Where is your Quarterly result?

I am always surprised by the quarterly result of successful companies. A lot of successful companies relentlessly grow quarter on quarter. They strive for some targets, achieve them and then move on to higher, loftier targets. They don’t halt to take rest, they don’t brag too much, they don’t get tired, they don’t give excuses. They do their best, and better that best very next quarter. Companies seem indefatigable whereas we human beings are so complacent, so very complacent.
We, human beings, look for growth in long term. And many a times we just lose track of time. Time just fly by us and then we wonder -- ohh the year is gone, ohh I’ve been thinking on this for past 6 years, ohh 4 years of graduation are gone, blah blah.


Why don’t we start declaring our quarterly results?


Quarterly/ bi-quarterly appraisals at work can serve the same purpose as quarterly result but in appraisals you tend to bloat your achievement in hunt of higher salary increment. So to avoid fudging data declare your quarterly result to yourself.
We make so many promises to ourselves, or give so much hope to ourselves, but things fade into oblivion during course of time as we remain engulfed in our mundane routine. And even if promises/hopes ricochet, we are so good at deluding ourselves. We have excuses ready for our every failure, every lapse.
Treat yourself as a listed company. You, owner of company, should be answerable to you, the stakeholder.When you are in stakeholder's shoes question ruthlessly why you, the owner, are not performing well. Wash down all your excuses and stop building castles in the air. Start declaring your quarterly results. In your quarterly result:


Give next year’s forecast: Write down what you want to achieve in next one year.
Give your quarterly profit/loss: Write down your successes and failures. Write down whether you are on right track to achieve your annual forecast or whether you need to alter the forecast.
Give your exceptional expenditure: Write down unforeseen blocker that caused dent to your milestones/achievements.


You can jot down a few lines at the end of every week to build a repository of your activities that you can refer and analyze later for declaring your quarterly result.


Am starting off with my quarterly result. Are you?

Don’t push me to the brink

- Mobile number portability got introduced in India some days back. When unhappy customer tried moving to other telecom operator she is given cheaper monthly rental and very attractive call rates plan.
- An employee stays with a company for years but when desired growth doesn’t happen she finally resigns, disgruntled. Then same company offers her a good salary hike plus other perks.
- A service offered is not up to the mark. Customer requests, grovel, cries; in vain. She threatens to sue the company in consumer court. Service is provided and some placatory compensation is doled out by company.


Why companies push people the brink and when customer is about to cut loose then same company try to retain them. It doesn’t work. Once human loyalty is hijacked, you won’t be able to rekindle same faith in customer. You might be able to retain customer but she won’t act as your advocate. She will be there with you just for the time being and something better will lure her away. Broken trust is nearly impossible to repair. And in this lightening paced world people don’t have time to trust you for the second time.


Dear corporation, don’t push me to the brink.


Dear Executive, Are you reading the stats on how many people were pushed to the brink in your company, how many of them stayed back, stayed for how long, anything you could have done to not to push them to the brink?

Write to me

Managers/Leaders/Executives often ask themselves: How do I build trust with my team. How to open floodgates of communications? How to tell team members to open up  so as to seek real feedback? How to create an environment of openness?


Writing, personally, to your team once a week (or once in 2 weeks) is the mantra that can make things happen. It can be sort of blog but you send that in a mail to your team, directly to their inbox. When Leader writes to me directly apprising me of the plans, happenings, learning, successes, failures, i feel special. I feel being valued. I feel that am worthy in hierarchy and not just a  cog. I will appreciate that you took time to write to me.


Make this writing subtle professional with a touch of team warmth. Write some informal stuff at the end to give it a personal touch and not just any newsletter.


Benefits to this practice:
- It kills rumors. I strongly feels that ‘Rumors are failure of leadership’. People usually get information through various informal channels but when a leader substantiates/discard/reason the rumours/happenings then it breeds faith and kill future gossips.
- It gives a sense of reassurance  to people at ground level, at all levels, to your team.
- It creates openness. People will write more to you giving you right ideas/feedback/opinions.
- It gives people a chance to confide in you. It open direct channel, kills hierarchy.
- It pushes your middle management layer to be more open, deliver more and keep promises. 


