In episode 52 of Frank Reactions I talked about the 1st P in the 3P Profit Formula: Promise. The other two Ps are People and Process. Today we talk about People, and the 8 different categories of people who influence your business success. 

People With Power To Make Your Business a Success

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When we think about the people factor in business, we typically focus on two categories of people: customers and employees. But they are far from the only ones we need to think about. There are 8 general categories of people who we need to deal with well to succeed. They are:

* Employees

* Prospects

* Customers

* Suppliers

* Distributors, Resellers and/or Franchisees

* Investors and lenders

* Influencers, including mass and social media, and friends and colleagues of your target customers

* Competitors.

Many of these I’ve covered extensively in other episodes and blog posts, so let’s touch on a few I haven’t discussed as much yet.

Lenders and Investors

One thing I hear over and over from people is that, at least when it comes to public companies, they don’t take customer experience improvements seriously because the investment in improving customer experience is long term, but the stock markets reward a short-term focus. This is a problem, but as more and more senior executives are telling their investors that improving customer experience is now a strategic priority, hopefully this is starting to change. The reasons private companies don’t invest in customer experience in are usually a little different.

* Often the founder is still the CEO and s/he doesn’t believe there’s a problem. As long as the company is still making enough money for the owner to be satisfied, why mess around with change?

* Others are just too busy running off in all directions to really focus on customer experience and the challenges of improving it. This is a typical problem in small and mid-sized businesses, which are often under-staffed.

* Owners who are thinking of selling their company may feel the same sort of pressure as publicly traded company executives to cut costs and show high short-term profits, even if that may hurt things in the long-term.

* Some private company executives may be getting pressure from their bankers who have set financial ratios the company must maintain to be in good standing.

* If lenders were friends or family, there is often a perceived pressure to repay those debts as soon as possible.

 These reasons are all understandable, but not wise if the company is to be successful in the long term. Public expectations about customer experience quality are going up faster than most companies are managing to cope with. You can’t simply ignore them if you want to survive.

Media and General Public

We hear a lot about the impact of social media on people’s perceptions of your company, and there is no doubt that it does have a huge impact.

Part of the impact is not what it says directly to people who might be your customers, but the fact that the mainstream media now turn to sources like Twitter as a first place to find new story ideas, information and updates. And mainstream media still has a huge impact on public perceptions.

Grinch Alert: I’m a skeptic when I hear words like “mindfulness” and “holistic”, especially in the context of business. But today’s podcast guest, Dorota Ulkowska of the Potential Project, has a point when she talks about the benefits of mindfulness at work.

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According to Dorota, 46% of the time our minds are wandering. [Did I remember to send that email? Has Suzie’s fever gone down? Is this bloody call going to end before I have to leave for my next meeting? Damn, that doughnut looks good! Oops, time to get back to writing this article.]

She’s right that many of us need training and practice to learn to still our minds and focus on true priorities. This can be especially important for customer service staff, who are often caught up in stressful situations, yet have to stay calm. It’s also huge when it comes to dealing with co-workers.

Mindfulness at Work: STOP Then ACT

With the help of two clever acronyms, here’s what the Potential Project proposes.

STOP

* S = Silence your mind. Shut up the background chatter.

* T = Tune In – Pay attention as though this were the first time you’d ever heard something like this (even if it isn’t)

* O = Open your mind – Battle “cognitive rigidity,” the tendency to tune out because we “know” what they are going to say, or because we are too focused on how we’ll respond.

* P = Present – Be present in the moment with the person you are talking to; focus entirely on them.

It takes training to learn how to do this, and sometimes visual reminders can help while you are solidifying the mindfulness habit.

Once the person you are talking with has had their say, respond mindfully, don’t just react.

ACT

* A = Appropriate – The way you respond should be appropriate for the person you are talking to. This can encompass the wording used, the tone of voice, and the overall message.

* C = Compassionate – They could have a very good reason for being cranky that has nothing to do with you. Don’t take it personally. Try to empathize.

* T = Timed well – Don’t speak over others. Don’t interrupt. Sometimes even silence can help.

How Mindfulness At Work Helps Change Management

If you think about our ancestors, it is hardly surprising that we are programmed to instinctively react negatively to change. Change signaled potential danger: the tree branches started rustling because a tiger was hiding there, about to pounce.

Our conscious mind, says Dorota, processes 7 bits of information per second, but our subconscious processes 11 million of them! So of course our subconscious springs to attention at the threat of change, even if, rationally, we know that the proposed change is a good idea. Being mindful, she says, will help you overcome the subconscious and let the logic come closer to being in control. It still won’t be easy, so you have to keep questioning your reactions (and – in a nice way – those of your colleagues) to make sure you are doing the right things.

So apply mindfulness techniques to dealing with yourself and your co-workers when change is needed.

It’s become a cliché: The only constant is change. But it is also true. In today’s interview we discuss change management, starting with changing your own acceptance of change, and then how to be a leader at times of change.

I spoke with Sandra Woitas, a long-time educator & expert in resiliency and change. She’s an advisor to governments, non-profits and businesses. (She’s had a bit of a change herself: her most recent gig is with the Edmonton Oilers hockey team!)

She was granted an Honorary Doctorate of Laws by the University of Alberta last year, and if you have time, you really should read her speech (opens in new tab).  I wish I could find a video of it, but so far no luck.

Mariana Konsolos is a serial entrepreneur who’s soaking up the sun in Miami right now, having recently sold a successful fashion accessories business she created from nothing 15 years ago, when she was an immigrant in a new country where she barely spoke the language. She’s dealt with a lot of change herself, and as an employer of many immigrants.

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Change Management Begins With You

To help others deal with change, we need to deal well with it ourselves. Sandra pointed out that we tend to be too harsh on ourselves, comparing our weaknesses to other people’s  strengths. Ooh… did that ring true! Her point was that you need to:

* Know your strengths and weaknesses, and

* Accept and focus on your strengths.

If you do that, she says, you will be less afraid of change, because you know you have strengths you can bring to the new situation.

Also, recognize that your colleagues or employees are likely feeling threatened by the changes too, so try not to take criticism personally.  Mariana deals with it by reminding herself that “it’s not all about me!”

Change Management Within Your Team

* Don’t hoard information and decisions. The more people understand about what’s changing and why, the easier it will be to accept.

* Look for and bring out the strengths of those around you.

* Don’t pretend to have all the answers. “Asking for help is a sign of competence, not a sign of weakness,” notes Sandra.

* Ditch the “me boss, you not” pecking order. Being the boss doesn’t mean you always know what’s right.

* Be patient. Sometimes we agents of change have to remind ourselves that most people don’t love change. It will take them longer to adjust.

A final change management tip from Sandra:

 

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As many of you know, I’m finishing writing my new book, PeopleShock: The 3P Profit Formula for the Digital Era. The 3Ps that lead to profit are Promise + People + Process. In today’s podcast episode, I take you through Chapter 5 of the book.

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Behind the Brand: Vision, Mission and Values

I’d love to get your feedback on it! If you have time to listen to the whole episode and/or read the full transcript, you’ll get to hear the fun stories that go with the key points. But if you are time-pressed, here are the highlights:

* Have a strong, clear, memorable rallying cry, or purpose. That will make it much easier to develop customer, staff and supplier loyalty. It also gives you a filter to help you make difficult decisions on priorities.

* The whole team should be involved in developing a new mission statement. If it is imposed from the top it will have little impact.

* Your mission or vision statement should be one sentence, and not longer than about 15 words. If people can’t remember it, they’ll have trouble living it.

* You can support your mission statement with a list of core values. Again, try to keep the list short enough to be memorable.

* Simply saying you offer great customer service won’t be enough; everybody claims that. What is your unique selling proposition (USP)?

* Have a firm base of values and principles. That will help your organization deal with the challenges when things go wrong.

* Breaking your promise to customers is one of the hardest customer experience mistakes to overcome. This is especially true of misleading sales or marketing promises.

Do you want to hear or read more of the book before it is released?

I’d love to get your feedback on it. Drop me a line at tema [at] frankreactions.com. Thanks!

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This is Part 2 of my conversation with Bent Dalager, Managing Director for Financial Services Nordic at Accenture in Copenhagen, about the role of robots in customer experience. Click here for Part 1.

It seems that this robotic seal can do as good or even a better job than nursing home staff in calming agitated dementia patients. How long till we can develop an online version that will work for agitated customers? 

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That’s a tougher challenge, for sure, as looking at a video of a cute, cuddly creature won’t solve your problem with the wrong product having been delivered, or an incomprehensible billing statement from your cell phone provider. But as robotics and artificial intelligence combine with neuroscience and psychology, it seems likely that it won’t be too many more years before automated customer service systems will be able to do at least as good a job — and often a better one — than customer service reps. Until my conversation with Bent Dalager, artificial intelligence expert at Accenture, I believed that robots were still a long way from being able to effectively mimic human empathy. But he points out in this interview (part 2 of 2; see part 1 here), huge progress is being made in giving robots an EQ (emotional quotient) that comes close to matching their already overpowering IQ (intelligence quotient).

Smart Machines Working With Less Capable Humans

In this part of our interview, Dalager says it is not just front line customer service reps who are at risk of being replaced by robots. The future for even jobs that now require years of education and experience will be one of “smart machines… working with less capable humans.” The “experience part” of customer experience, however, will still come down to human elements in some ways. Although researchers are making progress on machines that can empathize with customers, it still may be several years off before they can do it nearly as skillfully as humans. So your human customer service rep’s role may be more about calming an irate customer than solving their problem. The problem solving part will be handled in real time by the rep’s automated partner. 

What Can Humans Do Better Than Robots?

Ironically, given that robotics in business started with taking over physical tasks on assembly lines, robots are still a long way from being able to replicate the fluidity of human movement. It seems that developing empathy and ever-increasing intelligence is easier than learning to move gracefully. But even once a robot can cut your hair as effectively as a human hairdresser, there may still be a role for the hairdresser. The future for humans, says Dalager, will be in areas where we seek human connection, and particularly in areas where we want to compare ourselves to other humans. So there are 3 main areas where there seems to be a future for humans:

* Sports. While the dividing line between the technological element and the human one is getting blurred, people do still tend to find it more exciting to see which human can perform best than to watch to machines battling it out. Even the machine on machine battles people watch (do demolition derbys still exis...

If you’ve suffered through those automated telephone systems (and who hasn’t?) it may be hard to believe that robots may soon wipe out most customer service jobs. But recent breakthroughs in robotics are bringing that reality closer every day.

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Robots on the Customer Service Front Lines

We are a long way from the fantasy perfect companion virtual robot of the movie Her, but according to today’s guest, Bent Dalager, Managing Director for Financial Services Nordic at Accenture in Copenhagen, robots are already replacing tens or hundreds of thousands of customer service related jobs, such as insurance claims handling, and are fast encroaching on the contact center.

Spy Mode Lets Robots Teach Themselves

For as little as $10,000/year you can get and train a virtual robot to handle masses of queries or back end paperwork, at much higher volumes, speed, accuracy and consistency than humans can manage. Global consulting firm Accenture has already replaced 8,000 full-time equivalent jobs with “virtual robots” and another 16,000 will go this year.

Technology Breakthroughs

The breakthroughs making this possible have been:

* The ability for the robots to use self-learning, or cognitive computing,

* A new-found ability for them to switch between computer programs, so you don’t need special software to connect all your systems.

Result? In the back office, for example, you no longer need IT to do complex integration programs, and you won’t have to ditch your expensive legacy systems. “Spy mode” lets the computers watch how your human agents process things and do the same, even when it means moving data across systems. (I must admit that somehow it does seem unfair that staff are having to train their automated replacements.) When it comes to customer service, robots can do first line triage of problems, solving many of them without having to escalate to a human being. And they learn from what happens if problems are escalated, so over time fewer and fewer queries need to get the human touch. There’s an insurance company in the Netherlands, says Dalager, that already has 80% of the incoming customer service chats handled by a robot. This may sound dystopian, but look at the bright side for consumers: a robot can handle multiple chat queries way faster than a human.

But Don’t Customer Service Reps Need Empathy?

They do. This is the challenge preoccupying leading artificial intelligence companies. According to Dalager, robotic technologies are getting much better at being able to recognize and respond appropriately to customer emotions. When you combine the self-learning skills of IBM’s Watson with the increasing empathetic and context-sensing abilities of IPSoft’s Amelia, the robotic revolution will go mainstream. That’s only a year or two away, thinks Dalager. Amelia can already use context instead of just key words to be able to tell the difference between “I want to see red boots” and “I don’t want to see red boots”, and to detect the emotional pitch of a customer’s voice...

When Sue Miller walked into her new job as President of computer products vendor, Softsel, she knew it had problems. While it's US parent company was successful, the subsidiary she would be leading had not yet turned a profit in its 5 year history. It had a puny market share and a reputation as "box movers" versus the high-end competitors who were knows as product pros. Sales stood at about $20 million. By the time she was done with it, sales were up to $850 million and the company ranked #1 in the industry vendor listings. Here's the customer service based turnaround strategy she used.

You wouldn’t expect a book called the Resource Management And Capacity Planning Handbook to be high on the reading list of someone interested in customer experience improvement.

You’d be wrong though. Because if your employees are chronically overloaded, they won’t be able to deliver great customer experience.

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(He wanted to give it a livelier title, more like that of one of his other books, Napoleon on Project Management.) Fun title or no, this important book helps companies come to terms with what is a potentially profit-destroying problem in many organizations: chronic worker overload.

Overloaded employees are stressed, they make mistakes, and that doesn’t translate into good customer experience. @jerrymanas

He argues that most organizations “plan to infinite capacity”. They “take on everything and people have to suffer because of it.” Or they do the opposite and miss opportunities.

Instead they should make it a practice to review project needs in terms of human capacity before agreeing to take them on. Basically, many companies need to do a better job of setting organizational priorities. This means getting all the relevant department heads into a room and hashing out priorities. Jerry suggests evaluating projects through three “lenses”:

* Strategic alignment. How do the projects on our plate rank in terms of their ability to support the organization’s strategy?

*  Risks versus benefits. No project has a certain outcome. So evaluate each on the balance of risks to anticipated benefits.

*  Classifications. This lens is a little less clear. He suggests in the interview it could be things like wanting to spread project support among divisions, or focusing on the growth potential of projects. One that strikes me as a highly useful classification would be to evaluate each project’s potential impact on customer experience. Given the link between improving customer experience and long-term profitability, this seems like a natural.

 

Other capacity planning tips

Don’t over-complicate the process. This doesn’t have to be a full-blown, complex resource management analysis. Take a lean approach. Using the filters, or lenses, mentioned above, combined with human judgement and having the right people in the room to hash it all out, may well be enough to at least get you going in the right direction. Consider using project portfolio management (PPM) tools. While there are highly sophisticated tools for large organizations, there are simpler ones for smaller companies. But even the simple ones will likely take you beyond where you can get by just trying to use a spreadsheet. Have a “process party” to eliminate “process creep”. By getting rid of those nasty processes that, over time, creep up and start clogging the ability to get things done, you can free up internal capacity for more productive work. The notion of a “process party” sounds very similar to what Marcie Kiziak described in last week’s episode as a “Start/Stop/Continue” meeting.

Human Resources Vice President, Marcie Kiziak, got a chance to test out her HR theories on how to improve staff morale and turn around a dysfunctional workplace. She was thrown into an industrial coatings company as an interim Operations VP after several others had tried and failed to turn the company around.

Six months into the experiment at Magnum Energy Services subsidiary, Corrosion & Abrasion Solutions Ltd., she’s led an amazing transformation. Quality has improved dramatically, and turnover, absenteeism, and lateness are way down. Equally important, the staff are enjoying working together, and have regained pride in their workmanship.

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Staff Morale Turnaround Process

 

“We had quality issues, we had all kinds of issues… but at the end it was incredibly evident that it was a people connection issue.”

* Get in the trenches and ask questions. You can’t figure out what’s really going on if you stay at your desk all the time. Get on the shop floor. Ask questions. Learn how your operations really work. Most people will happily answer your “stupid questions” if you show them you really are interested in what they do and how they do it.

* Identify the disconnects. Marcie pulled staff from all departments together for a “start/stop/continue” meeting. By having them each go through what was working well (continue), what needed to be done but wasn’t happening (start), and what was happening that shouldn’t be (stop) from their perspective, they were able to identify the key issues.

* Understand the personalities. There are several assessment tools that can be helpful. They used the DISC tool to uncover the work style preferences of each of the staff members. It went a long way towards explaining why there was so much conflict. Going through the process also helped staff learn better ways of interacting with each other. They even put stickers indicating each person’s preferred style on their hard hats!

* Be honest and transparent. It is easy for staff to assume that “the boss” is making money, regardless of how well or poorly the staff are doing their jobs. If you open the books, and let staff see the impact of their work on the company’s financial results, they may well be shocked to discover what a difference they can make (negative or positive). Marcie meets weekly with plant staff to examine the profitability of every job they are working on, and this information is shared with all the workers.

* Have clear responsibilities. The company removed shift barriers so that people weren’t passing off half-finished jobs to someone on another shift. When that happened, it was too easy to blame somebody else if the job was poorly done. If one person has full responsibility for the work, they’ll care more about doing it well.

* Change processes that get in the way. By having staggered start times, based on the type of work each worker was doing, they were able to keep things moving smoothly with one shift instead of two. Instead of having everybody come in at, say, 8:00 a.m. for an 8 hour shift, they would have those whose work had to happen first come in earliest. Then the next type of workers would arrive when that first part of the job was wrapping ...

Change Management Sucks

At least, that’s what most employees seem to think. So do a lot of their leaders.

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Hardly surprising, when 70% of change management efforts fail. And yet, change is happening in every industry so quickly that organizations have to get good at dealing with change if they are to survive. Vik Maraj and Kevin Gangel argued in a blog series a while back that change management is dead. If it is, then how the heck are businesses supposed to cope with all the changes being thrust upon them? In today’s podcast episode Vik and I discuss (and sometimes debate) what he sees as the failings of the traditional process, and a different approach that his company uses.

Brainwashing Doesn’t Work With Employees

Traditional change management is mainly about propaganda argues Vik; about “staying on message” and repeating it so often that people will start to believe what they keep hearing. It is about the “things” we need to change, and training people on how to do things differently. But the fact is, employees aren’t gullible. If anything, all the past failed change management efforts make them especially cynical. You can train them all you want, but if you haven’t given them a reason to care about the change you are after, it won’t work.  (Avoiding losing their jobs, surprisingly to some, is not enough of a reason.) So you are starting your process by digging yourself out of a hole.  

4 Things To Do Differently To Really Change Your Organization

 

1. Change Your Thinking

It starts with the senior executive team examining what needs to change in their view of the world. We are all stuck viewing situations from our own frame of reference (or paradigm, or context, depending on whose terminology you want to use). Sometimes it takes an outsider to help you see things through a new lens. Take, for example, Kodak, which I discussed with Kodak’s former Chief Marketing Officer, Jeffrey Hayzlett, a while back. They needed to stop seeing themselves as a company in the business of making and selling film, and instead realize that their true business was about helping people preserve memories. If they had realized that a bit sooner Kodak might still be around today. Unfortunately, in a fast-changing competitive landscape there’s a tendency to hunker down and try to do more of what you’ve been doing, but faster and cheaper.  What’s usually needed, though, is a radical shift in what you are doing and how you are doing it. 

2. Take Risks

That means taking big, scary risks. One of the best discussions I’ve seen of this comes from Ben Horowitz’s book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. (It’s one of the best business books I’ve read, and I would urge anyone who wants to learn more about business and leadership to read it.) Several times he had to make major changes in direction when an awful lot of money and reputation were at stake, to keep his companies alive.

3. Be Honest