“We have a problem. Our staff turnover is quite high; our people make many mistakes and do not take any initiative. Moreover it seems to be impossible to hire an…
Waiting for the next “great innovative product idea” may never get you one step closer to a higher level of customer satisfaction, more revenue and consistent business growth. Instilling an innovative mind-set facilitated by some simple creativity tools that are supported by empowerment does. Innovate – every day.…
When times are a bit tougher, we still have the memories of the terrific times everyone could experience in the past. One of my best moments? Being a volunteer at Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games. What a collection of memories……
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).
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One day I was asked why I left the stable, “money-printing” ISO 9000 business to join the riskier Six Sigma environment. My explanation went something like this: “Well, I think it makes more sense to implement a real business improvement and management system than to hang a nice certificate in the CEO’s office.”…
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.…
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.
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, the strategy deployment, into…
Ting is a sophisticated traditional Chinese character that exemplifies the most important activity related to customer service in an impressive way: Listening. The old Chinese already knew that by listening you open your ears (not the mouth), you treat the speaker as a king, focus wholeheartedly with 100% attention.…
Two weeks after joining Central Bank in Germany, I spend a full week in the so-called Black Belt Training by TE Capital Europe. Black Belts are the project managers for process improvement approaches at TE. This approach comes from Motorola and is called Six Sigma. The first two weeks in the new company, I have tried to understand Six Sigma and to learn about the methodology and steps, after I got somehow familiar with TE Capital and its terminology, our banking products and our bank itself. While my new colleagues could help me with the latter, the learning of Six Sigma seemed to be an unsuccessful venture, as nobody in my bank had more than a hunch about it.…
A team spends months on improving customer-facing branch processes of a bank. After benchmarking with sister companies across the world and after carefully mapping out process steps they come up with an improved flow that drastically reduces the processing time for branch customers. It surely looks like a nice success story. However, they get devastating feedback from the customers whilst piloting the solution in five branches. Why? …
There are several invaluable lessons learnt during the different phases of YOG. A significant task has been the recruitment, preparation and motivation of more than five hundred staff and of more than twenty thousand volunteers within a timeframe of less than two years.
It is not new that recruiting people means evaluating, finding skills and experience that make up the eligibility – the aptitude – on the one hand and the suitability – the attitude – on the other hand. However, it is commonly much easier to evaluate the former in detail whilst neglecting the latter.…
I was chatting with a friend of mine who is in a senior leadership position. He wanted to implement a relocation strategy and he mentioned that based on his intuition all the processes should move to a particular country.
I asked him whether he knew why the processes were where they were today. His answer: “What for? How does it matter?”
I was taken aback and puzzled by the question and I remained speechless. Not because I did not know but the questions were bizarre.…
Architect of High-Performing Organisations
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