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putting customers first takes more than just calling them customers
At one time there was great trouble throughout the land. The people were not getting their just desserts, but this had gone on for so long that they had ceased to complain and they had become stoic in their acceptance.
It came at first as a whisper, as the first stirring of a breeze breaks the calm when a hurricane is due and, like a hurricane the word was to sweep through the land uprooting the trees of resistance in its path. And the name of this hurricane was Customer First, although it was to have as many names as it had priests, for each was to brand it according to their own ways (and fee scales).
And Lo! The people did become customers; not just those in the shops and retail premises, but no longer they that travelled by train, ship, ‘plane or bus would be called passengers. No longer would those who occupied premises, whether domestic or for their trade, be called tenants. No longer would those in ill health and needing to see the physician be called patients. No longer (yes, yes, all right; we get the picture – ed).
From that day hence they would all be customers and all would be well. Their time of strife would be over and they could rest easy for, when they handed over their hard earned coin, all would be well and they would be treated in the manner to which they should.
And so the priests, gurus, mentors, consultants and trainers did prosper, their pockets full of their client’s gold, and there was great rejoicing throughout the land. Those who proclaimed the way of the Customer grew rich and, in some cases, famous. Those who had sought their help (he’s off again. Enough! – ed).
Ok, let’s cut the pseudo biblical stuff, leave this fantasy world behind and consider ours. Are you getting better service because your train operator calls you a customer? Or anywhere else where you have become “a customer”? I doubt it. Sure there have been improvements in some places, yes, but that is because people have been better trained, not because of a name change. You might argue that the name change brought about a change of thinking, but I would suggest that such influence was limited. When I travel in someone else’s vehicle I am a passenger; when I have treatment at the medic’s I am a patient and so on. I find inappropriate use of customer patronising, how about you?
Maybe I am in a minority on this (that would be good, I might have rights), and I know I am being a bit obtuse here, but the point of this missive is that you have to mean it to make a difference. Just calling something by a different name doesn’t, on its own, make a change. For me it is the equivalent of the old dodgy car dealer’s “change the plates and give it a re-spray”, and is about as salubrious.
My train of thought here came from having been pulled up for referring to the people who were renting premises as tenants. “They’re customers” I was told, but then the attitude towards them would not have been out of place for the inmates of a labour camp. Calling them customers made no difference to the way they were seen or treated, so why bother with the pretence. OK, this is an extreme example, but does calling me a customer improve my rail service? No, but what would make a difference is changing the service I get for my money. That’s the challenge.
are meetings the bane of your life?
They certainly can be; the difference between a well run one and a poorly run one is like night and day, but what makes the difference?
The person chairing, or leading, the meeting is the key, but chairing the meeting is just one part of the whole deal. For me the issue is that so many people see the meeting as an entity in its own right rather than as an integral part of the process of making things happen.
So often the meeting becomes just an event that gets put in the diary and you get on with life in between the last one and the next one with no real connection. The agenda will turn up, maybe with some additional material, a few days before the meeting date and then you all turn up and go through the motions. More than a few will be ill prepared, not have read the papers or reports before the meeting, and those present will stagger through as best as they can. Where things haven’t gone right or deadlines have been missed there will be a few apocryphal stories trotted out, and everyone will want to chuck in their own version and, if the chair isn’t fully in control, there might be a bit of finger pointing to deflect blame. At best there might be an action to have got it done by the next meeting, but no-one will remember that until the agenda and minutes are circulated just before the next meeting, so it won’t be too much of a problem if people just ignore the whole thing. So you dispose of the coffee and biscuits and vanish until the next one comes round.
I’m being harsh maybe, and certainly cynical, but I’m pretty sure that some of you will recognise roughly that scenario. It is a composite of many that I have had to go through over the years. And they still continue, often even at board level, so goodness knows what meetings at those companies are like lower down the chain.
One factor that causes this problem is that people often don’t know how to make decisions. You may say that that is a daft thing to say, but it is true nonetheless; the ability to make decisions, or at least decent decisions, is sadly lacking in many organisations.
