He talks about how business is good at dealing with the symptoms of a problem rather than the cause of the problem.

I’m sure we all have examples of where this has occurred in our business experience.

This was reinforced to me today when one of Australia’s life insurance companies introduced their version of an electronic life insurance application.  Rather than completing a paper-based version, I can now sit with clients, ask them questions and the program will add or remove questions based on their answers.  At the end of the process the program can actually make an underwriting decision and approve the policy.

This is a great idea – think of the time it will save us.  In the old method we had to photocopy the application before we sent it.  It would have to be manually entered at the insurer’s end (with the potential for mistakes).  It was then placed in a queue for an underwriter to look at.  The process involved a lot of different people, and was time consuming.

An electronic application makes the process faster.  And that’s important in the financial planning world.  Once we have a client agree with our recommendations for insurance, we want to get the cover in place as quickly as possible.

So what’s the problem?

From the insurer’s point of view, they’ve introduced a new process that speeds up the decision-making process and gets business approved faster.

But not everything can be underwritten electronically.  There are still some instances where we’ll need to use a paper-based application.  And that takes time.  The problems that previously existed are still there.  The inefficiencies haven’t changed.

Perhaps the positive outcome is that if more applications are being processed electronically, this actually frees up the administrative staff so they can process the paper-based applications faster.

Only time will tell.

I’m happy that they’ve introduced a system that makes my job easier.  And I’m happy that they’ve chosen an electronic solution (the more automated you can make a process, the lower the error rate).  I’m just not looking forward to the next time I need to lodge something manually.  It’s then that I’ll discover whether they’ve fixed the problem, or just shaved the bear.

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A couple of weeks ago she stayed in a hotel in Sydney.  A few days after checking out she received an email from the hotel asking her to complete a short survey to provide feedback about her stay.  The survey asked all the usual questions and asked her to rate various aspects of her experience.

She told me that she was happy with the stay at the hotel.  Nothing went wrong, nothing bad happened – it was just a ‘usual’ night at the hotel.  In the survey she rated all aspects of her stay highly except for one. 

She elected to have breakfast in the room and mentioned on the survey that the toast was a bit soggy and bent.  If you’ve ever ordered room service you’ll know this is a reasonably common experience, usually because of the time it takes from when your meal is prepared to when it is actually delivered.  Of course there can also be a further time lag from when it’s delivered to when it’s consumed.

The soggy toast wasn’t a big issue – she’s used to it happening and only mentioned it because they asked if there was anything they could improve on.

A few days later she received a letter from the hotel manager thanking her for the feedback, and apologising for the soggy toast.  It goes without saying that she was very impressed with the responsiveness of the hotel and the effort they took to respond to her feedback.

A few points we can learn from this story.

1. Always ask for feedback.  I’ve stayed at the same hotel and received the same survey.  It’s not something they do sometimes, it’s something that happens automatically, all of the time.
2. If you worked in the hotel and knew that every guest would have the opportunity to rate their experience, you’d make sure your customer service was as good as it could be.  What gets measured gets done!
3. When you receive feedback, show the customer that you’re listening.  They did this by sending my friend a personalised letter acknowledging her feedback.  She made it clear that the soggy toast wasn’t a big issue, but the hotel has shown that if it was important enough for her to comment on, then it’s important enough to apologise for.
4. Always ask customers about things you can improve on.  She likes staying in the hotel and was happy with her experience.  If she was upset about the toast she would have said something.  By asking the question in the survey the hotel is finding out about things that are less than ideal, but aren’t bad enough to make guests complain.
5. Poor experiences are a good opportunity to exceed client’s expectations.  I’ve said it before on this blog that if there’s a breakdown in service, it provides you with an excellent opportunity to exceed your client’s expectations by fixing things.

My friend is looking forward to staying at this hotel again.  She’ll make sure she orders room service and I’m sure she’ll check the toast!

What can we learn from this?

• Do you have a formal client survey program?
• Does it ask the right questions?
• What happens when you receive bad feedback?

Let me know what you think.

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1. How To Apologize

There’s a few around the city where I live, and I’m always fascinated about whether they’re accurate.  I couldn’t tell you if they displayed the correct temperature, as I can only guess what it is when I’m out driving, but I can tell if the time is correct or not.

You’d be surprised how many of these clocks display the incorrect time.  They may be a few minutes fast or slow, or sometimes they’ve forgotten to change the clock for daylight savings time so it’s either an hour fast or slow.

I don’t know how your mind works, but when I see that the time is wrong, then I immediately assume the temperature is wrong also.  I don’t know how the machines work – the two functions are probably totally separate and there’s no logic in my thought process, but it’s the way I think.

It also goes a bit deeper.

If your clock is wrong, what does it say about your business?  Do you lack attention to detail?  Do you not care about being accurate?  Do you not even notice that it’s wrong?

When it comes to selling services, I’ve mentioned before how there are a lot of intangible elements to what you sell and clients look for cues that give them confidence that you can provide value.  They look at how professional your premises look, how good your marketing material is, how you present yourself and whether you do the things you promise to do.

