Be Different or be dead

June 28, 2012

Why ‘human being lovers’ are needed for amazing customer service

Source: Unsplash

Why ‘human being lovers’ are needed for amazing customer service.

Organizations that have a business plan and mission to delight their customers need to recruit people who like to deal with other people.

How can any organization provide amazing service if their people don’t like homo sapiens?

The most critical step if you want to amaze your customers is to hire people with the innate desire and ability to serve and please others

Why is it that we run into service people who obviously hate their job and would rather be taking inventory or working with technology rather than real people?

Why is it that frontline positions are filled with people who have a lot of seniority in an organization but basically don’t like working with other people?
Ever been in a restaurant and have been afraid that the server would either throw something at you or subject your underdone steak to the germ population residing on the floor of the kitchen?

First of all, there is no more important position in any organization that one that deals directly with the public.

These people should be called, as Tom Peters once called them, ‘Supreme Commanders’. They literally control all aspects of an organization that involve its brand: honesty, integrity, caring attitude, responsiveness and overall service quality.

In any call center operations, reps handle thousands of ‘moments of truth’ every single day! Do you think they could influence customer perception toward the company and subsequent decisions to buy a product or service?. No question.

Second, why would the leadership of the organization put anyone into such an important job if they didn’t have the requisite skills and attitude to serve other people? Beats me but they do.

I believe this dysfunctional behavior is due to the fact that they look at these positions as entry level junior jobs rather than a career destination responsible for influencing customer loyalty and long term profitability.

These actions can be taken to make sure you get people obsessed with serving people in frontline positions.

Recruitment — Ensure the recruitment guide asks the right questions to expose this virtue. I find that there are many of what I would call hygiene questions asked, but rarely do I find that the ‘love’ questions are absent to any significant degree.

The right question — Come right out and ask the candidate ‘Do you love people?’ and then ask them to describe 3 situations that proved it. You can tell quickly if the person is suitable to turn loose on your most valuable assets (customers) or not.

The ‘lover’ will tell you a story that makes you tingle; the rest will tell stories that leave you cold. Hire the ‘tinglers’.

Leadership present and accounted for — Have a senior person (an executive leader is the best choice) in the organization to participate in the panel interview process — I did this all the time.

This achieves three purposes:
— it shows people in the organization that hiring frontliners is a critically important matter;
— the candidate understands how serious the organization is about getting ‘people lovers’ in these positions;
— it enhances the richness of the interview itself in terms of the questions senior people bring to the table.

Training — Can you train people to like people?
My experience is a resounding NO! You either have an innate proclivity to like humans or you don’t; no amount of training will change that.
Training might influence how you behave — talk with a smile in your voice for example — and as long as the customer interaction is scripted you might get away with it.

The reality is, however that customers can’t always be scripted and sooner or later the trained frontliner will have to rely on their natural abilities to handle a challenging customer in an elegant and memorable way.

Where do human lovers hang out?

You should always have a frontline recruitment program underway to ensure that you are gathering the best people lovers you can to fuel the funnel created by employee turnover.

Tag ‘em early by going to schools at all levels and spotting the chosen ones.

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

• Posted 6.28.12 at 07:08 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

June 18, 2012

10 powerful ways your organization can improve its performance

Source: Unsplash

10 powerful ways your organization can improve its performance.

If you feel your organization is hovering above the same level of performance year after year, try these 10 breakaway actions.

They will give you new life.

▪️ Renew your business plan every year if you want to avoid it becoming stale. Never assume that what got you to your present point will work going forward. Environmental conditions change; an organization’s strategy must as well.

▪️ Focus your time and attention on the 3 things that will deliver 80% of your results. The biggest impediment to progress is trying to take on too much; to chase possibilities which of course are too numerous to handle with limited resources. Be clear on the few objectives that must be achieved if real progress is to be achieved.

▪️ Modify your business processes to enhance the service experience for your customers. Being easier to do business with has significant payback from increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

▪️ Cut the crap and grunge that gets in the way of achieving progress. Let go of the old stuff that is no longer relevant in order to have sufficient resources to meet tomorrow’s challenges.

▪️ Put the priority on executing your plan. Don’t spend all of your time on trying to get your plan perfect — it will never happen. Perfection doesn’t exist. Get your plan just about right and apply your energy to executing it.

▪️ Set cost objectives. Define the cost envelope that you can afford. Build your organization within this envelope. Cost should be an input to your organizational planning, not an output.

▪️ Adjust your strategy as you learn from execution. Execute — learn — adjust. A viable strategy is the result of paying attention to how well you implement it.

