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Customer Experience Matters

Building Loyalty Through Customer Experience, Marketing, And Leadership

PNC Bank Breaks Through Gen Y BlindspotYesterday

Last year I proclaimed that Banks Have A Gen Y Blind Spot. Well, that’s no longer true for all banks. It turns out that PNC enlisted IDEO to help engage Gen Y and created a new offering: VirtualWallet. According to a recent BusinessWeek article, PNC has signed up more than 20,000 customers (70% from Gen Y) and is on track to break even in two years.

Here’s how VirtualWallet is described on the IDEO Website:

[It is] a family of banking products that provide customers with seamless access to their finances and intuitive, tangible, and direct control of their money. Centered on electronic transactional banking, it is designed to both promote and optimize banking activities with features and visualizations that support the mental models and lifestyles of its Gen Y customers

My take: I really like VirtualWallet. It shows what you can do when you explicitl

Good Design Saves Lives In The UKDecember 1

I was intrigued by a story (forwarded by Jonathan Browne) about designers working with doctors in the UK to redesign resuscitation “crash” trolleys. These carts contain all of the equipment and drugs for handling a cardiopulmonary resuscitation. But there was a problem: The confusing layout of existing crash trolleys was increasing the risk to patients.

The article discusses three components of the newly designed crash trolley (that has already won two Medical Futures Innovation Awards):

• Put all items out in the open, so that the emergency teams can quickly find what they need; instead of having things buried in drawers.
• Organize kits based on the three major medical situations: clearing an airway, gaining intravenous access to give fluids, and restarting the heart with drugs and defibrillation equipment.
• Make the cart intutitve, so that it’s easy to use in a high-stress situation.

Ford Lacks An American Idol StorylineNovember 28

In an article in Advertising Age, Martin Lindstrom (author of “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy What We Buy“) discusses neuromarketing research which looked at how brand impressions impacted 2,000 consumers. As part of the study, they examined the value that Coke, AT&T, and Ford received from their $25+ million sponsorship deals with American Idol.

It turns out that the connection with the hit TV show increased the brand equity for Coke and AT&T, but it had a negative impact on the Ford brand.  

Lindstrom suggests that these results stem from how the brands were incorporated into the show. Coke and AT&T were integrated within the flow of the show, but Ford’s impressions lacked a clear purpose. According to Lindstrom:

The Cultures Of Best Buy, Google, GE, And SemcoNovember 26

I just ran across an interesting blog post called Four Radically Different Cultural Models: Best Buy, Google, GE, Semco. It outlines the differences in the culture and people management across these four firms. Here’s an excerpt:

• General Electric: The Ruthless Meritocracy
  Six Sigma (with some room for bringing in new ideas). True to GE’s past, the massive company still strives for perfection through efficiency, but CEO Jeffrey Immelt is pushing innovation just as hard to make up for Six Sigma’s tendency to kill creativity.
• Google: The Whimsical Idea Factory
  (Slightly) controlled chaos. Build fantastic facilities that eliminate employees’ everyday hassles and make them want to come to work (and stay there). Let them tinker and watch the sparks fly.
• Best Buy: The Every-Day-Is-Saturday Model
  We’re all adults here. Work is not a place you go, it’s something you do, so there’s no reason for the company to dictate when and where employees work. Managers look solely at results produced, not hours spent at a desk or in meetings.
• Semco: The Extreme Democracy
  Employees run the show, which means transparency in all things. Salaries are public knowledge, and complaints about managers are posted for all to see. Semco, a conglomerate that does everything from
  

Is Extreme Efficiency Really The Goal?November 25

A Wall Street Journal article called Stores Count Seconds to Trim Labor Costs discusses how the Meijer grocery chain along with other retailers are starting to use production techniques to monitor the throughput of employees.

The article discusses how Meijer uses the data about the efficiency of cashiers to identify under-performers which can lead to additional training and coaching, transfers to lower paying positions, or even the dismissal of employees. It ends with a quote from a cashier at Dewitt who talks about how she sometimes gets around the system:

It is pretty much survival, you have to learn the tricks of the trade. 

My take: From a customer experience (and loyalty) standpoint, I’m worried. Efficiency metrics can be extremely valuable, but they can easily be misused. The heightened focus on efficiency can easily come at the expense of other attributes of the experience. Unless a company’s brand is built entirely around efficiency, customers want and expect more. Here’s some advice for companies implementing major efficiency initiatives:

• Balance efficiency metrics with customer satisfaction metrics
• Reward high efficiency and high customer satisfaction
• Set wide parameters; only intervene with very low efficiency performers