Now that is someone who loves Cheddar Goldfish! ;-)
Note: Not kosher as far as I am aware.
(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
Now that is someone who loves Cheddar Goldfish! ;-)
Note: Not kosher as far as I am aware.
(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
They Must've Enjoyed Those Cheddar Goldfish
"Truth Always Hurts!"
The Truth Hurts
Give Me That Fridge Handle
Getting The Biggest Bang For The Buck
The best day of project management is usually the first day, but I want to show you that the best day is really the last day of the project.And as I thought about this, I sort of starting laughing to myself and thinking, you know what, I think this guy has something here.
Just take me out back and shoot me!
Wow, great job everyone! We really got something great done here--and we did it right! ;-)
Project Management - The Best Day
Start With Yes
Don't make me get through no to get to yes.
Keep a smile on your face and your focus on the customer; everything else takes care of itself.
The customer is in the water. They want the yacht. But I can give them a boat. It gets them to where they want to go, and they no longer need to swim. We can work our way up to a yacht.
Say YES!
Shock and Awe Project Management
"Shock And Awe" Project Management
"There's a solution to every problem."
"It's just that the customer may not like it."
"Well then that's not the solution you are looking for!"
Customer Service NO-NOs
2017 Year Of The Customer
Survey The Performance
Organizations are all interested in what sells—what’s hot and what’s not!
Of course, as advertisers learned long ago, “sex sells.”
What else? Fear sells. All the basic emotions seem to sell—everything from affection and anger to wonder and worry.
When people experience an emotional drive, their internal (biochemical) and external (environmental) states elicit a psychophysiological response that drives mood and motivation.
The result is that when effectively selling to people’s emotions, we address or meet their explicit or implicit “pain points.”
Fast Company (November 2010) has an interesting article called “The Felt Need” that differentiates wants from genuine needs.
A want is one thing, but a genuine need or “pain point” is something entirely different. Getting something we want may be satisfying a nice to have on our wish list, but getting rid of a pain point is something that we literally crave to fulfill from physiological and/or psychological motivations.
A good analogy to satisfying people’s wants versus needs is that it’s better to be selling aspirins than vitamins, because “vitamins are nice; they’re healthy [and people want to live healthier]. But aspirin cures your pain…it’s a must-have.”
Similarly, the article tells us that just building a better mousetrap, doesn’t mean that customers will be beating down your door to do business, but rather as organizations we need to figure out not just how to build a better mousetrap, but rather how to get rid of that pesky mouse. The nuance is important!
In technology, there is a tendency to treat almost every new technology as a want and almost every new want as a need. The result is vast sums spent on IT purchases that are unopened or unused that perhaps looked good on paper (as a proposal), but never truly met the organizational threshold as a must-have with a commensurate commitment by it to succeed.
There are a number of implications for IT leaders:
1) As service providers, I think we need to differentiate with our internal customers what their genuine pain points are that must get prioritized from what their technology wish list items that can be addressed in the future, strategy alignment and resources permitting.
2) From a customer standpoint, I’d like to see our technology vendors trying to sell less new mousetraps and focusing more on what we really need in our organizations. The worst vendor calls/presentations are the ones that just try to tell you what they have to sell, rather than finding out what you need and how they can answer that call in a genuine way.
In looking at the emotion, the key to long-term sales success is not to take advantage of the customer in need, but rather to be their partner in meeting those needs and making the pain go away.
Pain Points, More Potent Than Wish Lists
I really liked the article in MIT Sloan Management Review (Fall 2010) called “Designing the Soft Side of Customer Service” by Dasu and Chase.
The authors write: “Even in the most mundane [customer] encounters, emotions are lurking under the surface. Your job is to make those feelings positive.”
Wow! That is a pretty powerful statement.
Think about it. How often do you genuinely deliver on that positive experience for your customers versus how often do they come away feeling slighted, taken advantage of, maybe even cheated of the service they know they deserve.
Sometimes of course, there are justifiable reasons why we can’t make a customer happy—maybe the customer is simply being unreasonable or is a knucklehead or maybe even some sort of nutcase. We have to use good judgment when it comes to this.
