How Capable Blog Started

Four years ago I started this blog. Capable People was young and acquiring its leads very much by word of mouth (which it still does, of course). I was researching ways to increase the visibility of our corporate website, get it higher up search engine rankings, more visitors, and so on – for fairly obvious reasons. I think my research started by googling a phrase something like “how to get more visitors to your website”, then trawling through what came up. Anyway, a recurring theme was “get a blog” so, on a whim, I did. That lifted the lid off Pandora’s Box somewhat as I then immediately needed to populate it with something – but what? Back to google … “the do and don’ts of blogs” (or something). Rudimentary though this research was, it actually gave me a useful set of guidelines within about 30 minutes that I still use today. I followed the same path when I started using twitter too, although this continues to be very much a work in progress. We also have a LinkedIn discussion group, but we do not use Facebook.

Rules is rules

The main point I am making in this post is that there are rules (or established conventions, to be more precise). Following the rules make it more likely that social media will work for you, while ignoring or breaking the rules may be worse than not using social media at all. In social media we have a newish vehicle by which companies can interact with their customers or user group. The vehicle has rules and conventions that are established by the user group, and companies have to understand and accept this. So rule 1 is that the company doesn’t make or dictate the rules. Any attempt simply to use your blog and twitter feed as a direct advert for your services will be rejected. You are, in effect, inviting yourself into the virtual social lives of your user group, and they will tolerate your presence only up to the point that you start to become a nuisance, and being a corporate nuisance in the world of social media is a very dangerous thing to be

It has to “add” something

Let’s get one thing straight, adverts are adverts. Adverts have been around for a while and we all know what they are. Corporate websites are the same. More or less an on-line advert for the day job. Anybody who thinks integrating social media applications as part of the same mix is on completely the wrong page. That is not how it works. Let’s start with blogging. If you think you can just cloak an advert for your services under the cover of a blog article, forget it. Few people are so stupid that they can’t see through it, and nobody likes being talked to like they are stupid. Blogs have to be interesting, funny or valuable in some way, preferably with genuinely original content and well written. The rules of blogging are quite straightforward, actually

The best uses of twitter, on the other hand, in my opinion anyway, is where the company actually tries to use twitter to add something to the way they interact with the customer. The best examples I have come across recently are @DellCares and @DeltaAssist. These corporate entities actually use twitter to pick up rapidly on gripes and grumbles of customers (like me) not only to respond to them, but also to actually resolve the problems via Direct Messages. For example, I have changed flights with Delta using twitter alone, and had a faulty printer replaced by Dell again simply via 2 or 3 tweets. They don’t use twitter merely as a means of sweeping cyberspace for gripes and then passing them on to the normal complaint handling people, they actually pick up the problem and DEAL with the problem at one fell swoop. The first time this happened to me (Delta) I thought it was incredible. I was on a KLM code share to the USA and found that everything KLM managed to screw up, I could tweet @DeltaAssist to get sorted, even in transit. KLM had no such equivalent process. Their twitter account merely routed you to a number you could spend the best part of a day on and still not get a result. Since then I have found the same smartness applies to @Dellcares

Anyway, the point is that social media CAN play a highly effective part in the customer relationship, but it has to ADD something. Merely using it to repeat or duplicate something that happens on your website, well, does that really add anything? I don’t think so

The final observation I will make about social media (from a commercial perspective) is that it tends to be quite fair with you. You get out of it about as much as you deserve, by and large. I think that’s a good thing

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Smart Use of Social Media

So what is so special about Men-Tai? Well …

It doesn’t have a liquor license, so you can only choose from a small selection of teas (which they don’t offer you, you have to ask – and they don’t do refills) or you could take a soft drink from the chiller in the corner. When you arrive you are  presented with a polystyrene cup of chilled tap water, which they will refill. The polystyrene cups are taken from a cardboard box on the floor of the cafe. The servers wear whatever they want, which is generally a hoodie, trainers and usually a baseball cap. They tend not to make small talk. The tables are small, close together, no frills, no table cloths, nothing like that. Cutlery consists of disposable chop-sticks or a porcelain spoon (you can use both if you want) but no forks. The dish that your food is served in is likely to be chipped. They only accept cash. The second you consume your last mouthful of food, your bill will be placed on the table in front of you. You never need to ask for it. In fact you would not have time to ask for it. The menu is not extensive and there are no desserts. They don’t take reservations and if there are no tables free you have to wait on the street

