The more I help clients grow their businesses, the more I see how “teamwork” is not a natural thang!
Sure people like to belong, and people like to help in a common endeavour, but people are different and they have different values, habits and personalities. Ask your team to define “a job well done” and you will get a variety of different answers.
This may not sound like a significant problem, but what if their different definitions of a job well done mean that they approach the joint task differently? To you, it might be okay to call out at team meetings discussing how to do something, and voice your ideas. To someone else, they might want to think through the problem and think that your calling out is just self-aggrandisement, and just plain rude. There may be a raft of other differences that can cause team members to be frustrated at each other and the way the team works.
In a more formal structure, I have helped clients create team “charters” which outline what the team was formed to do, its objectives and scope, and its authority in doing the task. Read More
I’m sure you’ve all heard the phrase “don’t work in your business, work on your business.”
But what does that actually mean? For most of us it probably conjures up the difference between working hard at making or selling your product, or keeping the books, or labouring over the store – physical or online, versus a picture of being a relaxed leader working out “strategies” and “innovation” to grow your business.
For those of us who have tried to apply it practically, that picture simply doesn’t work! While you try to take time out to work out strategies or develop new techniques in your business, things just don’t happen in it. While we try to work on our business by developing better marketing plans or improving customer service, all it means is that later we have to catch up on working in the business. Am I right? Running a small business is a busy task!
When I started my first business I was busier than busy. I left my big international financial services firm to start a medium sized consulting practice with a couple of partners. True, while I spent a lot of my working hours (or let’s be honest, most of my waking hours) working in the business by dealing with client affairs and consulting directly with clients, I was able to work “on my business” during Partner-meetings where we discussed marketing, new products and hires and fires. To me then, that was working on the business and it wasn’t too difficult because we had borrowed and used the excellent internal administration systems from our previous firm.
But that was it wasn’t it – I wasn’t really working on my business, I was working in the administration of my business.
I found the real truth of working on the business when I left that partnership to start my own boutique consultancy where I hired from scratch and had to set up from scratch. There was no way I could have continued to work in the client advisory side of the new business as well as in the administration of the business – I would have killed myself.
As your business grows, you no longer have the only contact with your customers. More and more, that front-facing position is being filled by your frontline staff – your sales people, your front of house reception, your people who meet and greet and deal with customers day to day.
The customer service instincts that you displayed now have to be passed on to your frontline staff. So how do you breed that customer-service mentality into your team?
The principles are actually quite simple – ensure your team is vision-driven, build strong teamwork, create vision-centric KPI’s and provide rewards for doing the right things, as explained in this video.
Some key steps include:-
1. Ensure customer service starts with understanding your “brand”.
Your frontline staff need to understand what your “brand” is, as reinforced by your business vision statement. What does achieving your vision mean to your customer? What values will your staff need to uphold in front of the customer to ensure that the vision comes alive? What indications does your vision statement give them on how they should deal with a complaint? Are they empowered to make decisions about customer-service as long as their decisions align with the indicators in the vision?
2. Reinforce good teamwork
Remove any barriers to teamwork and create a structure that shares knowledge about clients and about service. Provide systems that give frontline staff all they know about customer preferences. Allow staff to hand over to someone else in the team more appropriate for the task or the customer.
3. Negotiate and implement KPI’s that measure attainment of the vision in customer-service
Remove Key Performance Indicators that measure output (how many customers served) and instead implement KPI’s that reinforce vision-centric outcomes (how many customers received what they asked for, how many customers received more than they asked for).
4. Reward vision-centric outcomes
Stop paying bonuses for income generated from customers. Instead create rewards that that actually reward behaviours that produce outcomes described by the vision and brand. Instead of awarding an award for the highest sales every month, how about awarding the person who satisfied customers? High sales may be one-off, satisfied customers come back again and again.
Get over to the Resources section of https://teikoh.com to see what other models, worksheets and templates can help you grow your business the right way.
I received an email from Joanne who owns an interior design consultancy in Toronto who asked a series of questions about her Vision for her business.
One of the more intriguing ones was:-
“I realize that making the company’s vision statement live is the key to how we fulfill the promise of our unique selling proposition. But I’m finding it hard to explain what I mean in our vision statement to my team and to customers. It seems so clear to myself what I want to achieve at the end of the day but have I got the wording wrong in the statement?”
Her company’s vision statement reads “We believe in taking both our customers and ourselves to the front edge of design so that we both benefit from leading the pack.”
Not a bad vision statement in my book. It describes a journey that involves both the business and the customer so that it creates the feeling of mutually beneficial relationship; it sets their value of being at the forefront of design which also sets the scene for the customer that says “don’t come to us if you want lace and frills”; and it feels inspirational and inviting. When I read that statement I see energy, innovation, and adventure.
No, I don’t think Joanne has “the wrong wording”. So back to her question, how does she explain what she means in the vision statement to her team and her customers?
Before I answer that question let me talk a little about why you need to make your vision statement “live”. Many businesses make the mistake of writing an exciting vision statement and putting it on the wall, but not making it come alive in the business.
Your vision statement is your “brand” and it should guide how you run your business, how you deal with your customers, how you behave day to day and why you are doing it. If your team members understand what it actually means, it takes away all the little micro-decisions they have to make because the vision spells out the way. No longer do they have to get authorisation or seek management advice about who to hire – they refer to the vision, understand what type of person is required, and make the decision. If they are concerned about whether or not to offer a customer extended payment terms, they refer to the vision and if they understand what it says about the desired customers and what service means, they make the decision.
In this way, a well understood vision statement empowers people.
So, how do you quantify a vision statement in such a way that everyone understands how it applies in almost any given situation? This video explains how.
If you choose your perspectives well, and if you really drill down in each perspective, the resulting description or answer to the question “once we achieve our vision how will we…” lays out what your vision statement means.
The website https://teikoh.com have worksheets and templates to help you describe your vision and quantify it, along with many other templates, tools and resources to create strategy, provide leadership and grow your business. Start the conversation, go to our Facebook page and leave a comment.
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Have you ever received truly exceptional customer service? What was it like and why did you think it was exceptional customer service?
Each experience is different but I bet you can tick off a couple of common characteristics in what happened:-
You felt individual attention
You felt that every detail of the service or product was meant for your satisfaction
You felt that whatever you received was timely
You felt that you not only got the product or service, you got that extra something that accompanied it.
Am I right?
Firstly do you see it is about what you felt? Exceptional customer service is not only about the quality of the box you bought, it is about how you felt during the transaction.
Secondly it is about “extras” – and these need not be something tangible like a bonus product. In customer service “extra” is about listening to you as an individual and perhaps providing nothing more extra than a courteous word.
Yet people also get it wrong don’t they? For every instance of exceptional service I would bet you have 10 examples of poor service.
If only every business realised that excellent customer service is not about spending more money or even putting in more effort – it’s about being consistent and predictable in what you offer. That’s it! Consistency and predictability!
Watch this video to see why you should implement simple systems that create excellent customer service.
Now let’s get back to how you should make your customers feel and how that can be done with some simple systems.
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