Be Different or be dead

October 7, 2019

5 deadly acts that will make a toxic customer relationship

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5 deadly acts that will make a toxic customer relationship.

A toxic relationship is a relationship characterized by behaviours exhibited by one party that are emotionally damaging to another.

We hear about toxic personal relationships where one person inflicts emotional and sometimes physical pain on their partner, but toxicity isn’t limited to people relationships; it’s also related to organizations, and the relationship they have with their customers.

A toxic service relationship is damaging to both the customer because of how they are treated by the organization, and to the organization itself as unhappy customers typically move to another supplier with repeated mistreatment.

Feelings should be the judge

Toxicity should be viewed as THE criteria to observe and judge the relationship an organization has with its customers because it focuses on the EMOTIONS stirred up in the customer — it expresses how the customer FEELS about how they are being treated.

A toxic service environment in an organization is manifested by behaviours that annoy, frustrate, anger, sadden, infuriate, exasperate, irk, vex, and piss off the people who come into contact with it everyday.

In my 30+ years leading business organizations that had an extremely heavy service component; I learned that you lived or died on how you served customers.

I learned that these 5 characteristics that, if left unattended, will destroy any customer relationship.

1. Distain for humans

Ever talk to someone in an organization who treated you with a bad attitude? Who talked down to you? Who had absolutely no interest in what you had to say?

Unfortunately we’ve all had the experience of engaging with an employee who really didn’t want to talk to us.
These people really don’t like people and yet they are in the position of having to engage with other people.

In a heartbeat, this person can destroy value because they lack empathy and caring for fellow humans; they quite frankly don’t give a sh##.
Strange that a service employee that would rather be taking inventory or filling out requisitions would be given the keys to the organization’s brand vault.

The recruitment process in toxic environments is wrong. It doesn’t place a priority on the skills and attitude necessary to create miraculous service moments with customers.

It doesn’t probe whether or not someone has the innate desire to care for others, because that’s what amazing service requires.
If just ONE of your customer servers doesn’t like people, you are on your way to having toxic relationships with your most valuable assets.

2. Outsourced call centers

Organizations that don’t manage their call centers well nurture toxic behaviour even though they believe they are doing the right thing.

The problem is, it’s the right thing for THEM and not their customers. They use a call center to manage costs efficiently not to build customer loyalty by creating memorable customer experiences.

Two specific call center attributes, in my view, contribute to toxicity — wait times and fluency in the english language.

How on earth can you say “Your call is important to us” and force someone to wait for a service rep for 45 minutes? It’s a joke really. The fact is (I ran call centers), staffing a call center is all about cost, not level of service even though they would claim the opposite.

Because if the staffing criteria WERE based on providing a high level of service your call would be answered in less that a minute — my target was to answer 80% of the incoming calls within 10 seconds (3 telephone rings).

The second issue I have with call centers is the ability of some reps to engage in an understandable conversation.
To be honest, I can’t understand many of them because of their strong foreign accents. They may have passed english exams but they can’t converse with a customer in a smooth way.

As a result I get annoyed and frustrated as my needs go unmet.
Unfortunately, few organizations use call centers to build customer relationships; they create toxic behaviour.

3. Dumb rules

Many organizations design their policies to control customer engagement rather than to make it easy and enjoyable. They decide that the needs of the organization come before taking care of their customers.

A statement from customer servers like “You can’t ... because it’s not our policy” is evidence that what the customer wants won’t be accommodated because of a rule that satisfies a different purpose.

Often these dumb policies that made no sense to the customer. They are rigid and strict and serve the organization only.

Toxic behaviour is expressed by negatives like “You can’t” or “Sorry but…” Healthful behaviour, on the other hand, leads with “Of course”, “Yes” and “Sure, we can do that”.

4. No power

In toxic serving environments frontline employees rarely are empowered to make decisions on customer requests that are not consistent with rules and policies.
They are escalated to a supervisor for resolution.

In my experience the process is slow and cumbersome: the service rep explains why the customer can’t do what they want —> the customer is annoyed and insists —> the rep goes looking for a supervisor —> the customer explains again what they want —> the supervisor explains why the customer can’t do what they want —> customer gets more annoyed and insists —> the supervisor either maintains the “no” position or gives in —> the customer is still annoyed regardless of the outcome because of the process they were forced to go through.

Ironically, the policy to escalate “deviant matters” to a supervisor has no positive customer outcome, and furthermore the employee feels neutered because they provided no value to the engagement process; they looked like an idiot in front of the customer because they couldn’t solve their problem.