It is quite beautiful. And I mean that

It is a perfect case study in quality management. It is so beautiful that I recommend every quality professional to pay it a visit. It is most definitely a “how to” guide to quality. The Men-Tai has precision designed the business model and customer satisfaction is very much at its core. It works, and this is how

The cafe specialises in dishing up large plates of tasty, cheap noodle and rice dishes in a no-frills environment. It does not pretend to be anything other than that. That is how they make their money and, because they have chosen affordability over luxury (a clear strategic decision), margins per serving will not be very large, and they only have about 8 tables. So think about that for a moment.  If this business model is to work, turnaround time as absolutely critical. That’s why wait times on food are under 5 minutes, and wait times on the bill are under 5 seconds. The last thing they need is for a couple of diners to tie down a table for an extra half hour sipping tea – that’s why drinks don’t figure in the equation. That’s why they can do without the hassle and added expense of washing glasses and changing table cloths. That’s why you never have to ask for your bill. There is a very clear but unwritten deal going on between the establishment and the diner which goes something like “I’ll give you a large plate of cheap, tasty and fast  food on the understanding that you eat up, pay up and make way”. If they have a mission statement, that’s probably it. And if it is, they certainly walk the talk

So why is it “quality”?  – Because it does exactly what it says on the tin

How can I say that they care about customer satisfaction? Because they deliver

Even when the temperature on the street is below freezing, when you’ve paid your bill and walked outside, there’s likely to be a small queue of people outside prepared to suffer the cold for the dining experience. It’s no place for an anniversary dinner, but it is exactly the place for a quality management study tour

I’d post a link to their website, but they don’t have one

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Quality – The Men-Tai Approach

You’ve got to see the BIG picture

In some of my recent posts I have suggested that some people who work in the quality field might not have the most holistic or balanced view in the world. I get the impression many just can’t see the totality of business dynamics, relationships and motivators that make up the giddy world that is a functioning and functional organisation. I have also had reason to doubt whether the concept of efficiency is properly understood

Public sector pains

Yesterday I found myself reflecting on efficiency in the public sector. There are a lot of unhappy people in the public sector at the moment, no doubt worried about what the current economic problems will mean for them and their jobs. Whilst I fully sympathise with anyone who is worried about their job, fundamentally I do believe that a public sector organisation should never be allowed to think more about itself than its outputs. Public sector bodies exist purely to do a job, to deliver a set of outputs, hopefully in an efficient way. As soon as it starts shifting too much of its focus away from the number one objective and towards its own intrinsic needs, then I think problems are inevitable

Customer Focus is not an absolute concept

All that might not be such an earth shattering concept. An organisation should be customer focussed, that’s a universal truth isn’t it? Well, I’ve started to think more deeply about this. The thing is, whilst a public sector organisation may exist solely for the benefit of its customers, that is just not true of a commercial operation. Commercial operations exist primarily to achieve their own financial goals. satisfying the customer is a means to an end, but not an end in itself. Making a margin is goal number 1, and in some ways the only thing that matters. Senior managers realise this, but I’m not sure that all quality departments do. Let’s face it, if money was no object, satisfying the customer would be a piece of cake, but we just can’t run a sustainable business on those terms. All organisations need a balanced and transparent range of metrics, otherwise we run the risk of our priorities lurching one way then the other. One year we get our “quality” and customer satisfaction right – but our margins are poor. Next year our margins improve, but customer satisfaction drops. Balance and transparency is needed. Quality departments need to understand basic economic principles

This is one area where the EFQM Model is superior to ISO 9001. It focusses the organisation on a much broader range of financial and non-financial measures, plus it allocates “weighting” to different metrics to emphasise the relative priority and importance of each. I’m not too sure ISO 9001 considers the interests of critical stakeholder groups other than the end customer at all in fact. That can’t be right can it?

Anyway, to summarise, I think I’ve discovered a new business mantra

“A public sector company should never be allowed to care more about itself than its customers. A commercial company often has to“

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Understanding Customer Focus

I got some good news a couple of weeks ago. I have been invited to speak at the IRCA 2010 Conference in Yokohama in June. I’ll also be running some workshops on the days preceding this event, which I’ll make sure are good fun. Getting involved with this event is a great honour for me and also a great opportunity. They’re interested in my views on quality in the 21st century, and its impact on the traditional view of 3rd party auditing, and they want me to develop this theme for the event

Third party quality auditing has a few weaknesses and a somewhat tarnished image. There’s a teeny financial conflict of interest in the mix, standards can be applied in a very elastic way and auditing can have a compliance-heavy bias, without taking a more “overall view”. As things are, few people would see something like ISO 9001 certification as any sort of guarantee we’ll get great service. For years you could say we’ve needed a people’s champion with real teeth, finally I think we’re starting to get just that

I’ve noticed how effective the use of social media such as YouTube and Twitter are becoming as guerilla agents for standards. These outlets are being increasingly used to “out” examples of poor service, and things can go viral pretty quickly. I think this is great. It gives the customer a direct voice and it should help to keep companies on their toes as, like the Spanish Inquisition, it can pounce at any time. Power to the people, you might say. It works a different way to certification, for sure, but in its own way I can see how it could help people make the right choice by giving them some useful information. Is it fair on companies? Who knows. There are many that would argue that if you have nothing to hide, then you’ll have nothing to fear

To illustrate the point, here’s a video clip from YouTube that was originally posted by Maria Palma at People2People Service. This is exactly the type of thing I’m talking about. In this case it is Comcast that gets the red face (you’d hope)

Click here to view the embedded video.

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YouTube – The Guerilla Regulator of Customer Service

The $10000 question. What do customers care most about, standards of service or price? Clearly, in an ideal world, we’d all always want both, but what if it was either/or? To what extent is the customer prepared to sacrifice decent standards of customer service to get the best possible price?

Well it seems like we’ll soon get an answer to that question because “budget” “airline” Ryanair appears hell-bent on testing the tolerance of the customer to shoddy standards of service

Even the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is starting to pass comment. Its not often the OFT uses words like “puerile” to describe a company’s approach to customer service, but they’ve just done so with this outfit. And I’ll bet many of us who have “enjoyed” the Ryanair experience will be easily able to identify with the sentiment

For years Ryanair has been chipping away at the service that they deliver. Continually parring it back to the bare essentials. In the early, heady days of budget airline travel these new boys provided a much needed kick up the back-side to an all too cosy market-place. Their strategy was to get the prices low by streamlining processes and removing a few things that most customers were not that bothered about, such as allocated seating and in-flight meals. But with some the process has become obsessional and lately it seems to have gone a bit far. For example, it may be quite fair to state that a person can avoid the cost of an in flight meal by carrying their own snack on board, but the same argument simply cannot be applied to the use of the toilet. I can’t say whether we’d be allowed to carry a bucket on board a Ryanair flight, but I’d not like to see it tested either way

But its not just the parring back, its the defiant attitude that Ryanair seems almost proud to promote. Never one to pass up an opportunity for free publicity, their rugby shirt wearing chief executive Michael O’Leary is never slow to deliver a personal counter attack to any criticisms that the news channels care to run. This is generally along the lines that the “no frills” service is what the customer must accept if he wants to enjoy their low prices. Put it another way, if they sell at the lowest price and the customer accepts it, then there is no case for complaint about the standard of service. It comes with the turf, get with it. So the low price becomes a bullet-proof excuse for poor service. Its almost as if poor service has become an accepted or even an integrated feature, rather than an undesirable consequence

We need to watch this closely because if Ryanair continues to go the way they have been going, we’ll soon know what the breaking point of the customer is, as they appear to have an unhealthy desire to find it

From a customer service point of view I worry about this approach. I stayed in a Travelodge last week and noticed they were going down that same line, charging extra, for example, to park your car overnight, with steep prices also for the use of the internet. This presents two problems as I see it. First (like Ryanair) you can never really be confident that you know what the final price will be, all add-ons considered. Second, I think it runs the risk of promoting an unhealthy organisational culture. At the start of this post I suggested that in an ideal world we’d all like good service AND the lowest possible price. I have no problem with efficiency, or companies parring back the specification, taking out costly and low value adding features and passing on the saving to the customer, but I do worry about the cultural side effects. Principally a culture of “if you come with us, this is what you get”. So far as service is concerned it often costs little or no more to be nice than to be indifferent. The risk is that staff become obsessed with what constitutes the basic paid-for service, and what should be charged as an optional extra

Looking at Ryanair it looks like the “no frills” strategy has over time promoted a culture, a policy even, of defiant indifference to the customer, and I shudder to think what their complaints policies look like

Ultimately thinking about this has helped me get one thing clear in my own mind:

Service delivery and customer service are not the same thing

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Please don’t leave before you’ve watched the video clip. It’s a hoot

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Do you want great service or a low price?