One of the worst excesses I have come across is the monthly review meeting. Everyone submits their departmental report, so all those at the meeting should have read it and be aware of how the others are doing. If there are any problems then they should be prepared to bring them up, but what happens? Everyone goes through their report at the meeting regardless and nothing really gets moved forward.
Meetings are part of moving things along, so they need to be treated as a point where the key people involved come together to resolve issues, so the first thing to be doing is making sure that the meeting is about the issues. What needs to be done, by whom and by when and what resource is needed to accomplish it. If people are armed with facts and not anecdotes they will be able to assess these points, agree on the risks of failure (so that the priorities can be understood) and make an appropriate decision. Job done; next issue, and do the same there.
At a project meeting last week we came prepared. Papers circulated had been read, the issues were discussed and we were agreed on who was doing what and by when and done in 30 minutes.
how easy is it to buy from you?
I understand that you need to have a set of processes to enable your company to run, and some of these will be around ordering, pick, pack, despatch and customer enquiries. This is a particular area of my own expertise, but why do you inflict this stuff on the customer?
Buying on line shows up the worst of this for me. Some examples:
• Crude product search engines that give you almost the entire inventory regardless of what you ask for.
• Page links that don’t work.
• Where you view the product, select a quantity to buy, get through a convoluted checkout process and only then get told that it is out of stock.
• Convoluted checkout process.
• Contact Us links that don’t work.
• Drop down lists in the Contact Us section that never seem to cover the query type that I have.
• Comment boxes that only allow too few characters for your query
Some company web sites are great; Amazon for example, but others are dreadful. Amazon relieve me of a lot of my disposable cash because they make it easy for me to spend with them and the overall customer experience is great.
On the other hand there are at least two or three companies a month that fail to extract funds from me because I can’t be bothered to go through all the hassle. Do people at these companies ever consider the customer experience? Do they ever try to buy from themselves? Somehow I doubt it.
And it isn’t just web sites. A lot of face to face experiences are no better. Two big gripes here; firstly the assistant who has to finish talking to their colleague when you’ve obviously arrived, and are waiting, to ask a question, and those places where you can’t enjoy looking without assistant after assistant walking up and asking if you need help.
OK, so all of that is B2C, but what about B2B? Well in many cases that is no better. Web links that don’t work, “Contact Us” buttons that either give you an email address with a promise to get back to you within 2 business days(!) or a phone number to a call centre somewhere that doesn’t even seem sure if the company you’ve called exists, let alone what they do.
Some web sites are so hard to navigate you doubt that you really want to deal with the company; if the web site is so badly organised, what are their other business practices like? For a start make sure that there is a consistent way of navigating around your site. Next, if you are going to engage with people on the web then you need to put something on there that people can play with and find things out. You also need to have something useful behind the contact details so that when someone does get in touch they get prompt responses. We’re using the web for its immediacy, so keep the ball rolling.
The next area that drives me to distraction is how hard some people make it to pay them. In this day and age a bank transfer is quick and easy, as is using a corporate purchasing card, so why are so many people still asking you to put a cheque on the post?
Generally there is room for improvement, so come on people. Get some thinking done on how people can trade with you. Things may be tight currently, but there is some money out there to be spent so make it easy for folks to spend it with you.
will Supplier Relationship Management be the big thing in 2011?
Revenue is one of the key components of profit, and therefore its perceived position as the lifeblood on business is reflected in the amount of money spent on trying to generate it; sales and marketing, and all of their associated costs make a reasonable dent in a company’s expenditure and so does the amount spent on training the people involved. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a big thing.
Now profit, as we all know, is what’s left over from the income when you’ve paid all your bills, but it is cash flow, or rather lack of it, which is the biggest killer of business. So you need profit underpinned by a healthy cash flow to survive, and cash flow is kept healthy by making sure that you’ve got your income in the bank in time to pay your bills.
And yet so many businesses just miss the whole point. They focus fairly lavish attention on bringing money in with little thought as to what is going out beyond the occasional budget cut or belt tightening exercise.
One of the key problems is silo mentality. When I am working with a group of buyers I’ll always ask how they see the sales teams that they have to deal with. The response is usually fairly hostile and rarely complimentary, but when you point out that they also have a sales team it comes over as though you’ve just told them that they have an uncle in gaol for murder.
It isn’t quite as bad talking to sales people about buyers, but both sides miss two important points. Firstly that the business that they work for will have both buyers and sellers that should be joined up and secondly that whilst the one group is trying to apply CRM to the buyers that they deal with, the other group is having CRM applied to them, but usually with little being done to equip them to get the best out of it. (In the reverse direction we call it Supplier Relationship Management or SRM).
You will also find frequent examples of buyers and sellers working against each other. Not deliberately of course, but because there isn’t sufficient recognition of the business drivers nor recognition of each other’s roles. In the service sector I’ve often seen companies that have sold solutions against a set of service levels that their supply contracts can’t sustain. Both sides are getting a pat on the back for the respective deals and nobody sees the conflict until sometime downstream when the end client is getting dissatisfied.
It should come as no surprise that the best examples of companies that balance efforts on what they spend and what they earn are often in the retail sector. Just think Tesco or Wal*Mart for example. They both manage their supply chains very well, and there is a constant and positive dialogue between all the various functions. Everyone is focused on taking revenue and squeezing as much value as they can from the transactions.
So here’s something that you can do this coming year. Buyers and sellers, seek each other out in your business and start having some meaningful dialogue. You will better understand how you can help each other succeed on behalf of your employer, but you can also help each other understand how the other works.
SRM is a very worthwhile area to be investing in. I’ve written here about collaboration being a way to move forward from recessionary times and working together in the supply chain is common sense anyway. I think that SRM could be a big thing in 2011.
avoiding the swings and the roundabouts and getting things done
I was discussing here the other week how business goes round in circles; the pendulum swings from one way of working to another and back again, and I argued that we needed to be less reactive. It’s a question of balance.
Conversations arising from that blog suggested that I was against radical change, but I’m not when it is necessary. If you have to swerve to avoid someone then it makes sense to do so rather that endure a painful collision. However, I would ask the question, why did you not see them coming earlier?
This is getting to the heart of running any operation, and those of us in #facilitiesmanagement know the issue only too well. We are often having to fire fight, and most of us in the business will have seen times when we were so busy quelling the flames that we didn’t have time to stop them starting.
One of the things that I’m passionate about in any job I take on is giving myself time to be able to do things properly. Anticipation is really 90% experience allowing you to expect the unexpected. You also develop your own toolkit of things that allow you handle things quickly when the need arises to stop matters getting out of hand.
Being able to anticipate is also a product of reading the situation and spotting the possibility of a problem and preparing for it, taking remedial action. “Perfect planning prevents p**s poor performance” as one of my team used to put it, and that really summed it up for our team. Yes we had our fair share of panics in the early days, but we worked on them, thought about them, talked about them and would listen to any idea, no matter how daft it might have sounded at the time.
Over the first year we had got most of the seasonal issues better planned and, no matter how well our solutions worked we would always review them because sometimes they were too good and we could get the right results with less effort and/or cost. Sure there were times when we got it wrong as well (I used to tell them that if we were perfect we’d be running FM beyond the pearly gates), but getting it wrong teaches you far more that getting it right.
Having the drains up in a non threatening way I also covered recently. Building a team where people can speak frankly requires a tremendous trust in each other. It isn’t the easiest thing to achieve, and you can lose it in an instant if you’re not strong enough as a leader, but when you have it the team can, and will, fly. Team spirit is another major factor in being able to anticipate problems and head them off at the pass. The team will be watching each other’s backs and playing for the good of the team rather than for themselves.
I’ve used the FM environment here to illustrate the point, but it applies just as much across the whole business spectrum. A fired up and motivated team will have the bases covered and negate the violent swerves because they will see things coming. A business in this shape is not going to get caught up in the pendulum swings because they don’t need to. They can make and cope with the fine adjustments to strategy by deployment of the right tactics to achieve objectives.
The only circles you will find a team like this going round are of the Plan, Do and Review kind as they constantly improve their performance.
Use your environment to help the environment – the ultimate in recycling?
In Facilities Management (FM) we pride ourselves on our buildings and how we run them, and I think that we have been early adopters and champions of sustainable and environmental issues. But are we doing enough? In terms of what we can do in our own right we probably are close to it, but how much are we influencing the people that we look after?
Whether we are an in house or outsourced FM service provider we are unlikely to be able to bring about significant sustainable changes on our own, but there are ways that we can collaborate with others to influence and be influenced by them. The key to this is, to use the word in its original meaning, our environment.
Consider the environment in which the building(s) we manage and the people who use it live and work in: The local geographic environment. Do we talk to our commercial and residential neighbours on issues of common interest? How about the local authorities; do we have any dialogue with them? What about how people get to work? Some of these issues will fall into the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) remit, so are you talking to them about what FM can offer and finding out what they have on their agenda? There are a lot of opportunities.
Consider the business environment that the people in the building work in. What business are they in? What do they want to showcase? What is the image that they are trying to portray to the outside world? Do you talk to the PR and Marketing people (other than when they want a desk moved)? FM has a lot to offer; we manage a lot of the things that interface with the outside world that can affect image and people’s perception of the company.
Your building’s occupants have an outside life, and that is another of the environment that FM impacts on. We manage the place where these people work for about a third of their day. We recognise that impact in terms of job satisfaction and people retention, but do we acknowledge that it also has a powerful impact on people’s moods and they way that they will interact with family and friends when they are away from work?
The ripple effect of the things that we do in the building(s) we manage goes out into the world around us, but often we are too involved in managing the splash to see where the ripples go and their impact. If we take that analogy literally, we know that ripples on a pond will cause erosion in the banks, so what impact are our ripples having in our local and business environments?
There is the “I’ve got enough on my plate” argument, but I would counter that by suggesting that getting to grips with some of these issues can take away existing pressure points and give you more time to manage. If your occupants are more content then you’ll have less complaints and the same applies to neighbours. If you’re building good relations with various internal and external groups you’re raising the FM stock and gaining a fan club; neutrals are better than enemies and fans are better than neutrals.
Over the years I’ve run all sorts of schemes, some of which seemed very off the wall to begin with but all paid dividends. There’s not room to list them here, but feel free to ask. Talk to others and collaborate on mutually beneficial projects. Using your environment to help the sustainable and environmental agenda is something to consider: The ultimate in recycling?
The art of diplomacy
On my recent US trip I got to chatting on the plane with my neighbour on the subject of tact. Exploring some of the differences between the way Americans and Brits do business, he felt that we place too much emphasis on what he termed diplomacy, hence tact. Straight talking is the way to go, he said.
It’s an interesting point, but I’ve always worked on the basis that people are, thankfully, all different, so you work at a relationship and modify your style accordingly. This has worked for me over the years whether that relationship is private or business, and for the latter, whether it’s been with my boss, my team, my peers, supplier:customer or customer:supplier. I don’t claim to have always got it right first time, but I usually made it work.
Where there have been failures it has tended to be through a lack of clarity. This was one of the reasons why my new friend felt being diplomatic was wrong, that we just danced around the point whereas his approach went straight to it.
In theory that is all well and good, but in practice I’m not so sure. One of the arts of leadership, and something that is very effective in negotiation, is in getting someone to do what you want them to do, but because they think that they want to do it. Being direct will rarely get you your desired result in those circumstances, but a more tactful approach usually will.
The direct approach is also something that does not cross cultural boundaries too well either, and so is often wasted if used in international dealings. Where did diplomacy come from in the first place? It came through cross border dealings where reaching a compromise was often the way to peace and survival.
