Script 22

Hello and welcome to Your Operations Solved, for Friday, May 21st , 2021

I'm your host, Channing Norton, of PC Solutions, and this is the 22nd episode of our show,
Listen to us Wednesday and Friday mornings at 9:30 Eastern, or on our bonus shows released on the 2nd Saturday of each month, at 2:30 PM. If you find the show helpful or informative, please do give it a like on your platform of choice, or share it to someone else who might also enjoy it.

If you have a problem in your business you want solved, email us at Solutions@youroperationssolved.com, we may just feature your business on our bonus show as we tackle it to help you and others.

With that out of the way, let's get started on today's headlines

First, an update to an existing story. We've talked a lot about the ongoing global semiconductor shortage on this show. Recent press releases by Cisco have given indication that, once again, the shortage is exceeding expectations, and not in a good way. Cisco confirms that, while they have successfully locked in their own supply and pricing, that capacity of their component manufacturers proves extremely limited. Cisco also cites an increase in demand as a factor worsening their existing issues. Cisco is seen as an important indicator in the computing market, as their hardware typically gets bought in advance of large business rollouts. As such Gartner has updated their predictions on the chip shortage, and now anticipate it stretching to the second quarter of 2022. Quite a few businesses are trying to buy early to get ahead of the anticipated further squeeze in prices. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the industry, AMD has announced a new line of computer processors that, uniquely, rather than focusing improvements on speed or power efficiency like any new release line in normal times, instead focuses on intercompatibility and ease of manufacture. They are betting that the higher yield rate that these chips may be able to offer them will be enough to get consumers to buy them for sake of being available. In short, AMD is betting that the shortage will last long enough for them to fully bring manufacturing of several new products on multi year cycles up to speed for manufacturing, with enough time left over to still make a profit over R&D costs. Regardless of how you look at it, the shortage is going to be going on for a bit.

Now, onto our main story, GDPR Fines. This one is a bit more relevant for our European listeners, but any listeners in america or other regions that do any business or have any presence in an EU country are subject as well. For those not familiar, GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, is a broad regulation covering how companies handle personally identifying information for consumers. Among other things, it requires that EU citizens be able to opt out of data collection activities, be notified of them, things like that. The law is too comprehensive to cover in detail here, though if there's interest, I can certainly break down the implications. One snag of GDPR compliance is that it applies to EU citizen data, even when they are not physically located in the EU, so, functionally, if your company does business in the EU, or serves EU customers, even simply via selling products on the internet and shipping them into the EU or delivering them digitally, you have to be GDPR compliant. In practice, of course, if you aren't subject to EU jurisdiction, then, well, there's not a whole lot they can do to you. Next Tuesday marks the third year anniversary of GDPR being enforceable, and we see that, unlike data protection laws in the US, it's far from a slap in the wrist for violators. Collectively, all 28 EU countries, plus the UK have handed out well over 330 Million Euros, or 415 Million US Dollars in fines that we are aware of (not all fines are listed in public databases), with the largest going to google, at 50 Million euro for failures to observe GDPR principles in the design of the Android Mobile operating system, and the smallest fine amusingly ALSO going to google, at $28 for failing to fulfill an individual's request for an inventory of google's collected personal information on themselves in an acceptable timeframe.

Regulators have been unafraid to go after entities as small as individual people, and as large as Google in their enforcement efforts, So, what does this mean for your business? Well, if you're subject to GDPR and EU jurisdiction, compliance is key, as the fines for noncompliance are getting more and more frequent (incidentally, if you want to check out the fine listings, Privacyaffairs.com keeps a record of every GDPR fine ever issued that's listed publically), so it's a matter of when, not if, noncompliant companies get fined. Nor is it simply one regulatory body you have to keep track of; GDPR is enforced individually by every individual country subject to it. So, how do we get in compliance? Well, the only way to know that you are in compliance is a thorough compliance audit performed by a firm or expert who has adequate knowledge and experience with GDPR to make that determination, however, let me talk to you about some basic guidelines to live by to not run afoul of GDPR too much.

1. When you collect data, notify the person you are collecting data on, and give them an opt out.
2. Have a privacy policy on your website, and make sure that privacy policy is within the scope deemed acceptable by GDPR.
3. When you let people sign up for contact, like an email list, specify each form of contact (email list, calls, texting), and allow them to opt in and out individually.
4. Have a cookie notification on your site, should you use cookies, giving the visitor the ability to opt out.
5. Have a means to furnish information requests. If someone wants to know what information you have on them, you do have to provide it in a timely fashion.

The theme here is that, ultimately, users have control over their data, not the company. If you are transparent in what data you are collecting, how you are using it, and give customers the option to opt out of that collection, you will have gone a long way to safeguarding your business from costly fines.

With that done, let's talk more on the topic we started on wednesday, collecting effective feedback from your customers, and tracking it in a way that allows you to use that data to improve your business.

