Focus on ‘Consumer Focus’

Consumer Focus may need to focus on itself; what is in store as the restructured organisation seeks a new Chief Executive?

 

Consumer Focus is described as ‘the new statutory organisation campaigning for a fair deal for consumers ….’. Its statement which accompanies application details for the new post of Chief Executive says that its ‘role is to put consumer across the UK at the heart of business and government decision making.’ The literature goes on to say “We will be the voice of the consumer, and work to secure a fair deal on their behalf. We were created through the merger of three consumer organisations – Energywatch, Postwatch and the National Consumer Council (including the Welsh and Scottish Consumer Councils). The new approach allows for more joined-up consumer advocacy, with a single organisation speaking with a powerful voice and able to more readily bring cross-sector expertise to issues of concern”.

Consumer Focus has strong new legislative powers. These include the right to investigate any consumer complaint if it is of wider interest, the right to open up information from providers, the power to conduct research and the ability to make an official super-complaint about failing services. Its first challenge may be provided by public services. Will Consumer Focus track the work of public services under emerging expectations, given there are likely to be spending cuts? Will a statutory body consider it appropriate to follow and ‘expose’ the dynamics of the public sector of which it will be a part?

This is what Wikipedia has to say on advocacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocacy):

“There are several forms of advocacy, which each represent a different approach in the way change is brought into society. One of the most popular forms is social justice advocacy.

Although it is true, the initial definition does not encompass the notions of power relations, people’s participation and a vision of a just society as promoted by social justice advocates. For them, advocacy represents the series of actions taken and issues highlighted to change the “what is” into a “what should be”, considering that this “what should be” is a more decent and a more just society (ib., 2001.) Those actions, which vary with the political, economical and social environment in which they are conducted, have several points in common (ib., 2001.) They:

• question the way policy is administered
• participate in the agenda setting as they raise significant issues
• target political systems “because those systems are not responding to people’s needs”
• are inclusive and engaging
• propose policy solutions
• open up space for public argumentation….”

The key issue for Consumer Focus is whether it sees itself as a B2B, a business to business organisation which only talks to organisations similar to itself. There is some merit in this approach in that it can access accumulated knowledge and experience of the 200 odd organisations that it claims to have consulted. However, how will it engage with the general public?

The organisation admits to being well-resourced to use these powers and campaign on the issues that matter most to consumers and further saying “we’re the largest and the best-resourced advocacy body in the history of the UK consumer movement”.

The statement goes on to day Consumer Focus is “not an advice agency nor are we a statutory regulator. Other bodies such as Consumer Direct, Citizens Advice, local authority trading standards and the Office of Fair Trading play these roles. We do have an Extra Help Unit (EHU) for vulnerable ‘energy’ & ‘post’ consumers”.

This background information clearly shows that Consumer Focus has a great deal to do in sorting out in its own backyard before it can provide a cohesive and strategic service to the consumer. It will face a number of challenges.

This analysis did not aim to simply challenge the merits or demerits of its positioning. Is the structure likely to delimit the delivery of the stated goals? Which came first; the goals or the structure? It is hoped that the structure does not impede the delivery of goals. It would be interesting to know if the organisation’s corporate business planners had first created a series of customer focussed goals and then created an appropriate structure for delivery to facilitate the implementation plan; if form has not followed the function, there may be serious challenges for the new administration.

Delivery – the present organisation structure appears to be cumbersome and reflects a more of a civil service operating culture than that of a proactive and forward looking service organisation which can become attractive to clearly defined consumers and customer sub-categories. The organisation chart also shows country bias and focus where vertical structures are connected to each other to form a business model. However, the lack of clarity in relation to identifying cross-cutting service drivers may create problems in the very near future. What a new organisation cannot afford to carry on is to repeat its bureaucratic model where each country director may have to create a probably isolated knowledge base as opposed to joined up the cross-cutting campaigns to reflect modern trends in customer service delivery model and its evaluation on a thematic basis.

