Be Different or be dead

February 18, 2019

5 effective ways to make a culture of personalized customer service

Source: Unsplash

Many organizations have in their business plan the goal of providing intimate customer experiences; personalized service tuned in to what THAT specific customer wants at THAT specific time.

The essence of the plan is to deliver memorable — WOW! — experiences that will delight customers and enhance their loyalty. It’s the warm caring treatment intended to make the customer’s skin all goose-bumpy.

The logic behind the personalization theme is that while providing a standard level of service to everyone will satisfy some people, it won’t appeal to all because everyone has slightly different needs.

But if service is individualized to reflect the unique characteristics of each customer, mass moments of delight can be created and customer loyalty will increase.

Personalized service is impossible

The reality is, however, personalized service is an impossible dream; it cannot be delivered because of ‘the noise’ that surrounds service delivery in every organization.

The noise is represented by all of the activities going on in an organization; they constitute the context within which personalization must be practised.

The noise consists of:
— repair and service delivery activity.
— advertising messages.
— ridiculously long call center hold times.
— social media conversations.
— customer complaints.
— internal cost management concerns.
— new leadership directives.
— product quality issues.
— differing business unit priorities.
— supply challenges.

There is too much noise

With this confluence of activity happening every moment of every day, is it any wonder that the art of creating a memorable personal experience for a customer gets lost?

Personalized service experiences don’t stand a chance when there is this cloud of activity in conflict with this purpose:
— customers wait 45 minutes to get a call center rep who does their best to provide caring service buts it’s ruined by the noise of the wait;
— customers are told their individual needs are important but the product breaks down after it has been used only a few times;
— employees are told that responding to each customer is the strategy yet service costs are cut to meet quarterly financial targets and there are insufficient numbers of employees to serve customers;
— social media conversations are replete with service criticism at the same time as the organization declares its intent to provide stellar personal service;
— sales solutions can’t be provided because of supply chain problems;
— a sensitive engagement with a service rep is followed by a disastrous installation that requires multiple attempts to get it right;
— a special deal is provided to a customer but the bill is sent out with errors.

All of these noise factors work in unison to discredit the personal service mantra, it’s not a believable proposition in the face of proof points that counter and undermine it.

A holistic view is required

Polite customer service reps and amazing fulfillment self serving technology won’t bring personalization to life; it’s a bigger challenge than that.

All the currency built up by a rep handing the customer in an amazing way is quickly lost, for example, when the product ordered is lost or the promised delivery date is missed.

And the caring attitude of a rep doesn’t really count for much when the customer has been sitting in the call queue for the better part of an hour.

To really provide a personal service experience requires a holistic view of all service components operating across the organization. They must all work efficiently on their own and work together in harmony to serve the same purpose.

If one link in the service chain breaks down personal service is a non starter.

In the long term, the culture of an organization must be morphed to delivering the personal service experience.
Leadership must declare it to be the prime objective of the organization; a strategy must be put in place to make it happen.

These 5 actions should drive cultural change to personalization

▪️Define the operations functions that the customer views as key in fulfilling the personal service promise and make sure they operate with maximum efficiency and minimal errors. If call center wait times is critical to them, apply resources to avoid their displeasure when the reach a rep.

▪️Insource the functions that drive the personal experience, outsource only those that have no influence on it.

▪️Re-vector your performance management process to prioritize those deliverables and behaviours that are key to the personal service mission; pay handsomely when someone is a champion of the cause.

▪️Set measurable objectives for the key operations processes that control how the customer feels about the way they are treated and hold management accountable to achieve them. If, for example, keeping promises for product delivery is important, set targets and measure performance.

▪️Ask the customer “Did you enjoy your personal service experience with us?” as the key lead question to monitor if the new culture is making way.
You will quickly find out if customers found their experience with you personal at all and what your organization needs to do to make it more memorable.

A personal service experience equals the sum of the experiences a customer has with each touch point they engage with in your organization.

It’s not about just the service rep, delivery technician, receptionist, repair person, website, advertising message and bill individually.

It’s about all of them, and unless they all work together in the spirit of personalization you can forget about the ideal and claim something else as your end game.

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

• Posted 2.18.19 at 04:38 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

February 4, 2019

How do amazing cultures react when unexpected shocks hit them?

Source: Unsplash

How do amazing cultures react when unexpected shocks hit them?

