Quality Controlled in HE?

I saw this article about 77% rise in 'unregulated' private university courses from the University and College Union.  The sad incitement here is that the number of private provider courses approved without quality checks increased by 77% from 228 in the 2010/11 academic year to 403 in 2011/12 academic year. 

It appears the UCU are tarring every private provider with the same brush.  We at Blairgowrie have worked with some of these private providers (granted not all of them) and I can honestly say they take the quality of their offer very seriously and invest significantly in the area. 

As part of their validation process with a degree awarding institution they go through extremely rigorous quality measurement and sign off.  Indeed some of their key staff actually quality assess other public university courses.

Yes it is important that rigorous standards are set and adhered to by all because we all want a quality education system.  However, it is lazy rhetoric by the UCU to simplify the argument to Pubic = Good and Private = Bad. 

This navel gazing perspective forgets the most important part of this, the 18 year old student,  what they really value and require irrespective of the sector in which the providers operates (Public or private).

Perhaps if the UCU adopted this perspective they could help contribute and solve the problem for our youngsters and their future, not simply roll out dogma and rhetoric which is neither helpful or constructive.

Heads and Tails choice for UKs Higher Education Sector

I saw all the news in the papers about declining student applications this year via the UCAS report.  This is particularly interesting to me on two counts. 

Firstly at Blairgowrie we have carved out a niche working with HE providers and helping them understand the market that they are in, the challenges faced and creating programmes where they can do something about growth i.e. Get more competitive and commercial. 

Secondly I am currently the hired taxi service for my daughter and take her around a variety of University open days anywhere in the country.

So what does it all mean for things in the news like this?

Well from my perspective it is a real challenge for the total sector.  I believe for the first time they will have to address the value for money conundrum that the boarder business world faces day in day out.

Simply, I am being asked to buy a product for £9,000 per year where I have no guarantees of anything, I am then asked for a further £7,000 per year to supplement this so this product can be used.  That’s just short of £50,000 over 3 years.

So what can I expect from my investment? 

Well the answer is ....no one can tell me other than glib statements which ere fine when the investment was nil, but for investment at these levels one requires something better.  This gets particularly worse if your offspring wants to do something that is not too vocational such as Philosophy. The assumption is that it is harder to get a job to pay for these subjects than say doing something more vocational.

Getting all philosophical for a moment; I am not advocating that that the sole purpose of a university education is to get a job, it’s about lots of other things but the levels of investment required now seem to be pushing it that way, which seems a bit sad really.  The implications being that those high end academic pursuits will now be in the domain of those that can afford to punt the investment whereas those that need to pay it off will focus on getting more vocational qualification.

What are the Choices?

So as numbers go down and decrease further for the pure academic courses, what is left for the University to do?  They have a big fixed cost to maintain (lecturers, faculty etc), They are on a three year cycle so have to wait for the last cohort to go through before they do something therefore for the less popular courses how do they manage ever dwindling student numbers or this tail end? 

After all it’s not like industry where you could argue it’s a loss leader and people will switch to a more expensive option – all courses prices are the same...although I suspect the costs are very different.

Therefore to manage the tail of courses it’s my supposition that strategically Universities have two levers to pull.  They can either drop prices or/and, decrease entry requirements stimulate demand for these tail end courses.

The University Conundrum

Of course each of these tactics come with some strategic baggage as doing this may be harmful to the brand of the Institution by potentially dropping quality which will impact on other course volumes.

So the conundrum for Universities is do they maintain the status quo, actively manage the tail or focus on the higher growth areas? The challenge understands how flexible they are and how much they can change their business model to support this now changing market.

This also is not just an individual institution issue; it goes to the heart of the sector and the way it is structured.  Currently, there has been little change but I suspect, and know through the work we have completed change for some institutions is on the horizon.  However, the Principles need to firstly acknowledge they are now in a market, secondly understand what the needs of their customers (students) are and what they value, thirdly do something about it...both from a business service model and marketing perspective.

So What is the Solution?

The drop in applications will, I suspect, continue and the pressure on Universities will increase become greater and greater until there will be some high profile casualties unless both the industry and Institutions addresses it.