The consultation process has identified four strategic campaign goals to achieve a fair deal for consumers; they are Value, Service, Access and Sustainability. Assuming that these goals represent a reasonable stating point, the challenge for the new chief executive will be to position these goals as service drivers and how they will deliver consumer benefits. Are the goals of the new organisation going to be congruent with the benefits that the consumer expects? What does ‘repositioning’ entail? This will depend on how Consumer Focus defines its primary markets.

The other key principles of the new organisation’s consumer strategy appear to be sustainable. Consumers are going to be helped to exercise greater personal responsibility and will be supported to do so through greater transparency and information provision; not a problem in itself but it remains to be seen how Consumer Focus will be empowered to benefit from this principle. Enforcement will ensure that business that ‘behave fairly are not disadvantaged by the few that attempt to break the law’. If the new org is not going to be a regulator or an advice agency, how are these principles going to be converted into targets for the organisation’s action plan so that they are stretching and measureable? The principle of change presents many exciting opportunities; consumers are going to have information about emerging consumer markets and the enforcers will be expected to deal with them. Does this suggest a watchdog function? If today’s announcement of the merger of Orange and T-Mobile telephone companies were to be approved on competition grounds, how and what type of information will Consumer Focus provide to ensure that it is objective advice to consumers and what action will the information providers expect from the consumer lobby or actual users? Given the need for clarity in the new organisation’s purpose, what will Consumer Focus expect from customers of these companies assuming that they get information on the new business model of the merged operations and insight into its cost and volume implications which will impact on customer service and best value?

Assuming that these concerns can be dealt with, what is the type of business profile and customer service ‘value image’ will the new organisation present? Consumers are more likely to ‘warm up’ to the new organisation if they can relate to the proposed impact that it hopes to make consumer issues? Will Consumer Focus be able to discard its rather staid and civil service presence and realign itself to become a proactive and consumer friendly organisation which will be driven by creative digital technology to maximise its access to consumers? Could it be argued that Consumer Focus should more likely direct itself at lobby groups, delivery organisations and government departments? There is no doubt that there is a viable job to be done and Consumer Focus will find its feet but how long will it take for the new organisation to become effective and useful? There are two or three things the new Chief Executive will be able to say. The first is “Give me time, I am reorganising before I can deliver” and the consumer may have to wait for 2-3 years before visible results can be seen. Or is it likely to happen that the first chief executive may only be able to reposition and realign the organisation and that it will be the second incumbent who will more likely be able to make an impact?

Whatever the outcome, Consumer Focus will have to become very slick in its campaign if it is going to win the trust and respect of the public and the consumer in a relatively short time. The new chief executive will have a very demanding and visible role to deliver but given the concerns about the structural issues and the current business model, Consumer Focus will have a major challenge on its hands. The above analysis has tried to reflect the concerns of a lay member of the public.

What plans does Consumer Focus have to respond to these questions other than to rush to defend itself?  Our experience of challenging other service providers is that they either do not take bloggers seriously or they do not have the mechanism of responding to challenge or both. If this single blog is considered to reflect the opinion of one hundred silent observers, it may be doing a worthwhile job. Nevertheless, this blog is quite used to being ignored.

One in a Million? A Customer Service Problem in the NHS

 

The protestors and rioters from last week, who took a stand against wealth creation should perhaps also recognise how our National Health Service is the envy of the world and also how it would benefit from more tax revenues….which are made possible by more wealth creation…

A young woman in her early thirties sought treatment from her GP believing that she had sinusitis. The doctor noticed her acute discomfort and pain and realised that she needed to go to the hospital if her condition did not improve within four hours.

During the next four hours her condition did worsen and an ambulance was called. The paramedics came fairly quickly and looked into her pulse, eyes, breathing, and heart and carried out other checks to establish that she had not had a stroke or was not facing other imminent risks. Upon arrival at the hospital they passed patient on to the Accident and Emergency ward and went off to their base.  By this time, the patient was in acute pain from a pounding headache and the increasing level of nausea was adding to her discomfort. One of the paramedics remarked just before she left that what the patient was experiencing ‘was more than a sinus or a migraine’ and suggested urgent treatment by the doctor.

