September | 2014 | Adventures in customer success and technology

We’ve had the key note and it was impressive – I’ve never had my family members watch one with me, and all be excited by the new technology! What technology you say? The Apple Watch…

Yes I’ll admit I’m an Apple fanboy at heart – it’s their whole customer experience and the simplicity of the Apple ecosystem that does it for me. It’s the idea of a “service bubble” again (as I’ve blogged about before – i.e. when you’re there with a brand and the whole experience is just right – from every interaction you have and you know it’s them), it just works.

The Apple Watch won’t be the first smart watch on the block (just like the iPhone wasn’t the first smart phone), but it will work and it will sell and it will have the same consistent simple experience we expect and that we want.

I don’t wear watches any more and I haven’t now for probably 30 years, but I’ll be one of those looking at spending £300 on an Apple Watch when it comes out. Yes it will tell the time like a traditional watch but I don’t need it for that (when in 2014 are you somewhere where you can’t find the time out?).

It’s the ability to do so much more without having to find your phone and pull it out. Maps telling you the direction to go, a heart rate monitor (that you don’t have to strap around your chest and get friction burns from – that’s another story), messages from friends and family, access to my photos, online shopping, a camera and access to passbook (boarding cards, loyalty passes and more), to name a few. It will ultimately replace my trusty Garmin Forerunner 305 (that’s beginning to drop the signal a bit more than it should) but maybe when v2 comes out with GPS included (running with the Apple Watch and having to have an iPhone on me, doesn’t work for races just yet).

Apple Watch apps

But – and this is the big question – am I prepared to never be offline? Never offline – this was the title of Time Magazine this week – have we even considered what this means?

You may say that you’re never offline now, with a smart phone always near by. But you can put it down. How often do you take a watch off? Rarely if ever. Always reachable, location always known and apps reacting to you realtime giving advice and directions – 24×7 365 days a year wherever you are (yes assuming you have a mobile data connection). We’ll get to a point when retailers know where we are and can automatically make recommendations on what to do, where to go and what to buy. We’ll see consumer behaviour changes that we’ve not even thought about yet. A lot absolutely will make sense and after a while we won’t know what we did without them (just like smart phones). But we need to consider the implications of some and work to make sure we don’t create a situation where having a smart watch becomes a necessity and if you don’t have one you lose out, to some extent.

We need good – no make that excellent – mobile data coverage everywhere as well, to make most of the use cases for smart watches work. Not just global coverage, as in in all countries around the world, but even within countries and regions. Even near the great city that is London, solid 3G and 4G coverage isn’t there yet. And then there’s good old network roaming – just imagine travelling around the globe as we do, and suddenly being hit by extortionate data charges – it won’t work. Telco’s and other businesses will need to rethink their existing business models and come up with ones!

It’s an exciting time! I can’t wait to see how things go when the Apple Watch hits the streets in 2015!

Apple Watch this space!

I too often hear the phrase service excellence used these days when describing technology delivery services, and in most cases there’s no definition of what this actually means.

Let’s go back to basics then and look at we mean by excellence in this context. From the Oxford dictionary, we have “The quality of being outstanding or extremely good”. Another definition is as a quality that people really appreciate, because it’s hard to find, and as being the quality of excelling, of being truly the best at something.

I like this last one – being the best at something and excelling – so going above and beyond the normal expectations, and importantly setting new standards.

It’s this excelling at something that hits the mark for many customers when it comes to service. Many of the organisations I’ve worked with and for, have been in challenging situations around their customer service, customer experience etc, and one of the focuses for my role there has been to revitalise their approach and work to transform the way they engage with customers, be they internal or external customers.

In this day and age, we’re all consumers (outside of the normal workplace) of goods and services and our expectations have changed significantly over the last few years. It’s now all about a truly anyhow, anywhere and anytime culture, and this has a huge impact on how organisations need to work and change and adapt.

To add to this challenge, some of the more legacy technology services that we’re delivering – as well as the new innovative solutions an services – just have to work. Email is a great example. If your email service is 100% available, 24×7, and can be accessed wherever you are on any device, is this an excellent service or is it just expected?

I read an interesting article a few weeks back, on cio.com, titled “7 Steps to Excellent Service Delivery“, by Phil Weinzimer – do take a look, there are some really good ideas here.

Phil sets out a 7 step plan that CIOs can use, to improve the delivery of their services to the business, and the core theme is understanding the business objectives better and delivering to meet those.

In summary the 7 steps that Phil’s lists are:

Identify the business and commodity services required by the business units
Identify the key stakeholders and priority for each business service
Build and develop the enterprise list of business services, for each unit
Socialise and communicate across the enterprise
Develop and execute the work plan, and get stakeholder buy-in
Continuously measure the service delivery – and build and use business focused SLAs
Continuously improve – regularly evaluate the service with the stakeholders and users

I really like this approach. It’s critical as I’ve mentioned to engage more with the business and key stakeholders, and to be able to respond in a very agile manner to their needs!

How does your service measure up? And what does excellent service mean to you?

Adventures in customer success and technology

Innovation | Transformation | Success

Monthly Archives: September 2014

Are we ready for real 24×7 connectivity?

Are you delivering excellent service?