The monthly business review meeting

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‘In meetings in which people truly value each other’s thinking and….truly listen…strategies get formed better, budgets get set better and…the quality of work gets to shine.’ (Nancy Kline ‘More Time to Think’).

I attended a Business Review meeting. It’s a monthly affair. There are lots of slides covering aspects of the business – contact centre, complaints, finance, collections, outbound sales and processing. The meeting takes three hours with each department head given their turn.

The first speaker got three minutes before being interrupted. He was asked an obscure question and didn’t have the answer. There was then an error on a slide. It went downhill from there. Points were repeated and we went off on a tangent. The first speaker didn’t contribute again after his presentation.

Company values

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I’ve just read a staff satisfaction survey from the contact centre of a large company. The Company has strong values. They are displayed in the reception areas, on the walls around the buildings and in company publications.

The values are pretty standard stuff – people, empowerment, communication, teamwork, customer focus, shareholder value and the like.

There’s enough in the staff survey to suggest things aren’t going to plan. Empowerment, communication and teamwork take a particular hammering.

If managers in the company aren’t working to the organisation’s values what values are they putting into practice instead?

Nancy Kline (‘More Time to Think’) says ‘How much did your organisation
spend figuring out its values? And how much did it cost to get it inscribed in
granite….or at least in a three-colour brochure? See if you can get a refund.’

Improve customer service – cut the marketing budget

It’s odd how companies prioritise the money they spend.

I took out a savings plan with an investment company. Now hardly a week goes by without one of their glossy brochures hitting the door mat. Activity is even more intense than usual with the tax year coming to a close. Another 15-page brochure arrived yesterday. They have adverts in all the newspapers.

Try ringing their contact centre. I rang last week as I haven’t had a statement for a while. It took a long time to get through. In discussion the advisor mentioned they were short of staff. He promised to pass the request for a statement to the ‘back-office’ for processing. It has still not arrived. Perhaps they are short of staff also.

Tom Peters tells a story of a store near him where they spent half a million dollars on renovation. The staff attitude was poor before the improvements and remained the same after. (‘The Little Big Things’).

Assessment centres – a ‘hit and miss’ way of selecting staff?

I attended an assessment centre as an assessor. We were looking to appoint a new manager at one of my clients and there were six candidates. There were some group and individual exercises to see how candidates showed key skills. There were also some interviews.

We got to the end of the day and it was clear that there were two very strong candidates.

One of the exercises was to give a presentation to the panel of assessors. A fellow assessor stated that it was hard to pick between the two better candidates. However she felt that one of the candidates should be preferred as he had done excellent flip charts to support his presentation which had been clear and colourful.

The ability to do excellent flip charts wasn’t one of the skills we were testing for the role.

It reminded me of a similar situation a few years ago. An assessor said he thought a candidate should get the role as he was of very smart appearance and would give a professional image of the company.

We could probably have made that judgement five minutes into the morning session and cut out the rest.

Assessment centres as a means of selecting to positions are good in theory – but the practice is sometimes less than scientific.

Picture by Joshua Delaughter

See also – http://www.helium.com/items/1555928-recruitment-process

Customer retention – ‘please close your account here….’

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I overheard a conversation when signing in at the gym yesterday. A member was explaining that he’d been there for 13-years but he’d hardly used the gym recently. He’d been ill all through January and was thinking of cancelling his membership.

The receptionist passed him to the manager who explained that he was on three months’ notice. If he didn’t give notice before the 21^st (the day the direct debits go through) he would effectively pay an extra month.

I happened to speak to the gentleman later. He was perplexed by the episode saying that he would end the contract. If there had been the slightest incentive to stay he would have done.

I’m not sure what the customer retention strategy of the gym is. Given that the member pays £60 per month and has been there for 13-years, there must be some financial reason for the gym to keep him active (pardon the pun).

Not all cases are as clear-cut. I remember working for a mobile telephone company some years ago. One of the biggest dilemmas was whether to tell customers that they were coming to the end of their contract. If they remained on their existing contract the margins would be higher (every months rental was profit) than bringing their attention to the availability of an upgrade (where the phone company provided a subsidy towards the new handset).

