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Phil's blog

Put non call centre people in your call centres

Jan 12th, 2009 | Customer Service | 0 Comments »

This is part of an ongoing series of tips on how to destroy your old ideas and practices about ‘the front line’- that front line people interact with customers and everyone else doesn’t – and open up the organization so people inside, on the edge, at the top, at the bottom, are ALL more connected with customers.

Intuit sends all its new hires to work between one and three months in the call centres before becoming the engineers who build the products. So, they spend up to three months talking with customers every day, answering their questions, learning from the customers themselves how their products are used. Only then – having had their brain changed by working directly with customers – are they allowed to go and build the next generation of products for those customers.

Source: I heard it from someone high up at Intuit.

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Criticism to praise ratio: what’s yours?

Jan 8th, 2009 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

Ros Taylor is a workplace psychologist who says that studies in her discipline show we should praise seven or eight times more than criticize, as the ratio for peak performance.

When you track back to find out what studies, they were conducted with teachers and originally applied to how students perform – apparently all the evidence is that the seven or eight to one ratio is the magic formula.

There’s the nice (probably mythical) story of the manager who put eight rounded stones in one pocket each morning and transferred one over to his other pocket every time he praised someone that day and put one back when he criticized. He did it because it takes us time to train ourselves into new habits (Ros says about four weeks) and he needed a physical reminder while he was ‘training’ himself.

It only works if you have pockets and access to pebbles. And I expect you end up with holes in your pockets if you try it, and a lopsided walk. It also doesn’t work if you don’t have pockets. But, it’s a nice story to embed the point in our minds anyway.

Also, just to be awkward, the pockets and pebbles doesn’t add up, does it, unless you only have one employee…(I’m being too literal-minded. Analyze anything too much and it gets destroyed 😉 It’s STILL a good story/metaphor).

What sparked that ramble off was Nick McCormick’s post in The Leadership Hub suggesting your criticism to praise ratio should never be more than one to one and asking what yours is. Here’s the link to Nick’s post: Singing People’s Praises

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Movies: When the user becomes the director

Jan 8th, 2009 | Customer Service | 0 Comments »

..and the script-writer. Well, kind of.

The producer / consumer split is blurring everywhere. Instead of providing a fully-formed final product to the end-user, it’s becoming increasingly common to involve them/us in its creation. Hence Alvin Tofler’s word ‘prosumer’ to describe this emerging change.

Anyway, you know all that. It’s just a preamble to introduce the latest example of it happening. Wired’s online magazine features the latest interactive movie technique that lets the viewer steer the path that the story takes:

Viewer’s Cut: Interactive Film Gives Editing Tools to You

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Validation and leadership

Jan 5th, 2009 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

This award-winning 16 minute film is funny, but makes a powerful point about inspiring people through validation. I was put onto it by John Kenworthy, who put a link to it into his ‘What Inspires Me’ uploaded picture of the word ‘Validation’ in The Leadership Hub. Leaders validate. This is an entertaining way of getting the point across. I think the point about ‘validation’ in this film also helps answer Richard’s question in The Hub recently: What is inspiration and how do we inspire ourselves and others:

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Five Rules for a Great Customer Experience

Jan 5th, 2009 | Customer Service | 0 Comments »

Over in the CX (Customer Experience) blog, Shaun Smith posts an article about his own experience as a patient in a UK hospital, which prompted him, while in a hospital bed surrounded by beeping instruments, to create his own ECG – experiencecareogram – charting his satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the various points in his customer journey.

Shaun cites Daniel Kahneman’s Peak-End Rule and the work of two other behavioural/behavioral psychologists, Chase, and Dasu, to offer advice to health service operators on how to create a great experience:

Five Rules for a Great Customer Experience
“In the case of the hospital experience in particular, we can turn to two other psychologists, Richard Chase and Sriram Dasu and their research into behavioural science. They build on the ‘Peak-end’ principle by Daniel Kahneman to suggest five rules for creating a great experience. Shaun writes:

1.Finish Strong.
Customers accept waiting in-line at Disney because they manage expectations about waiting times and thus under-promise and over-deliver.
2. Get bad experiences over with early. If you have to have a bad experience, get it out of the way as quickly as possible. In the case of the hospital make the lag time from admission to surgery as quick as possible so don’t ask everyone to arrive at the same time-stagger admissions.
3. Segment pleasure, combine the pain. Spread out the pleasure-so don’t ask me to choose my menu for the next two days at one time-allow me to do this before each meal. Try to group tests together so that they are seen as one process not separate events.
4. Build customer commitment through choice. Give me full information and then allow me to make an informed choice of treatment and drugs. Research shows that patients experience less pain and faster recovery when given some control over their pain-killing medication.
5. Stick to rituals. Nurses should give information to patients about what they are monitoring and why. Include the patient in the ‘ritual’
Source of the five rules: ‘Want to perfect your company’s service? Use Behavioral Science. Chase and Dasu. HBR 2001

The above is from Shaun Smith’s CX (Customer Experience) blog

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Four leadership tips from Larry Bossidy

Jan 2nd, 2009 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

1. What you do your people notice. So, be self-aware and be authentic.

2. Don’t be dismayed at people who are better than you. Embrace them. That’s how you create well-rounded teams.

3. Aim for self-mastery. Get better. Renew yourself.

4. Practise humility. Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It’s thinking of yourself less.

Source: My notes from an interview between Larry Bossidy – former CEO of Honeywell and co-author of Execution and Confronting Reality – and Tom Peters

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Create a new front line

Jan 2nd, 2009 | Customer Service | 0 Comments »

In 2009, let customers inside your organization more. Stop thinking of ‘the front line’ – that imaginary place where a thin line of customer-facing people acts as the buffer or interface between you and the customers. Imagine the line is breached and people previously ‘on the inside’ of your organization are accessible to customers.

How?

Try employee blogs. Intuit, the tax software company, lets employees blog, with a relaxed corporate voice rule. I heard their MD say a while ago “Our most loyal customers love hearing tips and tricks on how to get the best from our software, direct from the people developing the products.”

If you’re even more techno-savvy than that, and your user base is, too, try a Wiki user contribution system. Again, Intuit do this: a Wiki lets your users write and re-write content. I heard Intuit’s MD say “The speed of change, such as new tax law changes, far exceeds our ability to put relevant content up ourselves. Our customers do it.”

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What have you lived for?

Jan 1st, 2009 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

Looking back and looking forward as the year turns helps us make sense of what we are about, what we are for, where we are going. And to adjust course if our lives aren’t going quite the way we had wanted. There’s a sense in which we step out of our daily lives as the year turns, consider it from outside-in, before we step back into it again and get caught up once more. To ‘lead’ our own lives we really need to do this more than once a year, don’t you think?

When we eventually look back, because there is far more ‘back’ to look to and far less ‘forward’, I’d like to be able to say something like this, which comes from Bertrand Russell’s introduction to his autobiography. To be able to look back on a life like this, you have to have planned to live it. I think that’s a key lesson for me in how to lead your own life: think ahead to what you want to look back on. Then make it happen.

So, what do you want to look back on 2009 and say? Here’s the inspiring Bertrand Russell that lives on my wall, looking back on his whole life:

What I Have Lived For
“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

“I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have scrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness – that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that the saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what – at last – I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

– Bertrand Russell, introduction to his autobiography

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Death of The Salesman

Jan 1st, 2009 | Customer Service | 0 Comments »

2009, I hope, will see the death of the salesman. And woman, of course. I’ve had arguments with sales experts over the years – people who argue that ‘sales’ is about helping people to buy what they really want, and that new disciplines like ‘consultative selling’ help the new generation of sales people to move on from the hard sell to really understanding their customers’ needs and adapt to meeting those needs.

But, really, if you think in terms of ‘selling’ and ‘sales’ you need to clear your head and start again, because you’re thinking in a dying paradigm born of a supplier-dominated world. We are in the Age of the Customer. If you do your marketing right, from the very start (right from product concept, that is) you shouldn’t have to do any selling anyway.

I was researcing something from Bertrand Russell to start 2009 for my leadership blog and came acros this from him, written in 1932 would you believe, on resistance to selling:

On Sales Resistance

“Throughout recent years, a vast amount of money and time and brains has been employed in overcoming sales resistance, i.e. in inducing unoffending persons to waste their money in purchasing objects which they had no desire to possess. It is characteristic of our age that this sort of thing is considered meritorious: lectures are given on salesmanship, and those who possess the art are highly rewarded. Yet, if a moment’s consideration is given to the matter, it is clear that the activity is a noxious one which does more harm than good…

…Everything economic is looked upon from the standpoint of the producer rather than of the consumer. In former times, it was thought that bread is baked in order to be eaten; nowadays we think that it is eaten in order to be baked. When we spend money, we are expected to do so not with a view to our enjoyment of what we purchase but to enrich those who have manufactured it.

…And so everything is done for the sake of something else. We make money not in order to enjoy what it provides but in order that in spending it we may enable others to make money which they will spend in enabling yet others to make money which…. But the end of this is bedlam.”

– Bertrand Russell, writing in the New York American, June 1932

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What One Thing Can You Do?

Dec 7th, 2008 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

…to make a difference to morale and the ability to get the job done in these tough economic times?

I was talking to Andy Cosslett recently. He is CEO of IHG, the world’s largest hotels company (Holiday Inn is one of their brands).

He said he spent two days working in a Holiday Inn a while ago and came back with a list of things head office could do to make life easier for people on the front line, delivering the service, running the business, making the money (because that’s what the front line do).

It reminded me of when Allan Leighton spoke to us at Leaders in London. The Chairman of the Post Office had turned up at the crack of dawn at a depot, unannounced. He asked the depot manager what was the one thing he (Leighton) could do to make the manager’s life easier.

The manager said that his posties came into work at 4am or earlier and that the coffee machine had been broken for over two weeks. The requisitioning process to get a coffee machine replaced took so long that his crack of dawn staff had had no access to coffee for all that time.

“They lose confidence in me as a manager, and I lose credibility, and it looks as if I have no interest in their welfare. That’s terrible for morale”, said the depot manager – or something like that: I don’t have my notes in front of me, so I’m paraphrasing.

“What do I need? I need a new coffee machine!”

So, Leighton went back to his office and arranged for every depot manager to have a £200 (or something like that) contingency fund to cover emergencies or situations where the central system just couldn’t deliver what the depot manager needed with enough urgency.

So, what can you do that is low cost but absolutely important in sending the right signals out to people who may be suffering low morale, and/or that removes a frustration or problem for them, and that shows that you are still fighting their corner?

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