Compromise is also often a dirty word with those who like the direct approach. I’ve been on many teams where, when we’ve been discussing our approach to an upcoming negotiation, there have been people who have wanted to take a “no compromise” position. Well, there are two key problems with that way of working. The first is that you are leaving yourself with a limited position and, to a degree, painting yourself into a corner which you should never do. The second is that, if you succeed, all of the compromise falls onto the other party. Maybe that isn’t a problem in a one off deal, but it is not the way to be building long term relationships.
Using tact, taking a diplomatic approach and being prepared to reach compromise are not signs of weakness. They are the trademarks of someone who will make successful deals over a long period of time and who will also probably be an extremely good leader.
People who act like this get things done, build happy teams and they make deals that people are happy with. They establish that reputation and people want to work for and with them. They will not be regarded as a soft touch either, because no-one that generates that level of success over a period of time can ever be a soft touch. They just become respected players, and that is another good thing because they don’t let ego get in the way.
You may sometimes have to be direct, but don’t forget that it’s people that you have to work with to make things happen. Knowing how to work with people is therefore crucial to success. Tact and diplomacy will serve you well as tools, so learn how and when to use them.
Lead well and prosper.
TCB
Who would I have on the board of Me plc?
My friend Kwai Yu asked who would be on the board of Me plc. Having thought about this for a couple of days I’ve come up with some possible solutions here. I’ve taken a Fantasy Football approach with some of these, and have grouped them, as you will see, by category. So the nominations are:
The Entertainment Board.
First to invite would be Lionel Blair. If you wanted to personify the word irrepressible, then that would be Lionel. A positive mood to board meetings would be assured by his presence. Next up is Jane Russell. Here I’m not sure whether this would be as herself or one of her characters; maybe from the Outlaw, or Gentlemen prefer Blondes? Whatever, a smart cookie that one. Then I’d ask Doris Day. Let’s face it, whatever scrapes she got into everything always worked out in the end, and I’m an eternal optimist, so I’m sure that we’d go together well. We’d need legal advice maybe, so who else but Denny Crane; what could I add? Denny Crane! The final member of this board comes from the sporting world, and would be the late Sir Bobby Robson, the only member of this team that I have met. Two words sum up the reason for his inclusion; passion and loyalty.
The Former Colleagues Board
This one is made of people with whom I have worked and kicks off with Diane Santos. She was my boss for a time and was as straight as a die. I may not always have agreed with her, but I could always trust her. From the same team, her boss John Robson. John taught me huge amounts about leadership just by doing what he did. Later our paths crossed again when I was his business landlord and I’ll always hold him in high regard; a true gentleman. Very much in the same line is Mick Linsell, one time MD of Royal Mail and, for a time, my boss squared. Another who showed me the ways of leadership just by doing his job. And he stood up to Anne Robinson on live TV and came away with a draw.
The Historical Board
This one doesn’t go too far back, but I’d start off with a couple of politicians from the days when they were real people. Barbara Castle would be first pick. I may not have shared her political leanings, but here was a lady I would have liked to have known and maybe to have worked with. I’d team her up here with Sir Winston Churchill. Another with whom I would often have disagreed, but I love his way with words and his fighting spirit, a quality he shared with Barbara. Then there would be Leonard Cheshire, he of the Cheshire Homes and of Bomber Command. For me truly a great man and one who would bring a single minded courage to my enterprise. Finally here, and from much farther back, Vasco da Gama. I have a great admiration for those who just sailed off into the unknown to find what was there, even if that turned out to be death.
The Musketeers
Back in July ’96 I joined three guys, Chris Drew, Kelvin Little and Ian Tolley, in a team that we came to call the four musketeers (I was Porthos). We did truly live up to the One for All and All for One philosophy. We all still keep in touch even though we parted company in early ’99, having blazed a trail in those two and a bit years.
The winning team? The Musketeers I would think.
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Cracking codes and getting the secrets – a day in the life of JB
They meet in a quiet office overlooking the restricted area. Security guards with fearsome dogs patrol behind razor wire topped fences. She knows why JB is there. They waste no time on small talk; she slides a single sheet of A4 paper across the desk to him. He glances down the two columns typed upon it and nods. He puts the page into his briefcase, they shake hands and he leaves. Read more…
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the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke 