Change to make it easy for the customer

In every business, the customer has a job to do. Make it easy for your customer to do their job, and your costs go down and your profits up.

A couple of years ago, I worked to help a client translate feedback from customers into better ways of working. Stripped of consultant jargon, this meant: "Your customers say they don't like it when you do this. Please stop."

If only it was that simple. The things we were helping our client to change existed because the client needed to manage their costs and the trade-off of improving the customer experience while keeping costs down - was not simple.

So we turned things on their heads. Instead of thinking "what can we do to make things better?" we thought,"what can we do to make it easier for our customers to deal with us?" In other words, we considered the job the customer had to do when they wanted to deal with my client.

And you know? It worked. An example: one problem was that customers called our client for help when the information they needed was already available on the client's website. When we checked it out, we found that while the information they needed was a few clicks down the page, customers found the customer service telephone number at the top of the web page. So they naturally called straightaway, rather than taking the thirty seconds or so to look down the page.

Result? The customer got the information they needed - but after a time-consuming phone call taking five or more minutes, rather than in seconds from the website.

So our client made it easier to draw the customer's attention to the necessary information - by moving the telephone number to the bottom of the page.

Result? the number of calls from customers were cut by 50% - while customers got the answers they need in seconds, not minutes. Lower cost, happier customers.

So many companies don't realise that one of the fastest and easiest ways to boost customer satisfaction and sales is make it as easy as possible for your customers to deal with you.

In other words, pay as much time and attention to managing and motivating your customers as you do your people - and you'll be rich.

Mike

EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!

The first issue of our newsletter has finally hit the streets!

Bloomstorm News - Tips, Tools and Techniques from the Antidote to Change Nonsense is now available. Each free issue gives you practical tips and tools that you can use straightaway to improve your change performance.

In this issue, we explain some specific strategies for maximising the impact and value of your change efforts. You can download a free copy here.

Or, if you would like us to send you the latest free copy every time it comes out, then simply sign up here and we'll make sure you never miss an issue.

Let us know what you think, either in the comments section below, or here.

Enjoy it.

- Mike

Make Yourself Lucky

Luck happens when you do the right things.

The law of unintended consequences states that often the biggest outcomes of our actions are those we did not foresee. One example is NATO's failure to keep the peace in the Balkans ten years ago that led to today's glut of guns used by Europe's criminal underworld. McDonald's foray into salads that unfortunately drew attention to the difference between McDonald's normal fare and 'healthy' food is another. The law of unintended consequences is usually taken to be a bad thing.

When we look at people who think themselves lucky, however, much the same thing seems to be going on. But instead of a negative, it's a positive. Luck happens because people put themselves in situations that maximise the chance of a good outcome - even if they cannot predict what that outcome will be or how it will happen.

As an example, I was at a business networking breakfast yesterday as a guest of the inestimable Mr Graham. This session was very structured, very focused and worked spectacularly well. I was interested in finding potential partners - people implementing change (IT suppliers, for instance) who might need some extra firepower to make the change succeed. And lo and behold, sitting beside me was a leading supplier of software to small-to-medium-sized businesses.

What I wasn't expecting was someone from a prestigious language skills and translation company who also wanted to discuss working together, or my being able to think about new marketing opportunities through conversation with the director of a very high quality communications company.

And because we were talking together, I heard that the IT company and the communications company wanted to find actors as high-quality resources for telesales campaigns - and my sister is an actress and a member of London's oldest co-operative agency for actors, so I put them in touch.

Lucky to meet these people? You bet. But I - and more particularly, they (because they do this every week, and I was just a visitor) - got lucky because we were clear about what we wanted and put ourselves in a situation where this kind of outcome was possible.

The same thing applies to change. Nothing is more corrosive to a change programme than cynicism. Cynics set an implicit expectation of failure. And given that we all know that in business, as in life, you get what you pay attention to, if we expect bad things then bad things we will get. I'm not saying that cynicism creates bad luck, but it makes it much easier.

Wouldn't it be great to have lucky projects instead? Yes? So how would we do that?

First thing - don't debate with the company pessimists, ignore them. Don't talk, act. Get your good folks together (the 'Company Optimists') and be really clear about the things you want to happen. With them, identify events, or circumstances or beliefs that might make these things possible or more likely.

