Innovative Express
"Improving effectiveness by making the complex simple and making the simple work!"
April 2007
In this issue:
Hi Abhay,
I hope this newsletter finds you well.
An expanded article based on last month's newsletter published this week in The Business Journal in Phoenix. It discusses the defensive posture training departments have assumed in many organizations. Training is often sent to the chopping block first and rounded up like "the usual suspects." The article identifies ten obstacles for training departments trying to solidify their positions and explains how to overcome them.
Many companies would have you believe that excellent customer service is right up there with motherhood and apple pie. So who would intentionally alienate their customers? You would have to be crazy to do that. However, if you look closely, oftentimes the actions belie the grand pronouncements. Professional service providers like lawyers, accountants, architects, and, yes, consultants too are no exception. They end up creating a customer dynamic that creates resentment instead of loyalty. Crazy as it sounds, the current issue of Innovative Express explores how companies unwittingly create obstacles for their own customers-their source of livelihood.
Inspired to agree, disagree, or otherwise comment? Have an interesting story to share? We hope that you will let us know your thoughts.
Abhay Padgaonkar
President, Innovative Solutions Consulting, LLC
A Consultant Joke…
A successful consultant died at the ripe old age of 85 of natural causes and went to heaven. Despite a long line at the pearly gates, St. Peter personally came to greet him at the end of the line and took him by hand to the front of the line.
The consultant was clearly pleased, but asked surprisingly, "I like all this attention, but what have I done to deserve the special treatment?"
St. Peter said, "To be honest, we have never had anyone come through here who was 157 years old." The consultant looked shocked. "There must be some mistake," he said, "I am only 85 years old." St. Peter reassured him, "Oh, no! There is no mistake at all. We added up all the hours from your timesheets!"
The Fine Art of Alienating Your Customers...
Consultants are not alone in this predicament. They have plenty of company from other professional service firms. Despite evidence to the contrary, many professional service providers are clinging on to an outdated mode of charging for their time by the hour and not for the value they create. In the process, they torment, infuriate, and alienate their clients-the same clients they depend on for repeat business, testimonials, and referrals!
Here are my top-six pet peeves with my own professional peers. (A longer article with a dozen pet peeves will appear in RainToday.com soon.)
Surprise! The client has no way of expecting from month to month how much time was billed, by whom, and for what. At the end of the billing period, they surprise the clients, as they are waiting with abated breath, with a lengthy and weighty invoice. Clients get a sticker shock every month!
Protest Too Much? To make the charges appear legitimate, they break them into infinitesimal increments of time of say, one-tenth of an hour. They follow the old saying: "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with B.S.!"
Minimum Standards. They set an arbitrary minimum for the infinitesimal increment of time. So, even if it's a two-sentence email asking for status (which should have been provided to begin with) or a one-minute voice mail from the client, they charge for at least 20% of an hour, regardless of how long it actually took them to process it. They shamelessly pad the time, but keep it reasonable enough so they can defend it on the off chance that it's questioned. This tactic also has the side benefit of discouraging too much communication with the client-defeating the whole purpose.
Spreading the Misery. They have perfected the art of milking time by billing the same time to multiple clients. How will anyone ever find out that they billed the same hour to three different clients? The higher the factor of billed time to clock time, the better the chances for becoming a partner in the firm.
Creative Endeavors. They invent necessary but mindless lexicon of activities to justify their time such as: draft, review, revise, receive, instruct, call, begin work, follow up, meet, research, work on, work with, and finalize, to name just a few. They obviously haven't heard the legendary basketball coach John Wooden say, "Never mistake activity for achievement."
Nickel and Dime: If none of the above tactics works well enough, they rub salt in the clients' wounds by charging for copying, faxing, graphics work, report production, research site subscriptions, and postage at outrageous rates to the point that the client would wish that they had bought shares in FedEx Kinko's instead.
One wonders if it was a similar experience that prompted Mark Twain to say: "The more I get to know about lawyers, the more I'm in favor of hangin'."
Although this is an exposé on professional service providers, similar issues apply to any company in any industry. If they look deep enough, more times than not they will say, "We have identified the enemy. And it's us!" I have witnessed this phenomenon countless times in my consulting work over the years. There are several reasons that I have observed:
Bureaucracy, which ultimately is the triumph of means over ends, blinds the company to its own dysfunctional behavior. This internal perspective is further exacerbated by systematically eliminating external perspective of truth tellers such as trusted, outside advisors. Process breakdowns make sure that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing and the customer is left holding the bag. Incorrect and sometimes invalid measurements mask the real problems and actually encourage dysfunctional behavior. But most importantly, genuine, introspective, and no-nonsense leadership is often missing. All this leads to "surgery was successful, but the patient died" syndrome.
As an example, very few of us even noticed that H-P surpassed IBM recently as the largest information company in the world, perhaps in history. When asked recently why H-P didn't trumpet the fact, CEO Mark Hurd simply replied, "I don't think it's H-P style to go out and talk about that. Our history is to talk about technology. What we do for customers. The revenues are just the result. So we consciously decided that wasn't something that needed to be brought up."
What a breath of fresh air in this shameless world of marketing and self-promotion?
The Bottom Line: Walk a mile or two in your customers' shoes.
Personally Speaking...
All of a sudden, I started getting annoying text messages on my cell phone on horoscopes and other weird subjects. I ignored them until I discovered that I was being billed for a premium service called the "Poly Ringtone Club" for a small, weekly fee of $5.95 plus taxes!
I hit the roof! I called T-Mobile and had the full intention of launching into them for spamming me. The customer service agent at the other end answered the phone. After the customary identity verification, she asked in a very friendly and genuine tone of voice, "Hello Mr. Padgaonkar, how has your day been so far? Hectic as usual?"
I was taken aback, and also completely disarmed. This wasn't some canned query like: "Next?" With her simple but genuine overture, the whole tenor of the conversation changed. I described to her the charges I didn't recognize. She explained what the charge was for and asked if I had signed up for it on January 9th.
I explained calmly that there was a small chance my kids signed me up for it, but I seriously doubted if it was intentional. As for me, I told her that I wouldn't know how to sign up for it even if I wanted to. We both had a big laugh! Regardless, I told her that I no longer wanted to be part of the Poly Ringtone Club. Without arguing, she patiently issued credit on the account for all the spurious charges.
What was shaping to be an unpleasant shouting match ("Well, you signed up, not me," etc.) ended up being a surprisingly pleasant and civil conversation. She asked me if there was anything else. I took the opportunity to compliment her on her superior customer service skills, and also the company as a whole because all my interactions had been very smooth-no matter what the issue had been. In my mind, I re-pledged my customer loyalty to T-Mobile for years to come.
The Bottom Line: For well-run companies, customer service is not just a slogan, it's the lifeblood. They provide a great deal of attention, training, and authority to employees to whom they entrust their valued customers-so as not to alienate either!
Disclaimer: "This written advice is absolutely intended to be used, and if used under expert supervision is known to improve organizational and individual effectiveness substantially."
© Abhay Padgaonkar 2007. All Rights Reserved.