But often there are other problems that are getting in the way of us delivering on that positive customer experience:
Problem #1: We get caught up in the policies, processes, personalities, and politics of a situation, rather than focusing on the customer and their satisfaction. We forget who our real customers are.
Problem #2: We don’t think like the customer. We don’t genuinely listen to the customer or try to understand where they are coming from or what they even want. We are too busy talking the “company line,” playing defense, or taking an adversarial role. We don’t put ourselves in the other person’s shoes, not even for a minute.
Problem #3: We often don’t put the customer first; we put ourselves first. We are more concerned with not making a mistake, getting into trouble, or maybe don’t want to even work “that hard.” In general, we should, but don’t go the extra mile for the customer, let along deliver on first mile.
The MIT article tells us that we can improve customer experiences by designing-in how we manage the customer’s emotions, trust, and need for control (ETCs), as follows:
Designing for positive customer ETCs experiences will go a long way to resolving the problems of poor customer service, where we know and stay focused on who our customers are, can think as they do, and seriously deliver on their needs the way you would want your customer needs addressed.
I suppose if I have to sum it up in a couple of words, it’s about being professionally selfless and not selfish in all our customer interactions.
It takes some maturity to get there, but I think it’s why we are here to serve.
Customer Service Design
ITIL Version 3 - Serving Customers Like A Fine Restaurant
Apple has an amazing self-sufficiency model, where they have only 6 desktop support analysts for 34,000 worldwide employees, 36 helpline agents for 52,000 computers, only 38% of their IT budget is for baseline operations and 62% for innovation, and their IT spend is just .6 of 1%. These are numbers that most CIOs dream of. And of course, that’s only the beginning of the Apple story…
There is no doubt about it Apple is firing on all cylinders. Apple has become a $50 billion a year company building and selling technology products that consumers are salivating for—whether it’s a MacBook, iPhone, or the new iPad—everyone wants one, and I mean one of each!
Apple’s slogan of “Think Different” is certainly true to form. It’s reflected in their incredibly designed products, innovation in everything they do, and the keen ability to view the world from their user’s perspective.
Here are some amazing stats on Apple (heard at the Apple Federal CIO Summit, 8 April 2010):
Here are some of Apple’s self-proclaimed keys to success:
While the key factors to Apple’s success are not a recipe that can simply copied, they do offer great insight into their incredible accomplishments.
Next stop for Apple seems to be taking their success in the consumer market and making it work in the enterprise. This will go a long way to addressing users concerns about their technology at home being better than what they use at work.
Apple’s Self-Sufficiency Model
It’s intuitive that organizations should manage oriented to serve their customers, because it’s the customers who keep them in business. Yet, in the name of “shareholder value,” many organizations continue to put short-term results at the forefront of their decision-making and this ends up damaging the long-term success of the organization to the detriment of its owners.
Harvard Business Review, January-February 2010, in an article called “The Age of Customer Capitalism” by Roger Martin states that “for three decades, executives have made maximizing shareholder value their top priority. But evidence suggest that shareholders actually do better when firms put the customer first.”
The author continues: “Peter Drucker had it right when he said the primary purpose of a business is to acquire and keep customers.”
Clearly, we serve our customers in the service of our mission. Our mission is why we exist as an organization. Our mission is to provide our customers with products and/or services that satisfy some intrinsic need.
The equation is simple:
Shareholder Returns = f (Customer Satisfaction)
Shareholder returns is a function of and positively correlated with customer satisfaction, as HBR notes. If we serve our customers well, the organization will thrive--and so will the owners—and if we do this poorly, the organization will die—and the owners will “lose their shirts”.
The problem with concentrating exclusively on stock price is that we then tend to focus on short-term returns versus long-term results, and the shareholder ends up worse off in the end.
“The harder a CEO is pushed to increase shareholder value, the more the CEO will be tempted to make moves that actually hurt the shareholders…short-term rewards encourage CEOs to manage short-term expectation rather than push for real progress.”
The article cites companies like Johnson & Johnson and P&G that “get it.” They put the customer first and their shareholders have been rewarded handsomely—“at least as high as, if not higher than, those of leading shareholder-focused companies.”