The ward sister had other ideas and after ‘processing’ the patient decided to place her in a queue. When asked how long it would take before a doctor would see the patient, she replied that there was a four hour wait. The patient’s family asked for a reconsideration which was denied. They then decided to take the patient to a private hospital where a team consisting of general practitioner, ENT/head specialist and a neurologist soon diagnosed meningitis and began an urgent course of treatment. The patient was discharged after six days of exceptional care and treatment and is now making a slow but sure recovery.

The patient’s family is considering making a formal complaint. However, they are also aware that the NHS is likely to come up with many defensive positions. The family has since discovered that serious meningitis patients, when not treated urgently, have had strokes and three have died. How is the A&E ward likely to respond to a formal complaint? They could resort to any one of the following number of positions or a combination of them:

• The ward sister was always aware of the risk factors but it was patient’s family who discharged the patient and therefore, deprived her of treatment;
• It was the family’s wish and right to take the patient to another hospital and the ward sister had no control over them; she allowed them to leave according to their wishes;
• Although a four hour delay had been ‘announced’, the ward sister or her team would have kept a close watch on the patient and would have either moved her to the top of the list or taken her straight to the doctors’ treatment room upon seeing any evidence of life threatening developments;
• The patient’s family decided to leave the hospital at around midnight and at that time the hospital had limited resources but a long queue of patients;
• Although the family had exposed the patient to considerable risk, the ward sister did not consider that it was her responsibility to stop the family from taking away a patient that the health service’s own ambulance service had brought in.
•  The advice given by the paramedic that ‘it is more than just a migraine or sinus attack’ was not completely lost or ignored.

The family has a firm view that given the propensity of the health service to make excuses or to offer implausible explanations couched in medical jargon, they are not going to make a complaint. The family also believes that the entire process of registering a complaint is time consuming and unproductive. ‘The NHS is very good at defending itself’, they say.

Had the patient’s condition worsened and especially if she had become exposed to irreversible danger, the A&E ward would admit that it had ‘several lessons to learn from this incident’. Following, at best, an acceptance of mismanagement but not a formal admission of liability the business of the A&E ward would have returned to normal. 

The views held by the family about the NHS and their perceptions of the health service’s slick approach to freeing itself from risk factors and dealing with danger leave very serious concerns. There is, of course, also the dreaded statement “There are lessons to be learnt from this episode…. and all response mechanisms for dealing with similar cases in the future have been thoroughly upgraded”.  One member of the family is less convinced. Is it not becoming too common for service providers to fail miserably before they admit to having lessons to learn? 

 

 

 

What can a solitary campaign achieve?

For a start, customer service campaigns are never solitary. There is always a group of seemingly undervalued and unrecognised people known as ‘the customers’ who step forward and expect to be acknowledged. I know of at least three managers who spend a great deal of their time in dealing with customer correspondence relating to service complaints but they are not able to link the feedback from customer correspondence about their needs and expectations with the opportunities they could create for upgrading service delivery. There are five challenges for these managers:

1. How to skillfully handle customer complaints
2. How to ensure that the same complaints are not repeated everyday
3. How to train other staff to deal with complaints – do you want to employ the world’s highest paid complaints handler because a director does not trust his own staff to deal with ‘irate’ customers?
4. In keeping with number 2 above, how should the organisation learn from existing complaints to the extent that it is able to integrate improvements into the delivery mechanism? The alternative is to keep on dealing with the same complaints repeatedly.
5. How to learn from other service organisations.

There will be more discussion on how to address these opportunities. What would also be useful is to discuss how service providers should avoid being reactive when things go bad. Good complaints avoidance programmes should be strategic, ongoing, continuous and be based on open communication. Simple? Not really. We hope to bring you a few examples of success.

The Campaign for Customer Entitlement is nothing new. There have been many commentators and analysts in the past who have campaigned on behalf of the customer. The popular media features to customer complaints against service providers on a daily basis. It makes even better copy when they name and shame service providers. However, in extreme and justifiable cases this may be the only alternative.

The Airport and the Airline

Consider the plight of the hundreds of travellers who were stranded at Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5 during the last few weeks. These customers of British Airways and British Airports Authority were angry, exhausted and complaining about their customer service entitlement.

