Be Different or be dead

September 2, 2019

10 enormous barriers to progress that must be removed to succeed

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10 enormous barriers to progress that must be removed to succeed.

Every organization would like to build a high performance culture, but these non-strategic — CRAP — activities are in the way of making serious progress, and the leader needs to take ownership of eradicating them.

They consume precious time and suck up emotional energy.

Committee work

How many committees do you have working on various projects? What would happen if you reduced the number by 50% and empowered folks to make decisions and get on with executing on the strategic intent of the organization?

Committees are generally charged with the responsibility of coming up with recommendations that satisfy everyone; consensus building is their holy grail. Often these decisions take a long time to reach, they are watered-down and produce forgettable results. And sometimes they don’t make any decisions at all, only serving to assemble people who talk about a lot but do very little.

If you want to be a standout leader, take the axe to most committee work.

They should allow committees to be formed sparingly; engaging them for a serious strategic purpose, affecting the entire organization.
They should be stopped and never started again for less important activities that could be handled by individual managers or operating teams who must be prepared to make decisions and accept accountability.

Hyper-analysis

Analysis can paralyze an organization and is a symptom of people being reluctant to make a decision. It’s a comfortable position for people to be in; as long as they’re studying an issue they don’t have to take on the risk of driving a stake in the ground and pursuing a specific course of action.

Leaders should be encouraging less analysis not more.

Paralysis by analysis prevents progress. Do the amount of study that is consistent with the decision to be made. A $10 million decision will need more work than a $100K one.

And in the end, it’s crazy to believe that more analysis will make the final decision more accurate, more perfect. I don’t recall any decision I made that turned out the way the analysis suggested it would. Something unexpected and uncontrollable always happened that required the decision to be modified to some degree. So the return on investing more analysis time to get the decision perfect was ZERO.

COVID-19 is a classic example of an unforeseeable spear that killed most business plans beginning March 12, 2020; any analysis costs that were invested for any business plan prior to that time were wasted — a sobering thought the next time someone in your organization suggests that another 6 months of study is needed to reach the right decision.

The most appropriate way forward: make the call —> start executing —> learn from what you do —> adjust the plan —> keep executing —> repeat the above.

Coordination

What value is there in this function? Coordinators fill the gaps between functions in an organization; their purpose is to ensure two or more units work harmoniously together and deliver the outcome expected.

It’s apparent to me that organizations that use coordinators don’t trust that the operating entities can execute the required handoffs on their own;
they require someone to ensure that the process is done flawlessly and that the ball doesn’t get dropped.

When teamwork fails or systems are deficient, they need to be fixed rather than insert an intermediary as the solution

Not only does coordination merely address the symptom of the teamwork problem and not the problem itself, it adds unnecessary cost to the organization.

Organizations don’t need coordination functions; they need demanding leaders who take action to ensure departments work seamlessly together across the organization to deliver expected results.

They need people responsible for delivering results, not managing processes.

Consensus building

Standout leaders know that consensus building is a wasted exercise; it consumes energy cycles of the people in the organization and typically never results in everyone being on the same page.

The process is severely flawed; it asks what people think about a proposed way forward rationalized by study and analysis, and results in a broad range of responses depending on how each individual interprets the findings.

The expectation is that people will respond objectively and will see the merits in the proposal so that everyone will support it.

But that rarely happens. Individuals almost never see things rationally; they have their own personal lens through which they evaluate what is being presented to them. Their lens tells them if the plan benefits them and they respond accordingly.

Consensus solutions are nothing more than a blend of mediocrity build by everyone that satisfy no one.

And since everyone has a different lens, arriving at a consensus is impossible unless changes to the original proposal are made to reflect everyone’s feedback.

And so the watering down process begins. Because a multitude of modifications are needed to make the proposal acceptable to everyone, the proposal essentially looses its original identity and shape — it ends up having rounded corners built by everyone but satisfying no one.

