Statements of Intent

~ This transcript is automatically generated so may contain some errors ~

Every single business selling anything can start the process of turning a customer into a fan, but it's the process of how you talk to them, how you engage with them, how you personalize the experience, how you make it relevant.

How you make them feel that they're important and that their business is important to you. How you do everything you can to make sure they come back in the future.

Welcome to Statements of Intent. In this 20 minute episode, we're addressing how eCommerce has lost sight of the people at its very heart. You, the customer. It's a chat that's optimistic, it's casual, it's probably slightly ranty in places, but that's okay. But it's a place where I talk to senior eCommerce marketers.

And share their statement of how they're looking to change the status quo of eCommerce, adding more care, being more considerate to those very people that they're selling to - the customer. I'm your host, David Mannheim, the founder of Made With Intent. And we're going to jump right into it. Have fun

well, hello, everybody, and welcome to Statements of Intent. I'm your host, David Mannheim, but more importantly Martin, I've been struggling with this. Help me out a little bit. I'm struggling how to introduce you. So, I did a bit of research earlier today. And I'm just gonna read a little bit of your LinkedIn, because bloody hell, it's really long.

Uh, and I don't know, I don't know whether to talk about Intersport, whether to talk about Harrods, whether to talk about Pentland Brands, Burberry, whether to talk about Ted Baker, whether to talk about, uh, Chanchago, whether to talk about Wiggle, whether to talk about Y Stuff, whether to talk about Yes, whether to talk about how you founded Practicology and sold its pattern, whether to talk about ESW.

We can talk about Celtic football club, although they're a pretty small club. We don't

need to mention them.

You avoid advising work with the CX Alliance. So we could talk about you being an ambassador of the retail trust. Oh, by the way, we might as well talk about the two books that you've written. The power of customer experience and a hundred practical ways to improve customer experience.

Martin, where, where, how do you introduce

yourself? That's a bloody good question. And actually it is, it is a challenge. You know, I, I wrestle with the, how do I brand myself. I call myself, I call myself a consumer champion these days. Um, I mean, my, my mission statement is I'm trying to be a force for positive, can you hear the doorbell by the way?

This is, can you hear the doorbell in the background? I can. It's

barking. It's absolutely fine. Do you want to go answer it?

You can do it. Eh, well, no, it's okay. Somebody else is getting it. Anyway, sorry about that. It's alright, we'll keep it in. It's fun. We'll keep it in, absolutely. I'm trying to be a force for positive change for both consumers and brands.

So I kind of see myself sitting in between customers, consumers and the organizations that serve them. I try to continually learn what I can about what frustrates a customer, what frustrates a consumer, and what they're, and what they're looking for by way of experience. Um, and try to find ways of how I pass that knowledge and information on to brands to help them do a better job of how they serve them.

And I guess I deliver that, excuse me, in a number of different ways. Through the education that I deliver, through the books, the mini MBA and customer centricity, which I run with a college in Oxford with the courses that I run on the same subject with Strat Club Business School. Um, I do an MBA in a day, which is a kinda one day bootcamp on all things customer centricity.

So there's a bit around kind of education, uh, that I try to try to leverage to deliver that. You rightly pointed out my board advisors, so I get the opportunity to work hands on with some organizations and help them in how they do a better job of selling whatever they have to sell to whoever they have to sell it.

Um, and, uh, and then aside from that, I'm also privileged to have the opportunity to travel the world and do keynote presentations and run dinners and talk. Talk to people until their ears are bleeding, basically, about all things customer centricity.

I've seen a couple of your talks, and I can attest at how informative you are.

Um, I'm curious, this almost feels like care for, for customers. Has that, has that always been innate or was there an inflection point where you really started to double down on this?

I, I don't know, rightly or wrongly, I think I'm a good human, right? And I guess at the heart of me and what makes me tick, you know, I, I care about people and I care about, I guess I care about experiences that people have.

And I mean, I started, I started working on the shop floor. of my father's retail optical practices in sunny Glasgow. Uh, never has there been more sunglasses walking the streets of Paisley, which is a town on the outskirts of Glasgow where my dad had a practice. Cause my dad was, he really was genuinely an entrepreneur and genuinely an early life version of probably of Specsavers, you know, cause he, he was in business long before Specsavers was ever a thing because.