A highly successful culture doesn’t rely on text book principles and academic methods to shape the future of their organization. Rather it relies on creating an environment that can adapt to the realities of unpredictability and chaotic change.

So when it comes to issues like setting strategic direction, they are more likely to shy away from traditional business planning methods and adopt a different approach — the ability to successfully react to unexpected events that shock them.

Traditional business planning methods offer structure in the analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats — the SWOT process.
They provide demand and forecasting models to assess propensity to buy. And they provide many decision-making tools to assess the merits of various alternatives.

And although business planning is a mature discipline, it has two significant drawbacks in my view.

Complicated, expensive and time consuming

It requires an inappropriately high level of investment in relation to the benefits realized. It raises the false expectaion that the strategy will actually work as planned which is not the case in a world of rapid change and unpleasant surprises.

Reaction cultures buy into the notion that if, in the face of unpredictable change, the essence of the strategy can’t be counted on to succeed, the planning process should be simplified so that it is not overly onerous and complicated — it should be simple, expedient and cost effective.

Reaction is missing

Traditional planning says virtually nothing about the principle of response and most leadership teams spend virtually no time dealing with tactics to deal with the unexpected.

I have sat through executive planning workshops where 3 days have been spent trying to perfect the plan, leaving zero time to discuss execution and contingencies. It’s almost like people don’t like to admit that Plan A has a possibility of not succeeding; a ridiculous notion to say the least.

Sustaining cultures are brilliant at reacting to surprise events they did not anticipate; those that are unable to adapt struggle and die.
How many strategies have you seen unfold the way you originally planned? I have seen none; it is the impossible dream!

The principle of reacting is the essence of what I call planning on the run: set the (imperfect) plan — start executing — learn what is working and not working (because of the unexpected) — RESPOND and adjust the plan accordingly — then continue executing. And on it goes…

Reaction cultures take the following steps to take their performance to astronomical heights and to separate themselves from their competition.

They ignore precision

They keep the business planning process simple. Cut the time to develop the strategy in half to make room for more attention to implementation. Get your general direction right. Be ok with ‘heading west’.

My rule of thumb: spend 20% if the time available on the plan and 80% on implementation — who does what by when to make the plan come to life.

My success as an executive leader has been to minimize the traditional planning approach. I built an alternative approach — the strategic game plan — that I road tested in the real world for many years.
The essence of it is: dumb down the strategy building process, get the plan “just about right” and focus on execution in a world where the unexpected rules.

They focus on the few

My experience has shown that the fewer the number of things focused on the better the results. We are simply disastrous at trying to do too many things simultaneously.

Reaction cultures are great at getting to the real GUT issues they are facing; they don’t try and boil the ocean. They declare three critical issues that must be addressed to survive and they focus on them to the exclusion of other things that could be done.

They understand that trying to accomplish 10 or 20 objectives well is impossible and that all energy must be concentrated on the critical few priorities.

They plan to execute

To react, you must be focussed on HOW the strategy is to be achieved — execution is real time, which is where you have to be in order to respond to unforeseen events.

Reaction leaders drill down on how their strategic game plan is to be implemented. The implementation plan is developed in minute detail; action plan accountabilities and specific timeframes to deliver results are delighted to members of the planning team.

Reaction cultures shift the emphasis from planning direction to planning execution activity with excruciating precision.

They pour their hearts into Execute!

Bear down on getting results however you can. It doesn’t have to be elegant as long as you’re getting stuff done.
Reaction cultures concentrate on making sure everyone in the organization clearly understands what they have to do to support the execution plan; people doing their own thing is a nonstarter.

And they measure the hell out of the execution plan. Generally results are tracked monthly to ensure they have the capability to react in real time if results fall below what was expected.

They learn on the run

To successfully react to unforeseen external forces requires that organizations learn what works and what doesn’t.

Amazing cultures are hyper-fastidious over the results monitoring process that examines results vs expectations. They rely on actual performance to decide what action should be reinforced (because it’s working) and what should be stopped (because it’s not working).

Learning from doing is a critical attribute of cultures that can weave their way through storm force winds.

The learning-on-the-run process in a nutshell:
— define the top 3 - 5 critical performance indicators to measure.
— track results.
— focus on performance that is under achieving.
— learn what caused the shortfall in results.
— develop an action plan to close the gap.
— tweak the plan and move forward.
— keep the feet moving!

