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What You’ll Discover About Improving the Customer Experience:
- How to improve the customer experience with less effort.
- The questions you need to ask yourself before you can start improving the customer experience.
- What being a frictionless organization really means for improving the customer experience.
- How to make automation work for you instead of against you when improving the customer experience.
- 2 ways even small businesses can make their business frictionless.
- And much MORE.
Guest: Bill Price
Bill Price was Amazon’s first global vice president of customer service and is the founder and president of Driva Solutions, a consultancy dedicated to creating highly effective customer contact strategies and operations.
He has more than 35 years’ experience advising and directing major operations in more than 160 leading companies.
He’s the co-author of The Frictionless Organization: Deliver Great Customer Experiences with Less Effort (Berrett-Koehler Publishers; June 21, 2022) and of the bestseller The Best Service Is No Service, Your Customer Rules!
Related Resources:
If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other archived Customer Satisfaction episodes.
Contact Bill and connect with on LinkedIn.
Check out Bill’s recent book The Frictionless Organization: Deliver Great Customer Experiences with Less Effort on Amazon and other fine on-line and brick-and-mortar book sellers.
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Improving the Customer Experience
What can your business do about improving the customer experience, making those people who never seem to be satisfied, happy? Well, my next guest was Amazon’s first global vice president of customer service, and you can bet he’s got a bunch of ideas for how you can make that happen. Stay tuned.
This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now, the weekly podcast for smart executives, managers and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their bottom line. I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, and I got a super guest for you today. He’s Bill Price.
As I mentioned earlier, Bill was Amazon’s very first global vice president of customer service, and he’s now the founder and president of Driva Solutions, a consultancy dedicated to creating highly effective customer contact strategies and operations. As you might imagine, he has a ton of experience and expertise in what goes into creating an outstanding customer experience.
He’s even put some of that information between two covers as the co-author of the bestseller, The Best Service is No Service, Your Customer Rules!, and his more recent book, The Frictionless Organization: Deliver Great Customer Experiences with Less Effort. I love those titles, especially the recent one, because with everyone’s time and resources stretched to the max, being able to deliver a great customer experience with less effort is just what the doctor ordered. So, let’s find out more.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now, Bill.Available at fine brick-and-mortar and online booksellers
Thank you, Hanna. I’m delighted to join you today.
It’s a pleasure to have you join us today, Bill. Amazon set a customer service standard that even one of my former guest speaking on this topic said small businesses are measured against. It’s a high bar. So, having you here as an architect of that standard is really a treat. Your most recent book, The Frictionless Organization, you say it’s possible to deliver and improve customer experience with less effort. Please, tell us how that’s possible.
Well, the first step, and it is partly based on some of the Amazon stories that I can share and we talked about in the book. The first step is actually figuring out why your customers have to bother themselves to contact you for anything. My coauthor and I take that point of view quite seriously, saying that there are some good reasons why customers want to contact you and why you want to talk to them. Sales related reasons, perhaps recovery reasons.
But unfortunately, the vast majority of reasons represent failures or confusion or mistakes. Types of reasons that can be solved with better automation and self-service, or more importantly, with the elimination of the root causes of the problems. So, the first step in the road to becoming frictionless, to figure out why your customers are bothering to contact you, and then you run through a series of steps to figure out how to make that much, much easier for everybody.
What would be some of the questions somebody would ask themselves? I mean, I’ve gone through the reasons people have contacted my business and I’ve found a handful of them, things that are repetitive. Once I’ve identified that, what questions do I need to ask?
I’ll give you two questions that you should ask. One is, do our customers have to call us or contact us multiple times for these issues or for any of these issues? In other words, are we unable to resolve them the first time that they contact us? That’s the first question. The second one is a bit broader, that says what is the rate of contacts, over time, for these issues, especially for the issues that frustrate or irritate your customers?
Questions such as “Why is my bill so high?” or “My internet keeps dropping,” or “I don’t understand how this works.” Those types of negative issues or irritating issues, if the rate of those, meaning the volume of those divided by, let’s say, the number of orders or the number of customers, if the rate of those is going up, that’s a real sign of a problem. If the rate is going down, directionally, you’re moving correctly. But then, the third question is how can we get that rate of context down to zero, of the irritating context.