I’ve lost count of the number of times one of my training students has commented that I clearly enjoy my job, and I always give the same answer. I tell them that when you’re training you’re working with people who need to believe that you care about helping them. So you’ve either got to care, or be very good at pretending that you care. Fortunately for me I don’t have to pretend

The problem is that if it appears you don’t care, even if you’re good at what you do, people will assume they are getting a third rate service and conclude they should have gone somewhere else. The customer’s perception of the quality of the service relies almost as much on confidence as it does on your technical ability. If your customer loses confidence in you they’ll start second guessing everything you do, and first chance they get they’ll go off in search of someone else who can instil confidence. Someone who appears to care

Today I was rummaging around YouTube, trying to find a video clip that encapsulated this principle. After trawling through an apparently endless collection of patronising drivel (most of them hotel-based) I eventually found this one. Quite simply it is excellent. So good in fact I don’t think I need to hammer home its message in any narrative. A picture paints a thousand words, so they say. This one may paint even more

One thing I will say is “give it time”. It is slow to build, but it is well worth the wait. It is a very, very good piece of work

Check it out and feel free to tell me what you think by leaving a comment

Click here to view the embedded video.

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The customer experience

Inspection is an overhead cost. It does not add any intrinsic value to the product or service, and so it should be an objective to keep costs associated with inspections to a minimum. After all;

1. You can’t inspect quality into a job
2. Design and manage quality into the process, build confidence into the product and you reduce the need for inspection

However I am starting to wonder whether we sometimes get carried away with ourselves. My point being that there will usually be some benefit in a level of inspection. I think that is particularly true when we think about service provision. You see service delivery processes are different to production processes in at least one important way. That is, we are usually dealing with a variable input (i.e the customer and his requests) and this means our process will be inherently and unavoidably more variable. In short, it is a people to people process, and people are much harder to program, control and maintain than machines and components. They also have the infuriating talent of being able to vary in ways we could not have anticipated, which is generally not true of materials and machine parts

Other people may take a different view, but I have long believed that it is a bit naive to think we can take our tried and tested quality methodologies from, say, Toyota, and transplant them wholesale to, say, local government, education or hospitality. We can learn some lessons for sure, but we do need to take the right tool for the right job. I know some people who are so obsessed by their favourite model to the extent they think it can deal with anything they care to throw at it. If the only tool you possess is a hammer, don’t be surprised if all your problems start looking like nails

Recently I’ve started to take the view that to try to design inspection out of many service delivery processes might simply be asking for trouble. Watch the video clip

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, I’m not sure how many of you have ever enjoyed “The Starbucks Experience” but let me tell you, it ain’t always like that. I have no problem with a company that invests time and resources training and educating its people in that way, but then to simply expect it to happen, day in, day out, really? Truth be told people have good and bad days and if you really want to know what is going on, there is no substitute for “mystery shopper”. In fact I’d say it should be compulsory. I am in no way surprised at how vibrant the service appears to be in the video clip, when the cameras are so clearly rolling, but what happens on a damp Tuesday morning when no-one is apparently looking? A year ago I was so shocked by deteriorating standards of service in the USA I ranted about it in a post, naming names to such an extent that Ezine refused to re-publish it. You’ll note Starbucks was mentioned. In that post I do give the USA credit for previously leading the world in customer orientated service provision. My point is that if lapses like that can happen in the US, it can happen anywhere

Last year I worked with a College of Further Education that had used an agency to generate data through “mystery shopper” and they learned a lot, I can tell you. All this has made me think that maybe good old fashioned inspection has gone and got itself a bad name over the past 30 years, and that possibly we need to accept that it should always have a place set for it at the table

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Inspection is dead!

As I sit here looking at my newly delivered corporate pens it takes me back to the time that I started Capable People. I had just left a company that had quite a weak brand image and I’d decided that I wanted Capable People to be stronger. I quickly realised I had no idea what “brand” actually was. Fortunately these days we don’t have to sit and wonder about anything anymore. We have search engines. So after typing “what is brand” into Google (and scrolling past a few references to that tiresome and ubiquitous prick Russell Brand) I started getting somewhere

Lesson one was “it’s not the logo”. Apparently lots of companies think that it is. Well, it’s not. Brand is about everything you do. It is what identifies you, what defines you and ultimately what differentiates you. In that respect it can work for good and for bad

