What Service Customers Really Want – HBR.org

It’s nice working for a company that’s ahead of the curve.

Superior customer service can be an essential source of strength as companies emerge from the recession, but managers need to understand the extent to which the consumer landscape has shifted. Weakened brands, customers’ easy access to information about vendors, and the erosion of barriers to switching among competitors have combined to create a much more challenging environment for service, whether it’s outsourced or delivered in-house.

Evidence shows that customers will no longer tolerate the rushed and inconvenient service that has become all too common. Instead, they are looking for a satisfying experience. Companies that provide it will win their loyalty.

Our recent research demonstrates that when customers contact companies for service, they care most about two things: Is the frontline employee knowledgeable? And is the problem resolved on the first call? Yet those factors often aren’t even on customer-service managers’ dashboards. Most service centers continue to measure time on hold and minutes per call, as they have for decades. Such metrics encourage agents to hurry through calls—resulting in just the kind of experience customers dislike.

More than half of the customers we surveyed across industries say they’ve had a bad service experience, and nearly the same fraction think many of the companies they interact with don’t understand or care about them. On average, 40% of customers who suffer through bad experiences stop doing business with the offending company.

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How to Handle the Pessimist on Your Team – Management Essentials – HarvardBusiness.org.

Every team has at least one pessimist.

Turning Negativity into Productivity
Dealing with a pessimist on your team can be a frustrating and time-consuming experience. Attempts to ignore or counter frequent negative comments may simply incite further negativity. Good news: by being proactive you can help the pessimist change his behavior and enable your team to achieve greater productivity.

1. Create awareness. This is best done by pulling the team member aside and explaining how his comments are received. The rule when giving this type of feedback, says Jon Katzenbach, author of Wisdom of Teams and founder of the Katzenbach Center at Booz & Co., is to “be at least as positive as you are negative.” Explain why the person is valued on the team and make clear the impact of his behavior. For example, you can say, “When you make negative comments, the team gets stuck and we aren’t able to move forward.” Kramer points out, “This kind of conversation can be useful from a diagnostic perspective.” Once you understand the underlying reason for the pessimism, you can provide additional support or information if it’s needed.

2. Reposition negative statements. Negativity can fester and eventually kill a team’s momentum and motivation. Don’t let negative comments linger. Ask for clarification or more information about what the speaker means. For example, if a team member says, “This project is never going to make it past Finance,” ask the speaker to explain why she thinks that. Better yet, you can ask for alternative solutions: “What can we do to make sure the project does make it past Finance?” You can also ask team members to use “but statements.” Ask them to follow skeptical or critical sentences with “but.” For example, your team member could say “This project is never going to make it past Finance, BUT it’s worth laying the groundwork now because next year, Finance is apt to approve more tech projects.” It’s helpful to model this type of behavior for the entire team. Offer your own constructive criticism while providing an alternative solution.

3. Involve the whole team. It can be damaging to single out a team member in front of the entire team. Peer pressure is a far more effective tactic. According to Kramer, “Sometimes social sanctions work better than leader sanctions.” Set team norms and ask everyone to observe them. Goldsmith suggests that individuals ask themselves before they speak, “Will this comment help our customers? Will this help our company? Will this help the person or team we’re talking about? Will this help the person we’re talking to?” As Goldsmith points out, “Honesty may be the best policy except when it’s destructive and unhelpful.” Once you’ve agreed on norms, ask the team to hold each other to them. This approach can be used when you’re not the team leader as well. If a fellow team member is regularly negative, you can appeal to what Kramer calls “the collective wisdom” of the team by modeling positive behavior and using peer pressure to show the pessimist a more productive way of contributing. Of course as a peer, your influence is limited and you may need to talk with the team leader if your attempts to redirect the pessimist don’t work.

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HarvardBusiness.org

via Why Leaders Need Stories: A Lesson from Don Hewitt.

