This is the fourth of a series of interviews with CEOs that were included in a book I wrote in late 2010 called RARE Business. It was a collection of thoughts, ideas and strategies to help businesses ‘build better relationships with their customers and their people’. You can pick up an electronic copy of the book for free by clicking on the THIRD button down in the left hand column or by clicking here.
The interviews were included to supplement my own thoughts and experience and add richness, depth and context. In the interviews, I asked them what they have done to drive their business’ success, customer focus and how they have built their employee and customer engagement.
The last interview in the series was with Stefan Töpfer of Winweb and is featured in Having everyone involved in customer service helps create a better customer experience.
This time round it is the turn of Justin Cooke, CEO of Fortune Cookie to share his insights.
Founded in 1997, Fortune Cookie is one of Europe’s most well-respected digital agencies, famous for delivering beautiful, findable, accessible websites that deliver stunning return on investment. Clients include Legal & General, UEFA, Prudential, TUI, UEFA, National Rail Enquiries, Metro International and Europcar. Over the past few years, websites designed by Fortune Cookie have been short-listed for major design awards a total of 50 times.
In 2009, GP Bullhound Media Momentum Awards ranked Fortune Cookie 36th in a ranked revenue-based league of the top 50 fastest growing digital media companies in Europe. In May 2009, Justin was voted Chair of the British Interactive Media Association and continues in that role to this day.
Justin agreed to talk to me and shared some insights on what he believes they do that has helped them build a truly customer-focused business and team. Here are some of his insights:
- Our single-minded focus on making everything we do measurable for our clients and that we are prepared to link our fee to success.
- Build strategic, long-term relationships with clients – trying to understand what really matters and then building a road map to help make this a reality. Not forgetting the importance of people, service and relationships and that the small things can make a big difference. By being there in the tough times, learning, listening and always trying to be better. Results matter but so do relationships.
- Work as a team – hold stand up meetings daily
- The Client is always right – even when they are wrong
- A phone call is worth 10 emails. A meeting is worth 100 calls
- Always say what you can do and what you can’t. Regular and often. Never hide away from bad news
- Clients are your reputation. Referrals are the best secret of success
- Create a shared vision and set of values – Our senior team worked together to create our vision, mission and values and our strategy – these are shared and brought to life communicated out at our quarterly company-wide meetings
This is another great example of an established business that is leading its industry, empowering its team and delivering value for its customers.
Can you learn anything from their approach?
Remember, can pick up an electronic copy of the book for free by clicking on the THIRD button down in the left hand column or by clicking here.
Thanks to The_Warfield for the image.
In an ideal world when we have a problem with something we have bought most of us still would prefer it if we could pick up the phone and get through to someone straight away at any time of day or night. Right?
However, waiting in a queue when you call customer services seems to be a fact of life these days. This is unfortunate, especially when we consider the negative impact queuing has on overall customer sentiment and the customer experience when we are made to wait.
It’s not the fault of the customer but, in many cases, it is the customer who suffers.
Despite this negative impact, I believe that many large companies are not yet convinced by the economics of better and larger call centres with more integrated systems and, in some cases, more people.
Then, over the last few weeks, I’ve seen the following ad a couple of times on TV:
Being a big Star Wars fan it really caught my eye.
Offering a call-back service is not an ideal solution as it really is only a ‘patch’ over a company’s inability to deal with the demand on its call centre at certain times. For some firms, I fear, this is at all times if you look at the ‘Worst Waits’ research completed by WeQ4U recently.
But, a patch or fix like the one in the video can do wonders to the overall experience. It’s not ideal but it can make a good job out of a poor situation.
Why then don’t more companies implement more solutions like this? Is it about cost or resources or level of care or importance or ignorance or not wanting to be seen as a copycat or revenue erosion via premium call number use or what? Who knows? I’m sure the answer will vary from company to company.
But digging a bit deeper into the WeQ4U research shows that customers don’t have to wait for their customer service providers to introduce a call-back service as the folks across at WeQ4U have produced the WeQ4U App, which allows callers to get through to these call centres without waiting on the line AND without paying the premium call rate charges (up to 30p per minute) that many of these companies levy. Genius!
You can check out the iphone App here and the Android App here.
The app is developed by Matt King and his team at Orderly Software (Guys, you need to work on the look and feel of ALL of your sites) and their work is not limited to an app for customers. On their business side, they have also developed a software product that can help reduce the rate of call abandonment into call centres by as much as 90% and they can do this if they have their App or not. They already have some big clients on board already that you can check out here and here.
Great work and a much needed ‘patch’ to a seemingly perennial problem.
Thanks to sunface13 for the image.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 36:01 — 33.0MB)
Following hot on the heels from, Great customer service and customer experience requires emotional intelligence – Interview with Jo Causon of The Institute of Customer Service, today I am excited to introduce you to Qaalfa Dibeehi, chief operating and consulting officer of Beyond Philosophy™, a pioneering global customer experience consultancy with offices in London and Atlanta.