You may not know this, but up until the early 1980s, optics was a very heavily regulated industry. It was controlled by the government. You know, there was no advertising, no kind of high street brands or anything. It was individual professionals who were the optometrists. So you went and got your eyes tested and you had a limited range of frames to choose from, um, including national health frames and whatnot.

Um, but as things opened up, my dad saw the opportunity and he, so he, He started to launch a couple of different brands. He, he had his own glazing workshop. So he thought, why should I be sending, you know, some of these glasses away to somebody else where they make all the money? Why don't I, what is it, what's it going to take for me to set that up?

So he set that up within his business and he ended up actually doing glazing for other opticians. So he was a real entrepreneur, but at his heart, he was a good, he was a very good human. And he was brilliant with patients or customers. He's very engaging, very genuine, but also a good salesman. And, and, you know, just good with customer experience.

And I think that's where I obviously learned a lot of what I, hopefully what was ingrained in me at an early age. I probably got from him, you know?

Sure. It's interesting that you use the word human a couple of times throughout the entirety of that story. Both calling yourself and your dad a good human, which again, I can attest to have spoke to a few times now.

And your statement of intent that you want to bring to the table is all about moving away from customer centricity towards human centricity. And one of my questions to you is what's the difference?

I don't know if I have the answer to that yet, because I haven't quite had the opportunity to really sit down and kind of map that out, but.

I think if I were to describe it or articulate it as best I can, you know, it's almost like if you take customer service as a terminology, right? I mean, customer service is different from customer experience. Customer experience is what happens when you engage with a business in different channels and touch points.

Customer service is generally what happens when things go wrong and you have to talk to someone, right? About how do I resolve my issue? That's how I see it anyway. But I'm always trying to encourage businesses to think not about customer service, but think about customer care. And the language is really important because the language engenders an entirely different philosophy, an entirely different outcome, and therefore an entirely different set of measures on what's important.

Because if, if what you're doing is running a business and you're saying, well, I know I need a team of people that answer the phone to customers, but by golly, they're pain in the ass, right? Which is, which is in reality, how a lot of businesses treat customers, right? I'm sorry to say, but it is true. And we've all had it, right?

Where, you know, we go through multiple layers to eventually get to speak to a human being and you're made to feel as if the computer says no, right. And, or, or best. It has to be escalated up a chain of command and you don't get an answer, you know, there and then. And I think a lot of that behavior is driven out of businesses who focus on their contact center, on their customer service team, whether it's in house or whether it's outsourced or a hybrid of both, but they look on it from a cost point of view.

They're not playing the long game. They're not thinking about how do I build customer lifetime value? Because if they were, The only metric that they'd really be focused on is first time customer resolution, issue resolution. So when somebody phones the contact center, my most important KPI is not how many people had to wait more than two minutes to have their call answered.

It's not how many calls did you, Martin, as the customer service operative, take in a day. It's quite simply how many customer calls issues did you resolve first time, right? Surely that's the only really important metric because if you can do that, then you've got a really good chance of making sure that customer comes back.

And if you don't resolve it, either because the business is focused too much on the cost and not on lifetime value, And it's thinking of deflection rather than customer care, then you're good. You're, you know, somewhere down the line that's gonna catch you out, I think, significantly as an organization. Um, and a lot of that also comes from, sorry, Carol.

I was gonna say, I wonder where that misalignment comes from. It, it strikes me a, a story. I was trying to ring, ring Virgin Atlantic, um, to book some flights a couple of weeks ago, and it takes you through. This automated process of press one, if you'd like to do this too, if you'd like to, this takes you 10 minutes to get to the end goal.

Right. I pressed two and then three and then one or whatever the sequence of events was. And I ended up at an automated FAQ and said, right, you can hang up now. And he never answered my initial question because I needed to speak to someone about being so specific. That's very reminiscent of what you're saying.

But would you not argue that businesses like Virgin Atlantic, for example, Yes, they might see it as. Uh, efficiency, but they might also see it as trying to resolve somebody's issue as quickly as possible by automating the process.

Yeah, but that clearly doesn't work, does it?

Because it didn't work for you.

Not in that case, no. No, so the reality is, yes, look, if you've got a really, really super efficient Self service function where somebody can come on and you can answer everything, which in my experience, I've never seen that done really that well. Um, I think it plays a role. I think, you know, you have to recognize that not everybody wants to speak to someone.