Incomparable cultures have a ‘reasonable’ plan based on traditional methodology, but their success is they react to unexpected change better than anyone else.

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

• Posted 2.4.19 at 03:07 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

January 21, 2019

8 excellent ways to get your retail business back to winning form

8 excellent ways to get your retail business back to winning form.

It’s shocking to see the number of retailer ‘deaths’ that have occurred over the last few years. These were once established businesses with a history of loyal customers and decent profitability.

But they simply ran out of steam and couldn’t keep pace with the changes taking place in the industry. Buyer demographics and buying behaviours quickly change and retailers incapable of keeping pace die a slow and agonizing death — store by store by store…

There is no single strategy that will save a retailer in the current chaotic and unpredictable business environment — particularly a pandemic — but there are some actions retailers can take to at least increase their chances of survival.

1. Renew your business strategy

It’s very tempting to take action and employ tactics that you think will help, but you need to start with redefining a strategy that you think will successfully meet the new dynamic.

The critical piece of thinking here is that you cannot assume what worked for you in the past will work in the future

I believe the main reason so many retailers fail is they hold on to their past business model, expecting it to work in an environment where literally every customer — competitor — technology variable has changed.

In addition don’t get sucked into believing that cost cutting will save you. The retail death spiral is not a cost issue, it’s a demand issue. Cutting costs with the hope of salvaging the company has a perilous and inescapable outcome.

Did you really think that by closing over 1,400 stores Radio Shack would survive? Not unless they change their business strategy and figure out how to do a better job at serving customers and providing unmatched value in the marketplace.

2. Deliver value; don’t sell products

Look at your business as an instrument to deliver unique value, not as an agent to sell products and services. Think about being in the ‘benefit creation’ business where what people want and desire drives the innovation process. The model of stacking the shelves — be it in a bricks and mortar environments or online — and having customers excitedly buy is wishful thinking.

And your retail value must be different that your competition because if you’re not different, you will fall victim to the commodity space where the value proposition for any retailer is reduced to price.

Commodity market players ‘race to the bottom’ with their prices much to the delight of the customers but to the detriment of the business as margins are squeezed and profits plummet.

As the telecommunications space was heating up with competition, we morphed our phone stores from outlets that offered telephones and accessories to residential customers to a solutions selling vehicle for both residential and small business customers. Product sales took care of themselves with this new focus.

3. Redefine who you want to serve

Change your target market. Demographics and psychographics are changing. Millennials are growing in number and will soon be the largest segment of the population. Continuing to target the older population, for example, because it has worked up to now is a choice with no long term future.

The question to ask is “Which customer group represents the greatest growth potential for our business?” Focus your energy on that group. Build capacity and competencies in your retail organization to satisfy the wants and desires of that group.

And say goodbye to customers who are no longer relevant to your renewed strategy. You can’t afford to hold on to your old base while pursuing a new one.

Deselecting customers is a difficult issue for most organizations as it means carefully shifting focus and investment away from customers who have traditionally been in the center of attention to a new breed who are unproven in terms of revenue generation.

4. Look for order of magnitude not incremental change

Minor changes to what you do and the way you do them won’t work; explore new completely different ways to completely morph your business. And consider outrageous ideas like the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas as well because the traditional tried and true approaches simply will not work anymore.

If your new retail idea doesn’t scare the hell out of you, chances are it’s too modest. 

We completely reengineered our phone store network by closing almost half of them and reconfiguring the survivors geographically through our operating territory. This was anything but a modest change for which we took considerable criticism. But it was necessary in order to place our new “customer serving centers” closer to the customers we decided to target.

5. Recruit a new team

if your current retail strategy won’t get you where you need to go, probably your existing team won’t as well. Be prepared to change the composition of your teams and recruit new blood with the skills and competencies necessary to deliver your new direction. Look for disrupters who hate the status quo; people who will push for change.

HR must constantly be on the lookout for the new breed; they should constantly be in the recruitment mode regardless of whether you have immediate opportunities available or not.
Sooner or later positions will open up, and you need a stream of people immediately at hand to draw on.

As the telecom business was changing from a monopoly to a highly competitive model, we had to purge much of the organization in terms of the skill sets and competencies in our people. We had to import a cadre of folks who had proven experience in the retail world and let go many who were effective order takers but not able to sell competitively.