Simply, if there is no plan or active choices then these Institutions will simply wither on the vine, the key components of the plan are the same as anything else one needs to understand:

• Who are the customers & how many (Market & its structure)
• What do they value or what are their priorities (What are the needs)
• How can we create things to address these needs (Develop Products)
• How can we prioritise our activity to meet the needs (Prioritise initiatives)
• What activity do we need to do to execute on this (Plan & action)

 

However, step #1 is to acknowledge the issue and I think for some this is the most difficult step...

 

 

You've been Framed: A Simple Way to Strategically Frame your Business & its CEM Programme

Firstly I have failed miserably to keep up my once a week target for blog postings but it’s been all go at Blairgowrie Associates at the moment.  There have been a couple of interesting developments. We met our first senior director who told us that they have no customer issues and they have little use to use NPS...this is despite much publically available comment to the contrary.  I guess the maxim of 80% chief executives believe there customers have a great experience but less than 8% of their customers do really holds true.

More importantly, we have started to use a tool to help frame our client’s strategy.  For clarity, this is not about redesigning or recreating strategy, it is a simple way to understand and frame where your organisation is, no matter how big or small you are.

Helping Bridge the Gap...

We use this as a way of seeing how joined up an organisation is from business imperative through to end value created.  To create a common lexicon for Blairgowrie, we often score each component and discuss how connected each of these components are.

So the power is actually in the "joinedupness" (is that a word?) not necessarily the individual components. For most businesses one would be hard pressed to honestly say “there is no vision or strategy or activity”.  When we have run this past senior leaders we get an initial

contemptuous look and a short “of course we have all these things”.  More often than not this is true.  Yes for some it  could always be much clearer so everyone in the organisation understands their contribution and impact. 

To take a simple example and quantify, one may score the clarity of business vision, say, 4 out of 10.  This could simply mean the business needs to be more effective at communicating this internally to move it up a couple of points.  This indicates some improvements to be made for each section - NOT Recreation.

Where we often see major challenges for companies looking at the individual components is in the business activities box.  Often too many activities that are, at best, tenuously linked to strategy, vision and imperative – or sort of retro fitted by managers to please others. 

If we take a moment to reflect on how many of us have been involved in activities where it is not clear how they link to the other components of the model and it is difficult to articulate the reason why they are linked, without reverting to management speak?  I will admit there have been some occasions in my career where this was certainly the case; fortunately for me not too often.

Back to our senior leaders...the moment of truth is whaen you ask them to honestly assess how strong the joins (as indicated by the arrows) really are and how big are the gaps between each component. 

The acid test being can you move from left to right and right to left articulating CLEARLY how things fit together and why to people outside your company eg. shareholders, investors, analysts? If one finds oneself tripping over words, you know it could be better.  The reality is that it is more important to drive cohesion across these areas, as well as focus on the individual boxes.

This is our raison d'être at Blairgowrie - when we talk about "bridging the gap" this is what we mean.  Stating the blindingly obvious by joining up these areas and strengthening the linkage it means that the improvement and business value created greater and much more sustainable.

“Simple is as simple does”

I hope you agree the tool and its application is pretty straightforward, but we all know in our business lives we are swamped with lots of initiatives, governed by resource constraints and the need to execute these things...yesterday. 

Often we get distracted (or is it allured) by trying to unconsciously complicate things,  work to someone else’s agenda , or create false functional silos. All this is not out of badness, everyone wants to do a great job, but often this is easier to do than providing the headspace to step back and use this simple tool to frame the strategy and where to focus effort.  Focus on the blocks, the linkage or both?

It will help prioritise and stop some initiatives that have sprung up, undoubtedly with good intensions from the team.  I have used it as a great challenge mechanism at board meetings to question how things really fit and help prioritise for valuable resources when say the IT director  passionately suggests doing XYZ.

So how does this relate to Customer Experience & Business Improvement?

We have covered that the model simply helps frame a business in a slightly different way – the focus being on how joined up things really are.  The challenge for customer experience and business improvement is they simply become disconnected “stuff” that goes on in the business. 

This is NOT saying they are unimportant, but if it is not linked to the model it means that the programme becomes part of the other 1,000 other initiatives that suck up organisational time, money and energy.  How many of us have sat in meetings to talk about our deliverables without first contextualising how the deliverable links to business imperative, vision, strategy, activity and end value?

All voice of customer or NPS programmes are well intentioned but if they operate in a disconnected manner within an organisation any value created tends to be diluted or one spends lots of time trying to establish an ROI. 

