No Lines, No Waiting
Bringing service to the fore while conserving your cash
Tag Archives: downturn
2009
Personal Appointment Software May Just Save Your Job
In the face of close to 10% U.S. unemployment, employees may be wondering what they can do to increase their value. Online appointment software may just be the answer. It is a tool to manage two resources that often are poorly handled: time and relationships. With more companies watching what employees do, it may be time to seriously consider a change in how you go about your job.
Setting appointments with online appointment software allows you to be organized with your time and communicates to others (including your boss) that both your time and the time of others is something that you value. Aren’t supervisors looking for employees who are focused, organized, efficient, and place a value on the company’s best interest?
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2009
Appointment Software Can Help Small Businesses Make It Through the Downturn
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The reality of a tough economy has already come for many small businesses, as indicated by the over 10% quarter-by-quarter increase in the number of business bankruptcy filings over the last few quarters. Downsizing, smaller budgets, and more fickle customers mean that small business owners need ways to get their employees to work better as a unit to improve customer care. One tool that can assist in this effort is appointment software. Appointment software can unify your team’s schedules and provide real time information about employee-customer relations.
2009
Is the economy nearing the bottom? Seeing through the smoke and mirrors
Here’s reason to think things might be looking up: perhaps the real estate market is nearing the bottom.
A recent issue of Barron’s trumpeted “Buy now!” and said some high-end summer homes are 30% below peak. This caught my eye, because a year earlier (before the collapse) I’d heard someone on the radio finally talking sense. And he predicted that housing prices would hit a new equilibrium: 30% below the peak.
When I first heard that my ears perked up (I’ll say why in a moment), though I didn’t realize who the speaker was: Martin Feldstein, architect of Reagan’s tax cut. (I’m not known for quoting Reagan advisors.) He also said prices might overshoot on the way down (to 40% below peak), before coming back up to the new equilibrium.
It was refreshing to hear an observer who didn’t seem to have his head stuck up his abstractions. I’d moved to Boston in the summer of ‘06, and my old house in the midwest sat and sat for months without even any showings, as idiots pumped out sunny prognosications about how better times were right around the corner. I’m all for the power of positive thinking, but when you’re steering something the size of the US economy, I also think it’s prudent to have a clear windshield. And these guys didn’t.
For instance, one day a Wall Street Journal analyst puzzled that “Job creation is strong, but we’re not seeing the corresponding inflation that we’d expect.” Well, anyone who read Kevin Phillips’ The Economy is Worse Than You Know (April 2008) knows that our definitions of economic statistics have changed dramatically, so the old rules don’t apply anymore. (Yes, gasp, I’m quoting a Nixon advisor and a Reagan advisor in the same post.)
For instance, when Wal-Mart uses three part-time workers (no benefits) to replace one full-time retail job (with benefits), the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts it as job growth, when it’s really job dissection. Because apparently BLS only counts W-4’s. When three W-4’s replace one W-4, they call it job creation. (Don’t believe me? Call your Senator. I did.) This is like keeping the same game plan in football even though the rules have changed for what constitutes a forward pass. (I discussed Phillips’ excellent article in March on one of my personal blogs.)
Imagine that in your own company, a steady sales volume got broken up into many smaller orders, and someone tried to convince you that sales were strong because you received more POs. That’s pretty much what Phillips reports.
Yet month after month, year after year, the economic observers on air and in print said nothing about this. I presume they didn’t know, but in any case their advice was scarily ignorant. So when I finally heard Feldstein speaking sense – that housing prices would still be dropping for a while – I thought “Here’s someone who’s connected to my reality.” Because when I’d liquidated that midwest house, it sold for less than I owed on it (I paid $18,000 to get rid of it), even as the sunshine dispensers were saying things were looking up.
Feldstein’s prediction was reinforced by news coverage last summer saying that to liquidate foreclosed houses, banks were selling them at 40% off peak. Aha: the bottom, where Feldstein said people would be confident enough to buy.