You mentioned an interesting word before, and it’s in the title of your book about “frictionless organizations.” Tell me more about what you mean by that and how we can achieve that.
I like to answer that question with the opposite, if you will, which is let’s talk about friction first. I’ve mentioned already several times, but friction would represent mistakes, confusion, interruptions, irritation. And we all have encountered friction, whether it’s going into a restaurant and your reservation isn’t available when you thought it was; waiting for a product to arrive anxiously, and you don’t even know where it is, and it doesn’t arrive when it’s supposed to.
Again, your invoice might have a mistake in it, or some credit hasn’t been issued. We know friction when we see it. Interestingly, when things are frictionless, we typically don’t know what’s going on. In other words, everything’s going smoothly, everything’s going fine. I live here in the Pacific Northwest and we generally have beautiful air and beautiful blue skies.
But occasionally, when the smoke blows in from wildfires, you know that there’s a problem. That’s the equivalent of friction. The air is yellow or orange, and you have to stay inside or wear masks. But when it’s frictionless, when the air is fine, it’s just great. You sort of become accustomed to it. So, that’s sort of the image that I’d leave for your [Unintelligible]
All right. Do you have an example that can help make this tangible, about improving customer service and how it’s become more frictionless in a situation?
Sure. I’ll give you an example from another local northwest company that many of us know, and some of us are subscribers to, subscribers of. So, T-Mobile, some years ago, did a fascinating new marketing strategy called the Un-carrier strategy. They decided to relieve all their customers from term contracts. You don’t have to sign up for a one-year or a two-year contract, you’re free to leave any time you want. You may have to buy the phone, phone unit, or lease from T-Mobile, but you basically are not bound by any contracts.
And it was a phenomenal success for T-Mobile. The company then started to look at how could they transform the service experience. And among the things that T-Mobile did is they set up regional hubs of their customer service teams, and those regional hubs were sitting on top of not just the customer base in that region, but also the associated or nearby retail shops and stores. And they understood weather conditions and disruption, they understood possible network issues that were going on.
So, they became experts in those regions. In fact, they became known as the team of experts. And today, if you contact T-Mobile for support, hopefully, you don’t need to, but if you do, you may even talk to the same person because that same person is involved in a team within that same region.
So, it kind of harkens back to a day of personalization, when you kind of knew the person who might be able to help you with an issue, but they simplified it so that they have this team, and when you talk to an individual, if he or she can’t help you, someone within that team in that same contact center or in the same location will be able to help you. So, very few transfers, you don’t have to explain yourself all over again. and they really do wind up setting a new bar for being frictionless.
Well, that sounds like a great timesaver, and I really like that personal contact that you were talking about, because it seems like so many people rely on automation these days, dumb automation, I might add, [Laughter] that doesn’t take you where you need to go and just waste more and more people’s time.
Well, automation is both a blessing and a curse. You’re exactly right. Unfortunately, too many organizations, big and small, have flocked to various forms of automation, like chatbox and portals and apps, and even IVR, meaning interactive voice response systems. They flock to them without really thinking through the implications of how they’re designed and whether they’re really working. Other companies have done a great job.
I mean, think about my old company, Amazon. I mean, the WebSell service is simple. It works really well. If you want to reorder something, it’s really easy to figure out what you bought before, you see the little picture of it, you can click a few buttons and you’re done, you can buy it again. But other self-service, unfortunately, can be dumb. It doesn’t recognize who you are, it doesn’t recognize your previous purchases, even your most recent purchase.
So, some of the best automation might say something like, “Oh, Hanna, welcome back. We see that you purchased your product online a few days ago. You’re calling about your order” such and such. Intelligent, personalized. Maybe that’s not what you’re calling about, maybe you’re trying to contact the company or something else, but it could shorten the conversation and makes you feel like you’re being recognized or welcomed by the company.
So, automation can work really well. We have a chapter in the book called Digitize, which is all about coming up with great automation strategies. But unfortunately, many of the automation tools out there are pretty frustrating too.
Well, in figuring out which is the right ones, any tips on how somebody can do that?
Yes, there are some tips. So, the first step would be to go back to the framework that we discussed a few minutes ago. Figuring out which of these issues is frustrating for your customers and which ones might be frustrating for the company to have to answer. And I mentioned a few, like my bill is wrong or my internet is not working.