▪️ Target your current customers to achieve your sales objectives as opposed to putting all your eggs in the new customer acquisition basket. Create personal solutions for them. Give the special deals to them. If you don’t keep your loyal base, there won’t be a higher level to climb to.

▪️ Start building a culture based on creating memorable experiences for people. Lose the product flogging mentality. The secret to loyalty is surprising your customers with what they DON’T expect.

▪️ Sell intimate relationships, Don’t flog products and services. Trust that deep relationships will spawn a healthy long term revenue stream.

A tough journey. But well worth the time, effort — and pain.

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

• Posted 6.18.12 at 10:37 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

May 16, 2012

Why your language must change if you want to be customer focused

Source: Unsplash

Why your language must change if you want to be customer focused.

If you are like most organizations, you have your own language.

Whether you are in the communications business, the law profession, or medicine, over time people develop a vocabulary specific to you; it is understood by all.

The problem is that your unique language is reflective of looking inward to your products, technology, systems, and operating procedures rather than outward to your customers.

If you don’t ‘customerize’ your language you can hardly say that you are addicted to serving customers in every way possible.
The words and music don’t match.

In addition behavior can’t change to be outwardly directed to the customer if the internally focused language implies the opposite.

A few examples.

‘Calls processed’

Most organizations have call center operations which typically handle sales and service responsibilities. The productivity objective of most call centers is to process as many calls with as few resources as possible. Other metrics include call speed of answer and average call handling time.

The common denominator of this operation is the word ‘call’. You process calls. You answer incoming calls as fast as you can. You try and minimize the length of each call to maximize productivity.

The problem is that the customer is missing in action. If the call is the focus with implied productivity measures, it is hardly a wonder that taking care of the customer on the call gets lost as a priority.

Employees are more interested in call productivity — because they are rated on it — than creating memorable experiences for customers.

The solution is to eliminate the call processing mentality and start talking about serving customers.

Start talking about the number of customers served; customer wait time and customer serving time.

‘Customer commitment’

At least the customer is in this expression, but it lacks the personal dimension that is so important in serving customers well.

I like the word ‘promise’. Companies make commitments; people make promises. There is much more serving power in customer promises than customer commitments.

The productivity metrics become much more meaningful and visceral under the promises notion. What % of customer promises did you keep? How many promises did you break? Who in the organization is the best at keeping customer promises?

WOW! Much more powerful and easy for employees to relate to than the company commitment paradigm.

To change your language to reflect a customer focus, follow this action plan:

▪️ Develop a dictionary of your current language;

▪️ Identify the word/expressions that you understand but which lack the punch of passionately serving customers;

▪️ Create customer words to replace the internal jargon focused ones;

▪️ Change internal success metrics to reflect your customerized language. For example measure promises kept rather than commitments met;

▪️ Communicate to employees why you are changing your language; emphasize that serving customers is a critical element of your business plan.

You can’t have it both ways: saying that customers are your most precious asset yet through your language highlighting the internal fabric of your organization.

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

• Posted 5.16.12 at 09:13 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

May 14, 2012

How do great leaders make incredibly fantastic teams?

Source: Unsplash

How do great leaders make incredibly fantastic teams?

A critical element of leadership is creating strong teams to get the right things done

Effective teams are effective because they have a leader who has figured out that delivering the right things is the objective. It’s all about execution.

Here are 5 tips to building a strong and effective team.

Create your business plan to standout from your competition — Engage your team in the process.
Let them play an active role in shaping their collective future. Shared visions are more likely to evoke the energy and commitment necessary to execute well.

Top- down direction-setting is required, but should be carefully orchestrated and focused to those areas where leadership must be in control. Shared accountability bonds people together and gives them permission to call on each other when things go off track.

Keep it alive — Teams flourish when they are winning the battle, so the leader’s job is to ‘win a battle every day’. Let everyone know. Share the victory with the team.

Bash internal barriers — Well-oiled teams have a leader who removes obstacles preventing people from getting things done.
Priority #1 is to eliminate the grunge that fosters inertia and stands in the way of advancement. Effective teams are effective only if they execute well.

Be the Chief Barrier Basher for your team.

Translate your strategy for all employees — Paint a picture of what it means to the team and each member of it. Effectiveness comes from every team member working in harmony and having a direct line of sight to the strategy of the organization. Everyone must be moving in the same direction.

The leader’s job is to define roles that eliminate the possibility of dysfunctional activity which gets in the way of progress.

Shout out the people and achievements that show that the strategy is being successfully implemented — Reinforcing the behaviours and people that stand for the new direction will build stronger teams with better performance.

Effective Teams = enlightened leadership = shared vision = flawless execution = shared accountability

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

• Posted 5.14.12 at 10:09 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink