Feb 08 2007
Customer Care, Right Environments And Spittoons….
When it comes to looking after our customers, quite often there’s a gap, a huge gap between theory and practice. There are books about customer relations; there are videos about customer relations; there are Gurus (mostly self-appointed) about customer relations. None of them actually have to deliver customer relations. That chore is left to what was known in the last two World Wars as the PBI – as in “Poor B….y Infantry”. - the foot soldiers. The front line people, your front line people. So what do they make of it all?
You know about Pareto’s Law – I discuss it often enough – yes that one, the one that says 80% of the business comes from 20% of the customers? Well, it (almost) applies in this case. More than 80% of front line staff haven’t yet totally bought into the idea of effective customer relations. The other 20% have discovered a very enriching way of achieving a satisfactory outcome from interactions with customers. In other words, most of the time they succeed! And when they succeed, the customers actually thank them!
This can’t be about you – can it?
So what’s the problem? The first answer is: ‘the Directors” the next answer is “the Managers”. “Nonsense”, you say. “I’m one of those, and I have explained very earnestly why we must all focus on achieving first class relations with customers”. Mmmmm! Creating business and profit enhancing relations with customers requires the right environment, ethos, culture and philosophy. You can’t achieve it by simply telling other people to do it. You can tell them the technique for turning “difficult” phone calls around, but if they don’t feel like doing it, then they won’t.
If you and your whole organisation don’t believe in developing good relations with all of your customers – it won’t happen.
When so much time and money is spent on training people about the need for constructive relations with customers, why is it often so bad? For much the same reason that when so much money has been spent on telling people that smoking kills you, they still insist on smoking. No, the issue is the environment. There used to be spittoons in bars. What is a spittoon? It’s a bowl or bucket into which people spit. Oh yes, people used to spit into spittoons. They spat because they chewed tobacco; they spat because they had – please forgive the term – phlegm. For whatever reason, they spat. And so there were spittoons. So long as the environment accepted people spitting, there were spittoons. Once that environment changed, the very idea was repulsive. Which gets us back to relations with customers. So long as the environment in your organisation is tolerant of taking a patronising, competing or negative attitude to customers, some people will do just that. Continue Reading
Last week, I promised faithfully to keep you fully updated with regard to a new initiative I plan to launch and I am now able to confirm the TheTop10SalesArticles.com should launch on March 5th – Mmmm I hear you ask, complete with quizzical expression, “So, Jonathan give us the sales pitch” OK, no sales pitch as nothing to sell but here are the details:
The primary objective of The Top 10 Sales Articles is to provide an additional location for the very best business authors to showcase their work and benchmark the quality of their writing against that of their contempories.
As a general rule, ten nominations will be posted on the site every Monday and the winner will be announced the following Friday – the winner of the Article Of The Month award will be announced on the last Friday of every month.
Where will the articles be chosen from? I have invited just ten article communities who either specialise in sales and marketing or who have extensive sales related sections within their site, to become founding partners and the ten articles will be drawn from these sites only.
Thus, from March 5th, you will be able to read a review of the very best sales related articles from the previous week, in just one location – exciting stuff! Just one downside – I will never get to be nominated.
Two further in depth articles for you. On the Group site: thejfagroup.com I examine the growth in personal coaching, particularly for business leaders.
“Executives Who Balk At Taking The Journey Of Self Development Could Find Themselves Isolated”
“Traditionally, one of our largest clients ran its business from manuals. Staff who wanted to know how something should be done would be directed by a senior manager “to look in staff manual 108” for the answer. It was not a motivational style of management, and had become unsuitable for fast-changing modern business conditions. So eight years ago, based on our recommendations they created what they called “The ultimate service provision” by merging all the information technology (IT) and back-office functions. Management broke with old habits and traditional training, and decided to improve the leadership skills of the senior managers through coaching.
The outcome has been a resounding success, producing far better results than conventional development training. The evident superiority of coaching explains why more companies are taking the same route and making it a priority.” Continue Reading
And on my personal site: jonathanfarrington.com there is a piece on changing the emphasis and focus away from leadership and back onto the “followers”:
“Moving The Focus Away From The Leaders To The Followers” “Some researchers prefer to move the focus away from the leader altogether and to examine instead what makes others prepared to follow these individuals. In 1988 an important article published in the Harvard Business Review, entitled “In Praise of Followers, began to shift attention away from the machismo of leadership to the less glamorous side of the same equation: the role of ‘followership’.
What the advocates of followership recognised was that to become an effective leader, most people first had to learn how to be good followers. With few exceptions, this is as true of the corporate world as it is of military and political leaders. Aristotle noted: “He who has never learnt to obey cannot be a good commander”. Continue Reading
OK, that’s it - as ever, wherever you are in the world, have a great week - JF