I am your customer, you are my customer. When I need to provide you with something, you are my customer. When you need to do the same for me, I am your customer. I am marketing, you, finance, are my customer when you ask me for data.  I am corporate finance, you, country finance, are my customers. I am R&D, my customer is marketing and sales. I am sales, my customers are the consumers. I am information management, the rest of the company is my customer.

The customer-centric mantra that has been in place for many years has created this muddle. Not pronouncing the word ‘customer’ is so politically incorrect that we tend to pollinate our thinking and our language with it, to make sure we don’t miss it. There is an historical point and reason behind this. Many organizations work in silo mode with low grade cross-communication and cross-collaboration, so, it made sense at some point to inject a bit of ‘consumer mentality’ to make the point that we are all serving each other, in one way or another, within the organization. However, by over customer-izing the language, the real customer gets lost or neglected. There is only one customer, the ones who pays the bill. This is the external customer – an individual in Business to Customer (B2C) a company in Business to Business (B2B). Anything else is muddled thinking.

I encourage my clients to make language choices. The internal “I serve you, you serve me’ may need a different language: call it client, business partner, co-workers, co-dependents, chums, internal service providers… I am playing silly language games here on purpose. Find a way, other than ‘customer,’ so that we can have a real conversation about the real customer. So, a simple rule such as ‘the customer is always external’ could do the trick. Of course, there may be more than one external customer, of course.

Cleaning up internal language is important. Customer-izing the internal organization may be nice and rewarding. It may create a good feeling of cooperation, but it dilutes the external focus. And since many companies spend 90% of their time looking inwards and 10% outwards, a bit of ‘externalization of the customer language’ would do nicely.

A while ago, my brand new iPhone was stolen at the airport, having left it behind on a table for just a few minutes. Clever thief, stupid me! I had just acquired the phone with a data package from my carrier as a bundle. I called my carrier. Since I had a business account, I expected that a handset replacement would be easy to obtain. I did not expect it to be free. I was prepared to pay whatever was required. When I called them and explained the circumstances, they told me repeatedly that ‘it was not their policy’ to replace a phone, even if I paid. The phone came with a package and that was that. One contract, one phone. No provision to have a second one, even if I paid.

His level of sympathy was zero. The ‘It’s our policy not to do that’ was repeated several times by the ‘customer services representative’ at the beginning of each of his sentences, no matter what. When I challenged him that I needed help, not a lecture on their policies, he suggested that I try their competitor! Literally. Because ‘it was their policy not to replace a handset’, of course. Today, I am with another carrier.

But I didn’t go to their competitor at the time, because I decided to call Apple directly. A human being with a Californian accent (I was in the UK) was at the other end in less than a minute, compared with the close to five of my previous experience. I explained the incident in the airport, and how bad (stupid?) I felt. The voice at the other end started to engage with me in a conversation about how dreadful it was to have your phone stolen, how bad one feels, and how having a hard time on this is the last thing one wants on a busy day. And he went as far as saying, ‘I feel sorry for you’. I could not believe it. There was a human being with empathy for my little troubles at the other end of the line and he was truly sympathetic and kind. Had he tried to sell me a fridge I would have agreed. But I bought a new iPhone from him. Before he went off, we chatted about the weather in California and the UK.

In the last weeks, I have tried to book a hotel for a family weekend trip to Ireland. The hotel reservation person told me that, for that particular weekend, they had a policy of not accepting less than 2 nights. I only needed one. I expressed my surprise. I confess I have not encountered this before. ‘Sorry Sir, it is our policy that during these busy weekends, we don’t book for less than 2 days’. I protested, and they suggested that I should write to the manager. So I did. Guess what the manger’s email said?   That ‘it’s our policy’ etc.  I did email the general manager to test if he hired his staff from Robots Anonymous. His reply came with a familiar statement: ‘It’s our policy that’, etc.

These examples of self-centred-not-customer-services are not uncommon. People who are supposed to serve you, don’t listen to you and show zero interested in serving. None of these people at that hotel spontaneously suggested any alternatives to me. But I know a bit more about policies now. And I still think an Apple fridge is a good idea.

These rules apply whether you are an external partner or an internal one.

