let’s now pivot to the main focus of our interview. This might be intuitive, but I think it’s helpful to specifically articulate it. In your words, can you share a few reasons why great customer service and a great customer experience is essential for success in business?

David: Perhaps this is where we are a bit counter-intuitive. Our definition of a frictionless customer experience is one where we almost don’t need customer service. If the products work, if orders arrive on time, if the software is easy to use, and the flights and trains are on time, then those are great customer experiences and we hardly need customer service. These days frictionless experiences also include great digital and mobile based self-service as it’s convenient, fast, and private. We can transfer money from the bedroom and order from the bathroom. The friction of going to store is gone. Now we all know that customers do want choice, and some will want good ol’ staffed service, and that’s fine. All that automation and reduced failure demand frees up plenty of time and resources for those who need personalised service. So that is the strategic benefit of reducing friction: Not only is it better for customers, but it reduces costs for the business. We had a story about the UK device business Dyson who shut down one of their service centres in the UK because customers had no issues or problems to call about. So, customers had great frictionless experience and the business saved money. I’ll let Bill pick up on who in the business helps create these frictionless experiences.

Bill: Thanks, David. The lesson we learned at Amazon is that Customer Service doesn’t cause most of its work. It’s the problems and issues with the web site, with inventory control, and with shippers for example. In one telco we worked with, customers called up on average three times within two months of getting a new phone. The problems were caused by the sales process and set up. Customer service just had to fix up everyone else’s mess. So what we recommend is that organizations can learn from all the contact that is happening and work back to see where these points of friction and poor experiences are being created. Customer service interaction and data can help fix the issues created elsewhere. We used to call customer care “the canary in the coal mine”. Friction shows up in customer service but the whole business needs to help eliminate friction.

We have all had times either in a store, or online, when we’ve had a very poor experience as a customer or user. If the importance of a good customer experience is so intuitive, and apparent, where is the disconnect? How is it that so many companies do not make this a priority?

David: Very good point. A common problem is that measures and rewards are misaligned: The sales staff in stores are often rewarded for sales outcomes and not for service. They aren’t even aware of the issues they create downstream from a sale if they set you up incorrectly on a phone plan or omit the discount that they promised you. You also mentioned bad online and self-service experiences. We’ve been amazed at times how organizations don’t put themselves through their own experiences. I wish I had a dollar for every client I’ve had to tell things like “Did you know that XYZ doesn’t work on your web site?” or “Did you know your IVR is still playing a message from that problem you had 11months ago?” It seems to us that the bigger organizations get, the further management gets from what the customer is experiencing. Now in theory customer feedback surveys are supposed to bridge that gap but that often doesn’t work. For example, we have an Australian airline that never surveys customers on delayed flights. The sample is completely loaded! I know board members who have stopped trusting the feedback data because they can sense these bad sampling techniques. I’ll let Bill talk about some solutions.

Bill: Nice set up, David. One of our recommended solutions is to start to hold the right executives accountable for the issues they cause. One of the disconnects is that the folks who cause customer experience issues aren’t aware of them, let alone held accountable. We recommend using the data that reveals friction to educate these “owners” and hold them accountable for solutions; in some cases, this means reversing the customer service costs to the owners and boy, does that get their attention! We can also realign some of those broken metrics. For example, rather than reward sales staff just for sales, we might redefine a “successful sale” as one where the customer does not call in the first six weeks. Then the sales staff have an incentive to help remove those points of friction.

Do you think that more competition helps force companies to improve the customer experience they offer? Are there other external pressures that can force a company to improve the customer experience?

Bill: Definitely! What we have observed is that new types of competition often force step-changes in the customer experience with innovators like Google or Tesla that are changing the game. Many of these innovators are setting up lower friction models from the get go. Airbnb, for example, has tried to set up a completely self-service business for property owners and renters and several of Vodafone’s markets are doing the same for mobile telephony. These models are transforming their industries. Uber has created less friction and older taxi firms have had to respond with better booking systems and services. These innovators have changed the type of competition in the industry or redefined it. Lots of people call it disruption but for us its also about the lower levels of friction and improved customer experience that is being delivered. High friction players have to respond because their costs are higher and customers won’t stick with them. If they leave their friction and problems in their business, then the innovative competitors will eat their lunch.

David: Let me give a give a less well-known example. There is an innovative accounting software business from New Zealand called Xero. They have built a product for business accounting that they have tried to make so easy to use that small businesses with no accounting or finance skills are flocking to the product. The company obsesses about building intuitive software. The product works so well and has so few issues that they don’t have a call centre; in fact, you can’t call them! You check out their intuitive “Xero Central” if you need can’t find the answer, an expert from Xero will call you within two hours. The whole need for service is lower than older or traditional products. They can then re-invest this financial benefit in new features and better product. So, this sort of frictionless experience forces others to compete or die. One of their older competitors has four times as many support staff per customer. That isn’t sustainable.

Can you share with us a story from your experience about a customer who was “Wowed” by the experience you provided?