Of course, there are some things that clients can test and make judgement on – it’s the same thing as being able to check that the time is correct on the clock outside. 

• Are you on time for appointments?  If your clients (or prospects) are seeing other professionals they’ll compare you to them.
• Did you do the things you said you would?  Are you reliable?
• Were your staff polite?  In this case remember ‘polite’ is measured by the client’s standards, not yours.
• Do your written documents contain spelling errors?

Have a think about your profession and make a list of what the ‘clocks’ are in your business.  What are the little things that tell the clients a lot about your business?  How important is it to get them right?  How do you check that they remain right?

As always, I’m interested in your feedback.  Also, if you enjoyed this article, please tweet it!

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They both differed on the details, but here’s the main points they raised:

• Both aimed for at least 12 touches a year.
• The touches had to be meaningful.  Producing blog articles are too generic and don’t count.
• They had a schedule so all clients in a particular segment received a similar level of attention – they didn’t just focus on their ‘favourite’ clients.
• Some of the touches involved phone calls.  These could be a ‘how are you going’ call which was just a chat with no hidden agenda.  Other phone calls were more targeted – ‘I’m ringing to talk about ….’.  These calls were relevant and tailored to the needs of the client.  The phone calls were sometimes made by the planner, other times different staff members made the calls.  This helps to stop the client only wanting to deal with one person.
• Other touches included newsletters, invitations to seminars and workshops and targetted mailouts aimed at the specific segment or demographic. 
• One firm sends out copies of relevant newspaper articles – either finance-related articles that are suitable for the client or articles about something they’re interested in.
• They both sent out birthday cards.  Planners I’ve spoken with have mixed views on this, but these speakers said their clients loved receiving them. 

I came away from hearing these speakers and I felt challenged about how I could do this in my financial planning business.  I care about my clients and want to make sure we have plenty of contact with them, but I don’t want it to appear insincere.  We’re working on building a contact schedule that takes some of the ideas above plus some of our own to ensure we touch our clients in a meaningful way.  We don’t want to seem too overbearing, but we don’t want our clients to feel neglected.

How many touches do you think are necessary?  Are there examples of you’ve seen where a business has kept in touch in a regular manner without it appearing to be over-the-top?

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I’ve blogged before about how service breakdowns will happen from time to time – they are to be expected when you rely on people to deliver your service.  The interesting thing is that service breakdowns are opportunities – they provide an opportunity to recover from the breakdown and exceed your customer expectations. 

I remember during my MBA reading an article that explained how if you just deliver the service you’ve promised, you’ll meet your client’s expectations.  Exceeding them requires more.  And sometimes when things go wrong, you have the opportunity to not only make things right, but exceed your client’s expectations of the service they were expecting.

The other interesting thing about this video is that it’s heartfelt.  It’s not great quality, there’s no script, but that’s what makes it great – it’s real!  I wonder how much more business the Domino’s store could get as a result of this video.

Anyway, have a look at it yourself and let me know what you think.

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1. Effective Client Surveys from a Hotel

Example 1

I was doing some work for a client that required us to get some articles approved by an external compliance area.  They were simple articles that only provided a general overview of the subject matter.  For legal purposes I didn’t want the articles to provide too much detail.  The first set took 6 working days to get approved and came back with an email saying sorry for the delay, but pointing out that the service standards allowed for these approvals to take 5 working days so they were really only a day late.

Example 2

In the financial business we deal with a couple of insurance companies.  We lodge applications for life insurance with these insurers. 

Both companies have internal service standards with regards to the amount of time it takes them to process the application, have it looked at by an underwriter and then send us an email letting us know the status of the application.  Both companies tell us they regularly meet their internal benchmarks i.e. they’re achieving their service standards.

However, one company can process things inside 48 hours, the other takes over a week.  Remember, both are hitting their internal benchmarks.  The second company thinks it’s doing well based on its internal benchmark, however I don’t judge it based on it’s internal benchmarks, I judge it based on my experience with similar companies and the reality is that it is not competitive compared to its opposition.

Lessons We Can Learn

In the first example, it frustrates me that service standards are used to cover up inefficiencies in business processes.  When we send an email with content to be approved, someone at the other end needs to open that email, read the article and decide whether it needs to be referred to a technical or legal area for further checking and verification.  If it doesn’t need to go to those areas, why can’t that person spend another 10 minutes checking the article and approving it? 

What currently happens is that it gets opened, checked and then placed in a queue to be checked later.  To me that’s inefficient.  If you’ve got it open then action it.

The second example highlights the danger of not having your internal benchmarks aligned to external benchmarks.  Always make sure your benchmarks are relevant to the people they affect.  If they affect your clients, then find out what your clients expect and make sure you can meet their needs.

Do you have service standards in your business?  Are they relevant?  Do your clients know about them?  Leave a comment and let us know.

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I’m at a work conference staying in a resort in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia.