So when I saw Barron’s saying that some (non-foreclosed) properties are now selling at 30% off peak, I thought maybe we’re getting there: we’re at the point where real value has outlasted the smoke and mirrors of bogus stats. When values stop dropping, people will start to feel that it’s safe to go back in the water. The other shoe will have dropped, and we can get back to business.
So hold on, people. Stick to your values and take care of your customers.
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: downturn, economy, government
2009
A sign of the times? In the downturn, a clever startup CHARGES MONEY!
Kevin Kosh of our PR firm CHEN PR spotted an item by Scott Blitstein on Web Worker Daily about Clixpy, a clever new thing for website managers that will give you a “screencast” playback of everything a user did.
This could be useful for Customer Experience professionals, but what smacked me in the face was that these people are charging money right from the outset!
Good heavens, is the downturn forcing a return to old-style economics, where one’s income is tied directly to the value one delivers? If this keeps up, I’ll start to believe that maybe we are starting to pull out of the downdraft.
I agree with Blitstein that these folks should absolutely put their pricing up front, rather than requiring registration. (It’s 1000 captures for $30, or smaller batches for less, through PayPal – undeniably a good deal for someone who needs this kind of info.) Good luck to these folks.
(p.s. I did the Clixpy demo and was embarrassed at how screwily my mouse pointer wanders around between clicks when I’m exploring a page. Interesting, and it illustrates the value of recording people’s actual actions vs what we (or even they) think they’re doing.)
Filed under: online scheduling
Tagged: customer experience, downturn, economy
2009
Fortune interview on customer service in the downturn
Taking an ecosystem view of your world can help understand the nasty lasting impact of cutbacks in customer experience. Case in point: during a downturn sales decline because buyers aren’t buying; the ecosystem’s not flush with nutrients. By definition that aspect of your ecosystem will improve when the downturn ends. But if you soil yourself when times are tough, your position can be a lot harder to clean up later.
Voices from high places continue to warn about this. Yesterday’s online edition of Fortune, on CNNMoney.com, has an interview with author Emily Yellin (newly on Twitter as @EYellin) about how broken our customer service thinking has become. The title of her book shows the unspoken message that people get when service is crummy: “Your call is [not that] important to us.”
In the Fortune interview she raises two points we’ve discussed here:
- “As companies start to compete about price, service is going to be the one differentiator.”
I don’t know that I’d agree it’s the only differentiator, but it’s certainly a conspicuous one with big ties to customer satisfaction. (See Customer Experience has “direct link with loyalty” (4/28) and Customer Service Matters, 5/14.)
- “It’s not as easy to get away with giving bad service these days with the rise of the big megaphone that the Internet has given customers.”
Yep: that’s our series on the new post-Cluetrain world of “Customer Experience is not just post-sale.”
Look, it’s like any other relationship: you find out who somebody is when the chips are down. Prove your mettle. If you plan to survive this thing, plan for then. Think ecosystem, not just today’s balance sheet.
In the coming weeks I’ll be looking for real-world examples from past downturns to illustrate this. If you have any, send ‘em in!
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: customer experience, customer satisfaction, customer service, downturn, waiting
2009
Making it through the downdraft, part 3: customer service matters.
Got an email today from MITSloan Management Review, and a great item caught my attention as I browsed through their site. It’s a video interview with Prof. Martin Roth, of the University of South Carolina’s Moore School of Business, by the Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Merritt.
Roth reviews strategies companies use in a downturn, including cutting quality and customer service, and observes:
“They backfire because they’re really, in the end, not meeting customer expectations. Companies have to remember that although times are tough, and customers are concerned about their wallets, and companies are concerned about their budgets, markets continue to be competitive, and customers continue to have lots of choices of different products and services in the market.
“So … when companies decide to cut back on customer service, what may once have been a key differentiator for them brings them down to a parity level, or perhaps even worse. … It becomes much more difficult to re-convince customers that they should pay a premium.”
