The Olympics are done and one of the biggest winners was the UK.
They took 19 gold medals, and 8 of them were in cycling.
The director of British Cycling explained: “We focused on ‘performance by the aggregation of marginal gains.’ Even when you’re nearly perfect, you keep looking for a one percent improvement in every single thing you do. That’s what we try to do from the mechanics upwards to the rider. Some teams neglect the little bits. Not us.”
It made me think about customer experience (as I always do, you know) - where no detail is too small…where every experience can be made that little bit easier, more useful or more enjoyable.
I put this to Phil Terry, CEO of Creative Good (www.creativegood.com), while dining with him the other day. Creative Good is a customer experience pioneer, and Phil is one of the most interesting characters in the industry. Among other things, he’s organized a book club that will take you the rest of your life to get through. Take a look - www.readingodyssey.com.
But, back to our conversation…
Phil: Dave Brailsford?
DMcQ: British Cycling coach.
Phil: Er, right. Anyway. He’s got a point – you need to have mastery of what you’re doing and look to continually improve. We can extend that thinking to business – that we must have technical mastery of what we’re offering to customers. But there’s something else you need to think about if you really want to deliver great experiences – the law of probability.
DMcQ: Law of probability? Uh. Can you pass the wine?.
Phil: Let’s take this example: Imagine a plane has 2,000 parts. And imagine that each of those parts has a reliability of 99.9%. There is only a .1% chance that the part will fail. What is the chance, when the plane takes off, that one of those parts will fail?
DMcQ: Umm…calculator’s broken. Sorry. (whew)
Phil: 86% likely that one part will fail. This is why a plane has back up for those parts (in case you were worried about airline safety).
DMcQ: WHOA!
Phil: Now, extend that to your business – which certainly has more than 2,000 parts. You must have technical mastery – they must be under control and 99.9% reliable (if you’re lucky). But, no matter how hard you work on every last detail, things are going to go wrong and your customer’s experience will suffer. If you face that reality, you can do three things.
- Simplify the experience. Fewer parts means fewer chances that something will fail. Something with 10 parts, for example, has only a 1% chance of failure.
- Create a service experience that continually delights your customers. This way, when something does go wrong, you’ve built up enough goodwill that customers will be more forgiving.
- Know what can go wrong and how to deal with it. If your staff knows how to deal with a bad experience, they can recover from it.
DMcQ: Singapore Airlines has such a programme. Staff has a list of the ten most common service failures, such as spilling a drink on a passenger, and how to deal with it.
Phil: Exactly. If you have those three things in place, you can deal with the inevitable failures in your customer experience. If you don’t, then there will be chaos. And very unhappy customers.