I’ve heard some great speakers today and there are more lined up tomorrow so over the next few weeks I’ll blog about some of the things I’ve learnt.  But today, I want to blog about my experience at the resort.

I’ve blogged before about how delivering service is like putting on a performance - if it’s not rehearsed well, it can go badly.  Well, there have been a few elements to this hotel stay that haven’t gone too well that possibly could have been avoided.  Here are some examples, and some ideas to stop them happening in your business.

You need good staff to deliver on your promise

There’s two aspects to this point – having good staff and having enough staff.

Here’s some interesting events:

• When we initially arrived, we went straight into our sessions until 5.00pm.  We then went to check in to discover the hotel only had one staff member working at reception – there were over 50 of us.  So checking in took a little longer than it should have.  And the hotel didn’t create a good first impression.
• At breakfast they had insufficient staff to clear the tables.  At one stage it looked like over 60% of the tables were empty, but hadn’t been cleared.  I had no option but to sit at a table with someone else’s dirty plates.
• During the breaks in our sessions, there were a couple of times that no staff came into the room to clear the rubbish, top up the water etc. 

Sorry if I’m stating the obvious, but they know in advance how many guests they have staying there so you’d think they could get the staffing right.

Check the premises

In our meeting room I looked up at the light shade and saw a ‘Happy Birthday’ balloon sitting on top of it, right up by the ceiling.  It was obviously left behind from a previous function and the room wasn’t cleaned properly.  I’m a big believer in using checklists for delivering services.  If someone had a list of things to check off, they would have been reminded to check the light shade.

In the room

My room doesn’t have a clock radio, or any kind of clock.  Strange for a hotel room.  It also doesn’t have a list of internal phone numbers, so if I wanted to phone reception to enquire about getting a clock or a wakeup call, I don’t know what number to call.

I’m also a little frustrated with the room cleaner.  There’s a sign that tells me to leave in the bath any towels I want cleaned and to hang up any ones I want to re-use.  This morning I’ve hung my towel up on the towel rail together with my bath mat so I can use them again tomorrow.  I come back to the room tonight and they’ve been replaced with new ones!

Don’t tell me you’re going to do one thing, but then do the opposite.  One of the key elements of delivering good service is being reliable and doing what you say you’re going to do, not saying one thing and doing another.

Deliver on your promise

When you look at this resort on the web, it looks great.  And it is.  It’s in a great location and has great facilities.  But good service isn’t just about looking good; it’s about delivering on your promise.  And this place hasn’t delivered on its promise.

Reflection

Have a think about the areas I’ve highlighted her and think about the equivalents in your business.  Are there areas involving staff that you can improve on, or processes or service delivery?

Leave a comment and let me know what you think.  And if you’re reading on Twitter and like this article, could you re-Tweet it please?

 Photo credit The Edinburgh Blog

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The other night eating dinner we had an interesting experience which relates to running a business (it does….I promise).

My youngest son is usually pretty slow in eating - generally he’s the last to finish his evening meal. 

But the other night, things were different.  We were talking about what we did during the day etc, and didn’t notice how quickly he was eating.  He finished before the rest of us had half eaten our meals.

And the second he finished, he picked up the stopwatch that was sitting on the table next to him, stopped it, and announced that it had only taken him 7 minutes and 22 seconds to finish his tea.  Up to that point, we hadn’t noticed the stopwatch and hadn’t noticed how well he was eating.

When I was doing the MBA one of the phrases I learnt was ‘what gets measured gets done’.  It’s true and my son proved it.  You see, he’s a numbers freak.  He’s just started school and can do maths that kids a few years older would struggle with.  He gets motivated by timing himself.  If I want him to have a quick bath, I’ll let him know I’m timing him.  If we want him to get dressed quickly, we’ll time him. 

For my son, time is a measure that motivates him.

In business, there are measures that can lead to success.  In a service business there are certain activities you do that can lead to certain desirable outcomes.  An activity could be something like a phone call or writing a proposal.

One thing I learnt many years ago is that you can’t completely control the outcomes of your activities, but you can control the activity that you do.  In the financial planning business, we’re measuring things like the number of calls we make, new client referrals, number of financial plans we produce etc.  I know that if we’re doing the right activities, the results will follow.

I know that if we measure these figures weekly, I’m more motivated to make sure they happen, and less likely to put them off.  And I know that each of these figures has an impact on the other.  If we’re not calling people we don’t get enough appointments.  If we’re not doing enough appointments, we’re not writing financial plans.  And if we’re not producing financial plans, we’re not making money.

So what are the things in your business that need to be measured? In the blogging world you may measure the number of posts you produce, the number of comments you make on other blogs, the number of pillar articles you write etc.  These are all activities that you can control.  You can then measure the outcomes of those activities i.e. new subscribers or visitors to your site.  Over time you’ll begin to see how the various components influence each other, and you’ll have a better idea of what you need to do to achieve your business goals.

Have a think about your business.  What are the things you need to measure that lead to success?  Let us know what the relevant things are for your business.

Photo credit wwarby

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