People who work in retail often believe they can spot the mystery shoppers who come in to their stores. Mobile phones are making it easier for them, since a growing number of mystery shopping, or secret shopping, companies are asking their shoppers to film the stores they shop.

While I see the appeal, there’s no way that you can go into a store with a regular camera or phone and film without it being obvious that you aren’t a real customer. If you use a button-hole camera, maybe. But that’s not what the companies are asking their testers to do.

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Mobile Does Have A Place In Market Research

That said, mobile can be tremendously valuable for market researchers, as today’s guest, Daniel Weber of iTracks, told me in our interview.

Now that we are all becoming so accustomed to filming everything and making spur-of-the-moment videos, it no longer seems as unnatural for friends or family to film what goes on behind closed doors.

That makes “ethnographic” research — where a researcher studies people in their natural environment — potentially much more comfortable and realistic.

I know the theory is that people stop noticing the researcher who sits in a corner watching what their every move, but I’m not convinced that’s so true. You’d have to be there for many weeks or months for them to forget you completely and act the way they really would without your presence.

But with mobile, they can easily film themselves and give researchers “in the moment” feedback about their thoughts, feelings and experiences. This is tremendously valuable.

Data Overload

The challenge that remains, though, is analyzing the data and selecting excerpts to present to colleagues. If you have more than a handful of users the volume of data to analyze quickly becomes overwhelming.

Daniel pointed out that even uploading the videos users film can be a huge ordeal. Often you want to do this kind of research with people who don’t live in big cities with fast, reliable internet connections. It is super-frustrating to your testers if every time they try to upload their video the system crashes part-way through. That’s why iTracks has developed special technology so that you don’t have to start all over again if that happens.

What About Text Messaging and Chats for Market Research?

Later in the interview we also discussed a growing interest in using chat apps on phones for market research. I can see it having value when trying to reach teenage and 20-something testers, who have fast phone fingers.

Some people are trying to hold focus groups that way, and here too, I’m a bit skeptical. If you’ve ever followed an active Twitter chat, like #custserv (one of my faves, which is on Tuesday evenings at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time) you’ll discover how hard it is to follow a conversation when there are several participants scrolling by. You can jump in and out, but it is almost impossible to follow everything that is going on.

Of course, I think focus groups tend to be overused even in-person.

They can be valuable at the beginning of a research process, to give you insight into what issues may arise when you go to real user testing, and to help you formulate good survey questions.

Patient Experience is Often Frustrating for Doctors, Staff & Patients

The American, Canadian and European health care systems all have their advantages and drawbacks. I’m not about to wade into an Obamacare debate, but here’s a model being tried in a few places that really seems to improve patient experience, as well as the experiences of doctors, their staff, and allied health professionals. It also has customer experience lessons that can benefit all of us, regardless of industry. 

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Today’s interview is with Doug Craig, General Manager of the Edmonton Southside Primary Care Network. The network he runs lets doctors expand their clinics to offer related on-site health services such as access to nurses, behavior consultants, dietitians, exercise programs, respiratory therapists, and social workers. The goal is to lower the risk of people developing health problems and to improve chronic disease management.

Who Benefits?

It’s a win for all concerned:

* Doctors can be more efficient with their time, focusing only on the things that actually need their level of expertise. By being able to easily get related services and counselling for patients, their time is freed up to take on more patients and shorten waiting lists.

* Patients get better care by being able to access all these other services. It can also be easier to get in to see their doctor when that’s who is really needed.

* Related health care professionals and counselors love it because they have much more flexibility, don’t have to find their own clients or work in a hospital, but do get to work in a supportive team environment.

* The health care system benefits because it avoids costly hospital care for patients with complex needs, and it lowers the risk of more people developing chronic conditions like diabetes.

Patient Experience is Linked to Employee Experience

The Edmonton Southside Primary Care Network has won several best employer awards. As we’ve noted many times on this blog (and in my upcoming book, PeopleShock: The Path to Profits When Customers Rule), happy employees are essential if you want happy customers. In this case, the customers are patients.

The things they’ve done to create happy staff can apply to any workplace:

Hire for personality; train for skills

Yes, medical professionals have to be licensed to practice their profession, but Craig explains that they soon realized it was more important to focus on personality in hiring than looking for a specific clinical skill set. Even the orientation process now focuses more on teamwork and relationship-building skills rather than just clinical skills.

Trust your staff

In this case, staff are hired centrally by the Primary Care Network, but they work in medical clinics all over the city. So there is no way to do close, daily supervision. Many of their clinicians came from a hospital environment where they chafed under tight supervision, so this was a fantastic change for them.

Trust your colleagues to do what’s right in the moment

There are overlaps among the professionals, and sometimes it is more important to give the patient the support they need right aw...

Counting how many people enter a store is nothing new in the retail world, but Headcount CEO, Mark Ryski, used to find it frustrating that so many clients weren’t acting on his company’s market research reports.

The data he gave them went way beyond just telling them how many people crossed the threshold: his insights gave them lots of ideas about how they could improve to convert more of the visitors to their stores into customers.

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So why weren’t the clients taking action?

It’s a problem familiar to many consultants. In today’s interview, which followed a presentation Ryski gave recently to the Alberta chapter of the Marketing Research & Intelligence Association (MRIA), we discuss:

* The clever tactic his company now uses to get clients to act on market research results.

* The value of having a skilled human analyst look at data instead of relying completely on computer algorithms.

* Mistakes that are easy to make in interpreting data from traffic counts or other market research.

Great Market Research: Why No Action?

Ryski points out in the podcast that there are several barriers to getting action:

Problem: User-Hostile Reports

Many companies get sold on slick software with fancy dashboards that claim they’ll tell you everything that’s happening at a glance. The problem is that our brains can’t take it all in at a glance.

Often there is too much presented, it is shown in ways that aren’t intuitive to understand, and it isn’t obvious how to pull out only the data that is relevant to the user.

In fact, in many organizations software is bought by higher-ups, who love that it can tell them so much, but the people who actually have to use it haven’t even been consulted. The data dashboards that impressed the buyer may not present the information in a way that is useful to the user.

Solutions

* If you are a vendor, simplify your reports and test them with real users. Find out what they need to see and what format is most useful to them.

* Include training when you sell your software tools so they’ll start seeing the value immediately.

Problem: Lack of Resources

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: unless and until you’ve mistreated them, most staff want to do a good job.

The managers who get the market research reports want to use that expertise to do a better job. But life gets in the way. They have competing pressures for their time and budget.

So a store manager may know that the till lineups are too long, but if they can’t get permission from head office to hire more staff, what can they do?

Solutions

* Present your results in a way that will help them make the business case to their superiors about why they need extra resources.

* Offer suggestions about low-cost or easy ways to start implementing the needed changes with existing resources. There may be other areas within their budget that you’ve discovered do not provide much value to customers, so maybe money or staff time can be shifted away from those, for example.

I don’t normally share much about my personal life here on the blog, but over the past couple of weeks both my father and my father-in-law died. As a result, I don’t have a podcast episode for you this week or next.

They were both impressive, multi-talented and kind men. We will miss them.

I’ll have new episodes for you in March. Until then, here are three things you can do:

* Tell your parents that you love them. If that’s no longer possible, tell others you care about that you love them.

* Check out past episodes here or on iTunes. And while you are there, please give us a rating and write a review.

* Sign up for the early notifications list for my new book, PeopleShock: Why People Matter More Than Ever in the Digital Era & What That Means For Business, at http://bit.ly/peopleshockfirst.

Thanks.

More people die each year in the US from preventable medical errors than in car accidents. Think of it as 2 or 3 jumbo jets crashing every day. Many of these deaths result from dysfunctional cultures. Today’s guest, Bea Bohm-Meyer, of the Bohm-Meyer Group, knows how important culture change is in “high reliability” fields — situations where a mistake can mean death.

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Even when lives aren’t on the line, culture change is often the key to keeping your business off life support.

5 Drivers of Culture Change

There are some differences between “high reliability” organizations (the ones where screw-ups mean death) and others. One is that you must look more closely at “latent risk” — what happens if something goes wrong? Or, as astronaut Chris Hadfield puts it, “What’s the next thing that can kill me?”

But other factors are as important for culture change in any organization:

* Leadership

* Collaboration

* Communication (in both directions)

* Engagement

* Accountability

While leadership from the top is crucial, it is important to remember that leaders exist at all levels. If you want to transform the culture in your organization, look for cultural transformation “cheerleaders” throughout your organization and work with them to make things better.

As your culture is improving, it is important to keep reinforcing the values you are trying to instill, otherwise you risk backsliding.

Understand Your Staff to Understand Your Culture

I was startled when Bohm-Meyer said that “there’s truth in everything”, but I think the point she was making is that whether or not the objective “truth” agrees with how somebody perceives a situation, their truth matters. You can’t discount it, especially if you want them to change.

Try to find out why the person is resisting the change. That can be an important starting place for weakening resistance.

Remember that most employees want to do the right thing. They want to do their jobs well. But sometimes they are in a culture that makes that difficult or impossible. Like the classic example of a patient who dies from an infection because the doctor didn’t wash his hands but the culture was such that the nurse couldn’t remind him. Sounds crazy, but that sort of thing really does happen.

Mentioned in this Episode

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, By Atul Gawande  Fantastic book. Read it!

Tema’s interview with Bruce Croxon, founder of Lavalife

Peter Aceto interview, CEO of Tangerine Bank

What advice do you have on culture change?

Share your tips, suggestions, ideas below.

I’ve written before* about the importance of having motivated employees if you want to deliver consistently excellent customer experiences. An ESOP – Employee Share Ownership Plan (or Employee Stock Ownership Plan) – is one way to add motivation.

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Benefits of ESOPs

According to today’s guest, Dan Ohler, of ESOP Builders, employee-owned companies have:

* double the customer loyalty

* 20% higher productivity

* 200% lower turnover

* 3.5 times more job applicants

* less absenteeism.

Business owners are often frustrated by employees who don’t seem to care about the company as much as the owner does. But, if you think about it, why would they? Regular employees don’t reap the rewards of owners, and the business wasn’t their brainchild.

Once they become owners, however, they see things quite differently. In fact, research shows that employee-owned companies are more likely to survive during tough economic times. As with founders, once they are owners they will do what it takes to keep the company alive.

ESOP As Exit Strategy?

As the baby boomers hit retirement age, many of them are considering this route to deal with succession. According to Ohler, 70% of small and mid-sized company owners in Canada are looking to retire within the next 5 – 10 years and 70% of them have no succession plan! The US data is likely similar.

A friend of mine recently sold her business and the buyer wasn’t someone she had confidence in to carry on the customer experience focused tradition. Selling to employees instead of strangers can be a way of generating that retirement income while leaving your company in good hands.

Should You Consider An ESOP?

Despite the many benefits (which can also include tax benefits for both founders and employees), switching to an ESOP model is not easy, and should be done with the help of experts. Some of the issues to consider include:

* Do you want all employees to be eligible, or just certain key ones? (Personally, I think that including all employees makes the most sense, but many owners aren’t ready to take that big a step initially.)

* How will you help employees finance share purchases?

* What will happen if somebody quits or needs to be fired?

* What if they want to still work at the company but sell some of their shares?

* How should the shares be priced? (Hint: bring in a professional business valuator.)

* What are the legal and tax implications of the structure you choose?

Tips for Successful ESOP Implementation

* Get professional advice.

* Get employees at all levels involved in developing the plan and setting the rules around it.

* Teach employees to read and understand financial statements.

* Manage employee expectations. Just because they own a few shares doesn’t mean that every one of them suddenly has a say in every decision.

*See, for example,

Want to Grow Your Business Quickly? Focus on Employees First!

Wish Your Staff Were More Productive?

I’ve written before* about the importance of having motivated employees if you want to deliver consistently excellent customer experiences. An ESOP – Employee Share Ownership Plan (or Employee Stock Ownership Plan) – is one way to add motivation.

Get your FREE Transcript Now!