After that it's simple. Do what you can to make these events, circumstances and beliefs happen. You can't be sure that any single thing will guarantee the outcome, but do enough of the right things and the rights things will happen.

If you do this at the start of every project (or better yet, at the start of every week), I guarantee your change project will start being much, much luckier in ways that no-one can predict. And what's more - it'll be a damn sight more enjoyable journey.

- Mike

Fun, Risk And Reward

We all have new opportunities to market ourselves, and the rewards can be tremendous, if we can live with the risks.

Lew Grade was the archetypal show business impresario, larger than life with cigars to match. In the sixties, he had a franchise on Britain's independent television network about which he was famously (and erroneously) quoted as saying was "...a licence to print money."

Nowadays, of course, the franchises struggle to make money because the business model has changed - but if you can produce content, then there is still money to be made in television. And even though they might argue about it, TV production is like any other business - make the most attractive product you can at the lowest cost, and sell it effectively.

So I should not have been surprised when, at a business networking event this afternoon, the person sitting next me was Deborah, a very professional assistant TV producer. Turns out, of course, she was there not to scope out sales opportunities but to get referrals. Her company has a new series in the works.

In each episode, their cameras will follow the daily work of a senior manager in a mid-sized company, observing how s/he works with their people, and getting responses from the people afterwards about the managers' performance. The idea is to highlight areas - behaviour, assumptions, thinking - where the manager needs to improve. Think of it as our old friend 360-degree feedback, but watched by a couple of million people.

S/he then gets some advice and coaching from an expert off-camera to address the problems, and the cameras follow the manager again, to see how / if the manager's performance has improved. An interesting premise for a programme, but strongly dependent on two things - the character of the people selected for each show, and the calibre of the experts providing advice.

Deborah was at the event to ask us if we knew of people who might be good candidates for the show. The ideal candidate is quirky, with a strong personality and is likeable - because for the show to succeed, the audience must be able to identify with the protagonist.

Why on Earth would someone volunteer for this role?

Publicity.

Publicity for the company, and publicity for the person themselves. If they are lucky, this could be a fantastic breakthrough opportunity for the person and their company.

And this crystallised something that I had been suspecting for a while - as the TV companies have found out, traditional marketing models as taught in business schools are seriously in trouble.

Nowadays, for most of us, quality of service is a critical part of how we compete. But service is always personal - at bottom line, we trust a service because we trust the people behind it. So marketing increasingly needs to reveal the people behind the service. In the old days, this used to be almost always by word of mouth. But now we have many more channels to do so: blogs, social websites - and now reality TV.

The cool thing about each of these ways of reaching a potential market is not only do they give potential customers an insight to the values and thinking of their potential supplier of services, but these methods also scale - it takes the same effort to reach one person as it does to reach a million.

I am sure that you, however, have also worked out the downside to these (relatively) new forms of publicity. Because these reflect reality - albeit in a distorted mirror - they also can quickly reveal the character flaws of the individual concerned - and do so to millions of people.

On TV, of course, these risks are magnified. Good reality TV depicts people under pressure in situations with which the audience can identify. We watch because we want to see how these people respond - will they buckle, or will they triumph? For a medium -sized business, the potential rewards are phenomenal - do a good job, and potentially the world could be ringing you up, placing orders. Do a bad job, however, and the only sound on your phone line could be that of drifting tumbleweed...

And no-one wants to be ratnered.

But this is what business is about, isn't it? Big risks for big rewards - and, if you're lucky, have some fun on the way.

And if I have to choose between something safe or something secure, or risky, rewarding and fun, then fun wins, every time.

Not because I'm a hedonist (although I am) but because fun begets enthusiasm, and enthusiasm begets passion - and passion is the most contagious, most saleable, most profitable thing that any business can have.

So we scratched our heads, and came up with some names and I think Deborah got what she came for. I look forward to seeing what she produces - I'm sure her enthusiasm will make it something great.

And why are we in business, if not to do things with passion, to make something great?

- Mike

Everyone's A Winner

Do the right things, and the right things happen.