One good example of how J&J put customers first is when in the 1982 Tylenol poisonings, in which seven Chicago-area residents died, J&J recalled every capsule in the nation, “even though the government had not demanded it.”
Another good example in the article is Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry. They recognized the importance of the customer versus the focus on the shareholder and already “in 1997, just after the firms IPO, the founders made a rule that any manager who talked about the share price at work had to buy a doughnut for every person in the company.” The last infraction by the COO had him delivering more than 800 doughnuts—the message was heard loud and clear.
These examples are in seemingly stark contrast to the recent handling by Toyota of its brake problems, in which there has been delayed recalls and the government is now investigating. As The New York Times (8 February 2010) reported: “The fact that Toyota knew about accelerator deficiencies as far back as December 2008 “raises serious questions about whether car manufacturers should be more forthcoming when they identify a problem, even before a recall,” said Robert Gifford, the executive director of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, a nonprofit group that seeks to advise British legislators on air, rail and road safety issues.” Note: this is out of character for Toyota, which historically has been a car company known for its quality and safety.
As a long advocate for User-centric Enterprise Architecture, I applaud the organizations and the people that put the customer first—and by this, I mean not by words alone, but in deeds. It is easy to put the customer into our mission and vision statements, but it is another to manage our organization with a true service creed.
While the HBR article emphasizes short-term shareholder value as main culprit diverting us from a positive customer-focus, there are really numerous distractions to realizing the vision of a customer service organization. Some examples include: organizational politics that hinder our ability to accomplish our mission; functional silos that are self-serving instead of seeking the best for the enterprise; certain egocentric employees (a minority) that put personal gain or a lack of strain above a service ethos; and of course, greedy and corrupt individuals that seek to profit at the expense of the customer, perhaps even skimping on product quality and customer service, thereby even endangering health and safety.
While most people are essentially good and seek to do the right thing, the organization must put in place controls to ensure that our focus is never distracted or diminished from our customers. These controls include everything from establishing values, policies, processes, requirements management, product development, training, testing, measurement and reporting, and best practices implementation in order to ensure our finest delivery to the customers, always.
Why The Customer Should Be The Center Of Our Professional World
IT Leaders are often worried (almost exclusively) about the technology—Is it reliable? Is it robust? Is secure? Is it state-of-the-art? Is it cost-effective? And more.
This is what typically keeps IT management up at night—a server outage, the network being down, an application not available, a project off track, or a security issue such as a virus or worm.
While much lip service has been paid to the statement that “people are our most important asset;” in reality, too little emphasis is generally placed here—i.e. people are not kept high on the IT leadership agenda (for long, if at all), technology is.
Hence, we have seen the negative effects of outsourcing, layoffs, cut training budgets, pay and incentive stagnation, and other morale busting actions on our workforce, along with customers who have been disappointed by magnificent IT project failure rates—with projects over cost, behind schedule, and not meeting customer spec.
Our people—employees and customers—are not being properly cared for and the result is IT projects failure all around us (the stats speak for themselves!).
In essence, we have lost the connection between the technology outcomes we desire and the people who make it happen. Because what drives successful technology solutions are people—knowledgeable, skilled, well trained, and passionate people—working collaboratively together on behalf the mission of the organization.
A book review in ComputerWorld (21 December 2009) on World Class IT by Peter A. High identifies the 5 elements of IT leadership, as follows:
1. Recruit, train, and retain world-class IT people.
2. Build and maintain a robust IT infrastructure.
3. Mange projects and portfolios effectively.
4. Ensure partnerships within the IT department and with the business.
5. Develop a collaborative relationship with external partners.
Interestingly enough, while IT leaders generally are focused on the technology, information technology is not #1 of the 5 elements of IT leadership, but rather employees are—they are identified at the top of the list—and the author states that CIO's should tackle these issues in the order presented.
Further, of the 5 key IT leadership elements, fully 3—or 60% are all about people and relationships, not technology. #1 are employees, #4 is business-IT partnership (customers), and #5 is external collaboration or outreach.
So unfortunately for our organizations, people are the all too forgotten (or neglected) 60%.