David: In the early days of Internet banking, we had a bank customer with contact centre growing as fast as the internet banking channel. We helped them design one change that eliminated 30% of the calls in one stroke. It turned a business rule on its head and by doing so saved huge amounts of effort for customers and cut 30% of costs. That was a wow.

Bill: My “wow” is from Amazon when we turned on “dropdown 1-click” order options for customers. We had the 1-click order feature, but it only allowed for a single credit card and delivery address. After a customer told us that it caused her some effort to use another credit card or a different address, our IT team set to work and collected simple all of our customers’ credit cards and addresses. The wow was that we prepopulated the list for every customer with prior combinations they had used, instead of inviting customers to add back already known items. They were thrilled and it created more frictionless and low effort experiences and it increased sales dramatically.

Did that Wow! experience have any long term ripple effects? Can you share the story?

David: Yes, that bank has the highest rates of internet banking penetration in Australia and the best cost to income ratio.

Bill: “Dropdown 1-click” was just one of many changes that has made Amazon among the most valuable organizations the world and the highest score for the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

Ok, here is the main question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a business leader should know in order to create a Wow! Customer Experience. Please share a story or an example for each.

David: We are saying that a wow experience is one with no friction, in other words one in which everything just works. I’ll take three things that help create frictionless experiences and let Bill add two more:

1. A business leader has to understand the drivers of contact that are indicators of friction. Examples are reason like “Where is my package?” and “Why didn’t this work the way you said?” or “Why am I on this billing scheme?”
2. They need to measure the macro drivers of this friction. We call that the contact ratio or CPX. For example, CPX could be the ratio of contacts per sale and it rises (more friction) or it falls (less friction).
3. Next up, business leaders have to work out who is accountable for this friction and the poor experiences, and which ones are of greater priority. For example, a telco may realise that new customers calling to say “My bill is wrong” are really complaining about how the sales team set them up on the account; therefore, that billing problem is owned by the head of sales.

Bill: Picking up from David …

1. The 4th thing a leader can do is to find ways to create common goals and metrics around these measures of friction. How can the CEO or MD make all executives want to reduce friction? One example is to create common goals and targets around measures like contact per order or contacts per invoice, and then tie bonuses and rewards to them
2. The 5th and most complex part of creating frictionless wow experiences is to work out the right strategy for each indicator of friction. For example, they can eliminate software bugs and then lots of issues go away. Or, they can pre-empt problems as some utilities do by spotting bills that they think are too high, investigate the exceptions, and alert customers to help them understand the bill. One mobile company preempted issues by automatically moving customers to plans that better matched their use. They got permission, but that preemptive strategy was a wow experience. Or, they can digitize the issues on an app, in a chatbot, or in other forms of self-service to answer queries like “Where’s your closest store to me?” or “How can I change my password?”

Are there a few things that can be done so that when a customer or client has a Wow! experience, they inspire others to reach out to you as well?

David. Perhaps our definition of wow is a little different. If we are right and frictionless experiences are a wow, then we don’t want or need customers to reach out at all. We are happy that they are happy. For us, silence from customers is the sound of wow if silence is for good reason. The best feedback from customers is that they buy more, stay loyal, and tell others!

Bill. I agree, David. We also say that we shouldn’t have to ask customers if it was a frictionless wow. Businesses should have enough data to know. If anything, we think some surveys and feedback mechanisms create more effort for customers when the business has lots of information already.

My particular expertise is in retail, so I’d like to ask a question about that. Amazon is going to exert pressure on all of retail for the foreseeable future. New Direct-To-Consumer companies based in China are emerging that offer prices that are much cheaper than US and European brands. What would you advise retail companies and eCommerce companies, for them to be successful in the face of such strong competition?

Bill. We understand and agree with you. Amazon has changed the game and is perceived as a threat by many. But their customer service scores remain very high and their customer obsession is hard to match. In our latest book we’ve tried to help any business think and work like they do: Try and eliminate those points of friction … Constantly invent … Create for the customer. That’s the only recipe for survival. As for retail, it’s exciting to see the success of Amazon’s Go technology in its Amazon Fresh stores and in sports arenas — they are designed for no-touch, just walk out.

David. I also agree. Most businesses are smaller than Amazon so they should be able to stay closer to their customers. Smaller businesses should be able to listen better and act faster. But they have to drive out friction to make themselves really easy to deal with. As soon as things stop working well, customers are going to go elsewhere. Treat every customer contact as a problem and something to learn from. That’s what we recommend.

You are persons of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

David: Well, I’ve always wanted to create a commonsense political party that provided balance rather than extremes. It’s a pipedream, I’m afraid, but in our last election in Australia a bunch of independent candidates overturned sitting government MPs on climate issues, so perhaps it’s possible after all!

Bill: So many ideas come to mind! One of them is to expand “the circular economy” to reduce as much waste as possible. Every Tuesday my neighbor and I take 4–7 bags of day-old bread from several local shops to a senior center in Seattle, but that’s a drop in the bucket!

How can our readers follow you on social media?

D and B: We blog on LinkedIn and have our own book web site called www.frictionlessorg.com.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!