If there was one nugget of wisdom that stuck with me it was the advice that consistency was the key. People trust consistency and mistrust inconsistency. It means that, so far as visual queues go, that consistency in your colours, fonts, use of language and your style etc need some firm “do” and “do nots”. For me it also means that I have to be able to walk the talk. So no fibs and no wild exaggerations in other words

Our trust, and ultimately our loyalty, in brand relates to the way we are wired as human animals. In our human relationships we prefer people to be consistent. Truth is more consistent than lies you understand, and we prefer consistency because this is much more likely to be the truth. Inconsistent people are likely to be liars – so we see inconsistency in brand as an indicator or unreliability

So anyway, if you understand nothing else about “brand” this may get you started. It certainly helped me a lot, and continues to do so. Like so may things, it is the simplest of principles that deliver the most valuable lessons

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What is “brand”?

It’s an interesting read, but this post isn’t a review of the book. No, the theme of the book, whether or not you agree that Mark Earls is right or totally wrong in what he says, made me realise just how narrow a view of the customer realtionship typical quality frameworks tend to take. They will, for example, encourage the implementation of enquiry handling, ordering and complaints systems. They’ll encourage a systematic approach for agreeing your customer specifications and (lately) encourage you to measure your customers’ satisfaction – but that is about it. Now on one level I could accept that there is nothing actually wrong with any of that, all of those things are good to do, but I do worry about this growing trend of ISO 9001 auditors to exaggerate the scope and nature of their conformity audits. All of a sudden we have “assessors” who “assess” the “business management system”. The problem with statements like that is that firstly they are distracting and secondly, worse, they are factually incorrect. A certification audit to ISO 9001 assesses the degree to which the system conforms to the requirement of the standard – period. To suggest otherwise is just plain wrong, and the area of customer relationship management demonstrates that

Lately we’ve seen a drift towards seeing the terms “quality management system” and “business management system” as synonymous, when they plainly aren’t. If they were, as an example, the scrutiny of the effectiveness of how the business manages its customer relationships would go far beyond the current bits and bobs dotted around ISO 9001. It is a rich and complex subject, awash with strategic planning and subtle techniques executed by people who understand the subject and its underpinning psychologies

I like Seth Godin’s books for a jump start on getting your head round the cornerstones of the human dynamics. Seth writes short books that you can read front to back on a plane. More importantly (unlike Mark Earls) he only tends to tackle one or two subjects in each book. He’s accessible in that respect, even if you could argue that he doesn’t quite give the same value for money as Mark. One point he makes very well in his book “The Dip” is (to paraphrase) if it was easy we’d all be doing it. So success, while clearly possible, is no certainty, and there is real peril in oversimplifying complex concepts by boiling them down into a few mechanistic “do” and “do nots”

If only things were that simple

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Managing customer relationships

Clearly there were some very worthwhile and practical suggestions, but there were a couple that, to my eyes, did not appear to have been thought through. For example, the contribution that read only “Involve your customer in process redesign” made me quite uncomfortable

I read a lot of material on the subject of management. Some I consider very good and insightful, other stuff I don’t, and I’m noticing a growing tendency for an over-use of certain platitudes, such as “customer involvement” and “leadership” without much of an attempt to add substance, or give any clues as to what that may add up to in terms of planning, implementation or measurement

Let’s take the idea that we should involve our customer in process re-design as an example. It sounds lovely, but let’s try and think it though. How would we do it? Involving the customer in process design is quite different to involving the customer in product or service design. Involving the customer in product/service design is a clear and obviously very valid attempt to get our “whats” right. To make sure we build in all of those things the customer wants and values, and that we edit out those aspects the customer could not care less about. Involving the customer in these activities, getting our information from the horse’s mouth so to speak, increases our chances we’re going to hit the mark. Quality Function Deployment and Kansei Engineering are a couple of methodologies a company might use to add structure to that process

Process design on the other hand is about getting our “hows” not only right, but also getting them as efficient as possible. Now, there will always be exceptions to the rule, but generally the customer will not know enough about the nature of your working systems, terrain, supplier network, plant, materials, staff, past problems, economic environment, legislation or regulatory framework to be able to offer an informed opinion on the subject of how you should run your processes. You’re supposed to be the expert in those areas, not them

Anyway, the point I’d like to make in the post is that while I continue to be a big fan of keeping things simple, I do feel that there are natural limits to that principle, and sometimes we just have to roll up our sleeves and use our own talent and experience to solve the occasional tough problem

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The limits of customer involvement