So for me. My starting point when I'm thinking about really what I'm trying to do with a business, if it was me running Virgin, you know, today, and I was thinking about just the, you know, the customer service elements, then it's, you know, understanding the needs of different customers and understanding why they would want to contact us in the first place or have a need.

to contact us and recognize that not all customers are the same. So what I mean by that is, if you take the experience on a website, I'm, I'm, I'm what I would call a self service customer. So when I go into a website, more often than not, I've got a pretty good idea of what I'm looking for. So I make a beeline straight to the search.

Function straight to the search box because I key in what I'm looking for. And of course, as we all know, even that in this day and age, you know, nearly 30 years down the line from the advent of the Internet isn't, isn't exactly perfect, right? It doesn't always bring you back what you're looking for, but that's normally how I would start my journey.

If you equate that to in the physical environment, that's me walking into a store and a sales assistant coming up and asking me if I need help. And we said, no, I'm all right, thank you. I've got this, which I usually do. And I go off on my own and then invariably I end up coming back having to ask for help.

Because I couldn't find, because I thought I was being smart, but I couldn't find what I was looking for. Or there was maybe a, there was maybe just a little bit of detail missing and I wasn't able to complete. The transaction because I needed that additional piece of help. Um, so I think there's no one size fits all, right?

But you try to create an environment where you offer the right solutions for different types of customers at different times with different challenges. But what you don't do, as I say, there's no one size fits all. And what tends to happen is organizations often make arbitrary decisions. Like, well, we've got too many people in our contact center, or we've got too many people in the shop floor of our store.

Therefore, we're going to take a knife, we're going to cut out half of the headcount, right? But they do that purely from a cost perspective without any real, any real thought, I think, about what are the implications of that on growth. So whilst I recognize every business has to control costs, you cannot make cost reductions or optimize your costs at the expense of suppressing demand and the opportunities that you have for growth in the business in the medium term.

And I think that's often what happens. When you start to think about customer care and when you start to think about, you know, human centricity, even over customer centricity, I think you take customer centricity, you take it up a level, right? You go beyond just doing the basic things well, and you actually start to create a more.

Emotive experience with customers. I really believe right that no matter what you sell, David, whether you sell widgets, whether you sell really neat beanie hats or glasses or tableware or cars, I don't really care. Every single business selling anything can start the process of turning a customer into a fan, but it's the process of how you talk to them, how you engage with them, how you personalize the experience, how you make it relevant.

How you make them feel that they're important and that their business is important to you. How you do everything you can to make sure they come back in the future. That, you know, all of these things, it's no one silver bullet. All of these things, you know, which I think are based in. Not just the brilliant basics, but how do you become a bit more human as an organization?

So that actually people like coming into your stores, that people like talking to your staff, that people like calling customer service and not thinking, bloody hell, this is going to be a really painful experience. But actually, you know, the people are brilliant because, because the business has got a great culture and, and it's very much adopting that kind of human, human centric approach.

So I guess it's an evolution of what I've already written two books about and what I talk about, um, and it's just taking that, taking it to the next level and making that just a little bit more tactile and a little bit more

engaging. Yeah, it feels like empathy is the word that's I love, I love this, this concept, uh, that you've highlighted of a focus on terminology because when I think of customer service, the difference between customer service and experience for me is that service feels like a one way interaction and experience feels like a two way interaction and then you take it up a level further and you talk about customer care and that feels like customer experience, but with empathy.

That's what that feels like with me. It feels as though

Good way of describing it, sure.

Feels that you could use it in your third book if you'd like. Um, it feels Cheers, David. Thanks for that.

Text

in the

post. It feels as though for me, um, the, uh, the lack of empathy is what's missing in, within organizations.

Why do you think that is, is probably my question. If you, if you believe in that. I,

I, I absolutely do. Um Let me give you one, let me give you one use case or one example, I guess. Um, I, I really believe that one of the reasons why a lot of big high street brands that are no longer around basically, and I'm not going to name individual brands.

I mean, there's lots of them, right? They've gone to the wall in the last five or 10 years, but I fundamentally believe at the heart of that was a lack of empathy. It was a lack of understanding of really who their customers were, how they had evolved, what they were looking for. Whether it was because they didn't have the right products or services, or they were too slow to embrace, you know, the opportunity online, or the requirement to join all the channels together and an omnichannel experience or whatever.