I was in London on Monday with the nice people from the Made Simple group. They're setting up a groovy new portal (that's an information-rich base for folks on the web, not the game) for folks in Small-to-Medium-sized-Enterprises ("SME's" in the jargon) and (I've had a sneak preview) it's looking very good: attractive, informative, useful and easy to use.

I was up there because Howard Graham, the guy behind the Made Simple shebang, had put out a call asking for volunteers to make podcasts for the new site and I was one of those who responded. (It will be appearing there in few weeks - I'll let you know when it's up).

I like these win-win things. Howard got some content for his portal, I got a chance to introduce Bloomstorm to some more people, and (hopefully) the portal users will get something useful and interesting. It's a good way to do business.

We got to talking afterwards about networking (Howard's a big noise in BNI, the networking organisation) and I was struck again about the only principle of economics that to me has any real force.

It goes back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo (and is a corollary of the Law of Comparative Advantage, for those of you interested in that kind of thing) but as I understand it, the upshot of is that after any reasonable economic transaction in a fair market, both parties - the buyer and the seller - are better off. The buyer gets what they want, and the seller gets what they want. Value - to both parties - has increased.

To make a transaction work, therefore, each party needs to reduce the cost and maximise the payoff to the other party of doing business (while not giving away the farm in the process).

I love this idea, for all sorts of reasons.

It's self-correcting - if a buyer loses out once, they won't repeat the transaction.

It requires you to know the thing you do that offers most value to your customers

It shows how there is no limit to economic growth (because the economy grows with every fair transaction, and will continue to grow as transactions continue).

It is the only proven way to make war zones sustainably peaceful (give people the chance to trade and the personal value from peaceful transactions quickly outweighs the value they get from war. Northern Ireland is a great example. It's much harder to get people to riot when they might lose their digital video recorders in the mayhem - so the whole 'riot transaction' is not worth their while...)

I think it'll be only way way we'll beat global warming (A whole other post, maybe - but I will add one comment: yes, I get it about how it might also be the cause of global warming).

And it shows that the best way to get rich is to work with your customers and your suppliers and your partners to maximise the value they get from dealing with you.

How do we do this?

Be nice (or at the very least, courteous) to people, and so decrease the cost of doing business with you.

Be honest - if you lie about what you are selling (or, interestingly, about what you are buying) then the chance of getting the value you want drops down hard.

Help people - value does not have to measured immediately in pounds and pence.

Know the value of what you offer - in the other person's terms

Make it easy to do business with you.

Demonstrate that you can be trusted.

Interestingly, if these conditions apply, you don't have to sell what you are offering - you simply need to let people know what you've got to sell, and they'll buy.

And this is why I think the whole idea of networking is such a good one for your business. It's not about exchanging business cards and crocodile smiles and getting 'contacts'. It's about widening the pool of people who know you, trust you and want to work with you - or tell others that they should work with you - because the chance of a win/win outcome is very high.

And it makes doing business a pleasure.

- Mike

Beaming like a baby

Communication can kill your project.

I was at a client's project washup session (a 'post-implementation review' in the jargon) a while ago where we were to review a project to relocate a couple of call centres.

The project, to put it politely, had been going to hell in a handbasket. The client asked me to help when the project was already seriously derailed.

We got it back on course, and delivered much of what was wanted, not too late, and without doing too much damage to an already stretched budget.

Even so, very few were looking forward to the session. Three hours of reports of limited success, powerpoint presentations on 'things we should have done earlier/better/faster', flipcharts full of 'learnings for next time' - a steady stream of formal self-flagellation, almost like a Maoist re-education session. What could be more exciting :-( ?

The only person smiling was the representative from the communications ('comms') team. By luck or judgement, he went first. He presented a set of (beautifully prepared) slides showing us the comms plan, how they had delivered against it (largely on time and under budget, unlike almost every other part of the project) and then he revealed his coup de grace - the project comms team had been shortlisted for the final of a national competition run by a trade magazine. He sat down, beaming like a baby, newly fed.

His bubble was only slightly burst when John, the project manager, commented, “I wonder why the communications team keeps winning awards, while the projects they work on don’t?”

And I was struck by a blinding flash of the obvious.