 

Agnes Huffy[1] is an American consultant who advises airports and airlines. Her services might have come at a high premium last month at Heathrow, where the airport operator was blaming the airline in the early stages of the critical breakdown of services. The customers felt that their entitlement was going to be serviced by the airline because they were the service provider that had ‘taken’ their money. The roller coasters of customers’ emotions were probably matched evenly but in private by predictable waves of blame and confusion where airline and airport took turns in allocating fault.

 

Agnes Huffy, writing at a different time in relation to entitlement says “I was always under the impression that the delivery of good customer service was a key objective for all public contact jobs. I thought that a company’s success and survival depended upon its ability to provide excellent service to distinguish and differentiate itself from the competition. Today, it appears that such differentiating factors include a growing number of complaints about “service,” which many feel has disappeared not only from our vocabulary, but also from our overall travel experience”.

 

No Agnes, it is still there but customers seem to have become used to accepting declining levels of service in all spheres of the customer/service provider relationship. There seems to a cultural shift in accepting less for paying more. Someone was saying that service is better in Loitokitok.

 

Agnes Huffy goes on to ask, “ Have we irreversibly learned during our formative years to expect more than what is realistic? Perhaps our ambition and will to succeed creates a false sense of entitlement that we carry throughout our life experience. To understand the root of the issue, perhaps we need to consider the source. If you ask the disgruntled why they are disgruntled, we usually find it stems from a combination of a pre-conceived lack of trust, and an innate belief that they automatically deserve to get the most — regardless of the level of output or investment on their par”.

While I think I know where Agnes Huffy is coming from, I would not have said what she says next within ten miles of Heathrow Airport. Agnes Huffy says “ In a society where people are constantly clamouring to get the most out of everyday experiences in life, whether in business, travelling, playing, or at home, our perpetual expectation is to always get what we want. When this does not materialize according to our expectations, and in as timely a manner as we anticipate, we become frustrated, impatient and irritated, often generalizing the past negative experiences and perhaps even blowing them out of proportion. These negative mind patterns then continue to repeat themselves and become oppressive to our overall worldview”.

The customer for public services in Britain is described by labels, which reflect the different expectations of the service provider and the recipient. When my local council does not collect my rubbish bin, I may be classified as a disgruntled ‘resident’. But is the expectation of a reliable collection of my bin also not my entitlement?  Leave my bin outside for a day and the cat from 11 houses away will expose chicken tikka massalla that I did not share with him- he loves my food more than his own.

Armando Martinez, who works in the rather esoteric and higher-level world of ‘telcos’- telecommunications companies providing broadband and other personal media related services says, “ Entitlement is the process of authorizing a service (a music or broadcast TV channel, pay per view, etc.) or content (a movie, program, game or special event) to a customer. Entitlement also includes the assignment of rights, which are the rules that govern how services and content can be used”. Entitlement management systems are increasingly needed in Britain’s public sector. These systems should be capable of managing complex functionalities and challenges, such as those of collecting my bin, repairing my road, cleaning the street in live in and educating me to learn more about recycling the waste that my household generates. Is my local council’s entitlement management system able to track what service its customers, not ‘residents’ need? Has the council invested in capable systems to track how services are provided and how the delivery of entitlement is monitored by them?

Did the attributes provided below apply to the situation at Heathrow Aiport?  Could one have switched the labels? How many customers might have gone home feeling that it was service providers who were unhelpful, inattentive, impolite and unprofessional?

Customers		Service Providers
·         Unreasonable ·         Angry ·         Upset ·         Disrespectful ·         Demanding		·         Helpful ·         Gracious ·         Attentive ·         Polite ·         Professional

Agnes Huffy: “To have proper perspective, we need to adjust our way of approaching customer service interactions and communications. We should not expect rude treatment, and we should definitely not be so surprised when we experience kindness, consideration, and attentive customer care”.

Campaign for Customer Entitlement (presently with just one member) will be examining issues relating to customers’ right to service -entitlement, especially in relation to services. While the content will be drawn largely from public sector experience, there will also be occasional coverage of service delivery in business. The public sector has a lot to learn from business but the reverse is also true. 

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[1] Agnes Huffy, “Customer Service in an Era of Entitlement”. Airport Business, www.airportbusiness.com