WARNING: There is a rant in the forecast....Many of you know firsthand that a major storm seemed to come out of nowhere and blew through the Northeast this week. Rain and high winds accompanied it, taking down trees and power lines in its wake regionwide.As I have mentioned in previous issues, one of the great things about where we live is that we are close to the ocean and the beach. It can be super relaxing during the warm months. The downside? Between Labor Day and Easter there is usually an increased chance that we will get crushed by storms like this one.Given that, not surprisingly we awoke Thursday early AM with 90% of our town without electricity, cable and internet going on and off, trees down on roads, and kids' school cancelled. As the locals like to say around here: "Wicked awesome!!"With no obvious fallen trees or power lines in our immediate area impacting us, we weren't sure why we didn't have power. As a result, we figured we'd probably be among the first to have full power back by night fall -- we got lucky.Not the case. For some reason, as houses near ours got back to normal, we stayed in the proverbial dark. Worse yet -- the power company was saying that their estimate for restoration of electricity to our neighborhood was Saturday at 11pm on their interactive mobile outage maps. Ugh...After a quick check, I noticed that this restoration time seemed to be the EXACT SAME estimate for EVERY neighborhood in our town AND the town next to us. You don't have to be Encyclopedia Brown to see that this didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.So I went right to the one place that any sane, reasonable person would go to seek some immediate answers: Twitter. It was there that I found our power company diligently replying to every customer inquiry with close variations of this response:Hi {yournamehere}. We have currently set a global ETR in MA & RI for 11PM Saturday night. This is a worst-case scenario of when we anticipate 95% restoration, and many customers will be restored in advance of this.Nothing more specific than that was provided in the 36 hours following the storm. Additionally, they would periodically tweet out the number of people and trucks they had working "around clock" in both states to ensure they met this deadline. "We won't stop until everyone gets their power back!" they proudly tweeted.On the check list of managing customer experience, the power company seemed to be doing the following:Give people a way to visualize how widespread the outages are (and where) so they understand that they are not the only onesEliminate angry calls to a hotline (and the need to staff up during storms) by referring everyone to the mobile outage mapProvide customers estimates for restoration of their service that are based largely on an internal, top down goal, not based on actual analysis of specific affected areas. Promote social media as a way to promptly engage customers and answer their questions, but without really communicating anything.Talk about how many resources and how much effort is being dedicated to solving a problem.Anyone see a problem here? In the hours following a storm like this, customers increasingly care about only one thing: getting their lives back to normal. They have little interest or value for effort -- they are literally and figuratively powerless. They simply want a trusted partner that shows some empathy, delivers results, but most importantly, communicates effectively and provides reliable information in order to minimize the time they are in the dark. It seems to me that most utility companies don't understand this. They are clearly more focused on checking boxes and prioritizing their internal needs and processes over that of the customer (in part because, without competition, they can). Just a few weeks after we discussed it in this space, here was an example of self serving, tone deaf, straight up vendor behavior, Friends. The sad thing is, it's not just utility companies that do this. Many large, established companies (maybe even yours) exhibit this exact same behavior with their customers. When the needs of the company are consistently prioritized first, it makes the customer feel powerless and breeds resentment. The moment they can switch, they will. But treat the customer like a partner and they will trust that you are doing your best. In turn, will appreciate your herculean efforts every time....Friends, the links this week are mostly quick ones so feel free to dig into them. And the Last Word includes a rare gem for the music fans -- check it out. Have a good one!XOXODave
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Friends of Dave #147: I Feel For You
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WARNING: There is a rant in the forecast....Many of you know firsthand that a major storm seemed to come out of nowhere and blew through the Northeast this week. Rain and high winds accompanied it, taking down trees and power lines in its wake regionwide.As I have mentioned in previous issues, one of the great things about where we live is that we are close to the ocean and the beach. It can be super relaxing during the warm months. The downside? Between Labor Day and Easter there is usually an increased chance that we will get crushed by storms like this one.Given that, not surprisingly we awoke Thursday early AM with 90% of our town without electricity, cable and internet going on and off, trees down on roads, and kids' school cancelled. As the locals like to say around here: "Wicked awesome!!"With no obvious fallen trees or power lines in our immediate area impacting us, we weren't sure why we didn't have power. As a result, we figured we'd probably be among the first to have full power back by night fall -- we got lucky.Not the case. For some reason, as houses near ours got back to normal, we stayed in the proverbial dark. Worse yet -- the power company was saying that their estimate for restoration of electricity to our neighborhood was Saturday at 11pm on their interactive mobile outage maps. Ugh...After a quick check, I noticed that this restoration time seemed to be the EXACT SAME estimate for EVERY neighborhood in our town AND the town next to us. You don't have to be Encyclopedia Brown to see that this didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.So I went right to the one place that any sane, reasonable person would go to seek some immediate answers: Twitter. It was there that I found our power company diligently replying to every customer inquiry with close variations of this response:Hi {yournamehere}. We have currently set a global ETR in MA & RI for 11PM Saturday night. This is a worst-case scenario of when we anticipate 95% restoration, and many customers will be restored in advance of this.Nothing more specific than that was provided in the 36 hours following the storm. Additionally, they would periodically tweet out the number of people and trucks they had working "around clock" in both states to ensure they met this deadline. "We won't stop until everyone gets their power back!" they proudly tweeted.On the check list of managing customer experience, the power company seemed to be doing the following:Give people a way to visualize how widespread the outages are (and where) so they understand that they are not the only onesEliminate angry calls to a hotline (and the need to staff up during storms) by referring everyone to the mobile outage mapProvide customers estimates for restoration of their service that are based largely on an internal, top down goal, not based on actual analysis of specific affected areas. Promote social media as a way to promptly engage customers and answer their questions, but without really communicating anything.Talk about how many resources and how much effort is being dedicated to solving a problem.Anyone see a problem here? In the hours following a storm like this, customers increasingly care about only one thing: getting their lives back to normal. They have little interest or value for effort -- they are literally and figuratively powerless. They simply want a trusted partner that shows some empathy, delivers results, but most importantly, communicates effectively and provides reliable information in order to minimize the time they are in the dark. It seems to me that most utility companies don't understand this. They are clearly more focused on checking boxes and prioritizing their internal needs and processes over that of the customer (in part because, without competition, they can). Just a few weeks after we discussed it in this space, here was an example of self serving, tone deaf, straight up vendor behavior, Friends. The sad thing is, it's not just utility companies that do this. Many large, established companies (maybe even yours) exhibit this exact same behavior with their customers. When the needs of the company are consistently prioritized first, it makes the customer feel powerless and breeds resentment. The moment they can switch, they will. But treat the customer like a partner and they will trust that you are doing your best. In turn, will appreciate your herculean efforts every time....Friends, the links this week are mostly quick ones so feel free to dig into them. And the Last Word includes a rare gem for the music fans -- check it out. Have a good one!XOXODave