Of course the communications team were winning the awards – because, for them, their job was delivery of defined communications, not the delivery of the project. When we reviewed the communications plan in the project each week, we were reviewing communications activity, not whether the communication was successful in helping the project meet its goals. Mugs and posters (not like these) and 'plenary sessions' were all very well, but very little of this directly affected what was delivered on the ground.

Suddenly other things fell into place. A key frustration during the project was that it had been very tough to brief delivery teams and stakeholders directly. The reason? We had to comply with our communications team policy that our messages 'were consistent’ and that ‘the seniors had been briefed’ before we could discuss the project with others. This in turn delayed project work as we waited for ‘communications’.

Worse, because the comms team moderated communications from the middle, and not on the ground, much of what they did communicate was too general to be relevant to those doing the work. As the project delivery teams did not understand what was needed - in terms that mattered to them - much of the work they did needed to be redone. No wonder (as we found when we completed the washup) the single biggest issue affecting the project was 'communication'.

All the communication activity in the comms plan and in our policies was actually damaging the project – because it was preventing effective communication.

The project team had abdicated responsibility for communication to the communications machine – just when we needed to be able to explain to our project people, in practical, day-to-day terms, what we needed them to do.

I have seen this behaviour before in a number of my clients and it explains a lot. The logic of giving communications to a specialist overwhelms the common sense notion of enabling folks on the ground to communicate quickly and easily with each other to get the work done.

'Communication' can fill your project’s pockets with lead weights and send it for a swim straight to the bottom.

Remember, communication is no substitute for conversation.

- Mike

An American Mystery

Travel raises many questions - like this.

Over the years I've travelled a lot to the US - and have encountered many fascinating things and a bright and generous people. But there is one thing that no-one has ever explained to me. It may be cultural, or economic, or a reflection of collective taste...but it is a mystery nonetheless: why do all American hotels have beige bathrooms?

- Mike

Beating Boredom

Sometimes, exciting things happen in unexciting places.

Cranfield University is a post-graduate technology and management campus set in the middle of rural England in Bedfordshire between London and Birmingham. It was originally an airfield chosen by the RAF because the surrounding countryside was so empty of landmarks that German bombers could not find it during the Second World War. This – the avoidance of German military airpower – was possibly the most exciting thing to happen in Cranfield’s history.

From the aerodrome came a college of aeronautics, from that, a school of engineering, then manufacturing, then management until now it has become possibly the most boring University in the World.

For one thing, it is entirely a post-grad school – no party-loving undergraduates at all. For another, its subject mix means that it is 85% male. The result is that if you ever have the misfortune to be walking through the campus on a Saturday night, the loudest sound you hear is the Microsoft theme tune through an open window as someone starts up their PC for another exciting evening’s work on their thesis.

But occasionally, slightly funky things happen.

One of these was in the late eighties when IBM apparently decided that more people in British manufacturing needed to be familiar with the value that computers (especially IBM computers) could bring to industry. So they proposed to found a University department in Computer Integrated Manufacturing. Despite the catchy title (!), several universities bid for the money and Cranfield won. They built a building, put a couple of million pounds-worth of IBM mainframe, software, terminals and staff and set about recruiting an academic team. They found it at the University of Bath, where they found a set of academics who were interested in the “interface between technology and organisations.”

And this is where things got fun. Because no sooner had this crew come in than they started preaching heresy. Successful use of technology, they argued, was only interesting when it supported appropriate business change. The purpose of education in CIM was therefore less to do with the technology and more to do with working cross-functionally in teams to drive behavioural and process change – which technology could then support.

So that’s what they did - in interesting and radical ways.

I attended a Masters programme in CIM at Cranfield at the end of the eighties and it was an exceptional experience. The year comprised three segments: a taught course, followed by a group project, followed by an individual project. What made it different – on the surface – was fundamentally two things: first, that the projects were paid for by companies who wanted solutions to problems, not interesting theses. This meant that we very quickly adopted a ‘Real World’ focus (which was useful). And the second thing was that although the programme was continually assessed, at no time were we given our grades.

That’s right: throughout the course we had no idea how we were doing – were we passing, failing, at the top of the class, near the bottom? Not a clue.