I do want to note that I do not fully agree on the order presented by Mr. High; in particular I do not think the customer should be 4th on the list, but rather as the customer represents the mission and the requirements to carry it out, the customer should be unquestionably to me at the very top of the list of IT leadership focus—always. We are here to serve them, period.
Overall though, the key point is that IT leaders need to reorient themselves to people and not overemphasize the technology itself, because if they generally respect and take care of the people and the relationships, the technology will follow and be more successful then ever.
The Forgotten 60%
Two of the finest customer service companies these days are Amazon and Apple. Amazon with free shipping and generous return policy for just about any reason is amazing in their no nonsense customer-service orientation—they inspire virtually complete customer trust. And Apple with their try it, you’ll like it stores full of computers, iPhones, and iPods, as well as their extended product warranties, training classes on products and awesome service desks is just another great customer shopping experience.
We need more of these positive customer experiences:
· Products—products should be true quality through and through (not the shoddy stuff made on the cheap to maximize profit and minimize customer satisfaction).
· Commitment—companies stand by their products with hassle-free money back guarantees (forget the 15% restocking fee, the mandatory return authorization number, and the 4-6 weeks to get your money back).
· Service—customer service has got to be easy to access and quick to resolve problems (banish the cold and calculating automated calling systems with the loop-de-loop dialing—“dial 1 if you want to jump out of a window!”—and where routine service problems are resolved without having to escalate numerous levels to get a supervisor only to then get accidentally disconnected and have to start all over again; oh, and did I forget having to give your basic information over 3 times to each service rep you speak with).
Aside from these basics, we need new ways to improve customer experiences to give the customer an absolutely satisfying experience.
In this regard, I loved the recent commentary by Steve Kelman in Federal Computer Week entitled Customer service Tips From Developing Countries, where some simple yet novel customer service innovations were identified, as follows:
· Chinese Passport Control and Customs provides a kiosk for passengers to “report on their travel experience by pressing a smiley face or a frowning face.” Whoola instant feedback!
· Saudi Arabia ATM Machines, while withdrawing money “offered an option of paying parking fines and some government license fees.” That couldn’t be simpler and quicker.
· Singapore Passport Control “placed a bowl of candy at the counter.” A tiny gesture that goes a long way.
From a simple smiley/frowny face feedback mechanism to a candy bowl as a way to say thank you; it is not rocket-science to be kind, gentle, and caring for customers—most of the time, it’s the basic manners your mother taught you.
In technology, these customer services lessons are especially apropos, since it is easy to get enmeshed in the technology and forget the people and processes that we are supporting. (Or to put it in another way, “it’s the customer, not the technology, stupid!”)
It's the Customer, Not the Technology, Stupid
Being in a technical field like IT, we often see disconnects between the “techies” and the business people—almost like they are speaking foreign languages at each other. The result is that the techies don’t really understand the business requirements and the business people don’t understand the technical solutions. It’s sort of comical to watch, if not for being so sad in terms of the huge number of failed IT projects that result.
One thing we’ve realized is that we need to be able to communicate and communicate well between the business and IT or else we are not going to be very effective at IT service provision and enabling the business to perform at its best.
One solution has been to have IT staff whose job it is to translate between the business and IT units—these people are in roles at times called “business liaisons” or IT-business relationship managers. It is helpful to assign these liaisons to each business unit and give them authority and accountability for managing and nurturing a healthy relationship and unambiguous communication between business units and IT providers. The liaisons “own the customer” and ensure that requirements are captured correctly and understood by IT, that the proposed IT solutions are clearly explained to the business, and that the customer is satisfied with the systems and services they are receiving.
A second solution is hire IT communications specialists who more broadly “market” and communicate IT plans, policies, processes, goals, objectives, initiatives, milestones, and performance. I have found these professionals to be indispensable to “getting the message out there” and enhancing awareness and understanding for IT in the organization. Of course, IT leaders play a critical role in developing and honing the actual message, and in delivering ongoing two-way communications throughout the organization. In essence, they are the ambassadors and communicators par excellence inside and outside the organization with all IT stakeholders.
