Just some weeks ago, I filed my tax in Singapore. It took me about twelve minutes at my computer at home on a Sunday afternoon in April. It was not straight forward, I needed to make some amendments and additional inputs to what IRAS had already prepared for me. Yet, it was really easy to understand, very effortless to do and I have the strong feeling I did not make a mistake. Twelve minutes. Really.…
Nearly all medium-size and large companies spend hundreds of thousands or even millions on customer surveys every year. Customer survey results serve to amend strategies, design new products and services and focus improvement activities. Gathering customer survey data is only the first step. The second step involves making best use of the expensive data, analysing them, drawing business relevant conclusions and making important decisions. How are we doing in this step?…
Your staff members complain about having too much work. The proportion of people on short-term sick-leave is consistently above average. And, the turnover rate is disturbingly high. Do these symptoms indicate that you need to increase your staffing? However, the average number of daily transactions processed shows that your staff should be able to easily handle the volume. Comparing takt time and processing time does not lead to any obvious issue. So, what is the problem?…
Strategic workforce planning is the process of matching workforce demand and supply over a foreseeable time period. Organisations conduct workforce planning that builds upon quantitative activities such as headcount planning and workforce analytics, and use these data as part of qualitative decisions to support and implement organisational strategies.
Whenever I entered the management team meeting at MyBank, I had my state-of-the-art PowerPoint pitch showing the performance of each department and its core processes as part of our dashboard. Every month, we got the latest underlying data together, aggregated them and displayed an overall dashboard of how the business was doing. With that, we had a clear Line-of-Sight.…
“Why do we need a Competency Profiling? We have SOPs. That should be enough” was one of the statements I heard from a colleague. Here is some rational explaining why there is usually an added value in having competencies defined in addition to Standard Operating Procedures (SOP).
Spending some days in Nanjing, the former capital of China, is enjoyable. People are nice, work is fun, food is outstanding and my hotel is awesome. Nowadays, the service in most hotels in China is world class.
Competency Profiling starts with Understanding the Job
Monday morning I make my way to the restaurant, expecting my usual sumptuous breakfast. I am greeted with a smile and with the usual dialogue:
“Good morning, sir. Your room number, please” requests the waitress with a sweet smile. I answer 1326.
“Smoker or non-smoker?” I opt for the first one.
“Tea or Coffee?” I answer this one as well and start toasting my bread.
On Tuesday morning, it is nice to meet the same waitress with the same sweet smile.
“Good morning, sir. Your room number, please” she wants to know again. I did not expect her to remember, of course.
“Smoker or non-smoker?” I answer as well.
“Tea or Coffee?” I answer this one, irritated.
Wednesday morning the same waitress, the same questions.
On Thursday and Friday exactly the same procedure.
I am very sure it was always the same girl. And, I am very sure I was always myself staying in the same room, being violent non-smoker who always likes coffee with milk in the morning. And I would bet she must have recognised me from Tuesday onwards. I just assume she was following her procedure and was not willing to think one step beyond.
She knew her procedure. No doubt. Even with a smile. However, I gave her a not so pleasant rating when I checked out. She was the wrong person for the job.
A friend mentioned the following story to me.
She arrived in her hotel in Myanmar on Sunday in order to work the following week. The hotel was ok. It was clean and nice but not really comparable to hotels she was used to. She went for breakfast on Monday morning and was greeted by the waiter. The waiter asked the usual questions that seemed to come from the worldwide handbook for hotel waiters. This waiter, dressed in a not perfectly clean suit, was not too busy so that he started a small talk with my friend.
“How did you sleep”, was one of his questions – in starter English. And my friend hesitated but replied truthfully that her night was not that good. Just by the way, she mentioned that her pillow was too hard.
When she returned from her client meeting, she was truly surprised. On her bed she found two additional pillows with different height and filling. Exactly what she needed. I am sure this little deed resulted in a nice tip for the waiter upon check-out.
Competency Framework and SOP Working Together
We do not know what the SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for the waiter in this hotel says – if they have an SOP. I do not believe it instructs him to do what he did for my friend. If he got an SOP it was surely for waiters, not for chamber maids.
SOPs describe how a task has to be performed – often step by step. Competencies describe knowledge and skills needed to perform this task. Additionally, they formulate requirements towards attitudes to apply knowledge and skills. Competencies describe WHAT it takes to complete a job successfully with the “HOW” to do it. This HOW is of less importance when the job is about repairing a car, for example. However, it is of paramount significance if the performance has to be shown in the service line of business.
SOPs and competencies combined can help delivering the best results. Job competencies often take over the instructional task of SOPs in case SOPs are lacking substance or don’t exist at all. If it serves the purpose, why not? Investing in Competency Profiling may add value to performance management as well.
Performance is achieved through application of knowledge and skills with the right attitude. The waitress in Nanjing did her job, but was lacking exactly this attitude whereas the waiter in this second class hotel in Yangon did. He displayed competencies we could summarise with Customer Orientation, Collaboration and Teamwork as well as Alignment with Organisational Values.
He sincerely listened to customer needs and translated them into actions. This attitude is completely unlike the usual “How are you?” for which no one really wants an answer. Furthermore, he showed a great degree of Collaboration and Teamwork by helping his colleagues to satisfy the needs of their customers – beyond his own scope of work. And, he exhibited his organisational values, probably without even knowing.
His mind-set made the difference between poor rating and commendation by customers.
Lean application outside of the manufacturing sector is frequently met with scepticism. Oft cited reasons are that service providers do not ‘manufacture’ anything and that there is no ‘production line’ to speak of physically. All that is seen are desks, chairs, phones and computers.…
“Voice of the Customer” – VOC in short – is a key topic in all kind of customer service, TQM or Lean Six Sigma training and related project work. There are two main categories for VOC data, reactive and proactive. Firstly, proactive data is collected with methods like focus groups, interviews, observations, surveys or test customers. Secondly, reactive data is mainly based on customer complaints, feedback, hotline data or warranty claims. The nature of the human being restricts itself almost always to negative comments through reactive data channels.