5. Rewarding non-loyalty

Toxic cultures are more interested in acquiring more customers; they spend less time on honouring and rewarding the ones they currently have. After all, why invest the money when you already have the customer? False logic and extremely short sighted.

So special deals like “Leave your current supplier and come over to us for 3 months free service” are offered to prospects but the offer is not made available to existing customers.
With such behaviour how can any organization claim they put their customers first? It’s a dishonest proposition.

Healthy environments make new deals and special promotions available to existing loyal customers first — loyalty is rewarded before a new customer.

Promotions and low price deals are typically marketing decisions but they are integral to maintaining intimate customer relationships and therefore marketing needs to join the serving team.

Toxicity kills customer relationships and yet so many organizations practice unhealthy behaviour every day.

Stay on the lookout for these symptoms and be prepared to change your behaviour immediately if you respect your loyal customers.

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

• Posted 10.7.19 at 04:18 am by Roy Osing
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September 23, 2019

Why caring is the best way to beat your competition

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Why caring is the best way to beat your competition.

Tom Peters in his book Little BIG Things talks about caring and how critical it is to any organization searching for excellence.

Its one of the things that Peters does so well: take an apparently small trait and argue successfully — with compelling evidence — that it is strategic, of the utmost importance to any business and is an essential element that any organization must have to succeed.

Caring is a critical factor that will set any organization apart from their competition. This is a sad fact, really and is unfortunate proof that many organizations these days lack this very basic element of presenting a humane look to the markets they serve.

Caring is a binary concept. Either you care or you don’t, and it shows every time you engage with a customer.

As an organization, you don’t get loyalty points for exhibiting the caring most of the time. If your caring face doesn’t show up every time out, everyone rightly concludes that you’re not genuine in your intent. The aspiration to care really has no weight if it isn’t consistently backed up with caring moments orchestrated by employees 100% of the time.

An organization can’t care if they don’t have these things in place:

Always on attitude — People always have a bad day, but caring must be active, notwithstanding. A bad day cannot be used as an excuse to not care for even one moment. “Oh well, they’re just having a bad day I guess” can never be used as an excuse for an employee’s non-caring behaviour.

Friendly rules — Rules, policies and procedures must accommodate a customer nor drive them wild. You can’t make the the caring claim and then put your customers through the policy pain mill time every they want to transact with you.

Knowledgeable people — If you choose caring as a strategy, your people must be competent and capable of answering a wide range of questions customers ask. Employees require a healthy balance of knowing their specialty as well as a general knowledge of the company and it’s strategy.
Regular refresher training for your frontline should be a priority.

A clean environment — Appearance and cleanliness of your premises (including your website). When customers observe your place of business do they see a clean and tidy environment or do they see worn-out, old and tired? Is your web presence clean and easy to use or is it built by techies for techies?

Community support — Are you active in the community? Do you take your care claim to the not-for-profit sector? You can’t care on the inside and turn your back on your community responsibility.

Problem solving — Are your people problem solvers? Listening, asking questions and finding solutions scream that you care about your customer and the realities they face. The absence of a problem solving attitude tells the story that the organization exists to serve itself and no one else.

Customer friendly language — How do you refer to your customers? For example do you refer to your customers by words like transaction or call? If you do, you’re not well positioned on the caring scale.

Serving leaders — A leadership team comprised of individuals who ask “How can I help?” shows caring for employees. If you don’t care about your own people you will never be able to show honest affection to your paying customers.

It’s quite ironic really.

Every organization is seeking a complicated solution to the challenge of how to separate themselves from their competition and it is staring them in the face.

All you need to do is give a damn about people.

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

• Posted 9.23.19 at 04:00 am by Roy Osing
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September 16, 2019

Kill your ‘dumb rules’ to amaze your customers

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One of the most effective ways to create memories for your customers and earn their loyalty is to break your own rules to favour them when it makes absolute sense to do so. This opportunity normally arises when your rules clash with what the customer wants; they simply don’t want to play by your rules.

Dumb rules

‘Dumb rules’, are given birth usually by some control freak in the organization with a nonsensical purist view that a customer should behave in a certain way that serves the organizations purpose with little regard for whether or not a customer will react favourably to getting treated in the prescribed manner.

One of my favorite dumb rule stories took place at The Mirage Hotel Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. There is a wonderful deli in the casino that serves the best rueben sandwiches ever but the customer friendliness of their policies sucks.

My wife and I show up late one night and asked the hostess for a booth and were told flatly that our request was not possible since it was their policy to offer booths only for parties of 6 or more.
I get that management wanted to maximize the check value from these specific seats, but in this case the store was empty save my wife and me! Maximizing revenue beyond the two of us was an impossibility!