Whether you are doing good, or its just business as usual or you are in some unruly crisis, write to me.

PS: While i was working for British Telecom, Mark use to write to entire team every week and i just loved the concept. Thanks Mark.

Reassure

The other day I was at a clinic for some eye procedure. You tend to feel fidgety when someone is playing with your eyes, so was I. When procedure was on, the doctor kept on reassuring me that everything is all right. She keeps on giving me updates on what’s going on and what's coming up. Every step was communicated, “we will fix your eyebrows so that you won’t blink”; “a machine will start and you will hear some noise and that’s perfectly normal”; “you will get some smell, may feel some pain and that’s perfectly normal”. Then suddenly I realized that all my uneasiness vanished. Because I was continuously getting updated and was not just treated like guinea pig on operation table. A supposedly complex exercise went so smooth mainly because of continuous reassurances.
Reassure your client, customers and other stakeholders. Reassurance creates conducive environment for peace and when people are at peace they create a facilitative environment for you to operate hence increasing your efficiency. If I’m about to fly I need continuous updates about status of my flight. Either airline keeps on reassuring me or I will keep barraging their call center or website.
If your customer complains you of something (say broken gadget) and you know that it will take 3 days to fix, reassure customer and keep reassuring till it’s fixed. People might trust your brand but further reassurance strengthens customer’s faith in your brand. People trust that Fedex will reach anywhere on time but still Fedex keeps them updated on progress of dispatched material.
People say “keep me posted” or “keep me updated” but it’s reassurance they are seeking.
Human minds need assurance. Something is wrong, Reassure; everything right, Reassure. Reassurance breeds peace and creates Trust.
Reassure.

It’s just an Excuse

We make so many excuses, to ourselves.
We make fool of ourselves with those excuses.
We want to believe in those excuses so that we won’t feel guilty of our lethargy, our cowardice, our inertia.
Whenever you feel that you are shirking from something, anything, just tell yourself “This is just an Excuse” and you will know what to do.
I don’t have time for exercise. It’s just an Excuse.
I still don’t have the right money/idea for the startup. It’s just an Excuse.
I can’t find time to write blog. It’s just an Excuse.
I can’t. I will not be able to. I should not. I may not. Tell yourself, “It’s just an Excuse”.
It’s just an Excuse.

Ocean of Comments

“Its nice”, “Good one”, “great job”, “fantastic”, “congrats” and other  similar appreciative comments currently forms majority of the comments on web. Appreciation is a great way to encourage people. These comments give feedback to the concerned person so play a vital role in talent recognition ecosystem. But when appreciations just flood a website and drown other useful information then it is injustice to the website users (including the same appreciative people) because other useful information comments got buried under  'good job' comments.


Possible Solution: An app (or a  browser addin/plugin) can be created for filtering comments. App can process all the comments on a webpage and filter them in 4 major buckets namely appreciation, critique, 'related info' and spam. 
Appreciation bucket can club all the congratulatory comments; critique bucket will contain critics’ comments; spam bucket will club junk comments and totally non related info, and 'related info' bucket (the most important bucket) can contain comments where other users have added their own opinion and extended the discussion to higher level or some user commented other contextual useful info. 


Let’s give people whatever they are looking for. In today’s Google-world when people don’t want to waste even a single second in scanning non-useful information and search even for smallest thing, comments should also be filtered to let people read whichever bucket they are interested in. 


Once we started filtering comments this will impact the comments writing behavior as well. People interested in the real discussion will  feel  encouraged and will participate more as they will know that their opinion will not mobbed.

Hiring or Creating Tribe

You sell coffee and if your salesperson is drinking Tea, that too from other vendor, you need to speak to your hiring folks, Now.
You sell chocolates and if your salesgirl --on being asked which choc is best--says, “you can take anyone, they are all chocolates after all” then you are not going too far.
Your salespeople are your face to the customer. They are the real brand and create far more impact than your brand marketing gimmicks. Customers perceive you as they perceive your salespeople and subtle signals (watch salesperson not wearing watch) are not so subtle as they create long term impressions.
Find people who love what they do and give them reason to join you and be your advocate. Don’t just recruit based on economical bargain.
Advocates create Advocates.

Create Advocates

Last week I bought a Reliance Broadband Data card and immediately encountered some issue with its activation. I called their Customer Support Representative (CSR) (aka Call Center folks). The support representative listened my problem patiently and asked few probing questions. Then she had conference me with various stakeholders (Sales Person, who sold the data card to me, and Field verification person, who has to verify my Address) and solved my problem within 30mins. I was ecstatic!!


Involving your customer in problem solving and making your internal workflow transparent to them will make your customer believe you. Shroud of secrecy and keeping everything hidden from customers didn’t help companies much till date. Empower your CSR with requisite knowledge and skills and give them authority to make decisions. Zappos gives full freedom to its CSR to decide whether to give replacement shoes or not. CSR is your front end to customer so they need to be empowered to take timely right decisions and hence kindle trust in customer. Customer doesn’t like CSR who just reads out brochure and fail to make any decision for them. CSR folks should be aware of the bigger picture of the company. They should be aware of all workflows in company, scope of various Business Units (BUs) and which responsibility lies with whom. Awareness will help them to make right decision and Authority will allow them to make things happen with people from various BUs. CSR are generally seen to pass buck to other BUs and just acts as mundane information providing centers. They generally crib about not getting proper proactive response from other BUs. Customer is not bothered about what your internal limitations are and why things are not working at your end. They just need solution.


CSR should be customer focused and should have conscious inclination towards customer. This will help them in understanding customer’s pain points better. CSR, in addition to working as problem solvers, can also act as consultant to the company. They can give feedback to management on areas that can be improved. Feedback would be more precise and holistic if CSR is aware of all workflows internal to company. CSRs continuous feedback will smoothen various business units’ integration and inter-BU communication.


In case of customer complain, CSR should pull in all stakeholders in a conference call, find out the root cause of the problem, assign action points to concerned stakeholders and then follow up after expected closure. In case they find some process flaw\blip they can give feedback to concerned person so that problem can be eliminated for all future customers.


Transparent processes will make all stakeholders accountable in product servicing. A product manager told me once that key to success is to make every stakeholder accountable (in success as well as failure). People are more responsive when they are accountable. Various BUs act as if to do their mechanical work and push the work to next basket so that they can say my job is done. They are more focused on avoiding any possible blame rather than focusing on delivering right service. Once responsibility of delivery is shared amongst various BU they will act more coherently and with enhanced communication. Stakeholders should be properly trained for this transparency and they should be made aware of various dynamics of other interfacing BUs. People generally think that things are too complex so they can’t do anything about it. But if things seem complex then it means that you still have not understood them logically.


Once the things are transparent Customer will start to gain faith in you. And faith is far more valuable than, usual, customer delight. Faith makes your customers as your advocate. They will be able to vouch for your service in front of anyone. An advocate is even more valuable than Sneezer as Sneezer only spread information but Advocate vouch for you along with spreading information.


Transparency should be practiced with utmost caution in the beginning. When you are becoming transparent you are exposing your flaws to customer and few customers might not act in very genial manner if they are aware of flaws. Also stakeholders should be proactively responsive to CSR. CSRs should also act as moderator in stakeholders’ conference to facilitate resolution.

Feedback

Last week I happened to visit a hospital’s waiting room. There TV was not working. Everybody in the room was clueless whom to contact. It seems to lie outside everyone’s domain of responsibility. Nurses, housekeeping staff, electrician et al were either nonchalant or busy with their daily chores. How great it would have been if some trigger\feedback was sent to maintenance folks automatically!


