Last week, I started as series of posts detailing my thoughts on how I would fix or turn around a business operation. Inspired by a promising MBA student that is doing an internship with us, I thought I would take a stab at a scenario she threw at me. Last week-ish we talked about financials.

This week, let’s talk about getting a handle on your customers – specifically their level of satisfaction. A few years ago I linked and commented on a great approach to customer satisfaction (csat). The original article talked about the 5 csat questions you will ever need but it was service operation focused. I think the questions are still very relevant and can be used in almost any business.

It is really 5 questions and a 6th which asks for verbal feedback. I also throw in another question – a net promoter score question. So really….7 questions. Here they are (in order of importance):

1. Courtesy of the Whomever You Interact With Most Frequently (support person, billing, customer service, field service, delivery person, sales person, account manager, CEO) – Your customer deserves and and expects to be treated in a courteous/professional manner. If you are scoring poorly here you need to make sure you have communicated the absolute importance of service and satisfied customers to your team. You may also need to specifically train customer service and customer experience skills.

2. Skills and Knowledge of Whomever You Interact With Most Frequently – While a courteous employee is nice, it won’t make a bit of difference if they can’t solve the customer’s issue. Your customers want confidence in the employee’s skills and knowledge to resolve the issue at hand. This is the best way to measure your team’s skill and knowledge level. Weaknesses here go back to the hiring and training process.

3. Quality of the Resolution – Again, courteous and knowledgeable employees are really nice to have, but they need to be actually addressing customer needs/questions/issues. Customers calling back for the same reasons over and over again is a customer that is going to churn on you.

4. Timeliness of the Resolution – Time is money! Fix your customer’s problem the first time they call. Two things happen if you don’t: you drive up your total cost per incident and you irritate your customer’s…see churn above. This is a process problem. Break it down step by step. No step is too small. Trouble lies in the handoffs.

5. Overall Experience – This is really the weighted average of the first 4. Keep in mind that customers will weigh each of the above differently. If you have a low score (bottom two boxes out of 5), CALL THAT CUSTOMER AND BEG THEM TO HELP YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU CAN DO BETTER!

6. Additional Feedback – always, always, always allow your customer to give you open ended feedback. Let them vent. Not only will they tell you what is wrong (and right if you are lucky) they will tell you how to FIX IT.

Additionally, I have become a fan of the net promoter score. Net Promoter basically asks one simple question – “Would you refer us to someone else?” You take all the people that say yes and subtract all the people that say no and you end up with your score. It makes for a great measurable. And it is easy to create goals from it. If you’re NPS is 55 – set a goal to increase it to 60.

Ask these questions to your customers as soon as you get into your turnaround. Then do it quarterly. Track and compare results. If you have a lot of customers, you can outsource this task. If you have a manageable number of customers, keep it in house. If you have a handful of customers, you should be doing this yourself, on the phone or in person.

Each of the top 5 questions should get a scale of 1-5. 1 being completely off the rails broken and 5 being Superbowl win. I would label the boxes specific to each question. For example: Courtesy of the person would be a scale of Christian Bale/Mel Gibson to Miss Manners. Or you could let HR rule the world and do a scale of 1 to 5. If you do 1 to 10, then top two boxes are good. I like 1 -3 – easier to get through and eliminates ambiguity.

Ideally, every customer gets some kind of sponsor. Positive responses should get a follow up of thanks. Negative responses should get a follow up to work through the issues. It doesn’t even have to be an “executive” sponsor. In fact, you could kill two birds with one stone here….you can find out which of your employees are engaged too. (See next week’s installment.)

If you liked this post, try these...

• Running A Successful Turnaround: Final Thoughts
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This continues our series on how to run a successful turnaround – or – The Mike Lally Way. Maybe we’ll just call this RAST. Running A Successful Turnaround. The Mike Lally Way is just way too lame. Today, I will take a holistic, high-level view and in future posts, I will look at each element in more detail.

Walking into any turnaround situation, I immediately set out to acquire data supported by human information (or intel). You cannot just look at data on a page. A) the data will lie to you. It will beguile you. It will tell you that you are smarter than you think. B) You need to get out in front of your people anyway. Let’s start with data.

I want to see the following Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

Financial KPIs:
Revenue
Operations Costs
Profit
Contribution Margin
DSO. Days Sales Outstanding.

I want these numbers broken out by customer and/or by team. Definitely by customer. I want to know our most profitable customers (not necessarily the customers bringing in the most revenue). I want to know who is COSTING us money.

Customer KPIs
Customer Satisfaction – every main customer contact (assuming we have one) gets a very short 5+1 questions survey. The plus 1 question is the Net Promoter question. Then we start doing this quarterly, same questions. We track results.

Employee KPIs
Employee Satisfaction. Monthly. Simple questions. I will share them.

I will also interview everyone. Three simple questions. If the operation is very large where this isn’t feasible, I would push the interview down the chain of command and get summary reporting created.

Process KPIs/Production
Simple time studies will do. I want to know how long it takes us to produce the widgets. I want to know how long it takes to ship the widgets. And I want to understand how long it takes us to support the customers buying our widgets.