In short, IT needs to communicate early and often and communicate, communicate, communicate.
ComputerWorld, August 31-September 7, 2009 has a wonderful article affirming the criticality of IT communications in an article entitled: “Marketing IT: An Inside Job” by Mary Brandel.
As Brandel states: “It’s not about hype. It’s about conveying IT’s value.” I would add that it’s not only about conveying IT’s value, but also about creating IT value, by improving the two-way communication between the business and IT and thereby generating more effective solutions.
The article provides a number of useful suggestions for marketing and communicating IT that I’ve adapted, such as customer satisfaction surveys; IT annual reports that communicates accomplishments, alignment to strategic plan, “resources saved, awards won, and conferences at which staff members have spoken;” e-Brochures with “video coverage explaining goals,” services, policies, and plans; and Twitter alerts on service outages.
The key though which Bandel points out is that IT leaders need to “embed a 24/7 marketing mindset throughout the [IT] organization.” While business liaisons and IT communications specialists are focused on and specialize in this, it is still imperative for everyone in the IT organization to understand and be able to market and communicate IT services and processes to customers. All IT personnel are representatives to the business and should present and represent that customer service is our #1 goal.
From my perspective, this means transitioning our IT organizations to be wholly user-centric. This means a clear and ever present awareness that the business is IT’s raison d’être.
IT Communications, A Must Have
Is there an IT leader in the House?
According to an recent article in Harvard Business Review, December 2008, one way that enterprises can better architect their products and services is by “choice architecture.”
Choice Architecture is “design of environments to order to influence decisions.” By “covertly or overly guiding your choices,” enterprises “benefit both company and consumer by simplifying decision making, enhancing customer satisfaction, reducing risk, and driving profitable purchases.”
For example, companies set “defaults” for products and services that are “the basic form customers receive unless they take action to change it.”
“At a basic level, defaults can serve as manufacturer recommendations, and more often than not we’re happy with what we get by accepting them. [For example,] when we race through those software installation screens and click ‘next’ to accept the defaults, we’re acknowledging that the manufacturer knows what’s best for us.”
“Of course, defaults can be nefarious as well. They have caused many of us to purchase unwanted extended warranties or to inadvertently subscribe to mailing lists.”
“Given the power of defaults to influence decisions and behaviors both positively and negatively, organizations must consider ethics and strategy in equal measure in designing them.”
Here are some interesting defaults and how they affect decision making:
Mass defaults—“apply to all customers…without taking customers; individual preferences into account.” This architecture can result in suboptimal offerings and therefore some unhappy customers.
Some mass defaults have hidden options—“the default is presented as a customer’s only choice, although hard-to-find alternatives exist.” For example, computer industry vendors, such as Microsoft, often use hidden options to keep the base product simple, while at the same time having robust functionality available for power users.
Personalized defaults—“reflect individual differences and can be tailored to better meet customers’ needs.” For example, information about an individual’s demography or geography may be taken into account for product/service offerings.
One type of personalized default is adaptive defaults—which “are dynamic: they update themselves based on current (often real-time) decisions that a customer has made.” This is often used in online retailing, where customers make a series of choices.
There are other defaults types such as benign, forced, random, persistent, and smart: each limiting or granting greater amounts of choice to decision makers.
When we get defaults right (whether we are designing software, business processes, other end-user products, or supplying services), we can help companies and customers to make better, faster, and cheaper decisions, because there is “intelligent” design to guide the decision process. In essence, we are simplifying the decision making process for people, so they can generally get what they want in a logical, sequenced, well-presented way.
Of course, the flip side is that when choice architecture is done poorly, we unnecessarily limit options, drive people to poor decisions, and people are dissatisfied and will seek alternative suppliers and options in the future.
Certainly, we all love to choose what we want, how we want, when we want and so on. But like all of us have probably experienced at one time or another: when you have too many choices, unconstrained, not guided, not intelligently presented, then consumers/decision makers can be left dazed and confused. That is why we can benefit from choice architecture (when done well) to help make decision making simple, smarter, faster, and generally more user-centric.
Choice Architecture and Enterprise Architecture