I found myself thinking “I hope he brings it home with a real-world example.” He did:
“Circuit City… fell drastically behind Best Buy in customer service while Best Buy was making important investments, putting support systems in place for staff…”
I know it’s a tough call for management, balancing cost controls against long-term impact. We face it too: we’re being prudent, but we’re not cutting back on keeping our customers happy. There will be an end to this downdraft, and we’re not letting anyone steal a march on us.
This is a time for companies to demonstrate that they know what their value is, not gasp for air – and certainly not make their customers gasp for air.
p.s. This is the coolest video platform I’ve ever seen: it includes subtitles so you can mute it and “listen” without disturbing your neighbors. In English or Spanish.
2009
Customer Experience has “direct link with loyalty”
Good news, bad news:
- In a new report (abstract), Forrester Research now says customer experience has a “direct link with loyalty.” That’s good: today you need all the loyalty you can get, and if your competitor slips up through clumsy cost-cutting, it’s your opening to acquire their frustrated abusees.
- But Forrester also says customer experience is “in its adolescence”: players are awkwardly stumbling around, trying to find their power. And that’s not based on customer complaints: that’s from a self-test!
As we grind into the gritty part of the slowdown, businesses who lack genuine buoyancy are sinking, and only the ones with substantial value are bobbing above water:
- Sinking: Players who, like GM, depended on unsustainable consumer trends (the preference for SUVs)
- Swimming: Players like Best Buy, legendary for its focus on customer experience. Even in the downdraft of Q4 2008, they earned $570 million. Half a billion! And that’s despite a decline in comparable store sales (Best Buy’s version of same store sales).
When somebody tries to do business with you, it’s a precious moment. Give them a good experience. Tips from the “no lines, no waiting” perspective:
- Customer experience matters.
- When someone wants to do business, don’t make them wait.
- When somebody is a customer, keep ‘em. Make ‘em love you.
Food for thought: some real-world case studies of how TimeTrade users in many industries are doing this with appointment scheduling, pre- and post-acquisition, often as part of a larger customer experience strategy.
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: appointment scheduling, customer experience, customer satisfaction, customer service, downturn, economy, retail, waiting
2009
“The Bangalore Backlash”: Customer service returning to the fore!
Some folks think a tight economy means things have to get cheaper. No; things have to get worthy.
Our VP/Marketing Cindy Johnson just steered me to Ragsdale’s Eye on Service, the blog of John Ragsdale, formerly of Forrester Research’s Giga Information Group where he focused on customer relationships and customer service. He’s often railed against the concept of free service, arguing that it’s not sustainable.
Trouble is, it’s hard to tell how low people will go to save a buck, even when it’s not in their/our best interest. We want America’s economy strong, including our local economies, but we keep buying Chinese goods from megastores that put local stores out of business. And who can blame the merchants, if consumers keep going for cheap?
That is, until people say “That’s it, you’ve scraped bottom” and vote with their feet.
And perhaps we are hitting bottom. In December Ragsdale wrote about how people are starting to pay for support from people whose voices they can understand, or people nearby — including mighty brands, not known for being the cheapest bidder:
I just read a Washing[ton] Post article The Bangalore Backlash: Call Centers Return to U.S. which hits on enough controversies to keep me blogging for a month. Let’s start with this one: Dell’s new Your Tech Team service, which provides a US-based support engineer and a wait time of 2 minutes or less for $13 a month or $99 a year. Add to that Apple’s successful in-store Genius Bar and Best Buy’s in your face Geek Squad, I suspect that 2009 will be the year Value-Added Support has crossed from enterprise to consumer support. And it is about time.
Personally, I think Dell ended free support a long time ago. Sure, they offer free support, but it’s not support – it can be destructive. Just last month a relative clicked some virus-laden link and crashed his machine. He called Dell’s free line for help, and without any discussion, the rep led him through reformatting his disk, losing all his data.He thought that might be happening, but couldn’t believe it.
My first thought was “How could they possibly do that??” Then I remembered they tried that with me, years ago. I was savvy enough to say “You want me to WHAT??” Not long after, I started using paid support.