There is a different category, a different bucket of reasons or intents, such as “How do I do such and such?” or “Where can I get such and such?” “Where’s the closest retail store” or “What’s the balance of my account?” or “Did you receive my payment?” Just reassurance, efforts for reassurance. And those could be a contact center operator or an agent or someone in a retail shop. But in general, customers tell us they don’t really want to have to talk to a real person that way.
They’re happy to get an automated answer for those types of issues. So, it’s useful for them, but it costs a lot of money for a company to staff a center. Those reasons fit beautifully into this. Digitize your action and you can automate them. As I mentioned earlier, on an app, in a portal, in a chatbot, an intelligent A.I. type chatbot, in an IVR system, various types of tools that are out there.
And the key thing is to figure out – going back to my rate of contacts image before, what percentage of your customers who start in the self-service channel actually complete what they need without having to contact someone afterwards. It’s called “containment rate,” in our field. And if that container rate is high, that’s really good. But if it’s low, and sometimes it’s as low as 10% or 20%, meaning 80 to 90% of the time, the customer tries self-service and it doesn’t work. Well, that’s more friction and frustration.
So, to sum it up on this point, figure out which of the issues lend themselves to being automated, and then track how well they’re used, and then improve that usage rate by – usually, by simplifying the tools, by making it really easy to be able to interact with the self-service.
Well, Bill, you make the idea of becoming frictionless just sound so obvious, and it sounds like a very smart way to go about doing things. Why do you think more companies aren’t doing that?
We talk about that a little bit in the book, and let me just give you a few reasons why that’s the case, Hanna. Number one is there’s a lot of inertia, a lot of ingrained activities and processes in a lot of organizations, large and small, especially if they’re larger and they’ve been around for a while. But even some smaller companies fall prey to this. They say, “Well, we’ve always done it this way” or “This is the best way for us, the company,” and not necessarily what’s the best way for the customer. So, that type of inertia really gets in the way.
The other roadblock that makes it hard for companies to become frictionless is that they are often set up organizationally, with different challenges and different priorities. A sales team and a marketing team just want to increase the top line and the number of customers, while the customer service team wants to try to fix problems that the marketing team may have actually helped cause.
And IT systems sometimes, in fact, oftentimes are set up differently so that if you start in, let’s say, a website, and then you as a customer progressed to either a chatbot or an IVR system and eventually talk to a customer service agent, unfortunately, the underlying systems behind those different channels, those different touchpoints are often not the same. The access points are different, and therefore, the customer has to repeat himself or herself, and that’s frustrating.
So, all of those and other reasons, unfortunately, are there in the way of becoming frictionless [Audio Gap] recognize that and can kind of start tackling those, then they can start beating back those problems and go on the right path to becoming frictionless.
It’s interesting though, structural issues that you point out. I’m curious. I mean, it’s one thing for the large organizations. What advice do you have for the smaller companies, especially the growing entrepreneurs, people that are past the startup stage for A, becoming frictionless, or staying frictionless?
Two quick pieces of advice, and we can go into this a lot more. I love this topic. Number one is keep your organization as flat as possible, structurally speaking. Number two, and raise to that, is make sure everyone in the organization maintains a pulse on the customer. Either by talking to them every day, by reaching out to them, by answering customer email messages, by going on sales calls together, by listening to or reading the verbatim comments from surveys.
So, everybody in the organization, no matter what their title is, is intimately involved with what these customer issues and frustrations are. And then thirdly, to make sure that you bring the customer into the room. One of the images that Jeff Bezos had early on when I joined Amazon was the idea of the empty chair. And it was a real case, a real example. I was there in the room when he did this, and he kept a chair empty.
We all filed in in spring of that year, and we wound up talking about the upcoming holiday season, six, nine months hence. And we’re all wondering who’s going to join us in this meeting. And Jeff finally said, “I’m going to keep this chair empty for the customer because the customer can’t join us in our executive meetings. But everything we talk about; everything has to relate to the customer. I don’t want you to propose anything. I don’t want you to try any ideas out unless you can couch it in what’s going to be important for the customer.”
So, keep that in mind, no matter how big or how small your organization is, especially if you’re a startup, it’s got to relate to the customer. And make sure they’re in the room, whether you keep an empty chair for them, or at least keep them in mind.
Great. Good advice. Now, this recent book, The Frictionless Organization: Deliver Great Customer Experience with Less Effort. Why this book? Why now?
