In this issue:

How hard are you listening to your customers?

Books of the month

Being who you really are at work too!

    ISSUE 9 • Spring QUARTER • May 2007

    Our media are full of stories about customer churn in the business to consumer areas of financial services and telecommunications where there are always millions of new customers to chase.

    For businesses selling professional products and services to other organisations the loss of a single important customer can spell disaster.

    For those with highly technical and complex products and services like industrial or hospital equipment there are simply no additional customers of scale available.

    You’d expect then that such businesses would nurture the loyalty of their customers by investing skill and resources in measuring satisfaction, collecting customer feedback and acting to resolve issues.

    In fact for those businesses who are registered to the ISO 9001:2000 Quality Management System collecting and acting on customer feedback is an obligation. However ISO 9001:2000 doesn’t tell businesses how to measure satisfaction and only very few business managers have been trained to collect useful, actionable feedback.

    Some resort to low cost, simplistic solutions like including a comment card with a shipment, subcontracting their feedback collection to an outworker who doesn’t understand the sector or some start by using a web response form.

    These are low cost routes that only deliver low value results. The card only gets as far as the first line recipient. Only ‘nectar’ or ‘vinegar’ customers (those who are devotionally positive or highly critical) tend to respond. The balance between small, large, new, old, profitable and timewasters cannot be controlled. It is not possible to probe respondents for useful suggestions for improvement.

    In many surveys the questions asked tend to reflect the supplier’s view of potential issues rather than the priorities of the buyer and usually focus on product issues rather than on the lifetime relationship of the two organisations.

    In our experience it's much more useful and meaningful if a pilot ‘importance profiling study’ is first used to identify the customer’s view of the most critical elements of product or service delivery.

    Once a questionnaire is agreed, responses can then  be collected from a defined, balanced sample, picking recent purchasers of the product or service in question.

   In many sectors it’s not just the customer’s order department that must be contacted, but also their users, maintenance engineers, support personnel, incoming quality inspectors and senior management.

   It’s usually necessary to query the supplier’s invoicing and several other databases just to identify target respondents. The interviewer also needs to understand the sector and the products or services and must speak to the respondent and be prepared to probe and identify instances and examples.

When they are done well, surveys can reveal very simple, low-cost and highly significant opportunities for improvement for the supplier. In one recent example we found that many customers complained that invoices were hard to check since different internal part numbers were used.

In another we found to the supplier’s astonishment that customers rarely met sales people so were unable to answer a question about sales people’s industry knowledge.

Often we identify widespread or localised issues that the supplier is unaware of, but is easily capable of solving. Independent and disciplined reports help them to focus and improve.

 We advocate that suppliers run both regular tracking surveys and special probes when there is a change of policy or process. The feedback received can help them keep the customers they have today and increase the likelihood of a favourable recommendations when their customers’ employees move jobs or speak at industry events.

In any case, any kind of customer survey or research is itself an important communication, so it’s vital to invest in doing it right.

 Please request a detailed case study or ask us to help you review your current customer satisfaction measurement process or maybe build one for you?

Books of the month

Which I count as 7 questions but still forgiving that it's a useful tool to get people unstuck and to help solve problems by looking for different perspectives.

Click the book to link to our recommended book page

Why the emphasis on being yourself in business right now?

What’s the point of it?

Do I as a leader need to be myself?

How’s that going to help me and my business?

    For anyone who leads and manages others this principle has become crucial. It's one that leaders neglect at their peril.

     As you will find in the textbooks, ”If you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t believe the message”  (Kouzes and Posner, “The Leadership Challenge”).

    Numerous surveys have shown that the most admired leaders are those that speak the truth, have a clear set of values, and communicate in their own true voice. People believe those that behave this way and they are then willing themselves to come out in support of them.

     Managers often wonder why it seems so hard to motivate people, to get and keep their willing and enthusiastic collaboration. It comes as a hard discovery that they need to look to themselves to find the reason.

     It is common to go into organisations where things are difficult or all is not well, and people are leaving. Most of the time, relationships are poor, people do not speak well of their managers and don't trust them. It is most often the case that the leaders need to do some work on themselves if they are going to turn things around.

    The environment in which many of us work is so changing that we need increasingly to rely on well-motivated, highly skilled professionals with considerable expert knowledge, often working in de-centralised environments, often remotely, where value is placed on excellent communication, mutual support, networking, and self-direction. This is no command-and-control life.

    The leader now needs to sell a vision, articulate convincing strategies, build teams where collaboration is strong and trust high, to create resonance with those they lead and develop mutually supportive environments.

    The emphasis is on being emotionally intelligent, now a respectable word in the corporate language. And the first, key aspect of E.I. is self-awareness, the ability to know and be yourself. After all, you can’t manage what you are not aware of. Feedback on managers with weak interpersonal skills is often that they lack awareness: others see the gaps but they don’t.

    I believe it’s in the culture of our society today. People don’t trust others who are not genuine.

     Increasingly people who communicate well and influence others for the better are ones whom we believe in. It is as though we buy what they say. If we get them for who they are, we are more willing to be open ourselves, to share our own concerns. And only if the truth is uncovered can we put right what might be wrong.

       I came across an example recently where poor leadership and team working could lead to the delay of a major project for a business, which was already costing it over £300m. Imagine that cost of that!

If you want to learn more about how training in Authentic Leadership can help you and your business, take a look at our special offer this month and then contact us on info@rainmaker-coaching.com

"Logic will get you from A to B.

Imagination will take you everywhere."

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)    German-American physicist

Mike Meyer on organising your customer data to support your processes

"Think not of yourself as the architect of your career but as the sculptor.
Expect to have to do a lot of hard hammering, chiselling, scraping and polishing."

B.C. Forbes (1880-1954)
Scottish journalist & founder of Forbes magazine