People do not need a drill, but a picture on the wall

Just over a year ago we decided to create a service company for entrepreneurs, combining accountants, lawyers, business assistants and banking services in one place. We already had experience in developing b2b software and web services , but this time we faced a bunch of unknown problems. Richard Branson's guys came to the rescue - for four visits they taught us to ask ourselves simple and precise questions and answer them correctly. So we were able to identify the bottlenecks, learned how to hire the right people and unite them into teams, understand who we are and what level of service we should provide. We want Russia to have more good service, so we are happy to share our difficult experience.

A little bit about how it all began

At the start of the project, a very unusual team gathered in the Yekaterinburg office: a former train chief, who became an electricity seller; the guy who built one of the biggest affiliate networks selling b2b software ; sysadmin, who became chairman of the bank; another sysadmin, who led a b2b-Internet project , as well as designers and developers.

Over the years of work on previous projects ( Elba , Kontur-Extern , Dyadok , Bank24 , Northern Treasury , Inbank ) we have been pumped into creating simple and convenient interfaces, developing fast and reliable back-end , but we did not understand the main thing. People do not need a convenient and fast drill, people need holes in the wall. It is desirable that they appear in the right place in a magical way, or even better, if they immediately include screws, and a curtain with strung curtains hangs on these screws at the click of a finger. People need to get rid of the problem, and not to find a new high-tech hemorrhoids with a nanoshaft and touch buttons.

Similarly, entrepreneurs whose business is going uphill want to spend all their time on developing their business, and not on creating their own tax reports or making currency payments. Even with convenient tools, all this takes precious time and effort. A good example of such a routine is a coffee maker in a business center . He threw the money, pressed the right buttons and got a coffee. It seems good, everything is clear and clear, but will you tell your friends about this experience? And now the same coffee, but it is brewed by a good man who asks every morning how your business is going, wishes you a good day and sometimes brings a tasty donut as a gift. I want to tell the whole world about the institution where such a caring barista works.
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The most convenient interface for entrepreneurs who value their time is a living person, able to pick up and quickly resolve any issue related to business. We accepted the challenge and decided to make a service in which the entrepreneur does not need to take care of routine affairs: for him everything will be decided by a caring team consisting of an accountant, a lawyer and a business assistant . At the same time, she will decide quickly and without unnecessary questions, and also lift her spirits, take an interest in how yesterday’s meeting with business partners went and give practical advice on how best to conclude a deal with them.

Such an approach to solving problems is much more like a restaurant or a hotel, but not a banking business or the development of web services . Our web interfaces and mobile applications are just a means of connecting clients with service teams that live people are working on. Therefore, for us the most important thing was to learn how to serve our customers so that they would cry from happiness and would like to recommend us to their best friends.

In Russia, almost no one did this, so already at the design stage we resorted to the help of foreign colleagues: the guys from the English NB Studio helped to create a corporate identity and identity, the Swedes from ustwo breathed life into the interfaces, St Luke's London creative agency and even the legendary lone designer Michael Wulff had a hand in the master. We will tell about this great experience some other time, and now we will return to our topic.

From the point of view of service, we have always been inspired by the examples of guys from Zappos (we will also tell about this someday ) and Virgin Atlantic . You probably heard about how VA loves its passengers: delivers them to the ramp in a limousine, with the voice of Branson promises to give a free flight to anyone who does not answer the phone call within 30 seconds. We read a lot about it and decided to find someone to blame for organizing such a delightful service.

User journey and search for bottlenecks

It turned out to be easier than we thought. Two weeks after launch, Di Cooper flew into our office. In addition to working on the service in Virgin Atlantic, Dee played a large role in creating the volunteer service that helped guests of the 2012 London Olympics. She is a great Service Design Specialist. This phrase has been heard in our country by a very limited circle of people. We also did not know anything about him, we were worried about one simple question: “Why are we robbing so much?”.


Dee Cooper and her magical user journey

Dee helped to create a user journey - a diagram describing the client's feelings at each moment of contact with the Button : from the first acquaintance with the service, to the first appeal to the accountant. The button prepared for the start for more than six months, so as soon as we started, customers started to connect very actively, and we already had a representative picture, based on which we could draw the first conclusions.

On the resulting user journey, we saw that the biggest problem and the bottleneck is the connection process. In order to start working with the Button, the client must come to our Moscow office, transfer his accounting, meet the team and open an account in our bank, whose office was then across the street from the button. This process requires the signing of the N-th number of documents and takes about an hour, despite the fact that we tried to shrink everything to a minimum. And this hour was spent in an uncomfortable room - the client did not know what to do, even if you gave each Tetris for the connection time, so as not to get bored. In some cases, customers even had to run from our office to the bank office, because someone had overlooked something somewhere . You would not wish such an enemy, let alone recommend it to your friends.

We realized that we can not reduce the connection time, but we can make it fly unnoticed and leave the client only positive impressions. All that was required was to rent a good office with sofas and a stable Wi-Fi, learn how to open a bank account without departing from the cash register, treat a client with ice cream and cocoa, and also talk to him about the pain. Entrepreneurs are very interesting people, it is worth talking to them, and they will tell a lot of fascinating stories.

We managed to find a cool new office, conveniently located 100 meters from the Serpukhovskaya metro station. And then a funny side effect came to light - some clients liked it so much that they began to stay and work in our office, occasionally doing business. But we even like it - we have a lot of places, and we love to communicate. Later we hung a plasma panel in the office, on which they began to broadcast what is happening in the Yekaterinburg office, where exactly the same panel hung, showing a picture from Moscow :)


Cozy button office in Moscow

How to hire the right people?

After we eliminated the first problems, the number of clients began to increase even more rapidly. We needed new accountants, lawyers and business assistants . The first oncoming specialists did not fit - people who were not indifferent, responsive, able to communicate in human language, give happiness to the client and the rest of the team were needed. A cheerful user friend accountant who won't read the spell “RSV CUDIR FIFO BALANCE DEPET IFRS” out loud to you all the time, is more precious than gold. I wanted to do everything right from the very beginning, and the moment was the most appropriate, to call again for help people who had already succeeded in creating an outstanding customer service.

Di Cooper came again to visit, spent the day with us, plunged into client problems, asked some very simple questions: “What will the accountants do?”, “What do the customers expect from them?” And “How would you like everything what happened? " We wanted our specialists to communicate with clients through a web interface and mobile applications, do everything quickly, do not ask unnecessary questions, cause sympathy and addiction.

From this, a simple idea was born: to conduct the first stage of the interview through SMS communication , asking the candidate questions “based on” situations from the lives of our clients. At the same time, we deliberately used a confused and unprofessional style of presentation, typical of entrepreneurs who are poorly immersed in accounting and jurisprudence. For example: “I am on a business trip, I have lunch with a potential partner, I want to pay for dinner and hookah with company money, how to do it?”. Accountants divided into two camps. The first ones were indignant, showered with references to the NKRF and tried to explain with an accounting mat that it was unacceptable to smoke a hookah at the company's expense. The second asked to keep all the checks and promised to furnish everything so that the mosquito doesn’t waste a nose, or calmly and clearly explained why it’s bad to do so.

The answer to this question says a lot - you see, whether the candidate understands the subject, uses the jargon that is unacceptable for an ordinary person, and most importantly - he loves ordinary people with all their weaknesses and shortcomings.


How to explain to the child what an invoice is

The second thought was approximately in the same vein: why don't we have a game instead of a regular interview? We invited several candidates to the office at once, offered them to fulfill real tasks and answer real questions from real customers. The questions were at the junction of accounting, law and business processes , therefore there were always lawyers and business assistants from our teams who could and should interact with each other. Many candidates immediately rolled their eyes and left “this kindergarten”, the second part tried to do everything on their own, but we were interested in those people who started discussing ideas with the team, offered their solutions and listened to suggestions from people from other areas.

Each candidate performed 3-4 assignments, working on each in a new team. The decision on employment was taken not only by the head and HR, but also by the guys from the teams that had a chance to work with the candidate. After 2 hours, we knew exactly who knows how to work in a team, and who will constantly pull the blanket over himself. Speaking with the candidate tete-a-tete in a closed room, it is impossible to draw such conclusions. To understand who you still hired in this case can only be a few weeks later, which you spend on training and putting a person into the work. We learned how to detect it on the first day. Of course, there are also misfires, but we grow and they are found less and less.


Interview Accountants

At this second stage of work with Dee ended, she went to London. And in just a month and a half we scored many cool guys and rushed into battle.

How do the right people interact?

Finding the right employees is half the battle. In order to serve the client well and quickly resolve the issue, accountants, lawyers and business assistants should interact with each other. Imagine that a client had an idea to sell watermelons from Abkhazia to Oslo. To whom to go with this idea? To address her accountant? But there are legal subtleties. And who will help find the transport company? In ordinary life, an entrepreneur first discusses a future deal with a lawyer, then tries to retell all this to an accountant, then assigns some tasks to his assistant, and then one of them does not take into account the interests of the other and has to start all over again, if not completely Do not spend another week on the game of hot potatoes.

At the start, we made a similar mistake, inviting the client to determine for himself who to ask this or that question, as a result of which he was demotivated and lost precious time, being in thought. Our teams were built on the principle of specialization: accountants sat with accountants, lawyers - with lawyers, and assistants did not sit at all on the spot and constantly cruised from one specialist to another. We recruited wonderful people and they interacted superbly inside these professional cells, but the communication between the cells took time and resulted in the loss of valuable information.

Now imagine the all-inclusive hotel. The hotel staff consists of different people, they interact a lot, but the director of the hotel is able to ensure that the service for each client is guaranteed quality, and the client interacts only with the receptionist. This clearly corresponded to our picture of the world, but we still did not know how to achieve this. It is rumored that the director of any hotel has a whip and a room with good sound insulation. But this is not our case - we didn’t want to create strict rules for servicing and exchanging information between employees - this was contrary to the philosophy of the project, because you cannot make the client happy under the rules. Yes, and with our worldview, it also diverged: we do not like formalism and servility :)

We again called Di and she again began to ask simple questions: “How would you like people to interact?” And “What is stopping this?”. We wanted people to quickly agree, solve problems without long internal correspondence and tasks. It was equally important to teach people to make decisions on their own, and not to run to the boss for any reason (besides, we have no leaders). And we came up with a cool thing: self-propelled teams consisting of two accountants, two assistants and one lawyer. The client interacts with the accountant and assistant most often, so it is important that there are at least two units in the team, in case someone goes on vacation or falls ill with an unknown and serious illness.

People from each team are sitting in the same room, a certain pool of clients is assigned to them. If a client calls an accountant and wants to talk to a lawyer, you can simply pass the phone - for that, you don’t even have to get up from your place (does it bother you, too, to wait 5 minutes while the call is transferred from one department to another?). If a client wrote something to a business assistant and this requires the intervention of an accountant and a lawyer, they quickly discuss everything and begin to solve the problem together. It looks like your business has expanded into another room with the right people, but you don’t have to spend money on renting and equipping places.

As a result, we made the team a key idea of ​​our service: the client addresses all his problems to the Button, and the Button itself understands who should solve them. And here we noticed another interesting side effect: the teams became something of a small accounting company as part of one large accounting company. Each team has its own name, traditions and rituals, they organize their own office, choose furniture and other elements of the interior. Some even had their own logo and identity.


Rescue Team

What kind of restaurant do we want to be?