6. Provide personalized service

As a critical element of your renewed strategy set your sights on providing more personalized service rather than the traditional one-size-fits-all doctrine. Retail success comes from engaging with and serving customers on THEIR terms, not on what the business deems appropriate given their internal constraints. If retail isn’t prepared to meet their customers on their turf, the game will be swiftly over.

We moved from a subscriber model in our phone stores to the strategy of creating more personal customer experiences for every person who came to our stores. One tactic we chose was to make the inside mirror the outside; in other words recruit employees that were integral to the mosaic of ethnic populations we served.

So in an area where we had a significant Asian community, we hired frontline people and leaders who were also Asian and who could relate better to this customer group and serve them better than people with other ethnic backgrounds.
Service levels increased with productivity and we quickly outpaced our competition.

7. Build a leadership team of servers

Hand in hand with establishing a service culture is the need to move leaders from a traditional command and control bias to a serve and coach paradigm where “How can I help?” supplants ‘Do this!’.

Critical to providing a personal experience for customers, retail operations must do the same for employees. An employee who experiences a servant leader who is there to help solve problems and eliminate job barriers will naturally apply the same behaviour to a customer. They learn to be helpful to customers because they receive the same treatment from their colleagues and bosses.

In the same way we had to move away from customers we had traditionally targeted, we had as well to exit traditional command and control style managers to make way for people who were natural servant leaders

8. Eliminate commission salespeople

Having commission salespeople is the anathema of the concept of serving customers and providing personalized solutions to their problems.
Employees who are paid to push retail product will flog their wares to, not serve, customers. They will push for the sale as opposed to taking whatever time it takes to problem solve with the customer.

They will have zero motivation to create memorable experiences for their customer because it takes too much time, requires too much energy, and because they’re not getting paid to do it. Be prepared for an exodus of salespeople when you do this; they will look for opportunities to continue their flogging ways with other retailers. So let them.

Retail businesses can survive; all is not lost. But it will require retailers to put the past to rest and take action to break away from ‘the way they have always done things’.

Those that have the guts to do it have a chance of surviving; those that don’t will die.

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

• Posted 1.21.19 at 04:05 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

January 7, 2019

7 reasons most call centers are absolutely shameful

Source: Unsplash

7 reasons most call centers are absolutely shameful.

Call centers generally don’t give good customer service.

Every organization that is big enough has a call center to handle primarily incoming calls from their customers.

There must be some redeeming value in having one if everyone has one, right? There is: it’s generally viewed as the most efficient operating solution for processing volumes of calls coming into an organization.

The dark side to call centers

But having led large customer service teams in a variety of business environments I have experienced a dark side to call centers.

In many cases I find that call centers represent the antithesis of miraculous service.

When an organization declares they intend to provide amazing service to their customers and then chooses an operating model with a call centre — particularly in a foreign country — as its nucleus, they are not only being disingenuous, they are fooling themselves (and probably driving their customers crazy) and assuming substantial competitive risk.

These are the aspects of call centers, particularly those that are outsourced, I find quite revolting.

They exist to manage cost

They choose to implement a call centre environment not to serve customers better, but to process volumes of calls at the lowest cost possible.

The question is rarely asked “Is this the best way to both serve our customers in an exemplary way while at the same time optimizing our cost position?”

It’s all about cost. That’s why most organizations outsource them around the world where labour costs are low. Current outsourcing destinations include India, Philippines, Thailand, China and Indonesia with many more planning to enter the fray.

This outsourcing trend has attracted a plethora of experts who define what it takes to have a successful call centre.

They are managed to improve productivity

Effectiveness of a call center is generally based on micro productivity measures such as:

▪️average holding time — the elapsed time it takes a call center rep to handle a customer query. Management tries to drive this number down in order to process as many calls as they can with the resources available.

The outcome of each call is rarely measured. Was the customer satisfied with the service they received? Did they enjoy the experience with the rep?

▪️average speed of answer — the average length of time it takes to answer an incoming call. When I ran call center operations in the telecom world, my target was to answer 80% of all calls within 6 seconds and our resource levels were set to achieve this result.

This was probably the best internal target we had that represented an attempt to deliver good customer service.
Can you imagine in today’s world reaching a call center rep of any organization within 2 or 3 rings of your phone? Rarely ever happens, with common wait times in the minutes rather than seconds.

