“Serious About Improving Service? Ask Your Staff.”
Your staff will have valuable insights and examples on service gaps and improvement opportunities. It may require some courage and thick skin to question your staff for their input on service. I do not suggest this unless you are really open-minded to what you will hear and are prepared to effectively respond with action. Staff are closest to the customers and the organizational practices that link to the customer.
And of course, do go directly to the customer for their input. Surveying your customers is an essential step to obtain quality assurance and satisfaction measures. This can be post customer service call questions, customer relationship surveys conducted periodically and simply a confidential post card for mailing after their visit to your location.
Who is the customer? Anyone you provide a service to can be included in the concept of customer. This includes your internal customers. Management, supervisory and co-worker interactions are as equally important as communications, programs and services with your external business customers, community representatives, clients, students and all stakeholders.
While you may be excellent in serving your direct clients and customers, you should be just as exceptional in providing service to each other. This is whether you are a private corporation, not-for profit or educational institution. An organization’s staff image outside the organization is reflected in their internal working relationships. Your employees are the face of the organization. Ask them the following:
- What are examples of our organization providing exceptional service to our customers?
- What are examples of our organization providing poor service to our customers?
- What causes poor customer service at our organization and within your department?
- How do you think our customers would rate of our organization’s service to them?
- What do you think our organization and your department can do to better service our customers and to build their loyalty?
- How would you rate our service to each other – that is, our internal customers?
- What improvement opportunities exist within our internal customer interactions?
- What do you think, that I as your manager, can do to improve customer service?
- What do you think you can do to improve your own customer service effectiveness?
- What do you see as the benefits of an improvement?
“Your Board Membership: Evaluating Performance:
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While it is worthwhile experience for the opportunity to give-back and make a difference as member of a board, there can equal amounts of frustration when progress is a stalled in meeting your mission. This can be remedied by conducting a self-evaluation of your board’s practices and productivity. Self-evaluation is a standard practice recommended by many experienced board advocates. This can be readily achieved through a questionnaire completed by each member with follow-up discussion among the group on what they see as effective practices as well as needed areas for improvement.
I like to break the performance criteria into two areas: “Board Structure & Practices”, and “Board Behaviors & Relationships”,
Aspects of “Structure” focus on descriptors such as board mission, meeting management and member training. Individual board member behaviors and the relationships and interactions among all board members comprise “Behavior” performance criteria. Examples include communications, accountability and problem solving.
Here is a sample questionnaire get you started in evaluating your board.
Would you agree or disagree with the following performance criteria as they pertain to your board experience?
Board Structure & Practices
- Strategic Plan: Board members clearly understand their organization’s strategic plan. Their work reflects the organization’s mission statement and strategic objectives.
- Board Policies & Procedures: All members have copies of the board’s policies and procedures, member responsibilities, and committee roles. New board members receive an orientation on their accountabilities toward becoming an effective board member.
- Meeting Management: Board meetings have established agendas and related materials are provided to board members in time for their review. Meeting agenda items are addressed and action taken. There are limited occurrences of unresolved items continually carried over from meeting to meeting.
- Board Composition: Board members possess the qualifications, experience, and diversity to meet their objectives, and address organizational and community needs.
- Board Leadership: Meetings are well facilitated, focused on priorities and refocused if discussion diverges off agenda items. The board chair supports the board and effectively represents the board and organization to its stakeholders.
Board Behaviors & Relationships
- Working Environment: Board working environment is generally tension free with communication open, everyone participating, not holding back on their ideas or opinions. Board members treat each other with respect and listen to and value all input for consideration.
- Interpersonal Communications: Criticism is openly expressed to address issues and without personal attacks directed at board members. Disagreements and conflict do occur as part of the process to constructively problem solve and work through issues. They do not prohibit progress but are managed effectively.
- Decision Making: Board members gather information to make evidenced-based decisions to arrive at a group consensus in which everyone goes along to complete the job.
- Member Accountability & Commitment: Board members are accountable to completing their assigned tasks and committed to board driven decisions even if they do not agree with action decided on.
- Member Leadership: Based on the board’s need for a member’s expertise, board members regularly step-up to lead discussions and committees to address issues. Members act as good will ambassadors positively representing the organization as its advocate to the public.
“Incentive Plans To Get What You Paid For”
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“Senior management’s job is to pay people…If they &#%!@?!”a hundred guys out of a hundred grand each, that’s ten million more for them. They have four categories: happy, satisfied, dissatisfied, disgusted. If they hit happy, they’ve screwed up: They never want you happy. On the other hand, they don’t want you so disgusted you quit. The sweet spot is somewhere between dissatisfied and disgusted.” Quote from the book The Big Short.