Benefits of ESOPs

According to today’s guest, Dan Ohler, of ESOP Builders, employee-owned companies have:

* double the customer loyalty

* 20% higher productivity

* 200% lower turnover

* 3.5 times more job applicants

* less absenteeism.

Business owners are often frustrated by employees who don’t seem to care about the company as much as the owner does. But, if you think about it, why would they? Regular employees don’t reap the rewards of owners, and the business wasn’t their brainchild.

Once they become owners, however, they see things quite differently. In fact, research shows that employee-owned companies are more likely to survive during tough economic times. As with founders, once they are owners they will do what it takes to keep the company alive.

ESOP As Exit Strategy?

As the baby boomers hit retirement age, many of them are considering this route to deal with succession. According to Ohler, 70% of small and mid-sized company owners in Canada are looking to retire within the next 5 – 10 years and 70% of them have no succession plan! The US data is likely similar.

A friend of mine recently sold her business and the buyer wasn’t someone she had confidence in to carry on the customer experience focused tradition. Selling to employees instead of strangers can be a way of generating that retirement income while leaving your company in good hands.

Should You Consider An ESOP?

Despite the many benefits (which can also include tax benefits for both founders and employees), switching to an ESOP model is not easy, and should be done with the help of experts. Some of the issues to consider include:

* Do you want all employees to be eligible, or just certain key ones? (Personally, I think that including all employees makes the most sense, but many owners aren’t ready to take that big a step initially.)

* How will you help employees finance share purchases?

* What will happen if somebody quits or needs to be fired?

* What if they want to still work at the company but sell some of their shares?

* How should the shares be priced? (Hint: bring in a professional business valuator.)

* What are the legal and tax implications of the structure you choose?

Tips for Successful ESOP Implementation

* Get professional advice.

* Get employees at all levels involved in developing the plan and setting the rules around it.

* Teach employees to read and understand financial statements.

* Manage employee expectations. Just because they own a few shares doesn’t mean that every one of them suddenly has a say in every decision.

*See, for example,

Want to Grow Your Business Quickly? Focus on Employees First!

Wish Your Staff Were More Productive?

Interest in customer journey mapping has skyrocketed in recent years.

Today’s podcast interview guest, Ian Williams of UK-based Jericho Consulting, worries that it may just be a fad. That companies are doing it just to say they have, rather than to actually improve anything for the customers.

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Seems crazy that companies would invest in a process such as journey mapping without following through. But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m sure every consultant who’s worked with big organizations has seen money invested, work done, recommendations made, only to have the process stop there.

I suppose as long as they’ve paid the bills it shouldn’t bother me when it happens, but it does. My colleagues and I put a lot of effort into trying to help our clients improve and succeed; it’s not all about the money! But I digress…

According to Williams, companies should start by doing Voice of the Customer (VOC) research to find out what’s really troubling their customers. You can collect this information from:

* your contact center records,

* interviews with customers and others in your target market,

* social media listening.

Then move to journey mapping, focusing first on your most important customer segments. Look at what their actual journeys are, and, based on your research, what their ideal paths would be like.

From there, start mapping out your internal processes to see how they are affecting the customer’s journey. Where are the misalignments with what customers desire?

Don’t Confuse Customer Journey Mapping With Process Mapping

The terms “customer journey mapping” and “process mapping” often get thrown around as though they meant the same thing, but they don’t.

Customer journey mapping takes the customer’s point of view. What do they experience from the time they start thinking about using a product or service like yours, all the way through to the post-sale service, support, and possible future purchases.

Process mapping, on the other hand, looks at what’s going on inside your organization.

The problem if you start with process mapping is that you won’t see the frustrations your processes may be causing customers. So while you might make things more efficient internally, you may well lose sales and goodwill.

Once you know what the customer’s ideal journey is start examining your processes to find out how to streamline them so that not only will you have happier customers, you will be more efficient and cost effective.

That’s the great thing about customer experience process improvement: it can increase sales AND lower costs! Cool!

Customer Journey Mapping: Where’s The Customer In All Of This? (Image courtesy of integrationtraining.co.uk)

Member Engagement vs Customer Engagement

Association staff sometimes look at people who work in companies and think, “They’ve got it easy. They’ve got money to study customer needs and really serve their customers well.”

People who work in companies sometimes look at association staff and think, “They’ve got it easy. They don’t have to make money, and their members are naturally engaged with them, so it’s easy to know what they need.”

Turns out they are both right and both wrong, says today’s podcast guest, Matthew D’Uva. He’s the Executive Director of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) and until recently was the President and CEO of SOCAP International (the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals).

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Association Member Engagement

Association members are the customers, so customer knowledge is baked right in to the system. Members decide what the association should be doing. They serve on its board and committees, they hire and fire it’s executive director.

Associations are typically smaller, so there are fewer layers of bureaucracy if it wants to get involved in social media. Since they are member driven they usually find it easier to let members (i.e. customers) jump to its defense if it is being bad-mouthed online.

There are some pretty big downsides, though.

First, many associations are tight on funding. Staff are chronically overworked and there simply isn’t the budget for the sophisticated social listening tools some companies use. There may also be less money for training staff on how to use social and digital media.

Also, it can be difficult serving all members, given wide variations in geography and generations. You need a high degree of transparency and good feedback mechanisms, says D’Uva.

Associations and companies both suffer from one other problem of the current era: people who are massively overextended. There are so many more demands on our time than there used to be. So it is no longer as obvious that a rising executive should get involved in an industry association rather than focusing on the job itself, or doing other types of volunteer work.

(That said, based on my experiences, I’d still say association involvement should be a high priority for your time if you want to further your career. The things you’ll learn and the connections you’ll make are bound to help you going forward.)

Association Member Engagement Trends for 2016

*

Increased Customer / Member Expectations

Associations, says D’Uva, are feeling the same heat companies are for ever-increasing quality standards when it comes to customer service (member service).

*

New Ways To Get Member Input

For a long time associations relied on annual member surveys to gauge how well they were doing and learn what new offerings would interest their members. Now, thanks to digital media, there is a much wider range of ways in which members can let their views be known. It is also much easier than it was in my days back at the Canadian Bankers’ Association in the 1980s to collaborate with far-flung members. On the flipside,

How An Old-School Manufacturer Became a Results Only Workplace

Dennis Malacek, CEO & President of electronic equipment manufacturer, Dynatronix, transformed his “old school manufacturing facility” to a results-only work environment (ROWE™), and the results have been impressive. For example:

* One product line’s manufacturing time dropped from 54 to 32 man-hours.

* A good employee turned down an $8,000 raise offered by a competitor because the competitor had a traditional work environment.

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We are hearing more these days about companies moving to a results orientation. A fast-changing global marketplace has put pressure on companies to become more efficient and effective, and technologies have reached the point where working from anywhere instead of an office is easy to do.

In today’s podcast episode I interview Malacek about what it took to make the change and why he’s happy they did.

Experiences From A Move to a Results Focus

A few highlights:

* One of the big initial challenges is breaking old stereotypes, such as commenting when people come in late (or early). “You learn that time doesn’t matter; the result does,” says Malacek.

* Another shift was getting people past imagining that a results-only work environment meant working from home. Sometimes it can be working from home, but you can’t bring the whole factory home. What it does mean is finding a way to get the work done well, by the deadline, in whatever way makes sense for the workers and the project.

* Oddly, many workers feel guilty if they leave “early” because their work is all done. Malacek used a farm analogy to help them understand: “If I had 600 acres of corn to plant, I didn’t sit out in the field when I was done planting if it was only 3 in the afternoon. I went home,” he told them.

* One of the benefits, but also the challenges of going to a results-focused system is that it forces you to document everything and set standards. It forces you to think through what may be outdated policies or procedures, to clearly set out expectations — what results are needed. 

* Not all employees will adapt to this new approach. Some will choose to leave. Some won’t be producing the results, and so will have to leave.

* The hardest part? “As a manager, you’ve got to let go.”

Have You Considered Moving to a Results-Only Work Environment?

Please tell us about it below.

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