I come from the land of technical support. Any time someone was working on ANYTHING, they needed to be in a support ticket. Assigned to a customer. With the clock running. I want to see rolled up reporting, daily, weekly, monthly, etc. How many tickets, top 10 issues, AGING of tickets.

The same principles apply to production. Where do we have defects? Where do we require re-work? How long does it take?

Over the next days/weeks, I will dive into each of these elements/KPIs.

If you liked this post, try these...

• Running A Successful Turnaround: Final Thoughts
• Running A Successful Turnaround: Process Improvements
• Running a Successful Turnaround: The Employee View

About one month ago, there was a bit of debate around so-called Management Gurus. Which lead to a bit of a dust up between Tom Peters and Jim Collins. There was talk about the lack of science behind Tom Peters MUST READ In Search of Excellence.

Peters responded by talking about ISOE in the simple way that only TP can do. ISOE and Collins’ Built to Last are two books that are must-reads for anyone trying to study management or generally improve their quality of work-life.

Both use a scientific method to determine results. Collins is an academic and feels his kung fu is better than Peters’.

ISOE ultimately proposes 7 things all great businesses do. Peters has, without much alteration over the last 30 years or so, maintained these concepts. In short, they are:

1. MBWA – management by walking around. talk to THE people. Not the suits.
2. Put PEOPLE first.
3. “innovation through decentralization”
4. Stay CLOSE to your customer
5. CORE values (like Ray Kroc’s “QSCV” – quality, service, cleanliness, value)
6. Doing it rather than talking about it ad naseum.
7. Excellence! (per se)

These hold up. They are not complex. Stick to them and you will do fine. Simple. Yet IMPOSSIBLY difficult for MANY.

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[Originally posted on the old site]

I am sitting in a hotel room in Brentwood, TN (outside of Nashville). I am in town for some training. It gives me a break from bringing up a 500+ seat customer contact center in DeLand, FL that has me commuting 3 out of every 4 weeks to Daytona Beach.

It’s giving me some time to catch up on reading. I am not in the thick of the battle. I miss it to be honest. It is hard for me to sit for 7 hours in a room while someone talks at me. Made even harder because I am hooked on the rush of 13 hour go! go! go! days.

But I just finished reading an article in the latest Fast Company about Danny Meyer, who owns 4 of the top 20 restaurants in NYC. He talks about hospitality versus service. Which is a theme for this edition of the magazine. No links because it is not online yet.

You must NAIL service before you can even start thinking about the customer experience. This is something I am heavily interested in…we are at a turning point in the 100+ year history of the company I work for…we are opening a new call center. We have the opportunity to build it
RIGHT from the ground up.

Meyer talks about what he looks for in new hires. There are, of course, the technical skills. But then he talks about emotional skill sets. And he breaks them down into 5 areas:

1. A natural warmth and optimism. (You either feel it from someone or you don’t.)
2. Intelligence and curiosity. Passion about something.
3. Work ethic. (“You would be surprised at how many people show up late for an interview, or don’t shave.”)
4. Empathy.
5. Integrity and self-awareness. (“…somebody who is thoughtful about who they are and where things fit into their lives. If they are not accountable to themselves, it’s unlikely they’ll be accountable to the people they are working with.”)

I’ve probably interviewed at least 200 people in the last couple of months. I am not surprised about people showing up late for interviews, or in flip flops, or with thongs showing, etc. I am not surprised about integrity. Who accepts a job offer and then doesn’t show up on the first day? (We have a 20% no show rate. We haven’t cracked the code yet on how to identify this type of
person. We use a testing suite that gets at attitudes toward work. We keep setting the criteria higher. )

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• Running a Successful Turnaround: The Customer View
• Collins v. Peters
• Tell Me About Yourself

Lifehacker points to an site which provides a nice summary of Dale Carnegie’s MONSTER business/relationship book: How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Solid, basic advice for anyone at any time. I don’t know what happened to my copy of this book but it needs to be a permanent fixture in your library if you are serious about making some kind of statement. Don’t look at it as a “sales” book. Look at it as a networking book or a relationship building book.

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The July 2005 issue of Business 2.0 has an article about Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management which is a book written by Bill Swanson, CEO of Raytheon. This book is unavailable in stores but you can get it direct from Raytheon. [3-27-08. Turns out that Swanson stole this entire book from someone. So, he's not the most credible. But there is value here. ]

“The CEO’s Secret Handbook” lays out a couple of the tips/hints/ideas. One particularly jumps out at me. The rule reminds me of a friend and colleague (Jenn S.) because we have discussed the subject many times. It started with her telling me one day that she realized I was always nice to waiters/waitresses.

Like Swanson, I told her that:

A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter – or to others – is not a nice person. (This rule NEVER fails.)

I put the emphasis on the never but it is true. Swanson refers to this type of person as one that has situational value systems. These are people that can turn their charm on and off. You all know people that do this. You all know someone that is an absolute ass to anyone in a position of serving the public. These people will never make great leaders.