It was an experiment – and it worked. Because we did not know how we were doing, we measured ourselves against each other – especially against those we knew were doing well. So we worked 70 hour weeks, asked penetrating questions and drove each other in a frenzy of peer pressure to meet and exceed our own expectations – all without any cajoling or coaxing by the staff. On more than one occasion, students broke into the building at night to carry on working.

Those of us who survived – because not everyone could take the pressure or the ambiguity – came out having had an exceptional learning experience, and confident that we were equipped to lead change in almost any organisation.

Of course, this wasn’t true (is anyone capable of this?) but we were better able than most.

Nowadays, of course, the litigation nazis have come in and they have to give grades – and no-one is really interested in Computer Integrated Manufacturing any more. But for a brief time, something interesting happened at the most boring University in the World.

And I took my first baby steps in the business of change.

- Mike

Reaching for the revolver

The business of change is about the practicalities, so don't try to fix the culture.

Apologies for the delay in getting this one out, but I've been offsite with some nice people who've been letting me practice on them. It went pretty well, although there are a few things that we need to tweak, which is great - I would worry if it had all gone perfectly.

I spent two days with this team - a set of people I trust, who do a tough job very well indeed. They have a transformational role in an international technology firm that is helping to lead a revolution for customers.

I was helping them to scope their quarterly objectives and work out the specific issues and jobs that needed to be done to meet them. This work was counter-cultural - their organisation is very action-oriented, so that people are expected to take objectives and run with them delivering as they go, and not take time to think about them properly.

And this, of course, was the problem. The business is now awash with people running round trying to do things that they only partially understand, have only partly under their control and which have a practical planning horizon of only days or weeks. The outcome is that everyone spends more and more time trying to establish control of vague clouds of action, having endless meetings to establish boundaries and accountabilities for things that are unclear, generating huge amounts of office politics and resulting in...not very much, really.

All I did was enable this team to understand the specifics of what they needed to do. Now they are in a position to take control of their remit, and be very clear about they need from others. In practice, what the rest of the business will see is that this team will question others in more rigorous ways, and set a higher standard for the information that they need to get and use. I expect, however, because they now know how to use such higher quality information, there will be a step change in their performance.

Which is what we wanted to do. It was a good chance for me to prove the Bloomstorm model of using new skills to solve real issues, and a fair return, I think, for two days of their time.

There is, however, a wider point. It is easy to think that the solution to such problems is to understand the culture that leads to the behaviour we were trying to change. This is lazy thinking. You change culture by changing the way the business works - not the other way round. Viewed in this light, efforts to change culture are usually a complete waste of money with little or no return.

If, however, you set out to change specific behaviour for practical purposes, then you get the results you want - and as a side-effect, the culture has to change. But that's not why you make the change. You make the change to make the business better - the culture just follows along.

- Mike

Change and the Discworld

A new year is a good time for launching new ideas.

2008? Where did 2007 go? Seriously, I hope you all had a great holiday season and that 2008 will bring you what you hope for. As for us, Jan 1 2008 was the first official day of Bloomstorming (is that a word? Should it be?) and we're moving more to doing, rather than simply thinking, mode.

Bloomstorm, as you know if you've got this far, is about making real, enduring change happen. I've been trying to summarise the practical and effective nature of what we do with limited success and it has been an increasing source of frustration to me.

And this state would have continued, had I not been given a copy of Terry Pratchett's latest tome, 'Making Money,' for Christmas. For those who don't know (and I think this will include most readers outside of the UK) Terry Pratchett was the UK's biggest selling living author until a certain Ms Rowling introduced the world to Harry Potter. Pratchett's milieu is the Discworld, an alternate, late-middle-ages world with magic and is the most telling and consistent (and consistently funny) satire on our modern world that exists in print.

Throughout the Discworld series, Pratchett uses humour to disguises the fact that he has quite a lot to say on matters of philosophy, theology, government and human nature.

And in this, his latest work, I found the following exchange:

"Why are you always in such a hurry, Mr Lipwig?"
"Because people don't like change. But make the change happen fast enough and you go from one kind of normal to another."

This seems to me to be so accurate, so profoundly correct, that I am adopting it as my abiding principle for 2008: Make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.

In Bloomstorm, we look forward to putting skates on change and strapping on the rockets...

Happy New Year.

- Mike