I call it “actual support.”
In fact I’m typing this on an older Dell machine that’s out of warranty … and I’m going to go get that $99 annual plan right now.(Last time I tried their free stuff it was via live chat, and when I logged in it said “You are #497 in line.” I’m not making this up.)
I hope we’ve indeed scraped bottom, such that people are willing to pay for competence, rather than take something free that doesn’t work.You won’t get through the downdraft by being cheaper, you’ll make it by genuinely being worthy. Deliver value. Be good to your customers.
Filed under: online scheduling
Tagged: customer service, downturn, economy
2009
Scott Kirsner and Brian Halligan on getting hired in a downturn
In my after-hours life I’m involved in creating a new world of more effective healthcare. (I didn’t come to this voluntarily; it happened after I got, and beat, a nasty cancer two years ago.) I’ve become an active healthcare blogger (useful practice for the day job), writing under the persona “e-Patient Dave” on my own blog (The New Life of e-Patient Dave) and the e-patients.net blog. (The “e” is for empowered, engaged, equipped and enabled; that’s a story for a different blog.)
Because of that, I’m participating Thursday night 2/26 in an important evening event in Boston called Transforming Healthcare 2009. It’s being moderated by Scott Kirsner, author of the Boston Sunday Globe’s Innovation Economy column, with companion blog and videos. The man knows how to leverage his content.
Preparing to meet Scott, I discovered two blogworthy things today:
- He thinks like me regarding getting through the downturn (downdraft?).
- He just interviewed Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, the hot Cambridge (MA) startup whose “inbound marketing” software I’m using to write this blog. Scott’s column this week is Even in this job market, you can still stand out, and here’s Brian’s companion video, “Getting hired in a downturn.” (Are these guys channeling me??)
What the people in Scott’s column say is consistent with what I’ve said here: in a downturn, activity and opportunities don’t disappear, they move.
HubSpot’s weekly “TV” show, HubSpot.tv, likes to end each news item with a “marketing takeaway.” Here’s your business takeaway for today:
Smart business people figure out what changes are coming, and go there.
As the man said, “Skate to where the puck is going to be.”
Related posts: Collaborating more efficiently, Sprint’s innovative approach to lean customer service
2009
Making it through the downdraft, Part 2: Collaborate more efficiently
Yesterday I read a post by Web Informant blogger David Strom, echoing what I’d just said the other day: To survive and prosper in this economy, people are going to need to learn a new level of efficiency. He writes:
I want to see opportunity where others see looming disaster. And I think one way we can try to make things better is become more productive and do a better job collaborating with each other.
He’s right, and this became easier to see when I reduced it from concepts to the concrete.
See, when I hear about the economy as a whole – a million jobs here, $700B there – it seems abstract, all too much, too big for us to solve. But when I bring it down to human scale the truth becomes visible:
- It’s personal, not abstract. Those are real people losing those jobs, and those are real dollars they’ll no longer spend. To paraphrase Tip O’Neill, all economics is local.
- There are things I can do all around me to “nip and tuck,” making things a little more efficient. That efficiency amounts to money I’ve saved, for myself or my company. And that can save jobs.
This is the opportunity Strom points to.
Look, nobody likes to talk about it, but everyone I know is aware of layoffs around them. Six people in my family or my chorus have lost their jobs this year. (Oops, seven since I first drafted this.) But we as Americans and we as global citizens are far from being out of ingenuity. We will manage our way through it, proactively or reactively.
My advice: be proactive about efficiency. Find better ways to collaborate, find ways to nip and tuck. Most of all, as Strom says, notice when you’re wasting time, and knock it off!
Related content: for a real-life example of how our TimeDriver personal scheduler improves efficiency for a realty coach, read TimeDriver eliminates tedious scheduling time for driven real estate coach. She says it saves three days a month of back and forth making appointments!
Filed under: appointment scheduler, scheduling software
Tagged: collaboration, downturn, economy, efficiency
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