[Laughter] Well, funny story there. You mentioned the two other books that David and I wrote back in 2008 and 2015. During the pandemic, I was having a walk with one of my good friends, another former Amazonians, and he said, “You know, Bill, your first books really had a lot of great points in them, but unfortunately, a lot of companies that I deal with,” he was telling me, “Either haven’t read them or have lost sight.”
So, he says there are so many more reasons why companies are complicated today. More channels of contact web services, AI tools, interrelated businesses, so that it’s not just one company you deal with, they may be a third-party delivery company and so forth. The earlier ideas of “the best service is no service” need to be updated. So, I got back with my coauthor, and David agreed, and we thought, “Okay, let’s update some of our earlier ideas, but completely from scratch.”
New stories, new frameworks, new interviews, and try to update it for the proliferation of channels and the increased expectations from customers. You mentioned at the beginning of this interview that even startup companies and other folks you’ve interviewed have said Amazon has set the bar even for smaller companies. And you hear that, you hear customers say, “Why can’t you be as easy as Amazon? Why can’t I return something to you as simply as I can by punching a button on Amazon’s website?” So, customer expectations have gotten higher, channels have proliferated.
Unfortunately, we tend to have lost sight of some of the simplicity that customers want. And so, David and I thought it was time to try to figure out how to appeal to maybe a new set of executives and managers.
Well, I’m glad you did, because it seems that you could just never get enough good advice when it comes to improving customer service. That is what it’s all about. What would be the most important message that a reader would take away from your book?
I’ll go back to what you asked a few minutes ago. They would say, Wow, this does seem obvious. Why can’t we do this? What I would encourage the reader, especially if he or she is the business executive, or a budding executive, or a manager of businesses, I would ask them to kind of pause while reading the book and say, “Wow, these are things that I’ve experienced as a consumer myself.” We talk in the book about good stories and bad stories. The bad stories, we generally don’t name who the company is, the good stories we do.
And I’d encourage the reader to say, “Gosh, I encountered that as a consumer. I certainly don’t want my customers to deal with that in our company.” So, that’s a good thing about this business of marketing and customer service and customer experience, we all are students of customer experience with everything that we do. So, I would encourage the reader to say, “Hmm, I don’t want to be in Bill Press’s next book as a bad story.”
[Laughter] There you go. I’ll tell you; I think what you said about the customer experience is so true. I mean, just yesterday there’s – this really happened. We had one of these fancy espresso machines that was giving us a big headache, and I was so frustrated with it, I was ready to just say, “Okay, I’ll go and get another one.” My husband’s like, “Oh, no. I’m going to call the company,” and I’m thinking, “Okay, there’s a two-hour time sink.” [Laughter]
You’re going to go in circles and go nowhere. But I was really amazed that this company came through. First, having him put the machine through its paces, and then when we discovered, “No, there really is something wrong with this equipment,” and it’s not that old, it was less than a year old, they offered to replace it for free. And I’m like, “Oh, my gosh.”
This can be wonderfully shocking. [Laughter] You went into it thinking, “Was it going to work?” Because in general, it doesn’t work.
Right. Yes.
And then and you were excited that it actually exceeded some of your expectations. That’s a nice story. I like that.
Laughter] Well, I can’t wait to get it because it’s a nice color that’s coming, too. [Laughter]
Even better. You get a replacement but it’s a better color.
Exactly, exactly. So, anyhow. Bill, thank you so much for your time and for your insights about improving customer service, because I think there’s always going to be some room for improvement, and if people keep that front and centered. I love the story about the empty chair. It makes it very visual that, “Hey, this isn’t all just about you.” You’ve got multiple constituents to satisfy, and especially the customer, because without them, you’re not going to have a business, you’re not going to have the cash flow and the revenue.
So, it has been a tremendous pleasure to speak with you. I appreciate all you do in helping organizations. And if you’re listening and you’d like to know more about Bill Price, his book, and especially the recent one, Frictionless Organization, we’re going to have links to all of those on the show notes of BusinessConfidentialRadio.com, along with a transcript of this interview.
Thank you so much for listening. Be sure to tell your friends about the show, and leave a positive review. We’ll be back next Thursday with another episode of Business Confidential Now. So, until then, have a great day and an even better tomorrow.
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