Value Complaints – They Carry Valuable Information About Your Processes
Asking staff working in customer service departments about the nature of the feedback they receive from customers will result in answers like “No-one calls to tell us how good we are in delivering our service. Most of the calls – that are not questions – are more or less strong complaints.” On the one hand, this sounds frustrating, “not fair”. On the other hand, “negative feedback” is very powerful due to the fact that someone takes the time and tells us what goes wrong in our processes, hence shows us opportunities for getting better, for getting more competitive, for growing. The quality of this kind of information is usually much better than the feedback received via proactive channels like surveys due to the fact that respondents of surveys do usually not have a stake in the issue.
How do YOU feed back?
Reactive
The other day in Singapore, I had a small complaint about an SBS bus driver who did not really respect me cycling my way on the road. After getting home I took some time to recap what happened and wrote a very detailed letter to SBS to explain the situation.
Proactive
After I spent some days in a hotel in Batam, I received a survey form I needed to fill in before leaving the hotel. Did I fill it in? Make a guess…
Customer research studies in the German financial industry some years ago have shown, that complaints normally reveal only the “tip of the iceberg”. Receiving 50 complaint letters means we get only the feedback from those people who take the time and the courage to complain. Hence, there might be about 1250 customers out there who experience a similar situation but do not complain. May be they go immediately to our competitor if they have a chance. We may never find out. Furthermore, the research has shown that there might be as much as 10 times more negative contact points with our company – like “Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line.” These negative incidents are not “big enough” for a complaint but always impactful enough to drive customers’ decision sooner or later.
Welcome complaints! As long as you get complaints someone is interested in your service and wants to help you improving. Behind each complaint you can expect as much as 25 times the situation that has led to the complaint and as much as 250 negative “Moments of Truth” with your company. Use this valuable and powerful information for taking actions. And, give positive feedback, too!
The Moment of Truth is the short time frame when a customer experiences the product or service that many people have prepared often over many months. It is the moment when a small, often unintentional mishap has the huge potential to spoil the result of hard work by others in the organisation behind the scenes. Good process managers know this and put their focus on the Moment of Truth.
The Moment of Truth
When Jack Welch explained his view on management he used to draw a company structure against the common understanding upside down. His explanation went somehow like that:
Who is the most important person for our company? It is our customer. Consequentially, the people who make or break every day’s business are the people who interact most with our customer, our front line staff. The crucial job of the lower management is to make sure their team members at the customer interface have everything they need in order to serve, to impress and to delight the customer. Every level of management has to support their team members with this purpose. My job is to ensure everyone in my company is able and willing to do his best for this objective.
For many of us this is not really new. However, the number of managers – call them process managers – who really go to Gemba for experiencing the Moment of Truth is marginal.
Is it not enough to ask your staff what is going on at the ground level, what happens at the moment of truth? Well, it would if they knew. And, it is a very normal human tendency that information gets “filtered” when it is passed from hand to hand, from level to level. Often there is a factor of guesswork added to the information.
Only an hour after running a very simple role-playing process simulation, the 20 managers involved in the process are asked to state the time spent on their own process steps. They merely have to guesstimate the duration for their direct involvement – a non-challenging task, one would assume. To everyone’s surprise the actual time measures more than 300% of the time estimated by the group of managers. Hence, it is not enough to estimate or guess. You need to measure in order to know.
Does this only apply to processes that are new to managers? Not at all. A Lean Six Sigma team’s project focusses on reducing the lead time for treating the customer at a routine service process. During an interim project presentation, the manager who has been directly responsible for that process for many years raised his voice after the team revealed data about the time needed to attend to the customer. He doubted the data; he could not believe that the process took as long as presented. Of cause, the team members were able to show facts… Hence, if you run a process for years, it does not automatically mean you know what happens on the ground. Customers and employees change. And so do processes.
Gemba is the place where your product or service is received and applied. You cannot learn about the Moment of Truth, the usage of your offerings and how well you are able to meet customers’ expectations by conducting an annual survey or by issuing some evaluation forms.
CEOs like American Express’ Kenneth Chenault know about this. He is said to spend time in American Express call centres to pick up calls from customers and listen to their requests. He surely cannot change the customer service level by answering some calls every now and then. However, he walks the talk. As a leader, he knows how important it is to observe and focus on what is critical to customers during the Moment of Truth. And, he expects his employees to “have it in their DNA”.
The former CEO of Singapore’s Alexandra Hospital, Liak Teng Lit, used to host a monthly lunch for a focus group of patients who had just gone through Alexandra’s service. He wanted to hear them out about their experience at the Moment of Truth. This way he learned about hospital processes and how his customers perceive them. Whenever possible, he would look into improving things. .
For managing a process successfully it is essential to know the details about the process. This can only be achieved by a set of carefully crafted instruments put in place:
And, don’t forget going to Gemba from time to time to observe what happens at the Moment of Truth. The purpose of this is two-fold: Firstly, it helps you getting real information from the ground regularly. Secondly, it sends the right signal to your team members, your colleagues and, last but not least, to your customers.
Moreover, it is very likely that you learn something new about your processes.
Developing a compelling vision and mission statement as well as a sound strategy is vital for any organisation. Equally important is the translation of the strategy into the day-to-day business. This step becomes even more critical for multi-national companies with their need for regional adaptation and alignment with corporate at the same time. So, how do we make sure our mid- and long-term plans – developed in the head quarter – make sense to business leaders and employees in other regions?…
Architect of High-Performing Organisations
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