Be Different or be dead

February 13, 2012

Why company rules should be to delight customers not please employees

Source: Pexels

Why company rules should be to delight customers not please employees.

A local business school published an article based on the book Hacking Work, by Bill Jensen and Josh Klein. The article was titled: ‘School wants students to break dumb rules for smart results’ and it encouraged students to eliminate the ‘Corporate Rules’ that got in the way of job efficiency and effectiveness.

The message: eliminate the dumb rules in your organization that prevent you from doing your job in the most productive way possible.

This approach, recognized by the Harvard Business Review as one of the top 10 breakthrough ideas for 2010, does not go far enough.

It is focused internally. The benefits realized are improved productivity, lower costs and happier employees.

Nothing wrong with this, but…

Where is the customer in the discussion? — Roy, scratching my head

I have written extensively about the need to cleanse the internal customer service organizational environment of dumb rules and stupid things that don’t make any sense to your customers.

Look for a rule, policy or procedure that gets in the way of delighting your customers. Remove an obstacle that prevents them from providing WOW! service.

The internal cleansing priority must be on improving the experience for the customer, not increasing productivity. I’m not saying that killing rules that drive work dysfunction is not important. It is. But with limited resources and time available to any organization, we must do the really important things first.

What is more important that removing the stuff that annoys your customers and forces them to go elsewhere?

I suspect that you will achieve both goals by eliminating dumb rules with a customer focus. Destroying those little-BIG bureaucratic procedures that drive your customers crazy will also improve job productivity and employee satisfaction.

Form a Dumb Rules Committee in your organization and empower people to seek out this dysfunctional stuff.

And ACT on what they discover. If you do nothing with their findings your credibility and believability goes down to zero and your next attempt at engaging your employees will be met with (earned) skepticism and reluctance.

You will be surprised with the energy and passion that is released through this simple Dumb Rules exercise and the employee commitment and loyalty that is built.

People will have fun and spread the word that you really intend to be customer-obsessed.

Actions scream out your intent. Do it.

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

• Posted 2.13.12 at 11:57 am by Roy Osing
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February 2, 2012

3 amazing ways to delight your customers

Source: Pexels

3 amazing ways to delight your customers.

Creating maniacal, loyal customers is not about price. And it’s not about products and services that actually work to specifications.

People expect things to work and they expect to pay a reasonable price for it. That’s the price of admittance. That’s what any organization must do to play the game. If you can’t provide stuff that works all the time at a price people are willing to pay, you don’t have a business. Period.

If your quest is to attract a band of loyal followers that will do business with you forever, you must create a dazzling experience for them whenever they touch you. You must focus your attention on how they FEEL when they engage with you as opposed to what they GET from you.

How can you create an environment that is capable of creating dazzling service experiences?

1. Recruitment

Recruit people that have an innate desire to serve their fellow human beings.
Customers can’t be delighted if a frontline person really doesn’t want to serve. and you can’t train people to like people.

They either do or they don’t. You can train them to ’grin’— with a smile in their voice — but you can’t teach people to actually and honestly like others.

Dazzling service experiences are delivered by individuals who actually want to make the customer feel important.
To make them feel that they are listened to. To honor them. To do whatever it takes to see their eyes light up. 80% of your recruitment budget should be dedicated to this task.

2. Rules and policies

Design your rules, policies and procedures to serve the customer.
Every organization has dumb rules, rules that make no sense to customers. Rules that annoy and infuriate them and drive them to leave kicking and screaming to others.

Rules have a legitimate management control purpose but if they drive business away because customers are unwilling to abide by them what ‘s the benefit?
The issue is the customer element in rule design is missing. Management control drives the process. Give the customer an equal say in rule design. Engage them to help. They will be impressed that you are open enough to involve them and you will be on your way to dazzle.

3. Empowerment

Be flexible. Empower people to bend the rules on the customer’s behalf. Even if you have designed a rule system that optimizes on the customer experience, you will still have control-driven ones that remain. Empower your frontline to bend them when it makes sense to serve a customer.
Trust them to do the right thing to preserve the dazzle objective.

The end game is to deliver a mind-blowing service experience not to enforce the rules that get in the way.

Dazzle = Serving People + Rules that Serve + Caring Empowerment.

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

• Posted 2.2.12 at 10:59 am by Roy Osing
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December 6, 2011

3 simple ways to make it incredibly easy to serve your customers

Source: Pexels

3 simple ways to make it incredibly easy to serve your customers.

Most organizations are on the hunt to exceed customer expectations and provide remarkable customer service.

If you had the energy and capacity to do only one thing to advance toward this goal it would be…

“MAKE IT EASY FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS TO ENGAGE WITH YOU”.

Sounds reasonable and straightforward doesn’t it?

The problem is it doesn’t always happen. Organizations often put their customers through hoops and inconvenience when they try and serve them.

— Ever stood in a lineup for 40 minutes before being served?
— Waited 60 minutes on the phone before a call center rep answered your call?
— Tried to navigate through a voice response system to get to the right person to talk to?
— Had to repeat your story to 4 different people after being transferred among several departments?

We’ve all been there.

When these things happen, it is impossible for any business to claim they care about wanting to serve us well, let alone exceed our expectations.

What is the root cause for this dysfunction? It boils down to operations planning — systems and processes.

And it’s also about trying to control costs.

The organization designs it’s operations to suit itself in a cost efficient way rather than serve the customer in an easy way.

Cost efficient systems and processes drive what the customer transaction looks like.

If you really want to take a giant step to BE EaSY follow these steps:

1. Involve the customer in process design

Ask a panel of your fans if the process is easy. Customer-driven re-engineering rather than having internal process management experts lead the way, would produce huge benefits.

Also as a major side benefit, your customers will appreciate that you invited them in to help you. They will tell others of your openness and willingness to let go of some control.

2. Simplify your business processes

Eliminate steps. Reduce the amount of work performed in each step. Minimize the number of times the customer is required to do something. Take the burden off the customer and place it on your organization.

3. Never pass a customer around

This is probably the greatest annoyance to any customer.

“Sorry, but this isn’t my area; I will transfer you to sales and they will help you.” NO! The employee with the customer should stay with the customer until they are satisfied. They should own the issue and work it through to a satisfactory ending for the customer.

4. Say ‘yes’

Create a service culture to ’say yes’ to customers. Do whatever you can to satisfy their needs and wants. Don’t let your internal rules and policies get in the way. Bend them or break them if they are preventing you from saying ‘yes’ to your most precious assets.

These steps won’t make you perfect overnight but they will put you on the right path.

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

• Posted 12.6.11 at 07:42 am by Roy Osing
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November 3, 2011

Why being efficient by reducing cost results in worse service

Source: Unsplash

Why being efficient by reducing cost results in worse service.

Efficiency is the enemy of humanity

I can hear the efficiency experts and technology pundits screaming. The process re-engineering guru’s laughing at my outrageous declaration.

But here’s the thing. Any person charged with employing a new way of conducting business — a process, procedure or system — always looks for the cost savings involved.
Streamlining is measured by how much we reduce operating expenses; how the customer experience will be enhanced is never the starting point of a redesign project.

Technology adoption is rarely measured by how much it enhances the customer experience notwithstanding the application of AI in the customer engagement environment.

It is the norm that when we seek to apply new methods of doing business we extract a nano-gram of humanity from our organizations.

We reduce our ability to dazzle a customer to save a dollar in operating expenses by substituting humans with technology.

If you migrate a person-function to a machine, you reduce humanity in your organization. If you rush a person-function to make the process ‘more productive’ (save expenses), chances are that you are reducing the value of the customer engagement.

It’s virtually impossible in my view to mechanize a customer contact function and preserve the warmth of the human experience. The delight of a customer reaction to a caring act by an employee.

Some advocates say AI technology can replicate an amazing human- based experience, but I have yet to see it. Yes, Chatbot technology, for example, are improving because the controlling algorithms are getting more exhaustive and they are now able to deal with the most rudimentary and predictable customer transactions. But they quickly run into trouble when customer behaviour doesn’t fit the predictive algorithm.

And I also think in general that technology acceptance is governed by the fact that people are now resigned to receiving the lower grade of service they provide.

If you are doing something for the sake of efficiency and cost reduction, be honest enough to declare it.

Then tell everyone how your actions will preserve the humanity in your business — good luck with that.

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

• Posted 11.3.11 at 09:50 am by Roy Osing
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