So make the call, try and sell it to others but do what’s right. Forget about the consensus building process.

Following rules

Being constrained by rules stultifies creativity and innovation. Some rules are necessary, but others have outlived their usefulness, conceived in a different time when circumstances were different.

All rules outlive their usefulness eventually and standout leaders know this. They monitor current rules and policies to decide their relevance; the gutsy ones decide that a cleansing purge is required to eliminate the ones that are barriers rather than enablers to high performance.

For your leader to-do list: develop a plan to reduce the number of rules and policies you currently have in your control kit bag by 25% over the next six months or so.

There are a number of potential positive outcomes from your audacious act: employee engagement could increase, customer service could improve, decision making could be more effective and innovation could increase. Definitely worth a shot, right?

Benchmarking

I believe benchmarking is an egregious practice that virtually every organization follows in some way or another. It sucks the motivation to create something new and different from people because it’s so easy to find a best practise (whoever defines what that is) and try to copy it.

Copying best practises under the guise of innovation is intellectual dishonesty.

A standout leader should be expunging this notion — mandate that it can’t be used — as a valid problem solving tool and, instead, nurture a value set among employees that encourages the discovery of new, unique, special, imaginative, far out, newfangled and avant-garde solutions to the problems they encounter.

Tell everyone that copycat solutions will no longer be tolerated and that uniqueness will be the barometer to judge the worth of what people do.

Following the job description

The job description is a concept — backed up on paper — intended to contain what people do.
Metaphorically it’s a box constructed for employees to run around in. It has limits in terms of what’s in the box (ok behaviour; allowed) and what’s outside the box — not ok behaviour; disallowed.

The benefit of having the job description is to avoid ‘leakage’ of work performed among the variety of positions in an organization and if duplication and overlap is prevented then efficiently and productivity is increased.

And it’s true. The JD does compartmentalize and separate work; work is distributed throughout the organization by using it.

But there is a downside that standout leaders recognize, and that is, if taken to the extreme, it encourages doing what the JD says and not what is appropriate in the moment. ‘It’s not my job!’, for example, could influence the action an individual takes in the middle of a customer service crisis, rather than fixing the customer issue regardless of what the job description says.

The great leader knows that they can get the best of both worlds — the efficient use of resources as well as the flexibility and nimbleness required to take advantage of new opportunities — by using the job description as the foundation to govern the basic activities of what people do but also by allowing people to deviate from it when necessary to do the right thing to satisfy the needs of the overall organization.

We need people to step out and do amazing things not be bridled by a straight jacket.

This work — eliminating dysfunction — should define the priorities of the standout leader.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 9.2.19 at 04:00 am by Roy Osing
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August 31, 2019

5 proven ways to improve the call center experience

Call centers have become a routine thing these days. Television not working? Call the customer care number. Your order is delayed? Call the customer service people. These are just a couple of examples of our frequent encounters with call centers.

Having said that, it does not mean everyone has a good experience while interacting with the customer service representatives.

The one thing you must know to ace the call center experience is the ease of use.

What do we mean by lease of use”?

The purpose of any call center is either provide support or do sales. In both cases, it is important that the call center software that the business is using makes it easy - a) for customers to reach them, and b) for the agents to support the customers.

Ways to improve the call center experience

Simple IVR

In simple terms, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is used for inbound calls. A pre-recorded menu is played for the caller to choose the relevant option. Now, the idea is to keep the options limited to reduce confusion and faster resolution of the customer’s problem.

Additionally, having multi-level IVR is good as it allows the caller to choose an option specific to their query. Having said that, care must be taken that too many levels are not there as that wastes the caller’s time and tests their patience.

Intelligent routing

Do not make the caller wait for answers. The longer the caller waits, poorer the experience and less chance that they will return to your brand. Moreover, if the caller is connected to the right agent at the first time itself, it has two-fold advantage - the customer is happy and the agent is productive.

Let us understand this with an example. Jack calls MoneyLending Bank with credit card lost complaint. He goes through the IVR and is connected to an agent. Once Jack explains his problem, the agent puts his call on hold as it needs to be routed to a different department.
This spoils the experience of the customer and wastes the agent’s time. Thus, having good routing algorithm in place will direct the call to the right department in the first attempt itself and make things smooth.

Single screen for all activities

Call center agents have a lot on their plate on a daily basis. They do not need more chaos due to incomplete customer information which leads to angry interactions or having to toggle between multiple tabs and windows.

Having a unified desktop which provides the agents with a holistic view of the customer puts them in a much better position to answer customer queries faster and with satisfaction. Moreover, with a single screen interface, the agents can perform all their activities there itself, without having to switch multiple tabs. This further improves the response time and allows the agents to multitask as well.

Creating a knowledge hub

If the agents have all the information ready to go, it makes their life and job a lot easier. A knowledge base is a repository of all important documents, articles and FAQs will allow the agents to quickly search for the required information and answer the customer queries.

For instance, a customer calls to inquire about insurance plans - what’s included, any add-ons, etc. For an agent, who handles hundreds of calls in a day, it becomes difficult to remember the details of all the plans. With a knowledge base system, the agents can simply search the query using certain keywords and get relevant content.

Encouraging collaboration

Another way of making things easy for faster resolution of a customer issue is to encourage other agents and even the supervisor to help each other to work as a team.

Understanding this with an example, if a caller asks a question which is out of the agent’s purview, the agent can have a conference call with the customer and her/his supervisor. Doing this will ensure that the customer’s problem is addressed and resolved in that call itself rather than making them wait or delaying the problem.

Concluding thoughts

Call centers are one of the easiest and most common ways through which the customers reach out to companies. By implementing the above options, the brands can look to significantly improve call center experience for both, the agents and the customers.

A call center software provider which understands the business requirements and customizes the solution accordingly is what one should look for.

Some of the must-have features to excel at delivering exceptional customer support is integrating the right call center functionality as discussed here.

With the right integration, any organization can make use of any existing system in addition to deploying any new CRM or other third-party systems. After all, it all comes down to simplifying things for better call center operations and the customer service experience.

— Shambhavi Sinha is a technical blogger & product marketer and has been writing for 3 years. She is into technology and writes tech-based stuff. Her aim is to provide knowledge to users by sharing tips and tricks about new technologies, DIY, and knowledge about call center software.

• Posted 8.31.19 at 04:40 am by Roy Osing
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August 27, 2019

Why successful sales is about relationships not pushing products

Source: Pexels

There are two options to consider when setting a sales philosophy for your organization. You can choose to generate revenue by selling stuff or you can choose to build intimate relationships with people and have them buy stuff.

Selling stuff equates to flogging products; the focus is on what is being produced rather than on the demand elements of the customer. Very few people like the flogging experience where a sales person tries to shove a product down your throat with little consideration for our needs and expectations.

At the end of a flogging experience we generally feel used, abused and violated vowing to never return.

Building deep relationships and have people buy stuff is quite a different thing and is based on the axiom that you need to “make a friend before you can do business”.
The sales dynamics focus on getting to know the prospect and their specific wants and desires. The relationship builder actually makes you compelled to buy!

The forces at play propel the prospective buyer along a course of action that requires a transaction; anything less conjures up the feeling of guilt given the time, effort and caring the builder has invested in you.

Relationship building firms understand and trust that cash flow is the result of deep customer relationships; an annuity stream is established over a longer period of time with an impressive net present value as compared to the short term financial benefits of the one sale wonder.

Start the move today to developing a relationship building sales team that sends sales performance sky high.

And introduce this element in the sales compensation plan. If you are purely a flogging organization today, add a percentage for the relationship element and begin the journey to remarkable sales. Begin with compensating your sales team 20% on relationship building and increase this amount over time.

How do you measure relationship building? Create a report card with 6 key relationship building behaviours and ask the customer to rate the salesperson on each.

Customer perception is reality and it will not be long before every salesperson is paying attention to what is required to be a successful relationship builder.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 8.27.19 at 11:50 am by Roy Osing
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August 26, 2019

How a winning customer service strategy can be simple to build

Source: Pexels

How a winning customer service strategy can be simple to build.

It’s all very well to say that you intend to compete and win in the marketplace by providing unmatched customer service, but exactly what does it mean?

How can you make this vision more than merely an aspiration?

What does it look like when your business plan’s strategic intent is being successfully executed in the field?

What behaviors do you witness? What customer feedback do you get? What service quality metrics are relevant?

The service strategy

Your service strategy is the call to action for how you intend to deliver the ultimate in serving customers; without a service strategy you won’t have the execution elements in place to see your vision become reality and you’ll be like many other organizations that want to dazzle their customers but fall short of the mark because they can’t execute.

The service strategy is intended to breathe life into your service vision by specifying the exact deliverables you intend to deliver to customers and the results you expect.

It is the promise, if you will, you intend to deliver to the marketplace that makes you unique in the crows of organizations all wanting to be the service Czar.

Lack of a service strategy clouds the issue. People are not clear on how to behave, on the results expected and on the measurements that are relevant.

Your service strategy should reflect two components:

#1. Core service

Core service is the basic good or service you produce, without which your business doesn’t exist. Core service is WHAT a person GETS when they do business with you.
— In the financial business it’s an investment plan that protects the client’s assets and grows them according to their personal lifestyle goals;
— In telecom, it’s a video channel that functions with no intermittent breaks in transmission;
— In the air travel space it’s delivering passengers and their luggage safe and when they were promised;
— For the movers of households, it’s delivering someone’s personal belongings to their destination on time, on budget without breaking anything.

People expect your core service to be provided flawlessly every time they engage with you and they don’t give you plaudits when you do. For example, I’ve never heard anyone say “WOW! it’s absolutely amazing that you delivered my furniture from Toronto to Vancouver without anything being broken!” 

But the converse is also true. If an organization can’t deliver its core service consistently, they are criticized and the word is spread about how bad their service is.

#2. The service experience

The second component of a service strategy is the service experience they enjoy when they engage with you…. HOW they FEEL when they do business with you; how they FEEL when they are receiving your core service.
— When buying online, is it easy to navigate the pages to find what you want? Is there a chat function that allows you to ask questions rather than have to browse the FAQ page?
— When ordering internet service, how long do you have to wait before you get a call center rep?
— Does your financial analyst make themselves available when you need to see them? Are they respectful of your needs and wants?

Unlike core service, providing a delightful service experience gets you plaudits. People remember what you did for them and they tell others how great you are. AND they stay loyal for as long as the same service experience is created for them.

Both core service and the service experience must be addressed in your service strategy. Here’s and example of a service strategy my team developed for a business organization I lead:

“We are easy to do business with. We care.
We provide and support innovative quality solutions.
We make promises and always keep them. If we fall short of our strategy, RECOVERY will be our #1 priority”

Core service elements are covered — solutions are provided (not products); promises are kept.

The service experience is addressed — a caring attitude is expected; recovery is invoked when a mistake is made; systems and processes are created to make it easy for people to transact business.

Once your service strategy has been articulated its a great idea to workshop it with all teams in the organization to define what each function must do to play their part.

For example, what does the strategy mean to sales? In the above case, sales must focus on developing solutions for customers; flogging products is verboten. And relationship building skills are required with a caring attitude. Do the same for every part of the organization so that everyone is working together toward the common service goal.

And build the performance expectations into everyone’s annual performance plan to ensure it’s given the priority it deserves.

If you pay attention to these tactics you will see your service vision come to life!

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 8.26.19 at 12:24 am by Roy Osing
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