There are three reasons why a good story can be a useful leadership tool:

To inform. We all want the facts, but if a leader wants the facts to matter he needs to add a little seasoning. Stories can take raw data and give it life. For example, why not use a spreadsheet to tell a story about rising sales, or declining quality? Use the data to make your points. Then, flesh out that explanation with stories about the effect on individuals, teams and the company as a whole.

To involve. If you need to get people on your side, you need to involve them in the process. You need to engage their interest. For example, if an executive needs to persuade people to support an initiative, she can describe how the initiative will benefit the customer but also emphasize how it will improve the lot of employees, too. (More customers, more sales, more revenues, more jobs, more opportunities for promotion, etc.)

To inspire. Employees become jaded; there is only so much “importance” they can absorb, even when their jobs are at stake. So it falls to leaders to find ways to inspire their teams. Stories are the ideal vehicle for inspiring people because successful ones can dramatize the human condition. A story about a customer service representative who drove to the house of a customer to rectify an error, or a sales person who drove through a raging blizzard to close a sale, can quickly become the stuff of corporate legend. These stories give sustenance in times of travail, and say to an employee faced with long odds, “If he can do it, so can I.”

To add to this article, leaders need stories to create a culture, or even a culture change. Think about a leader in your past who has shared a story of amazing triumph or disastrous failure to a department or organization. The story tells will always paint a picture as to what is needed by everyone in the company, whether it be personal sacrifice, accountability, experimentation, or the ability to break rules when bureaucracy creates needless hurdles.

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The latest addition to my non-required leadership library is The Oz Principle. While other books I have read largely focused on trust, vision, and service (among other things), The Oz Principle is almost exclusively accountability. It’s actually a decently entertaining and quick read too, complete with comparisons to The Wizard of Oz. The idea is that everyone should be able to see it, own it, solve it, and do it. If employees, front-line leaders, or CEOs blame the economy, point fingers at abusive customers, or hope problems go away then the organization is destined for failure. This may seem like very basic, elementary rules of thumb, but the several case examples of everyday failures to accept responsibility prove two things: everyone does it, and any organization that fails to learn from it will fail. Period.

To solve it, the Oz Principle puts forth steps for employees from every echelon to assume greater accountability. Again, several of the case studies seem common sense at first. But when you realize how much integrity is required to confront oncoming disasters it becomes clear how rare accountability truly is.

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The start of a new year at work brings new commitments to creative problem solving. I have heard metaphors such as “If I gave you $500 to spend on our department, what would you do?” and my personal favorite “If you can wave a magic wand and change any one thing about our department, what would it be?” (from The Leadership Challenge) As I ask this question recently, most people seemed unable to immediately respond. This lack of immediate response is explained in a recent Center for Creative Leadership blog post:

From CCL’s Leading Effectively Blog:

Most of us use our so-called left brains very effectively. (Linear, rational, verbal, logical, symbolic, and so on.) It’s our right side of the brain that needs a bit of work. (Aesthetic, emotional, musical, imaginative, visual, and so on.) And them [sic] some work on integrating the two. The very best in science, art, business and leadership always integrates the two.

We typically apply a linear map in our structured, left-brain approach to problem-solving. For example, if a piece of equipment is bad then we use an establish troubleshooting approach to identify and exchange it for a working replacement. But using the “magic wand” approach forces people to use both sides of the brain. Thus, we’re able to define challenges that we typically assume are as concrete and unmovable as the foundation of our building.

My favorite answer to the magic wand question so far has been “I would change how difficult it is to create change.” This demonstrates that structured, linear boundries have been removed from the problem-solving process. It’s an annoying cliché, but it is nonetheless the start of thinking outside of the box.

When we draw, we learn to look at the boundaries. What part of this is my hand and what part of it is a shadow? Sometimes we can see more effectively if we change the light, or look at the empty spaces. Drawing forces us too look at the edges of the “problem,” because we are drawing with a line. There are no “lines,” in nature, just as nature does not always create actual “boundaries” between countries. They are artificial boundaries, just like pencil lines. Knowing the difference between what’s “real” and what’s contrived can make the difference between strong and weak leadership.

Categories: Leadership, Work
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