
I was recently asked by someone what the Sage brand stands for and what does it convey. Here is an internal memo that I sent which might have broader applicability to a wider audience.
The Sage brand stands for something credible, consistent, and customer centric, and its essence is about extraordinary customer experiences for living breathing businesses. Our proposition is to help customers meet their objectives by freeing them to do business their way. How exciting and liberating!!
The challenge, however, is to bring such an ambitious and inspirational brand promise to life within our businesses on a regular and noticeable basis. Putting our customers at the heart of our business may be easy – making them our passion could be challenging.
Within the business units that I manage, we broke this challenge down into four steps for simplicity.
· Step One: Define the experience
· Step Two: Make extraordinary customer connections
· Step Three: Measure it!
· Step Four: Make what we learn real and actionable
Step One – Define the experience
I have heard customer experience sometimes defined as the difference between customer expectation and delivery.
For example, several years ago British Airways conducted a research project on why customers were delighted with Virgin Atlantic but were “less than satisfied” by British Airways. After all, they flew the same sectors, in similar planes, from similar airports (clearly before the Terminal 5 “event”), at similar prices, with similar looking staff. What they found out was surprising to them – customers loved Virgin because they expected less from it and were dissatisfied with BA because they expected much more of the brand than what they experienced. For the same reason we are perfectly fine chucking away an ordinary pen when it stops writing, but expect a Mont Blanc to go on for ever.
So we began by exploring what our customers expect from us. Firstly, our customers don’t come to work to use our software. Quite the contrary, I believe. They use our software so that they can go home on time. A Friday afternoon end-of-month payroll run stands between an early start to a fabulous weekend or a complete social disaster. They want us to take care of their tasks quickly and correctly. So the first two expectations are performance and accuracy.
Secondly, they don’t want to spend a lot of time learning and unlearning our products. Let’s face it – a degree in software development isn’t something our average customer aspires to, they want our stuff to be easy to use. The next expectation, therefore, is “simplicity.” Finally, they look for a true return on their investments – better than what they got from their previous solution. Thus they seek “value for their money”.
So how do meet the expectation around performance, accuracy, “simplicity, and delivering value? We can do it in three ways – deliver quality solutions built for customers, provide them superior customer service when they need it and where they need it, and listen to them at every occasion.
Step Two – Extraordinary customer connections
So how do we make an extraordinary customer connection? Fundamentally this is about listening. Across the Business Management Division (BMD) in North America we are looking at a new and innovative way of “listening” to customers. We are creating community portals to hold not just one-to-one but many-to-many customer conversations creating a social network of sorts between us and our customers. We are openly discussing problems, challenges, and ideas online. We are trying to convert an otherwise ambivalent user community into Sage fans. This isn’t always easy. Once we make a commitment to have a conversation we have to hold up our end of the promise, regardless of how uncomfortable that conversation may be although we can set some ground rules.
Our ACT! community site is a great example. This site went live a few months ago and we registered 30,000 hits in the first week! Here are the latest statistics as of July 2008.
Web Statistics for the Act! Community Site
Launch Date: Feb 2, 2008
Pages viewed since launch: 4.45 Million
Total Posts: 14.3 Thousand
Total Registered Members: 4,828
Total logins: 73,555
This demonstrates the appetite within our customer community to interact with us, with our partners, and with each other. Not all conversations were initially easy but each one was essential. Interestingly our Business Partner (or VAR) community often gets uncomfortable with this approach. They believe it is dangerous to have customers “air dirty laundry.” My response to them is that if we “made them wear it they have the right to air it!” Needless to say, to convert an ordinary customer experience to an extraordinary one needs an extraordinary effort – and online customer communities are one way that we are exploring to do this.
Step Three – Measure the customer experience
How do we know we are addressing the right needs of a living, breathing business? For several years now we have standardized on an industry wide metric called a Net Promoter score… I know several of you have done the same. This is based upon a survey conducted by Satmetrix and on a scale of 1 to 10 it measures customer responses. By consistently measuring customers over a period of time, the trends indicate how prepared they are to recommend us. The only drawback with this method is the data is good for trending and not always immediately actionable. Therefore we are currently working with Satmetrix to tweak this methodology a bit. The proposed approach sets up triggers to automatically flag troubled accounts via e-mail and escalations. This can serve as an early warning system enabling us to step in early and turn an unhappy customer round.
Step Four – Learning and acting
Last but not the least, let’s look at the issue of making all of this actionable and real. After all, if the airline loses your bags, while you appreciate the letter from the president saying how sorry he is and the call from a service rep that she is “looking into it” – what you really want are your bags back! For that reason we have created a customer loyalty champion within each business unit who is the gatekeeper of this extraordinary experience and holds the rest of us accountable. To ensure that this individual is empowered to make decisions they report directly to the General Manager in most business units.
In summary – I believe that our brand promise is genuine and credible. It puts our customers at the center of this transformation and we have millions and millions of them who will thank us. While the brand transformation won’t happen overnight, I am confident that it will act as a catalyst for change. And speaking of customers and the ACT! community site, I would like to end with this story that our BMD CRM General Manager David Van Toor shared with me.
A customer recently responded to one of David’s blog posts and commented how excessively long hold times and bouncing to three different phone queues had caused him to return the ACT! product. David called the customer back directly and asked for a second chance by arranging a support call. Partly as a result of the investigation into the root causes of the customer’s poor experience, we changed the routing of failed entitlement calls from Sales to Customer Service, resulting in a better experience for these all customers. Today, that customer is back with us and is probably thankful that we treated him as a living, breathing business and not just another statistic.