“There’s a consistency in leadership that’s greater than mere situational awareness.”

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The latest copy of the Mun’s Report [link has expired] from the Help Desk Institute has a great piece on choosing customer satisfaction (csat) questions to measure the performance of your service team. You ARE measuring the performance of your team from the eyes of your customers (end-users), right? HDI has been surveying various companies that provide service and support (tech support, help desk, other forms of customer or end-user facing service) to determine best practices.

The idea of a csat process is to determine the performance level of your service team. Are you meeting your customer’s expectations? Are you failing to meet them which could and usually does mean your customers will dump you and find someone who will? Or…are you providing too much service which is just added cost for you?

The questions (in order of importance):

1. Courtesy of the Analyst – Your customer deserves and and expects to be treated in a courteous/professional manner. If you are scoring poorly here you need
to make sure you have communicated the absolute importance of service and satisfied customers to your team. You may also need to specifically train customer service skills. I know this sounds odd, but people simply do NOT have a service mentality. Make sure you are hiring service oriented people as well.

2. Skills and Knowledge of the Analyst – While a courteous analyst is nice, it won’t make a bit of difference if that analyst can’t solve the customer’s problem. Your customers want confidence in the analyst’s skills and knowledge to resolve the issue
at hand. This is the best way to measure your team’s skill and knowledge level. (You do know their basic skill level, right? You benchmarked during the hiring and training process, right? You assessed them before they came on board and after they completed your training, right?). Weaknesses here go back to the hiring and training process. Don’t have the money to implement a knowledge-base? Build a wiki. Find
a way to get to best practices among your team. Everyone should be solving things roughly the same way. I personally hate scripting, but troubleshooting and solving problems doesn’t leave a lot of room for interpretation if you do it properly.

3. Quality of the Resolution – Again, courteous and (seemingly) knowledgable agents are good, if doesn’t matter if they don’t actually SOLVE problems. Customers calling back to fix the same problem over and over again is a customer that is going to churn on you.

4. Timeliness of the Resolution – Time is money! Fix your customer’s problem the first time they call. Two things happen if you don’t: you drive up your total cost per incident (you are measuring cost per ticket/incident/case, right?) and you
irritate your customer’s…see churn above. This is a process problem. Break it down step by step. No step is too small. Trouble lies in the handoffs.

5. Overall Experience – This is really the weighted average of the first 4. Keep in mind that customers will weigh each of the above differently. If you have a low score
(bottom two boxes out of 5), CALL THAT CUSTOMER AND BEG THEM TO HELP YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU CAN DO BETTER!

6. Additional Feedback – always, always, always allow your customer to give you open ended feedback. Let them vent. Not only will they tell you what is wrong (and right if you are lucky) they will tell you how to FIX IT.

Feel free to add an additional targeted question if you must. But this is a great approach.

If you liked this post, try these...

• Running a Successful Turnaround: The Customer View
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[Originally posted in the old blog. The site I pulled this from is no longer available. Searching for the article did not yield results. - Mike]

I will warn everyone now that there will be a tendency to talk about customer service and support, multi-channel management and CRM related topics in this blog. On Customer Support was written by David Kay back in May of this year and published at Line56.com. I just pulled this document out for another project I am working on. The article details four shifts in customer support.

1. From Product Support to Solution Support
   - no longer can the support group afford to be isolated from the rest of the product “team” or company. Support, in many cases is the only time you get to talk to your customers. Product development, marketing, sales etc all need to listen. there is also a shift taking place from measuring customer satisfaction (“c-sat”) with LOYALTY.
   
2. From Reactive Support to Proactive Support
   - in the past, customers would call for support, give their pedigree information (name, id, etc), open a ticket and then disappear once the problem was solved. The shift is happening where customer information is being gathered and analyzed to identify common threads. The idea is to NOT have a support organization. In this shift, if customer A contacts you with a problem, you can then look at your entire customer base and identify other customers that will or may have the same problem and then proactively contact them to fix it!
3. From Solving Problems to Improving Products and Knowledge
   - This means taking the best support agents OFF the phone (solving customer problems) and assigning them to the task of increasing the ORGANIZATION’s ability to solve problems.  Use these team members to build the knowledge bases. Use them to perform root cause analysis on problems and feed back solutions to all members of the product team, not just support.
4. From Just-in-Case Training to Just-in-Time Knowledge Transfter
   - The speed at which new problems develop is making it next to impossible to pull entire teams together for “training”…especially in a 24/7 world. The idea is to relentlessly build the knowledge base to allow front line agents to adapt on the fly.

Kay states:

Rather than making existing processes more efficient, they redefine the value delivered by the support organization away from the negative (fixing broken products) and towards the positive (increasing the value of the customer relationship). This allows the support organization to drive customer loyalty and profitability, taking a leadership role that
rightly belongs to the most customer-facing organization in the company.

Huzzah to that! Those of us who have been and still are on the front lines have been saying this for YEARS.

If you liked this post, try these...

• Running a Successful Turnaround: The Customer View
• Collins v. Peters
• Hiring for the Customer Experience