That quote hit home for me. Like many of us I have been on the receiving end of some interesting incentive goal setting rationale. In one case, the payout started once I was 10% above last year’s numbers, while the organization’s projected annual sales growth was set at 3%. A real disconnect in goal setting. I didn’t see a dime until I made my case to my boss’s boss for a plan modification. One of my clients was planning to offer a commission they couldn’t afford: the payout was higher than projected revenue growth. Consider the following suggestions in setting up a plan for your staff:
- Start with your organization’s strategy and what your want to achieve and link sales efforts to established strategic objectives.
- Develop sales goals in the context of the projected revenue growth for your business to sync sales performance.
- Do homework to determine what your production has been. Sales goals set without any historical analysis is like “shooting in in the dark” with goals too high or too low based on past results.
- Make goals realistic and attainable with a performance stretch. If you desire higher production, set additional performance tiers and pay accordingly. Unrealistic expectations demotivate, while easy goals won’t allow you to attain the growth you want.
- Put the incentive expense in the context of the financial benefit to your business. Yeah, you paid some big bonuses but how does your bottom-line look.
- Run the program for a test period to learn where you may need modifications.
- If a new plan, start out with a fair payout that you can always modify as you gather more data. You want to avoid reducing an amount in the future. That will hang over your sales people like a dark cloud; a real motivation and trust killer.
Great Ideas: Now What?
Everyone is enthusiastic since their ideas were heard and they are now ready to run full steam ahead with implementation of their tactics: making their idea a reality as a solution for the organization. But, maybe you are thinking: should I devote resources to it? And, if you were so fortunate as to have 10 people in that meeting with ten ideas…can you do all those tactics?
I agree, that it is never fun, since the last thing we want to do is to diminish any creative drive by our staff. But you can facilitate their continued involvement and commitment while managing resources to meet the priorities at hand. This can be accomplished by having them participate in the rating process to “weight” which tactics might have a better payoff.
What you find is that it actually structures the decision making process while successfully generating more discussion as people begin to think through their ideas. Here are the steps:
1) Title a spreadsheet or flip chart with the name of the initiative
2) Create 6 column heads on the spreadsheet:
> Idea/Tactic: action to meet the initiative
> Value/Relevancy: tactic’s relevancy to initiative?
> Ease of Implementation: easily execute the tactic?
> Resource Availability: have people, money, time?
> Cost Benefit: tactic’s impact worth the effort?
> Total Rating: total of weightings
3) List all the ideas under the Idea/Tactic column
4) Provide each team member with the spreadsheet
5) Each member weights each idea vs. the criteria on a scale1 to 4, with four as highest or best adding-up the weights for a Total Rating.
6) Highest weighted become the direction pursued.
7) Two or three complimentary tactics can be clustered into one grouping to be executed by a sub-team.
“Maximizing Customer Engagement at Your Business” Free Webinar
The link below will take you directly to my free 30-minute webinar “Maximizing Customer Engagement at Your Business” sponsored by the Mahwah Regional Chamber of Commerce as part of their Professional Development Series.
Webinar Overview
Your company, like many others, has experienced the impact of the digital revolution. You probably are spending money on digital and print advertising, website design and search engine optimization to drive customer traffic. In addition, many businesses are transforming themselves by offering their customers seamless multichannel access involving the integration of digital and physical service channels: mobile, desktop, store, and call centers.
As a result, you and your employees are now interacting with customers in multiple ways: telephone, email, retail floor, front counter and field sales.
We ask simple questions for you to ask yourself: will your staff gain the customer’s trust and confidence in those personal interactions that enables them to close the deal or deepen customer loyalty? Are your business practices in-place for quality customer assurance?
In my webinar, I pose the notion that there has been one constant of continued importance during this marketplace reinvention: that workforces must continue to possess social, customer service and sales skills and practices to deepen customer engagement.
Presentation Outline
- A customer engaged organizational culture: – what does it look like – takeaways to guide your business
- Documented research that effective customer engagement behavior benefits a business’ financial outcomes
- Responding to a changing marketplace – diverse industries hired and developed a new type of worker
- Your leadership, company mission & values as a strategic foundation for successful customer engagement
- Changing your employee’s mindset to build their confidence and comfortably transition into this economy
- Actions to develop customer engagement skills and practices at your organization
Webinar Direct Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd9PJWZGFl0