This interview makes up number eighteen in the series of interviews with business leaders in the ‘customer’ space, leading authors, thought leaders and general all round good guys and gals, that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses.
I’ve followed Beyond Philosophy™ for a while now so I was excited when I reached out on Twitter (that social network again!) and Qaalfa if he’d be up for an interview on the blog. When he agreed, I was thrilled and Qaalfa didn’t disappoint.
Below are some highlights from our interview:
- Beyond Philosophy’s™work focuses on board level, CEO, CFO and CMO level in helping companies build great customer experiences.
- They do 3 things:
- Strategic guidance – here are the thoughts and here is the design
- Education – design the programme and the modules and train the trainers
- Customised research – when the solution requires a different approach and techniques than a normal research house would use
- The rise in customer centricity is being driven by competition. Most products and services are now very similar and competing on the experience is the next/new competitive frontier
- Customer experience is like an iceberg. It has two elements. One above the surface….the physical, rational part and one below the surface ….the emotional part
- Everything that a business does has some rational components to it and some emotional components to it
- Businesses have max-ed out on the rational experience that they can deliver and now need to focus on the emotional elements in order to drive loyalty, retention and cross and up sell opportunities
- Beyond Philosophy is applying science to the art of emotional experience and engagement and quantifying emotional experience and engagement
- To generate change in customer centric thinking and activity, making the economic argument is key so that businesses can make the links and understand how emotional engagement and experience directly affects the bottom line
- Customer engagement and employee engagement are fraternal twins
- Literally, employees deliver the customer experience…they design it, they build it, they deliver it
- Doing everything you can to make customers happy is wrong and is a fallacy of customer experience and customer service
- Think of a joined up organisation and customer experience where your customer experience is a pipeline and each department represents a section of the pipe. If the departments are not aligned then you get leaks. As the customer goes through this pipe they feel the leaks. Some of them they see, feel and care about and some of them they don’t
- However, customers are also recognising that the ‘leaks’ are not solely the responsibility of the person in front of them but understand that there is a bigger policy or process issue. Customers are much smarter than many organisations give them credit for.
- Wrote a recent complaints handling vs complaints outcomes recent whitepaper (available here), where they found that complaints handling is more important than the actual outcome and that if a customer has to put in a lot of effort to chase the complaint then their propensity towards making future complaints goes skyward
- Qaalfa lists his top priorities for creating a customer centric business as:
- One, define the experience that you want your customers to have and what are the rational and emotional components. In short, define what your ‘North’ is.
- Two, have someone with the responsibility and the authority to make sure that that experience is delivered with all of its elements across the organisation
- Third, decide what are your metrics to measure progress towards achieving that experience both global like NPS, CSat etc or local that get at a particular issue
• Customer experience is new and is ever changing
About Qaalfa (taken from the Beyond Philosophy bio page)
Qaalfa Dibeehi is chief operating and consulting officer of Beyond Philosophy™, a pioneering global customer experience consultancy with offices in London and Atlanta.
Qaalfa is a customer-centric business transformation specialist with more than 20 years of expertise in the customer experience space, which have earned him numerous industry accolades. He is a sought-after confidant of board level executives in a variety of industries ranging from pharmaceuticals, telecommunication to financial services, non-profits to healthcare. He is particularly adept at the peculiarities of customer strategy in developing markets and geographies. In addition, he helped develop an assessment tool that won the 2003 CRM Innovation of the Year award.
Focusing on helping organizations balance their commercial and service obligations, Qaalfa has held senior consumer and strategic consulting roles with a variety of organizations, including Fulcrum Analytics, Schering-Plough Pharmaceuticals and Citibank. Earlier, he worked for the city of New York, where he oversaw medical, physical and psychological occupational health standards. Qaalfa started his career as a research neuroscientist.
Demonstrating a strong desire to share his knowledge, Qaalfa has been a university professor and a keynote speaker at various conferences and industry events. A leading customer experience expert, Qaalfa co-authored Beyond Philosophy’s most recent international business bestseller, Customer Experience: Future Trends and Insights (2010) and contributed to the company’s prior book: The DNA of Customer Experience: How Emotions Drive Value (2007). He has also been quoted in international media and has authored a variety articles, including of white papers, magazine and journal articles.
Qaalfa holds an MBA in international business and management from New York University and Master’s Degrees in statistics, psychology and health administration from the City University of New York.
True to his trans-Saharan ancestry (nomadic), Qaalfa is a global traveller who has lived and worked in three of the world’s great cities: New York, Tokyo and London.
If you want to to talk to Qaalfa on anything you’ve read, you can connect with Beyond Philosophy on Twitter (@BeyondP), LinkedIn (Beyond Philosophy’s Company Profile), check out their blog here or connect Qaalfa, himself, on Twitter (@QaalfaDibeehi).