At the end of it, and at the heart of it, take, take the store business, right? You know, how many big national retailers now provide the ability for the people who work on the front line of their business? or give them any real autonomy over day to day decision making, right? Which I, I personally find quite astonishing, right?

Because the reality is, even on this little island of ours in the UK, right? You know, what customers would be wanting to buy right now in the North, the very North of Scotland versus what they might be buying in Brighton or London. Even as we head into winter, it might be quite different because it's already bloody freezing up north and yet it's still relatively mild for this time of year down here.

So even if you just talked about it from a weather perspective and you think about how much our weather changes and how variable it is around the UK. for different parts of the country. Why wouldn't you give someone who runs a store in any given area some control over how they merchandise that store?

Some control over, you know, offers that they create on the spot. Because do you know what? The forecast this afternoon is terrible, David. So if you come in, you come in to buy. A suit, or you come in to buy some t shirts for your holiday abroad over Christmas or whatever. Um, I'm going to sell you an umbrella because I know what's happening this afternoon.

And I can even mention that to you when you come in the store. We've got, we've got an offer on umbrellas today. David, you might need this by the way. I don't know if you've looked at your weather app. So why wouldn't we empower people to do that? Why wouldn't we empower them to resolve issues for customers when something's gone wrong?

Why do they have to contact the head office? or go up through the chain of command. So my point is, you know, people running our stores around the country, they're closer to customers, they're closer to the environment in which those customers are, and they're better placed, I think, to make some of those decisions that could have really quite a big impact on how customers feel about their experience, as well as a big impact on the commercial performance of the business.

And, but what's happened is as these retailers have got bigger and bigger and bigger, They've taken all the control and all the decision making away from the front line. They

put more process in place. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's now these head offices that make all these big decisions. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't have a head office.

And I'm not, of course, as you get bigger, you have economies of scale, but it's how do you balance, how do you balance economies of scale with still delivering an experience that customers really want. And that's where independents do well. Independents still do well wherever they are thriving because They're able to, they're able to deliver that much more personalized experience,

you know.

That's again, another really nice concept, the concepts of autonomy and independence. Because at the end of the day, the people on the shop floor, they're the ones that are closest to the customer. They're the ones that are interacting with them on a day to day basis. Yeah. It feels like we could learn a lot from them, right?

You know, when I used to run my old agency, as I'm sure you did as well, when we used to gather user research, one of the first things we used to do is ring up the customer service team. But thinking about it, we should have really gone in the shop and asked the people who are interacting face to face with these people, be a bit more human about it rather than perhaps over a

phone or a web.

The front, the front, the front line of the business are, you know, in my opinion, the front line of any organization, whether it's. a business selling to consumers or whether it's a business selling to another business. That front line are the difference between success and failure. Now I take it for read that we've got the right products.

You know, if we haven't got the right products or the right services, then we're dead in the water, but as long as we've got the right products and services, it's the people that interface, I think, with customers that fundamentally make the difference at whatever part of the business that is. What's going to be really interesting, obviously, in the next few years is to see how AI fits in with that particular element of retail and other sectors like hospitality or anything else.

And how, how you leverage AI as a business to maybe drive economies of scale to maybe cut, maybe reduce costs and drive growth in other areas, but not necessarily at the expense of human interaction or human intervention. How do you, how do you manage the two things together to really. Take everything to the next level and beyond, you know, which I can't help thinking is an opportunity in itself.

Let's not go down that rabbit hole. We are up on our 20 minutes.

Martin, thank you so much. I really, again, enjoyed the concepts of thinking about terminology, autonomy, independence, being more human in our approach with customers. So thank you very much for your statement of intent. Thanks

for having me on.

Cheers.

There we have it. Thank you so much for listening. Please do like, subscribe and share on whatever platform it is that you're listening to on today. This show comes from the team behind Made With Intent, the customer intent platform for retailers. If you are of course, interested in being more profitable, whilst being more personal.

And please feel free to check us out at madewithintent. ai. Thanks again for listening and joining us on our mission to change how eCommerce sees, measures, and treats their customers. I've been your host, David Mannheim. Have a great day.