We created teams and they began to serve customers in a self-propelled style. And then, of course, a new problem arose. We told the client: “Just write to the Button, your team will decide everything”. But the client had a number of questions: “To what degree can the team be loaded?”, “What kind and level of task can it solve?”, “How long is this done?”. Some clients wanted the team to spend all their time and energy only on their business, while others, on the contrary, did not understand why they pay for a lawyer and a business assistant , although they almost never use their services. For a long time we could not find a middle ground and explain to the client what tasks and in what volume the team can undertake.

We invited Dee for the fourth time. To our surprise, she suggested starting with our own expectations, rather than customer expectations. “If Button was a restaurant, which one?” Such a simple question did not have a quick answer. At that time we had a feeling that absolutely anyone (or rather, we just did not think about it). Sometimes we behaved like a fast food restaurant, and sometimes as a premium class restaurant. We ourselves did not know much about ourselves and because of this did not meet the expectations of our customers. In fact, good service is possible in every segment. In McDonalds, for example, excellent service (in terms of expectations): people want to quickly eat burgers, go to the toilet and use the free wifi.

We thought and decided to clearly define our place in the world of accounting services. To do this, we drew a simple graph, placing attention to the client on one axis, and the cost of services on the other. The lowest in terms of attention and cost were freelance accountants , who once a quarter take documents from you and prepare reports, at the other end - a full-time accountant who spends all the time on you and demands a lot of money in return. In the middle are the accounting companies that take your accounting to outsource for reasonable money. We realized that most of all resemble such a bookkeeping company, but we have our own bank, lawyer and business assistant , which is an undoubted advantage.


Button knows its place

If you still draw an analogy with the restaurant theme, Button is not a premium restaurant: premium staff, legal and assistant services can only be given to you by staff members (if you are lucky). On the other hand Button is not McDonald’s, we are not focused on fast and cheap service of millions of people in semi-automatic mode. The button looks more like a cozy chain restaurant for casual dinners and evening gatherings. In the imagination, a favorite table by the window is drawn, the staff knows you by name, you remember what to order without a menu, but even here the chef often prepares something new and is always happy to suggest you try it. We decided to become such a “restaurant”. To convey this to customers is a matter of technology.

What can be done if nothing happens? You can draw conclusions!

In fact, in four iterations and half a year of work, we managed to quite seriously change the approach to creating a service. I am very pleased that there was a number of people able to ask the right and accurate questions. Unfortunately, not everyone is so lucky, so we decided to distribute a little of the intimate, which really helped us and, we hope, will help someone else .

Now we have a well-developed process of connecting clients, hiring a team and putting employees into work. The next important step is to learn how to work in a situation where there will be more than 10, 20, 30 such teams ...

We have always been skeptical of “Western” consultants, but these half a year have greatly changed our consciousness. In the west, the service has been lined up for decades and it has become very popular. We hope that in a few years the Russian business will be able to learn from this experience and learn how to make money for the happiness of its customers.

If you compress everything written above, you get five simple tips:

1. Find out your client, find all points of contact, understand what makes him happy and identify the most bottlenecks. The client should be comfortable with every call, every written letter or in person.
   
   
2. To hire the right people, artificially place them in a situation that they have to face in reality. You don't need a faceless crowd, people need to share your values ​​and understand goals.
   
   
3. Get rid of bureaucracy and make people communicate and interact. If at least one person is in a vacuum, a good team will fail. Each person should also understand your business so as not to run on any issue to the authorities.
   
   
4. Be clear on what kind of restaurant you would like to become and provide an appropriate level of service. Make sure your expectations match your customers expectations. You can make an acceptable service for everyone, but really good - only for a specific audience.
   
   
5. Do not be afraid to ask advice from those who have achieved something . Even if they are far away and speak another language :)
   
   

upd: we just launched demo-access, so far there is no link even on the site, if you are interested in trying, you can do it here i.knopka.com/boot#/signup