In our discussion Wednesday, we established the fact that WHO you are asking for feedback, WHEN you are asking them, and HOW you are asking them are all really critical in making sure the feedback you get is both useful and representative. You certainly do not want to only collect feedback from some channels, and have areas of your customer base unlikely to use that channel be unsatisified and not know it. Take the example of McDonald's offering free food to those who submit surveys about recent visits. While I don't have access to their data, it seems likely that the submitters of such feedback likely skew poorer than McDonalds' average consumer. Free food is more attractive to a broke person than a millionaire, after all. That's fine, because the feedback is still valuable, but McDonalds now has a hole in their data. They fill this hole by collecting data from secret shoppers, and occasionally running larger feedback driven promotions. 

How can we apply these principles in your business? Well, it starts by recognizing that there's two types of feedback, detailed feedback and micro feedback. We can see this in the fast food example. In researching this piece, I filled out a half dozen feedback forms for fast food to get an idea of the length and questions, as well as explored their apps. To any customer experience managers at national fast food chains who might be listening, I'm sorry, you got a few garbage results in from me, for science. Every single one of the chains I examined, McDonalds, Wendys, KFC, Subway, Sonic, Jack in the box, had two types of feedback available, In the app, for an order, you can provide microfeedback, that is, a single question satisfaction survey. Was this order good, thumbs up or thumbs down, variations on that. Every single one also offered the free food system... but for that you needed to fill out more questions. The winner was Wendy's here, who gives out a free burger if you complete a, by my count, 28 question survey (though by the look of it, question count changes based on your answers, so its possible you can get greater or fewer). These restaurants assign a higher value to these in depth surveys, but always make sure they cover other parts of their market with other feedback systems. We can learn from this.

Standard business activities should include Microfeedback options, a "How did we do?" This way you can identify the customers who were not served properly and fix your mistake before they get unsatisfied. I will say, anecdotally, some of my favorite online sellers were not those with a perfect experience, but those where the product I got required a warranty claim, and it was fixed quickly by the seller. Similarly, if you screw up a customer interaction, and go above and beyond to fix it, you will have turned an unsatisfied customer into a loyal one, as they know they can rely on you to make things right so that they always get what they need. An example of this would be setting up feedback software to include a feedback system in your email signatures. The additional data points here will be used to to plot trends, with this, for business to business customers, you can get a read of what accounts are at risk of being lost and need extra love, and what accounts are prime for testimonials, case studies, and referrals. For Business to Consumer customers, this looks more like the McDonalds example, of providing quick feedback in your ordering system or online for your customers. Without a mobile app and a strong presence, getting feedback from as large a swath of your customers as the fast food companies do is difficult, but you should be able to get a start.

You also need longer form feedback, and typically this has to either be directed at a particular person, or incentivized, or both, to collect. People don't like filling out long surveys, but will happily do so for a reward, or if asked directly, person to person, so, for business to business companies this takes the form of regular point of contact meetings.

Finally, if possible, we'd like to look at other avenues where our customers talk about our company. Examples of this are online reviews and social media. Good customer experience tools are capable of tracking both of these platforms and putting you in a good position to respond to both. In addition to addressing your public image in cases of failures, and in building a brand. Look at Wendys, for instance. Careful use of these tools can help you get involved in the conversation when you and your industry are discussed, and help direct the conversation to you.

So, let's talk now about where to compile all this data and how to use it. Different platforms, both industry specific and generalized, exist. A good tool should allow you to track your general Customer Satisfaction score, a Net Promoter score, which analyzes how likely a customer is to evangelize your product to others, and for account based businesses, customer health score, which is a bit business specific, develop a scoring system based on what accounts leave you based off how long they've used your product, how often they engage with it, their CSAT, number of support issues, etc. Build a model of an account that's about to fail, and make sure that your metrics would flag that account for attention and love. Ideally, in a system, you should be able to drill down into specific concerns and feedback, specific accounts or products, as well as see overview metrics in the moment and over time. The goal here is to allow you to implement initiatives in your business while having fine grained control over your Customer Experience. For instance, you might make a structural change that allows you to fulfill orders faster, and its important to keep track of if your customers feel a quality drop as a result of the change. Customer experience metrics are your way of doing that. On the flip side, you might change your packaging to something that costs a little more per order, and use your Customer Experience metrics to track if the change is worth the additional cost. For account based businesses, the net promoter score can be used to drive referrals. For non account based businesses, high NPSes could be targets for some swag, to encourage them to actually promote you.

Next on the wishlist is Automation. While obviously, no Customer Experience Management platform is going to make you send out surveys manually, automated followup is another matter. Say, for instance, you had a customer that ranked you two of ten on a survey, you may want to automatically send an email "we're so sorry you had an issue with your experience. Our team will get back to you shortly to make this right."

Also important is integrating with your existing CRM, if they are not the same product, you need to be able to see these stats in your CRM so you know what customers to pay attention to.

Finally, Chat inboxes. Many people like using web chat boxes for quick queries, especially with the influx of decent software chatbots beginning to hit the market over the past few years.

Do you have ideas on how best to utilize and collect customer feedback? Let us know about Solutions@youroperationssolved.com

That's our show for today, thank you so much for listening. Next time, join us for a conversation on technical debt. In the meantime, check us out on the web at www.YourOperationsSolved.com, where you can join our newsletter, and separately opt to be notified of all our uploads. I will see you next time.