In some cases managers will not be able to articulate or identify an ROI because the approach has become an end in itself - not a means to an end to build the bridges between strategy, operational reality and results.  Short term this is great but mid to longer term this initiative will eventually be changed and forgotten as the next great white knight initiative comes to prominence.

Funnily, I came across a PR statement from Satmetrix research today saying 70% of organisations do not know, cannot measure or cannot prove the return on investment (ROI) from customer experience management initiatives.... Q.E.D

If you want to discuss this further you can get me at doc@blairgowrieassociates.co.uk

Does NPS Evolve in Organisations? My Virgin Media Experience

As I received my nice e mail from my friends at Virgin Media, post a service interaction I had with them, but more of that a little later, asking me to participate in a survey. This then got me thinking about if organisations can be segmented into groups according to how they look at loyalty or NPS measurement.

Stating the blindingly obvious, there are no commercial organisations (solvent ones) that when asked are customers important they give a big resounding “NO”. However, when one digs a bit deeper and tries to get under the skin of organisations a natural order of things quickly emerge.

Where is your Company on Here?

Firstly you have those companies that know about NPS but are just too busy to put it in their business, as its not high on their priorities – they are obviously focusing on “other strategies!”.

The next group have seemingly outsourced loyalty to the marketing team as “its customers...isn’t that the domain of marketing..far too unimportant to bother the CEO”.

The third group is interesting as they have things in place, tend to be pretty slick but are constantly analysing and re-segmenting for greater insight - To quote Nike “Just Do it”...just start to do things to effect traction.

The penultimate group again have everything in place, loyalty is central to the organisation – absolutely brilliant! However, get so focused on NPS, improving traction, monitoring improvement, which they forget to keep the customer informed about what is happening. All the great work is totally invisible to the customers. As far as they are concerned all they ever do is complete surveys and hear zip.

Finally the ideal state is all of the above but then the organisation actually closes the emotional loop and tells us simple customers what they are doing & the effect we have made on them. 

This gets me back to Virgin Media... I thought, “Here we go another survey that will be lost in the corporate cloud...what’s the point completing it? I have better things to do...” As a CX professional this is a tad grating but I am compelled to complete it as its what I tell our customers.

To my delight and surprise I was then directed to here. An absolutely fantastic experience where humble customers (yes we who pay the cheques or checks in the US) can see how and what our feedback is driving in simple, measurable, actionable and quantifiable manner. 

All the things we talk about at Blairgowrie and I was converted from a passive to a promoter that is prepared to write a blog about it. But it does make me ask the question of organisations where do they sit on my chart – all feedback welcome.


Ps. For the record Virgin Media are not a customer of ours!!

What NPS can learn from Popular Culture - Challenges with NPS Benchmarks

I was looking talking to a customer the other day about Net Promoter and the invariable conversation about how great it would be to benchmark all providers and have a league table for the great & the not so good. I did point out that Satmetrix have just published their “benchmarks” for industries. 

The challenge here is they are very US centric and of little use to many businesses as a true benchmark as most of the customers are massive multi-national blue chips.  The value of them is that they can provide some directional insight on the great and the good.

However, what’s the relevance of Apple Corporation current value $568Bn to a £150m support services business in the Midlands?  People tend to want benchmarks with people like them – the closer they reflect you the better.

This did get me thinking of novel ways to describe the issue of benchmarking and the impact of relativity in NPS measurement.  For those who really know me understand that I really try keep everything really simple and this is reflected in the Blairgowrie Associates Culture – simple, measurable, actionable and quantifiable.  So here goes my attempt to simplify the challenge as I see it...

The Syndrome Effect

It is great that all companies strive to get their customers to promote, provide the 10 NPS score we all crave, this creates a problem.  In a benchmark sense if everyone scores 10 and provides great service the problem was best summed up by Syndrome aka Buddy in the Management classic The Incredibles.  Whilst Brad Bird is no Charles Handy, the comment was just as profound. 

You see " if everyone is super...no one will be" - applying this to NPS if everyone is 10 or +60 in a benchmark one can see no difference.  This then leads on to the Brian effect...

The Brian Effect

Again I never thought I would be citing Monty Python but the piece makes the point for me better than any Micheal Porter tome on competitive differentiation. 

