Customer engagement

Grant Leboff: So Adrian, one of the things that's quite interesting in the book is, I mean, everybody talks about customer engagement. Adrian Swinscoe: Sure. Grant Leboff: But you, in the book, you say, to really engage customers, you need to be willing to fail, which sounds puzzling, in the first instance. What do you mean by that? Adrian Swinscoe: I think there's a really interesting idea around …we talk about engagement, and what that means, but we still talk about engagement in a very mechanistic sort of way. We talk about customer service not failing, having a perfect experience, so on and so forth. But I think if we actually step back and look at engagement, what does engagement mean? Particular human to human kind of level. Sometimes your best friends or the people that are closes and dearest to you, are the ones that are willing to make mistakes, they are willing to try new things, you're there to support them on their journey. I think there's not that many companies have taken that to heart. 'Cause they're always trying to be no failure, perfect service, so on and so forth. But I actually think, what's interesting is that there's an opportunity to think about, can we try something kind of new.. But it might not work? Actually, in the belief that if your service's good enough, customers will forgive you for not getting things right every time. If you're trying to improve the service. If your intent is to improve things. But your willing to, maybe, trip up couple times along the way. Actually, the amount of forgiveness that customers will have for companies that are trying to do the right thing, I think is enormous. Grant Leboff: Do you think it's stifling for companies if they're unwilling to fail, which let's say some companies are, you know, they just don't want to make any mistakes. Adrian Swinscoe: Yeah. Grant Leboff: Do you think that stifles them in terms of creativity and innovation, and actually long term, can actually be harmful? Adrian Swinscoe: I think so because what you end up doing is if your primary motivation is not to do something wrong then you'll just never embark on some of these new, impossibly incremental initiatives or innovative initiatives that might not work but could be amazing. Because if you're striving for perfection, you'll just, but there's a risk that something might fail, you'll just not do it. So what you'll do is you'll forgo all sorts of potentially great opportunities just because there's maybe a small percentage risk that you might fail. Grant Leboff: That's a really interesting point because I don't think that's something that companies think about, particularly. When you look at some of the big companies around, I mean, Apple didn't get their maps apps right, did they? Adrian Swinscoe: Not at all. Grant Leboff: First off, and Google, I think, has had some quite public failures as well. I think when you talk about these real innovative companies, do exactly what you say. Adrian Swinscoe: Well, absolutely, I think there's a great example from the UK, which they don't do so much of it now but they used to do, and that's First Direct [The UK’s first online bank]. On their website, they used to have a thing called, First Direct Lab, where they used to put up new pieces of software, or initiatives that they were trialing and they would let people know that, "We're trialing these things, test them out, let us know what you think." And they used to get massive amounts of feedback, and learning for the customers. They said, "We built this, let us know what you think." People used to try, and go, "It's great, or it's not great, or it's rubbish, or be better if it's like this or like not." So they're almost innovating in public but in doing that, through their innovating in public sort of initiatives, they build additional trust with people because people can see that they're trying to do things that are going to help them, and it's going to improve the service. I think that just, it just all lends itself to why First Direct are still loved by the majority of their customers and still one of the most talked about customer focus brands in the U.K. There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order make it more readable.