Westpac wrong on closing bank branches

This is a sign that this banks is now starting to understand that customers want to deal with real people. But is it going far enough? There is more to delivering successful customer outcomes than dealing with people in person but at least the bank is empowering branch managers to make decisions for themselves.

See http://bit.ly/20sDxl

Finally - A Bank That Wants to Help Their Customers

Now here is a bank that is looking to provide services that its customers might actually need rather than telling the customer what they want. Financial services provider Malayan Banking (Maybank) has launched an online income tax payment service for its customers.

See http://bit.ly/1FcVu5

The Evolution of Business Process Excellence

Here is an excellent article on the evolution of Business Process Excellence. It starts with the early days of Total Quality Management, Business Process Improvement, Six Sigma, Lean, BPM and concludes with an explanation of Customer Expectation Management; an emergent management and business approach with the powerful idea of defining your business, not in terms of the goods and services you provide, but in terms of "customer expectations."

See http://bit.ly/RAYOp

The Opportunity for Business is the Customer Inexperience

The reason businesses are in business is to serve customers. "There are many opportunities for businesses to help customers free up time to get things done."

By looking at the customer process from outside-in, business can create both new opportunities, improvements and innovations. In delivering on the customers expectation, a business will position itself ahead of its competition, providing it with an overall strategy that will allow it to ultimately be successful.

See http://bit.ly/30laE

Apple iPod

It is interesting that throughout history, there are many examples of where the first person or company that created something new were not able to capitalise on the first mover advantage and nothing is more true than in the MP3 market. At the time the iPod came out, there were a lot of MP3 devices already in the market. So what made the iPod the defacto standard?

First of all, marketing helps and when gadgets look cool, then people are drawn to them. Comparing the iPod to the generic USB-looking MP3 devices around at the time there was no comparison, the iPod won hands down.

Next is the interface, the early MP3 players either had an LCD screen, the later ones had a colour screen but really did not take full advantage of it. The iPod on the other hand displays song information and provides album covers and cover flow, which is a nice touch and ads to the user experience.

Next, user interaction - click buttons versus click wheel. This innovation made it easy for users to scroll through large songs lists and immediately raised the customer expectation. Once you've used it you'll never go back.

Finally, the complete end-to-end experience. For acquiring MP3 files, generic MP3 manufacturers leveraged off third party systems such as Windows Media Player. This proved to be problematic. Any problems users experienced due to software updates, upgrades, software errors, connection problems and so on were not considered to be the fault of the MP3 manufacturer, nor did Microsoft take any responsibility for the problems because it was associated with a third party device. No-one owned the user experience. Apple looked at the user experience from end-to-end and their response was to provide iTunes, an application which made it easy to acquire songs on iPods and other Apple devies.

Now the Apple iPod, iTouch and iPhone have become the defacto standard as mobile entertainment platforms and they have helped make Apple one of the most successful technology companies of the 21st century. Apple is defintely a good example of an outside-in company and this year, Apple was named 6th in the Millward Brown Optimor TOP 100 Most Valuable Global Brands 2009.

Why customers may never become customers again

Where there is so much competition around, you have to earn a customer's loyalty and that means providing "great products at the right price and backing it up with great service". Shouldn't all customers deserve this quality, not just new customers but even customers that have already been loyal. If it really is better to save an existing customer than to find a new one, why do companies not look after their loyal customers better? Is it because they have already given enough of their money that they have already become profitable? Is it because companies have customer aquisition strategies in place but do not have similar strategies in place to keep customers?

In another example of where every customer interaction is a moment of truth, if a company makes it easy for a customer to leave then the customer may come back in time. Make it difficult, and the customer may never return.

See http://bit.ly/7ixuK

How company's waste money

Here is a great blog post from The Process Ninja about Fantastic Furniture. This post highlights the importance of process and what can happen when processes are not in place. This classic example highlights how every customer interaction is a Moment of Truth and every MOT creates work.

See http://bit.ly/TlN1Q