Rule number 1. Resistance is never universal. There are always pockets of power or pockets of discomfort. How you move them forward is simply an art. There is no such a thing as an entire organization resistant to change. Thinking  that way is a trap. See rule number 10 (but not yet, keep reading)

Rule number 2. The system will always protect itself against solving the problems that it creates. Don’t expect sudden conversions. Turkeys don’t like Christmas. Start where there may be less antibodies. Usually in the edges of the organization, not the core-core

Rule number 3. Don’t overwhelm people with incredibly well-crafted and complex plans. Spend the energy helping them to visualize an attractive outcome that ‘can’t be refused’.

Rule number 4. People who ask for examples of where else something has been done before successfully, don’t really mean that. They mean ‘I need comfort’. If there is a deep discomfort, no number of examples will move them. Comfort can be given in many ways, not just case studies.

Rule number 5. Talk about the cost of not doing something much more than the cost of doing it.

Rule number 6. Your fans may not be your buyers (whether a consultant or an internal partner). Your readers may not be your clients. Your faithful and grateful audience may have no power (both internally in an organization or as external partner)

Rule number 7. This is for external consultants and partners. Be prepared to say ‘you are not a good fit for us, we can’t help you. (Possibly with an added, ‘but we can give you the phone number of our competitors’)

Rule number 8. Whether external or internal partners, never, ever, ever  present a full plan to the entire Leadership Team or Board without having gained previously individual buy-in at least in 2/3 of the members.

Rule number 9.  If you get a super-excited and super-enthusiastic group of people who say ‘this is so good that it should be done across the board, not just us, let’s involve other higher or broader levels’, this is really bad news. Chances are it will never be done.

Rule number 10. ‘Readiness’ is a red herring. Nobody is ever ready. Don’t aim at full rational and emotional convincing of all. That the powers let you start, even if not fully convinced, is 100 times better than waiting for total enlightenment. People become ‘ready’ ( and that includes leadership teams) when they see good things already happening. Readiness is most a post-hoc state of mind.

Bonus rule: Consider this line by Robert A Heinlein (1973): ‘A fool cannot be protected from his folly. If you attempt to do so, you will not only arouse his animosity but also you will be attempting to deprive him of whatever benefit he is capable of deriving from experience. Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig’. Sometimes singing is just impossible, get over it.

 

Yesterday was International Receptionist Day. Perhaps it was buried in a myriad of International Days of Something. But the receptionist is the most  important employee in the company. Together with the guy at the phone in the call centre, the porter, the first nurse you see in an Emergency Department in a hospital, the first shop assistant who either floods you with the most intrusive ‘can I help you?’ and follows you round the shop, or the first shop assistant that looks at you as the enemy and makes you get out as fast you got in. We have a name for these people: front line. A bit of a military term. Well, I have news for you from the front.

If you are at a high position in the company and don’t know what is going on there, you don’t deserve to be at that very high position, It may be that you simply do not do, do not understand front line. Meaning you have never bought airline tickets on the phone, or queued for a cashier in a supermarket, or needed to wait 2 hours in a waiting room in a hospital. Apparently, these people do exist.

Paul Spiegelman and Britt Berrett, who wrote a wonderful book under the provocative title ‘Patients Come Second: Leading Change by Changing the Way You Lead’, wrote this lovely paragraph that made me smile. A lot.

Nobody comes home after a surgery saying , “Man, that was the best suturing I’ve ever seen!” or, “Sweet, they took out the correct kidney!”  Instead, we talk about the people who took care of us, the ones who coordinated the whole procedure – everyone from the receptionist to the nurses to the surgeon.  And we don’t just tell the stories around the dinner table.  We share our experiences through conversations with friends and colleagues and via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

If you don’t know what is happening in the human-to-human interaction in your multiple front lines of some sort, you are missing the most important piece of strategic information. At your peril

In my job as an organization architect, I travel quite a lot and therefore I stay in lots of hotels which food I tend to accept, reluctantly or not. I have come across a lot of well-intentioned food that intends to convert plain fish into a Thai extravaganza. Just recently.

I know of well-intentioned front desks that have called maintenance several times for me and that consider the number of times they have called their index of service as opposed to considering why they had to call maintenance in the first place.

I know of well-intentioned client team members who intended to read the brief but did not have time and expect that their intentions count as comprehension of the substance matter.

I know of well-intentioned leaders who wait and wait and wait to call out bad performance perhaps expecting a sudden conversion and miracle.

I know of lots of well-intentioned people who do their best; just happen that their best is below the threshold of making a difference.

I myself am well intentioned, many times. I am sure.

The question is whether we want a well-intentioned world or a world that works, that changes lives and that enhances the individual.

And I was wondering about this recently, God knows why, in front of that pseudo Thai extravaganza that killed the dish but was well intentionally done by a well intentioned chef.

I supposed we should be grateful for the well intentioned world, considering the alternative. But, no matter what, well intentioned leaders, as well intentioned chefs and front desk people, are playing the game with a level of ambition that does not resonate with me well.

And I mean well, not to offend anybody. I am really well intentioned here.

I’ve been in front of 2000 people in Ecuador last week. Out of 8000, all belonging to a family owned conglomerate. My task was to talk about ‘shaping cultures’. And they have a strong culture indeed. A culture in which 35, bottom-up, employee driven teams across four business units had been working for a year on anything from increasing productivity in a factory, to improving safety, to modifying processes and systems. All internal and bottom up. A joy to watch and to understand.

My task, after all the company presentations, was tough. It was difficult to ‘tell grandma how to suck eggs’, as the English saying tells us. But I tried.

I did share with them my 10, experience based, characteristics of the companies that will succeed and go beyond middle of the ground and survival. I feel very strongly about this list and their potential associated questions – chosen here below only one of many possible

1. They will need a strong future-looking narrative, credible, compelling, anchored on specific values (Q: what is the space in the world that we occupy?)
2. A shared sense of urgency (Q: can it be done faster and better?)
3. For every ‘change’, a clear mind on what is not for change (Q: Going X, this will change; what will not change?)
4. A collective human capital view: ideas know no hierarchy (Q: who knows about this anywhere in the company?)
5. External focus beyond nice words: mastering the ‘seeing and feeling’ of the customer (Q: what would the customer say to this?’)
6. Resilient, and ability to change gears as fast as possible, when needed (Q: Stuck? What’s next, now?)
7. Questioning, inquiring mentality, all over, as if in magically in the water supply (Q: is this the best we can do?’)
8. Learning. From mistakes, for sure (traditional) but more from own strengths (Q: what are we really good at, and how can it get better in dealing with A,B.C?)
9. A sense of community, as supposed to a sense of company (Q: ‘Who is for ‘the cause’ and can jump in any time if needed?’)
10. Strong ‘keeping promises’, from employees to management, from management to employees, and all to customers (Q: Did we really walked the talk?)

(The company, Group Vilaseca, seems to tick all the boxes for me. I swear I did not know about the 5 winning projects before my talk)

This 10, my 10, are not based upon 3000 CEO surveys. But 3000 moments of reflection. In fact, the methodology behind is simple: what are the key traits that I’ve seen again and again in the companies, clients or not, that are really, seriously ahead of the game? AKA, would I buy tickets for that ahead-of-the-game game?

(I am proud to have some clients in this list, ticking all boxes, having all the tickets to buy for that game).

So, I may be biased. But that is why I share these things in my Daily Thoughts. If Daily Thoughts were impartial, objective and unbiased, how would you know what I think? And if you didn’t, what would be point of the Daily Thoughts conversation?

 

 

 

Something went wrong with the room allocation in my hotel. When I arrived on the 3^rd floor with my plastic key, I noticed a conspicuous standing sign in front of the next door room: ‘Team Meeting’. Large hotels, and this was a large five star one, do not have meeting rooms next to guest rooms. Weird.

Nothing happened until late evening when ‘the meeting’ took place, with lots of noise, laughter, music and movement of chairs. I was puzzled, but something in me, including my brain wanting to sleep, convinced me that ‘the meeting’ would stop any minute. Surely. It didn’t’, and went well into the early hours of the morning.

On my second day, I warned reception beforehand. The first reaction was one of disbelief: ‘your room is next door to a guest room, sir’. As if I needed a translation. I politely repeated the problem: ‘it will be addressed immediately’.

It didn’t. The second night was the same. When I checked out, I got the standard ‘was everything ok, sir?’ No, my dear, I have just told you that I have had two nights of wild ‘team meetings’ next door, so, no, everything was not ok’.

24 hrs later, I received a very long email from the manager. It started with full acknowledgement that they got everything wrong, a disaster, nothing could be justified. She was sending a sincere apology and offering me the best possible personalised service next time I stayed. It was a surprise.

I replied with another long email with thanks and more details that they may have overlooked. And she replied again.

She did not twist the arguments, give explanations, excuses or justification. It was full acknowledgement of the fiasco, no matter how much one could justify the bizarre allocation of rooms. She did not even try. She was genuinely sorry, and I could feel, also grateful that I had replied to her email.

I will go back.

I have had another hotel incident just weeks ago in another city and another hotel chain. The sequence and type of disasters were different but equally, if not more, unsettling. On my check out, I was more preventive: ‘before you ask if everything is OK’, I can tell you that A,B,C’.

The manager carried on looking at his screen behind the counter and said, oh, and then, oh, and perhaps a third oh. And then, ‘I have taken 25% off your bill, sir’.

I will never go back to that hotel.

Give me the humans. Robots give discounts.

 

An indepth analysis of the world of ‘Digital Transformation’ shows two things. One is that there is no such thing as ‘Digital Transformation’ as a single domain or relatively well bordered area of expertise and action. In fact, you don’t have to look hard to realise that it is more difficult to find things that do not belong to ‘Digital Transformation’ than the ones that do. ‘Digital Transformation’ seems like a big supermarket with hundreds of shelves full of stuff.

It is unrealistic to expect a ‘single domain’ (area of expertise, and therefore expert) that can seriously contain: going paperless, better customer experience in websites, transforming customer experience, jobs done by software, artificial intelligence, analytics, robots doing human stuff, digital transactions, blockchain, digital/enterprise social networks, mobile technologies, self-service HR systems, real time data, electronic documentation, social media, multi channel services, more sophisticated CRM, automation, faster computing capacities, process (digital) reengineering, and cloud services. And there are still many other supermarket shelves I have not named.

Calling all of these ‘Digital Transformation’ is the equivalent to calling ‘business’ to all you and I do. And finding ‘experts in business’. When clients tell me that they have appointed some people to lead ‘Digital Transformation’, I ask which one.

The other ‘finding’, shocking but not entirely unexpected, is the virtual lack of reference to behaviours. It’s not the first time that technology takes all the airtime and reduces behaviours to a by-product of what technology changes or will change. The mistake is a big one since behaviours are hardly a by-product. It is more the other way around, you need some behaviours in the system to support the digital transformation. These behaviours must be tailored to the objective (since the supermarket has hundreds of shelves) but at the very least they will have to deal with changes from audience (push, customer, information) to community (pull, engagement, reputation); speed; trust and risk (less people involved) and virtual collaboration. And, again, this is just the start. Just a few of the pillars. Each shelf has its own behavioural set.

The most efficient way to deal with that multi-target Digital Transformation is to look at the cultural and behavioural conditions that are needed, perhaps changed, ‘installed’, embedded and spread at a scale, to support it.The behavioural DNA (change ability vs change) will support/must support any of these digital shelves in change. Behaviours are not a by-product, an afterthought. They are the fabric, the tapestry on which everything else works. Starting with behaviours, is a smart move.

 

Every morning in my neighbourhood there is a small window of time when traffic becomes chaotic, slow, painful and frustrating. It’s called the school run. Around here, many kids are taken to school by car, by their parents, adding that traffic to the one of public transport, and school buses for the non-motorized kids. The situation is as predictable as night and day.

The streets in this area are quite typical of an English town: narrow, busy, occupied by tired looking cars tightly parked and hardly suitable for two-way traffic. The English have mastered a silent negotiation of street space with an unwritten driving code of eye contact, followed by the raising of a finger (which means thanks, there are several other types) to decide who goes first. Very civilised but still chaotic. This slow motion is part of the daily morning routine.

At the same time, in the middle of this infuriating and impossible traffic, the local municipal council decides to send the bin lorries out (or garbage trucks, or dustbin lorries, or waste collection vehicles if you want to be more sophisticated). The traffic then transforms itself into a funerary procession with dozens of cars unable to overtake and in slow crawling mode behind that very systematic collection of multi-coloured bins by men in orange or yellow suits.

Why then? Why at that time of the day? Well, it’s a stupid question. They are just doing their jobs, so they need to be respected. It is what it is. The dustmen are doing their jobs, the municipal council is doing its job and the planners of such a clever strategy are doing their jobs. And that is the problem. Doing your job blinds you completely to other jobs, other problems and other people. Even life.

The unpleasant officer at Security in the airport, is just doing her job. The nasty manager having a go at the employee, is just doing his job. The senior leader restructuring on the spot with no warning, no prisoners, is just doing her job. The reader of a script in a call centre asking you impossible questions, is just doing his job. The assistant pharmacist (in the UK) asking what other medicines you are taking when buying that medicine, even if she has no clue about the implications of any answer, is just doing her job.

Have you noticed how many people around you are just doing their jobs, and, implicitly, they are asking you for your acceptance, compliance, obedience, silence, forgiveness and even consideration for their hard work? Have you noticed that most people who are not helpful to you are just doing their job?

I am scared of people just doing their jobs. They usually have no consideration for my job, or your job, or the sum of all jobs. It’s impossible to do a good job if you just do your job.

Manners is an old fashion concept. Courtesy, consideration, empathy with the other? All in one? Manners are the behavioural expression of all of the above.

When you see them, you will appreciate them. Speaking for myself, I am told by reliable external observers, that I am transformed into a mini monster when confronted with lack of them, automatic pilot customer services or robotic, scripted explanations of anything.

A local restaurant, part of a chain, busy night. There is one table left. We were pointed towards it. About to sit, I am told I have to wait 30 minutes for food. I react with puzzlement not about the 30 minutes per se, but the fact that this comes from the sky when I am about to sit down. My puzzlement apparently puzzles the head waiter: ‘Well, don’t you see? We are very busy!’. I can’t describe how I left the place, but I was not nice.

A conversation with very senior health officials in charge of large hospitals. They say the ‘customer centric’ stuff is easy: some patient wards are hell, some are superhuman. Both share the same resources, both in the same hospital, both equally stressful. The key? The Charge Nurse, the nurse at the head. Plant the right ones, and the difference is life or death.

In a transportation Viral Change™ Programme we asked the dispatchers of buses to stop calling people by numbers and learn their names. We went from ‘240, received, how come you late again, 375 could you pick up that kid, 489, not good enough, you both 489 and 673 have to go now to 23 East, pronto’ to talking to Peter, John and Mary. It was not that hard. The bus drivers thought that a miracle had been performed (or brain transplant of the dispatchers). Then, it was not hard to follow with the drivers calling the kids by their names. Versus mmmm, or other noises. Their kids were always the same day after day. It was not rocket science to get to know their names, but that was not how the system worked. Until it changed. Guess what? Some kids started to reciprocate and calling the drivers by their names. OMG, revolution. The humans have landed.

I have written several times about the #hellomynameis campaign started by Dr Kate Granger. It’s not about wearing a badge saying #hellomyname is Peter, although the badge is included. It’s about humanity. But, hey, you get the badge, and you see another hundred around you, and it’s all smiles and introductions to strangers by name. Oh, those humans, how easy is to change them, how stupid is that ‘resistant to change’ stuff.

Get ‘manners’ right (that’s the behaviour), get culture as a consequence (not the other way around)

Consideration, courtesy, empathy, respect, humanity? The culturalist says, get them, you’ll have manners. The behaviourist says, install manners, you’ll get the culture.

It’s both, the Always Is Both People say. But, mmm, you may know by now of which school I am.

Political commentators in the US have argued that Donald Trump’s campaign is a protest one, attracting people who are against things, as opposed to pro something, that is, Republican values. Indeed, the Republican party does not seem to know what to make of many things going on. But the point here is not political, but one of human behaviour. We all are very good at protest, and protest is a great magnet.

Let me qualify ‘protest’. When we run Employee Engagement surveys we take answers as a face value, but an answer may or may not be a true answer. It may be my opportunity to ventilate my anger and annoyance about things that are only collaterally related to the question. We should know that. We know that. But we ignore it and read the scores, because doing anything different will be politically incorrect. After all, we have just invested in the Survey, one that ‘everybody does’, and that is a sign of sound management. (Really?)

Ridiculous feed back forms post-events, that are based upon a desperate an flawed customer worship, ask questions about ‘content relevance’, length of presentations, quality of slides, focus on topic, presentation skills of the presenter, and even ‘expertise’ of the speaker (which magically converts the audience into a panel of expert auditors), but I have hardly ever seen questions about changing your thinking, make you think, aha moments, learning something new, or triggering a different behaviour tomorrow. Those feedback forms are useless as learning platforms and only a source of numerical badges of honour for the organisers. They prostitute the learning event into an entertainment show, and seem to care little about true learning impact.

Many years ago I was invited to speak at a supposedly elite gathering. I had not finished my speech when the organisers started to hand out feed back forms to the tables and delegates started to fill them in. At that point, I ended the talk and walked out of the room. I was younger and less radical. Today I would have stopped as well but asked for a form for myself to rate the audience.

If you want a collective psychotherapeutic and cathartic platform, surveys and feed back systems may do the trick. But don’t automatically associate feed back with learning. They are not married.

To protest, ventilate, whinge and castigate the system, may all be legitimate and sound. As I said before, even therapeutic. The question is are we learning anything? Can we read between lines? Can we interpret the answers?

In any collective action ( and management and leadership are arts of making that happen), the future is built more on pro-something that against-something. Learning comes from many places including mistakes, but not exclusively from mistakes. A list of negatives does not automatically build a positive action plan. Surveys are as good as the questions and how to interpret the answers. The culture of perennial, indiscriminate, automatic pilot feed back, may be disguised as learning but, as in the case of Colossal Employee Engagement Surveys, may end up being a Colossal Distraction that gives us an alibi for harder, tougher, digging in the pursue of the truth.

Perhaps because custumer focus was not enough, we created customer centrism. Apparently this is not enough and we now need Customer Obsession. That’s it. The whole focus of customer-latest for the prestigious research firm Forrester is Customer Obsession. It’s not only Forrester. As a well balanced comment from Ross Freedman ^[1] points out, it’s all over the place.

I think it’s a very bad idea.

I appreciate the semantics and the drive towards serving the customer well, meeting their expectations, and beyond the expectations, and exceeding them, and even in pan-galactic delivery of expectations.

My first question to the obsessed people is, why now? I thought this is at least 40 years old. Why now? Perhaps it’s not the era of Customer Obsession, it’s the era of Customer Fear. Why? Because the customer has choices, many, too many and too digital? Perhaps. Because it can leave you a star in the Trip Advisor or a poor red smiling face at the exit of the toilets in Heathrow airport, or after Security? OK, so you are afraid. Of what? Of the algorithm? Of the target imposed by your boss, not by any customer?

I travel via Heathrow almost every week of the year. I have never asked them to put smiling face electronic dashboards in front of me outside Security and outside the toilets. In fact what I have seen, many, many times is the passenger in front of me being reminded by the security staff that those bottles of water could not go through, sorry, and hitting red face ‘awful security services’ at the exit, in front of me, once both of us have rescued our belt.

I am a customer. I don’t want anybody obsessed with me. I want a human interaction and a decent service. And a decent product and a decent price. If you want to do something for me, you are going to have some trouble ‘exceeding my expectations’ because that assumes that you know what my expectations are. And you don’t. You have never asked me. If you want to do something ‘extra’ for me, here is the tip: surprise me.

I am afraid that the Era of the Customer and Customer Obsessions sounds very desperate to me. A desperation for possessing all data about customers and pleasing above all with not much critical thinking. Being customer obsessed, we could accumulate a thousand good positive reviews of our mediocre product.

Customer feedback is feedback, which includes the word back. No forward
Innovation will not come from customer obsession. Custumers are not the source of innovation. Not today. I don’t know what that happened, but I may have missed that
Culture that is open and embraces the customer will not come from Customer Obsession.
Changing the world will not come from Customer obsession
A fairer society will not come form Customer Obsession
A high purpose for the company will not come from Customer Obsession.
Surprising me as customer will not come from that kind of obsession.

Here is an hypothesis I propose for the Research People: how many companies are there, small and big,  doing an excellent, outstanding, successful, profitable and proud job with customers, and will not consider themselves ‘customer-obsessed?

My bet is that the more obsessed, the more paranoid. Another illness.

‘We are reorganising in Business Units to meet customer expectations’. Actually, not, no customer has called you to ask you to reorganise to meet their expectations. Customers want products, service, cost effectiveness or anything else. They don’t care about your structure, processes, systems and cost cutting exercises.

We are doing lots of things on behalf of the customer, which the customer shouting ‘Sorry, not in my name!’

The following things are not the same:

1. What the customer wants
2. What do you think your customer want
3. What the customer needs
4. What the customer does not even know that he needs, wants or even be possible to do.
5. How the customer may react and you are very afraid of. (Here custumer-centrism is more of a Trip Advisor syndrome)

Industry after industry, people who innovate and succeed go beyond what customers say and need and want.

The old heroic, alpha-male leader, incredibly customer centric and responsive ‘The customer is always right’ is simple nonsense. Actually, the customer may be wrong. No, very wrong. Not even wrong.

But back to the us-centric world, once you have worked out the above 5 customer lines, you’ll start calling a spade-a-spade, or a cat a cat. Reorganization, new business units, cost cutting re-sizing and other, should be right in their own merits. If you need to invoke the customer to justify your rearrangements of the chairs in a potential Titanic, you are in bad shape.

Customer-centrism is a vacuous mantra unless you start unpacking the whole thing and articulate it into behaviours. Until then, it’s a decoy.

1. Customer: buys your product, once, or twice, pays, that’s it. Thanks
2. User: buys your product, once, or twice, pays, uses, you know about it, you learn, you have a conversation.
3. Audience: You push a message, they listen, they like it, or not, go, maybe you get a review.
4. Community: An audience in which people pull each other. They listen, they like it, or not, go, stay, maybe you get a review as well, but eventually it creates a sense of belonging, an identity. It grows. It creates something in common (as in common-unity) with you.
5. Advocates: endorse you, say you are good. Thanks.
6. Ambassadors: endorse you, say you are good, thanks, willing to represent you, take care of your things, big or small. On behalf of you. Your Personal Diplomatic Service.
7. Activists: endorse you, your advocates, and your ambassadors, represent you, do something, again and again, engage with others in a community; above all, they act ( as in act-ivism).
8. Fans: they think you are cool. They don’t have to do anything else other than thinking you are cool. The coolest of them also tell you that you are cool. It’s so cool!
9. Clicktivists: they click ‘I like’ (you, your page)
10. Facebook friends: names in Facebook.

To clarify once more: activists act, advocates talk, ambassadors represent, fans like you, audiences listen, communities manage a ‘commons’, costumers buy, users know you and you know them, clicktivists like you, and Facebook friends also like you but tell you which cereals they have eaten this morning.

The Fundamental Social Attribution Errors (TM pending) are of the type:

You expect advocates to actually do something for you
You expect clicktivists who like you to put money down
You expect fans to come to your rescue
You expect customers to spontaneously create a community of love
You expect audiences to represent you the day after.

Etc.

Of course, of course, of course, how could I forget? There are combinations!

But if you start in the hope of combinations, you may be ready for a shock.

Liking you is not buying you, or giving you money or represent you. Get your social taxonomy right.

If you are in the jungle and you can’t distinguish a lion from a bush, you won’t get your money back from that bad Botanic course.

 

 

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Oscar Wilde

It’s hard to have a conversation about value. It’s easier to have one about price, cost and return on investment. Value is a sum of tangible and intangibles that defy the specific translation into numbers. It’s also subjective. I can see great value on something where you see little of it, yet the cost, the price may be the same.

It’s very healthy to look at value and price/cost at the same time. First together, then unbundling them. There may low cost and high value, or vice versa, or combinations of the two measures.

In the professional services arena, the traditional consulting model, lead by the Big Consulting firms, has destroyed the value conversation by costing and competing on number of people/consultants (bodies), time (number of days) and unit costs (daily rates). That model sells time and bodies, not value. It equalizers time, effort, quality of delivery, and delivery itself. A day is a day. Nowhere else in the contractual world, a day of doing nothing costs the same as day of breakthrough thinking. So, a 100000 contract is composed by so many bodies (consultants) in so much time, at such daily rate. Double the bodies, and the time, you double the cost. And there has always been justifications for sending more and more troupes to the client. This model is broken.

Value consulting is philosophically in the antipodes. It does not understand number of bodies (consultants) or number of days. It understands value delivered and total, fixed costs. Procurement people hate this, and fight this. But, whether you, they, like it or not, value is the only thing that matters.

Similarly, an acquisition can be understood in term of costs, price, multiples of revenue, return on investments, etc., and also in terms of value (strategic, philosophical, enhancement of a platform or capabilities for example). These are two not mutually exclusive, but certainly different categories

We need to reclaim the value conversation in what we do, inside the company, with the market, with professional services providers. It may be hard if you start from zero experience. The comfort zone will always be ‘the numbers’. But pushing the value conversation always pays off. It elevates that conversation to the right level. Paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, yes, there are things that have value and things that have cost. Where to start where to dwell, where to end the conversation, is simply a choice. But The conversations are different.

Reclaim value, get value, put  a cost.

 

There is so much to fix and manage inside the organization that the task could be never ending. Soon, and easy, one could find oneself 90 % or 100% focus on the inside. Inwards management, or whatever you like to call it. It’s a big risk and one almost inevitable.

That is why a constant reminder of the purpose of the organization is needed. Without that, the customer-centrism stuff would be lip services, pharmaceuticals would be run with nobody pronouncing the words health, or patient, or, say, transportation with no mention of customer, other than the number in the spreadsheet. Exaggerating? Perhaps. But the risks of collective ego-centrism are always there and handy.

It’s not enough to bring the customer language in, but it’s a starting point. It’s also about that ‘but what is the purpose?’ question very clear upfront.

In our Viral Change™ Platforms we have often simple behaviours such as asking ‘what would the customer think of this?” or even ‘wait a minute, why are we exactly doing this?’, looking at purpose, high or low. These (disruptive, often in all senses of the word) questions are powerful to redirect the focus from the inside (the navel-gazing/nombrilisme) to the outside.

I am not a fan of Time Management techniques. It’s personal! But very often the breakthrough in this switch of thinking has come when I have asked the client to record what he or she does ( or collectively a leadership team) for a week, and then realized that close to zero time was dedicated to ‘the outside’, whether the client or the high purpose. Although intuitively people tend to know that, being confronted with the ‘recorded reality’ is always shocking.

If the inside competes with the outside, don’t let the self-absorption/nombrilisme win. It’s a battle for which you need to be prepared.

 

 

There is a ‘meeting expectations’ cult in business. It has created its own concept of (customer) services: meet customer expectations, or, better, exceed customer expectations. The cult has been developed without the cult leaders asking too much about the logic, reality, reasonability, irrationality or potential craziness of the expectations that the customer may have. The question is how to meet them, or to exceed them. It seems sometimes ‘at all cost’. After all, the same cult did create the expression ‘the customer is always right’, one of the most outrageous assumptions that business life could embrace.

I can understand the customer area. Sort of. But I have a hard time with this ‘philosophy’ when exported to all aspects of daily business life, resulting in bizarre stereotypes such as starting meetings, some times one on ones, with, ‘what are your expectations?’

Actually, I am bit harsh. That may even be OK (maybe) but once ‘expectations’ have been listed, nobody discusses the pertinence of the expectations, or their relevance, or the potential ability of meeting them. I have yet to see a meeting that starts in that way (and I attend hundreds of them in clients set up) and that, once the expectations are itemised in the flipchart, somebody says: sorry, those expectations are rubbish, or they will not be met, or wrong meeting, or they are unrealistic, or, hey, I did not know tat you were expecting this. No, here we go, lets carry on. Ticked. Next.

Also, only a minority go back at the end of the meeting and check. And then what? Is it a good meeting or a bad meeting because the expectations? What if my expectations were A,B,C and the meeting went in unexpected directions where we learnt X,Y,Z? Does it make it a terrible meeting?

‘Expectations’ is almost always a bad frame, an input an output model that intends well but creates an artificial relationship in the form of transaction: I have something to give you, list what you want. Give and take. I may give you garbage because this is what you want, so here it is. I can even excedd it. Its not up to me to tell you that your expectations seem subterranean.

Nobody (that I now) goes home and says to her husband or his wife: ‘darling what are your expectations for the evening? So I make sure we are satisfied tomorrow morning.

There is an incredible ability for business to adopt Martian language. My recommendation is ‘keep calm and speak normally; this is already 50% of he success of the meeting’.

We do so many things on behalf of the customers! Or because the customers. Or for the customers.

We reorganise, downsize, right-size, do, undo, reshuffle, create a new division, kill an old one, change titles of people, get rid of layers of management, close down the factory, downgrade a country, leave a country, change the CEO, set up a call centre in India, create an Account Management System, build two new Business Units, train a Sales force, buy a CRM, buy two CRMs, buy a more expensive and more friendly CRM, reorganise again and train everybody on Customer-Centrism. We do all that ‘to meet customer expectations’.

It sounds wonderfully customer-centric. Slight problem, no customer has ever asked us for any of these.

What we mean is that we must do things differently, perhaps faster, perhaps cheaper, perhaps in survival mode, perhaps strategically. Let’s call a cat a cat. A downsizing, restructuring, getting rid of a layer of management, for example, may be the right thing to do at a particular time. Do it. It does not need the ‘to meet customer expectations’ to be right.

The customer expects service. The customer sees, smells and hears behaviours. The customer has no interest in your new Standard Operating Procedures, your new CRM, or your brand new call centre. The customer does not care much.

Internally, actually, to add the ‘to meet customer expectations’ in your explanations to the troupes about why you do all that, is not credible, possible laughable and likely to be insulting. At least for some an insult to the imagination.

Say for what it is. Do what you need to do. No apologies. You may not need any. But leave the ‘to meet customer expectations’ at the door even if you believe that, as a result of all these, the customer will win. Good for you if this is the case.

But, as for the customer, hear the ‘not in my name’.