Front line leaders – you’re on your own….

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I’ve written before about the importance of first-line leaders and how their roles have become more complex. I’ve also discussed John Adair’s approach to developing people in these roles.

Team leaders and supervisors play a huge part in any contact centre or customer facing department. However, the amount of effort allocated to develop and support them in their roles is insufficient.

I can’t help thinking that the situation is getting worse.

My suspicions were raised by an article in the ‘Financial Times’ at the start of the year. The article discussed how the Chartered Management Institute are putting more resource into developing the leadership skills of younger people. The initiative was to help fill the 1 million new leadership positions coming up in the UK over the next 10-years. The article implied that effort is needed as organisations have mixed records in supporting leadership development in their own operations.

In some contact centres there is almost an air of desperation among first line supervisory teams. Functions such as human resources, recruitment and project management have been cut. In one company, the Organisational Development team, which worked closely with team leader groups, has been reduced from three to one. At a time when more support is required, the opposite is happening.

Your client wants your advice – but more than that they want to think for themselves

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‘Listening is the ultimate core competence’ says Tom Peters.

The topic must be back in fashion. I’ve read two articles in the last month on listening; as well as the three chapters from Tom in ‘The Little Big Things.’

My readings came to mind a few days ago. A member of staff at a client site joked that ‘the problem with you consultants is that you only tell us what we already know.’

If only that was the case. I suspect most consultants, or professional people, don’t have these skills. It’s quite an art to draw out what the client already knows; to let them think things through and offer an environment for them to do this.

I suppose the difficultly stems from being an expert. The situation has been seen many times before. After all, you’re being paid to tell it as you see it. A colleague once told me the solution in the car on the way to a new client meeting – isn’t that the expertise the client is paying for?

Years ago I read a book by Nancy Kline on listening and not making assumptions. It was a great book. For months I sat in meetings observing people and wondering why people bothered attending if they’d already made their mind up.

The most important leadership skill?

I don’t have much time for management consultants (present company aside).

I’d been put off by a guy when I was running a customer service department who told me the answers to my problems when tendering for the work. How did he know? I’d worked there for 2-years and couldn’t see them. He hadn’t taken the time to observe and listen before jumping to conclusions.

It’s the same with managers at all levels – day in, day out.

I was mentoring a senior manager and told him he needed to have a clearer picture of what was going on at grass roots level in his business. The messages he received were distorted as they came up the chain and he hadn’t realised it; spending most days running projects and sitting in meetings.

‘Go into your contact centre, speak to some staff…. then listen.’

He found it very difficult. He interrupted staff as they were giving their views; explaining that senior management had already assessed the ideas…but there was this or that reason they wouldn’t work.

Customer service – full circle?

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In the eighties I worked for a large bank. An announcement was made that customer calls were to be ‘centralised’ in the newly built call centres.

Local managers weren’t happy and didn’t accept the idea; sales opportunities would be lost as their branch staff would no longer speak to customers who phoned in. Branch staff ‘knew’ their customers and relationships would surely be broken.

The reply was compelling. Call centre staff would have more time and first-class training so no opportunities would be missed. They wouldn’t have to worry about administration and could spend their time providing an excellent service. The customer would still have a knowledgeable and friendly voice at the other end of the phone.

Why is the customer services team the odd one out?

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I visited a medium size telco recently. The company is doing well and seeing strong growth. There is a decent Christmas forecast as there are some new products on the market this year. Their telephone sales team is also up to full strength and there are high expectations.

The company has progressed like others. They took on a few staff in the early days to answer phones and do some processing. Before they knew it they had a sizeable customer services team; together with customer retentions and collections.

I met the CEO, bright and early. He explained they’d lost a couple of senior staff recently; the heads of the customer service and collections teams. He was concerned about collections, so he’d moved the deputy in customer services across to run that team. This left a big gap in the senior management of the customer services team (who also had retentions reporting to them).