Productivity and service miracles don’t easily coexist in most organizations; this measure needs attention if any organization wants to get out of the revolting category.

They don’t drive customer loyalty

Whether a call center serves incoming calls or is used to originate sales-type calls, the heavy traffic volumes involved generally work against the relationship building activity that leads to a loyal customer.

A call comes in > the rep answers (eventually) > the rep deals with the customer’s request > the rep terminates the call > the next call is fed to the rep.
And the cycle is repeated over and over again with a supervisor scrutinizing how long the rep is on each call.

The call center is essentially a production shop with no overt objective of creating an experience for the customer that could lead to brand loyalty.

Customer satisfaction may be measured along with productivity objectives, but a satisfied customer does not make a loyal one.

Satisfaction means that expectations were met; loyalty demands more — minds must be blown, expectations exceeded and marvellous experiences created if the loyalty dial is to be moved.

And this takes time. A WHAM! BAM! THANK YOU MA’M! process does nothing to encourage warm feelings and a desire to do more business with the brand involved.

They take control of your brand

The moment power is given to an outsourced call centre to engage with your customers, control is relinquished and your organization’s brand is put at risk.

Many organizations don’t even put in place a performance management contract with the 3rd party outsourcer to measure how customers perceive the service they receive from call center reps, so changes to brand position are unknown and can’t be responded to.

And with high turnover of employees, consistency in whatever customer treatment is given is almost impossible — at least I don’t experience it.

When your customer connects with the call center you have chosen to empower with your most valued asset, and the experience they have does not go well, it’s on YOU.
The call center rep is YOUR employee. The service outcome is YOUR responsibility.

YOU pay the price in the market.

Their words create the precious moment

Whether a customer has a miraculous service moment or not depends on communications with the call center rep. Miracles happen when the engagement is spirited, entertaining and responsive. When there is an easiness to the conversation that leaves the caller happy and fulfilled.

And for me, very often it is extremely difficult to fight through the accent of a foreign call center rep to have a meaningful and enjoyable conversation.
I simply can’t understand many (not all) of them, and that’s a BIG problem for the outsourcer.

If even the basic communications expectations of the call can be met, there is little chance that a service miracle will ever occur and in fact the opposite is the result with the caller being annoyed or angry with the encounter.

It’s not that the foreign reps are uneducated or don’t have some skills in the English language.
But it’s one thing to pass English 101 and have an understanding of sentence structure and grammar, and quite another to engage with someone else in a way that flows and is productive to the other party.

Are these reps tested by role playing to evaluate their conversational proficiency? Not from where I’m sitting.

Wait times are shameful

Outsources really don’t care about how long we wait on the phone to reach a rep; if they did, they wouldn’t tolerate wait times that often reach ridiculous levels — for me personally, I am blown away if I actually get a rep in 5 minutes and am not surprised to wait 45 minutes or longer. Business mediocrity in action.

It’s ironic that wait times take no priority at all; organizations are content to provide messages they feel assuage their shameful service: “Your call is important to us”; “We are experiencing unusual traffic volumes at the moment” unfortunately greet us more often than not when we call for help.

But wait! There is a silver lining to long wait times. Put your iPhone on speaker, slip it in your back pocket and get on with the job jar your wife has skillfully filled for you.

The reps have an impossible task

I totally get that even a highly competent and caring call center rep has a tough time being on 100% up time.
By the time a customer gets to them, they are often met with frustration, anger and sometimes abuse, with literally zero chance of turning a bad encounter into a pleasant experience.
The reps simply wants to get away from the pain they are engulfed in.

And the rep of course doesn’t own the problem — leadership does.

It’s a pipe dream and shameful leadership behaviour to create an impossible working environment and expect employees to perform impeccably. What planet are they on?

It’s quite simple, really.
If you want low costs, technology can do only so much and you will be saddled with the result. Under-resourcing is typically the result of cost cutting in the face of relentless demand and who pays the price? CUSTOMERS DO!

Call centers generally don’t focus on building intimate customer relationships and outsourcing them makes matters worse.

There are exceptions, however, but these rare organizations make the decision to establish their call center as an integral loyalty building instrument not as an efficient call processing center.

So if you decide to use call center technology to engage with your customers, please don’t preach your intent to deliver amazing service.

It’s intellectually dishonest and it fools no one.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 1.7.19 at 04:10 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink