Archive for the 'mission' Category

I was asked 3 questions about contact centres for a website recently and I thought I’d share them with you:

1)         What was the biggest challenge facing the contact centre industry in the last 12 months and how did they overcome it?

Whilst there are sexy new things we’re doing like customer help customer, analytics and new ways of knowledge sharing, its really about  the same old challenges to brilliant operating basics that should be the focus for managers who are making big strides.

TOP OF THE LONG LIST OF INTERACTING BASICS ARE :

• a) Why customers have to contact you at all
• b) How the business model changes to focus on removing unnecessary contact, driving excellence in self service and engaging the whole business in removing root causes of frustrations and listening to feedback and intelligence from the contact points
• c) Operating effectively to meet demand
• d) Understanding what knowledge the website and staff need to answer customer needs
• e) the role of contact centres in providing feedback and intelligence to the rest of the business; and how to get the mountains of customer feedback gathered around the business to be useful

 2)         What are the key issues you expect the industry to be tackling in the next 12-18 months?

• a) Embedding new business wide processes that remove at least 20% of unit costs every year  by using feedback and what front line staff know to drive change
• b) The move to customer help customer model causing the role of contact centres to change rapidly
• c) The same ones as before on brilliant basics of running contact centres and self service channels

 3)         Could you give us some insights on how companies can stop doing stupid things to their customers and the benefits it is bringing to their organisations?

Our mission is “How do we stop doing dumb things to our customers and our people?” so we have lots to say on this topic. If I can paraphrase the question – the most successful businesses are removing things systematically by installing and embedding new company-wide management processes based on a different kind of data. The least successful businesses keep kicking off analysis and then generating projects to fix things: we call this “it’s raining projects”. The least successful businesses are swamped with the feedback they request from customers, but don’t act on. For more contact peter.massey@budd.uk.com or take a look at www.budd.uk.com

Customer satisfaction, Voice of the Customer, customer experience, feedback, listening, mission, self service, the best service is no service | No Comments

The ECSM conference last week in London was a great hit. And so it should be with speakers like Michael Eisner of Disney and gurus Peter Senge and CK Prahalad. Nice to see someone going full out for quality of content rather than pandering to the sponsors.

One of the highlights for me was that CK, the “world’s premier strategy guru” talked about co-creation of business value and new virtual organisations being the powerful place to be. Having being delayed by British Rail I only know this because Phil Dourado intro’d my talk, on Amazon’s Skyline and WOCAS processes, by explaining how we in Budd and LimeBridge already did what CK was predicting. We created a global organisation of immense value to clients in the UK and overseas without traditional thinking or structures.

I really looked forward to seeing Peter Senge talk. His book ‘The Fifth Discipline” is the absolutely seminal work on systems thinking – thinking about the whole rather than 20th century management’s habit of breaking things into accountable pieces. Then wondering why the whole doesn’t work to customers satisfaction ie why dumb things happen. He created a language for explaining gut feel, for intuition, for delayed reaction and for personal performance.

“To measure is to fragment” was one of his mantras.

His plea was that “It’s all about the customer” is far too simple a statement. Its about everything if you are to be about the customer. He touched briefly on the importance of passion and purpose – the topic I spoke about later. In fact we should soon have some video clips from this talk on our passion, from the PPF event in Dublin a few weeks ago.

His major message was to foster 3 core learning capabilities to succeed in a world where complexity is acceptable :
Aspiration: personal mastery and shared vision
Reflective conversation: mental models and team learning
Understanding complexity: systems thinking

He did get a bit carried away on the world being at a tipping point, there being 40x more CO2 than at any time in the last half million years. It could be all about to end but heh don’t say he’s right til its over….. Luckily, as the saying goes ‘you can relax, the world’s not going to end today, its already tomorrow in Australia’

gurus, mission, unified business | No Comments

Radio 4’s You and Yours programme picked up on our mission “how do we stop doing dumb things to customers” today and included our sound bite. How do you sum up the answer to customer experience in 15seconds?

The thing to do is to recognise that customers know what’s wrong, so listen to them and act on it. Short and sweet eh?

You and Yours are looking to reward good service by accepting nominations which they’ll broadcast on air. Today’s were:
Nat Savings & Investments’ call centre
A lady in New Maldon post office

To keep nominations coming in, they ask you send them via: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/youandyours/youandyours_contact.shtml

dumb things, good things, mission | No Comments

Just a quick thank you to all of you who didn’t notice we were scrooge like with the Xmas cards (again !) . We gave the money to a charity called Odyssey www.odyssey.org.uk which “enhances the quality of life for people with cancer through imaginative programmes of challenging and dramatic activities using the outdoors”.

Hope your mission statement is as useful as theirs…if not change it! If you can’t change the world, get another mission…well, 23rd January is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year.

Seriously, some mission statements can, at best, be called fatuous….. They don’t need to be. Look hard at what turns your people on, what changes their world, where the stretch is. Does your mission do it for them?

Our mission? Thought you’d ask that: “How do we stop doing dumb things to our customers and people?” We’ve been at it a while now – hard yards, but inspiring stuff !

charity, mission | No Comments