In my experience the fathers and mothers of dumb rules can be found in staff type jobs whose role is to develop and implement operating procedures to govern, among other things, customer transactions. In these circumstances the objective is to meet internal requirements like efficiency and productivity rather than ensuring rules enhanced the customer experience.

And, unfortunately where customers are not considered the prime target for the rule or policy they become collateral damage in the rule’s application; they are mistreated and tell hundreds of other people how crummy the organization’s service is.

But there is a way to both have your cake and eat it to. You can both realize efficiency gains by applying the rule to the masses and bending or breaking the rule for those few customers who don’t accept it and push back on you.

The apply-the-rule scenario gets you the productivity gains you want from the majority of your customers who are ok with it; the bend-or-break scenario avoids the pain of an unpleasant customer encounter and impresses them and makes them more loyal to your organization.

When apply-the-rule is winning

You’re in loyalty do-do when apply-the-rule is winning. If your frontline employees spend a great deal of their time enforcing the rules, policies and procedures of your organization and, as a result, are constantly saying ‘no’ to your customers nothing good comes of it — loyalty is threatened — and employee engagement is in jeopardy because being a rule enforcer is not a rewarding role to play in any job.
Job frustration can eventually lead to employees finding another organization where day to day existence isn’t so painful.

Employees can’t create delightful moments for customers when they are constantly trying to get someone to tow the line on something they don’t agree with — empower your frontline to ‘say yes’

I’m not suggesting that a frontline person should break a rule that would violate the law, but they should have permission to bend-or-break an internal policy that has no significant negative long term consequences for the organization.

When you test your policies

Rules and policies impact people differently; each person will react to an enforce-the-rule encounter in a different way: some will be ok with having to comply with the rule while others will go postal.

One way to anticipate how your customers will likely respond to one of your rules is to ask them before it is implemented. Unfortunately I’ve never witnessed a process where detailed due diligence is done to brainstorm the negative reactions that customers may have to a particular rule or policy that is being considered, but there should be.

Given that customers are likely to respond to a rule in ways we never imagined, the only solution (if you want to protect and grow customer loyalty) is empower your frontline people to bend one of your standardized rules, policies or procedures when the customer needs a different treatment; when their needs are quite reasonable but out-of-bounds to what the policy manual says.

To those who think that empowering frontline folks will result in them giving away the shop, stop worrying. They won’t.

In my experience, empowering them to use their judgment and determine when and how a rule should be bent-or-broken actually produces a greater degree of rule enforcement as they typically reserve flexible treatment for those customers who truly need it.

Once given the latitude to apply flexibility to policy enforcement, they actually take a more active role in advocating the company’s position behind the policy.

When frontline people are allowed to control the bend-or-break process, the organization is rewarded by a customer who is blown away by how they are being treated and how humane the organization is. And they tell others how truly great you are.

The solution: the Dumb Rule Committee

How do you go about identifying and killing these ugly loyalty threateners?

Go ask your frontline what dumb rules they are constantly having to deal with. They know them but do you have the courage to listen and do something about them?

I created dumb rules committees in the operations areas of my organization and appointed a dumb rules leader for each committee whose responsibility it was to seek out and destroy (or otherwise modify) rules that made no sense to customers and drove them crazy.

Fun was had by all over this concept. Everyone, particularly the frontline, welcomed this initiative; they all were passionate about the purpose; we made real progress.

We had contests among the committees to see who could come up with the most dumb rules to kill, and we celebrated the winners. The committees were expected to not only identify rules, policies and procedures that annoyed customers, they were also charged with the responsibility of eradicating them by taking whatever action was necessary to get it done.

My role and that of my senior leaders was to remove any roadblocks preventing the committees from getting a rule dealt with.

Customer-friendly dumb rules

Certain rules are required by law or regulatory governance.
First of all do your due diligence to make sure that the claim is real and not the posturing of a champion who doesn’t want their rule or policy removed. If the rule is necessary, however, then at least look for ways to make it customer friendly.

And reconsider how the rule is enforced with a customer; what communications strategy is used. Is it friendly and helpful or is it demanding and intimidating?
Take the time to design the customer communications content to minimize an adverse reaction; it’s not always possible but it is worth considered doing nevertheless.

If you are able to expunge even 20% of the dumb rules you have in your organization, your customers will reward you with their loyalty and your reputation will soon attract new customers as well.

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

• Posted 9.16.19 at 04:20 am by Roy Osing
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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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