You see the challenge is if every company claims to have an NPS of X or talks about using NPS to improve customer service (again all great things), to the humble customer there is no difference. 

The importance of the message gets lost in the rest of the claims, sub claims and pronouncements.  In essence it is like the scene from Life of Brian where all the characters claim they are indeed Brian...and so's my wife.

Therefore next time you are at a conference and the Company presenting is extolling the virtues of their current customer experience initiative or framework, ask your self if this really differentiates them against their competition or better still are they simply Brian....

What is YOUR Personal NPS?

I got in today and thought I would have a look at LinkedIn, mainly as I could see I had 4 new messages, oh the excitement..  To my surprise (and I confess disappointment) they were all requests from former colleagues for an endorsement or recommendation for when I worked with them.  Not that I have any problem whatsoever doing this as I have done the same but it got me thinking....If NPS is a simple measure of loyalty then one could start applying it to one’s self in a business context; You might want to use it for your private life but if you do you really need to get out more. 

Therefore would you recommend another individual (score 9/10) or are you simply passive (score 7-8), there may be occasions where you may detract from a person but in my business experience I can only think of two people I have met who would fall into this category.  The usual follow up question of “why did you score this way” could lead to some real personal development opportunities – although one may find this a tad embarrassing.

With the prevalence of social media and mobile devices, one could score individuals anonymously and immediately.  Indeed if you have a look at the technology being offered by SurveySwipe where you can NPS things (and people) via a multitude of mobile devices (the image of the i phone is theirs).  No doubt one could have an immediate dashboard of people’s scores.  Indeed, I noticed the concept of NPS for individuals when I had a meeting with the guys at CustomerGauge, where in their follow up communication they included a link to rate them.  I have no idea if this is linked to performance management within their organisation but it would be a simple and effective measure?

As for Linked in endorsements it got me thinking if one could come up with a simple, measurable and reliable way of calculating Personal NPS.  So here is my starter for 10...

What is Your Personal NPS?



Therefore your NPS is calculated by taking the total requests that you have asked people for endorsements (You can see this by looking at Profile >>Recommendations>>Received Recommendations.  You then add on the pending requests to the recommendations and calculating the percentage of Endorsements you have received (You can see this by looking at Profile >>Recommendations>>Received Recommendations). 

Reciprocal endorsements are those ones where you have also provided an endorsement for someone and they have for you –the “I scratch your back...” approach.  The percentage here is expressed as a percentage of total endorsements you received.  Therefore to get to your personal NPS, simply deduct one from the other.

A Simple Worked Example

Fred has requested 38 former collegues via linked In for an endorsement (n=38), but hereceived back 21 endorsements from his former colleagues (55% of n).  However, Fred reciprocated endorsements for 7 of these people (33% of total endorsements). Using this example Freds Personal NPS is calculated 55% less 33%

Freds Personal NPS is 22%

Some Thoughts

So whilst this might seem like a bit of fun, imagine if recruiters started to use this as part of their selection process?  One could argue that they already do this when looking at linked in anyhow.  One could also use it as a basis for personal development and improvement.  I guess the real ouestion is what is Your personal NPS - you can tweet it to me on @davidjoconnor or hash tag it #personalnps.  I could plot the results....in the next blog

NPS - Statistics & Smiles

I was reading through some linked in posts on a few customer insights groups and it got me thinking  about times I have sat in meeting discussing a variety of customer measurement metrics or insights, only to be interrupted by some  amateur  statistician to ask me about the statistical significance of the results.  In my experience this tends to be asked when the results are, ahem, not terribly favorable for the individual or Company.*

Indeed in one business a senior manager was instructing his teams to call up customers to ask them to make the scores higher, therefore make him look better.  I guess the best way of describing this is a sort of corporate boiler room where operators were pushing their questionable service performance.

In some quarters there seems to be a need to try and legitimize NPS through statistics which is really sad as the measure is and was never set out to be statistically significant, only significant in closing down customer issues that impact loyalty. The closest it gets to statistical significance is asking one to state what N is (how many responses).  The mistake often is to question method and ignore what one will do to address the issue - Take a leaf from Apples book and call the customers to close & resolve the customers perceived issue that drives dis tractor behavior.

So next time you have someone focusing on method rather than outcome, just remember the cartoon above and smile....


*As I majored in statistics, it is pretty easy to confuse these folks, so keeping it simple is a must