A question I am frequently asked in my workshops is how to achieve an attitude of resolution where people have dug in their heels, or they have a difficult personality, or they have more power in the situation than you have. This is a subject many people find challenging and frustrating. There are no easy answers, and sometimes people won’t budge, but here are the suggestions that have worked for me…
Client Stories: Transforming NGN’s Way of Working
A new Head of Innovation was looking to rapidly change ways of working to introduce enterprise class business agility: their clients and consumers wanted the right things delivered and those things delivered quicker. As part of the transformation, our client was tasked with building and guiding a diverse team of colleagues to enable and facilitate continuous delivery and ongoing improvements.
Indifference or inertia isn’t customer loyalty
After sending an unrecognised 0808 telephone number to voicemail recently I foolishly answered the phone after the third or fourth call. As I suspected, it was my mobile phone network provider who initially claimed they were calling to ‘thank me for my loyalty!’
Cost exist to be reduced.
I was reminded of this great quote from the master of the Toyota Production System today: “Costs do not exist to be calculated. Costs exist to be reduced.”
As a Chartered Accountant, I am well trained to understand cost – especially with respect to Activity Based Costing. Understanding the cost of every element of the process is clearly important. However, it is all too easy to then assume that these activities are actually necessary.
Context Context Context!
I recently spent three weeks traveling in Japan. Of course I was on holiday so I was without the usual level of push and drive and drive to get things done. That said there were a number of factors in the context in which I was living that contributed to my sense of well-being. These struck me as both things I observed that were present and those that were absent. In no particular order of importance here are the factors I observed and my reflections on them…
‘Customer excellence is here: it’s just not very evenly distributed yet’
‘Customer Excellence is here: it’s just not evenly distributed yet’. A fantastic quote that I wish I could claim was mine! Whilst it is not, I can recognise a particularly relevant and accurate quote when I see one. The quote is in fact the very first line of the executive summary of this years Nunwood UK Customer Experience Excellence Report – a report that should be essential reading for any customer experience professional in the UK.
My week in a wordle
It was a very busy week last week. This wordle shows the topics / spread of discussion from various clients and activities I’ve been involved in.
Sack all the cleaners
Before we start let me just clarify that I’m not about to call for the wholesales removal of cleaners from their current employment. Nothing of the sort. But I do want to talk about empowerment and ownership in relation to … Continue reading →
Introducing the Omni-Channel Service Center
In a global population of 6.5 billion, over 4 billion have mobile phones. Global consumers are not merely just increasing their use of mobile telephones they are doing so via smarter devices, whether they be smart phones, tablets or hybrid devices. All of the information in the world is doubling every 12 months – not including the Internet of Things…
Are we talking the right language of customer experience?
Many customer experiences simply happen because when it comes to the attitude and processes, we hear people say “We’ve always done it this way”. And if it works today, why not? Well, for a start things could be so much better. Maybe – and I’ve often seen – things aren’t actually working in the way your customers want. The consequences of complacency are huge yet that word rarely, if ever, makes an appearance on the “risks and issues” log.