Feedback is necessary and does add value. Either we act on received feedback or not but one should actively seek feedback so that we are aware of diverse opinions. We generally tend to leave it to people (either our customer or client) to give feedback. But as nearly all of us are in crunch of time not many people takes out time to give feedback. People are more inclined in finding other option than mending the existing option. We can’t depend entirely on willingness of people to get feedback. Create processes that either automate feedback capture or prods people to give feedback. When ATM machines stops working some trigger should tell maintenance folks to act on it. Historic trend (per hour or, better, every ten minutes) can be collected for every specific machine based on its usage. Once that’s historic usage trend is violated system should flag that as discrepancy and highlight this to maintenance folks. They can validate whether it’s real discrepancy or just a blip. It will lead to decreased maintenance turnaround time and will lead to increased availability of machine hence enhanced customer experience. For how long banks will depend on security guard at ATM or unhappy customer to report ATM's malfunctioning to bank?


Any machine that can capture data should be used as feedback mechanism. The machines that don’t capture data should be modified to capture data and send it to right people for their processing.

If you are dealing with people then don’t rely on people proactively giving feedback. Make processes so that process prods people to give feedback. Like don’t let your waiters to decide whether to take feedback from customers or not. They might shirk from their responsibility many a times. Make this a process that every time some customer is billed, waiter has to mandatorily collect feedback while giving the bill to customer.

Right interpretation of feedback is also very important. Sometimes if you coerce people into giving feedback they won’t tell you the right thing but they will tell you the thing that is easiest\fastest for them. So do give leeway to people whether they want to give feedback or not. Always look for dissenters\outliers while analyzing feedback. Dissenters are the folks who will give you different feedback. Whatever that may be, right or wrong, but you will get different feedback from them. In this world of ‘schedule adherers’ or ‘people blabbering niceties’ or ‘intentionally vague people’ dissenters are rare breed so they must be appreciated for their thinking.
Actively collect feedback, improve, collect feedback, improve……..

Are you ready for the big day?

We are always told that failure is fine. We can learn from mistakes, improve and carry on. But what if you fail on your BIG day, the day you are most expected to deliver? 
Many a time famous bloggers refer or point out something in their blog and add web link to something interesting. The server hosting newly recommended thing crashes because of huge number of hits that day.
This not only make you lose your probable customers but also give them a negative first impression. In case they hear about you again from some other source next time, they might not turn up.


What if one day you get 20 times more customers?
What if your company gets a big proposal today?


Plan for the big day (when it’s about to come you will know that it’s coming; gut feeling?). Get ready and deliver that very day. Because some mistakes pushes you back few years.
Someone rightly said that “it takes 20 years to become overnight success” so that night you need to deliver.
And if sudden rush flummoxed you, recover fast and deliver.
It’s all about delivering at right time. And nothing more right time than Big day.

Can you call me back, please?

Nearly entire world whines about customer support call center’s long waiting period. But not many organizations did anything substantial regarding this. Companies still have average waiting period of 10 plus minutes before they entertain customer. 
When customer wants to speak to support staff of a product or service it means either she is in need of some info or some action from support team. And most of the times it is urgent. When customer is calling you with utmost urgency and you want her to wait endlessly and force her to listen to your promos or on-hold music then it means you don’t give a damn about customer and you are making her irritated.
Automate as much responses as you can for the customer. Take care that just for the heck of automating responses you won’t let customer travel in zigzag fashion (like press 1, now press 7, now press 9, now…). When customer has chosen one particular selection where the end point is speak to customer representative give option to end user for call back service. As soon as your support staff is free they can call back customer and handle query\issue.
Call back facility will make customer feel special and will obliterate the need of irritating waiting period. You value your customer, customer will value you back.

So Right yet so wrong!

When I was reading NYtimes today I realized that when you reach end of the page one slider box slides into the page to give reference to another article. A very novel and breakthrough idea! As soon as reader reaches end of the page suggest her something more so that you can retain her for longer time on your site. These days people are getting routed to websites through some referencing links (either referred by some blog or website or mail etc) for some specific interesting article. So as soon as article is done reader will close the webpage and move on. But if you refer something when reader is done with current page, reader will surely be tempted to go to suggested page provided the reference is good and interesting.
Some websites shows suggestions at the start of the webpage itself. But when reader visits website for some specific article they are focused on that article so will not move to another article even if suggestion at the start of the page is really good. But suggesting at the end of the page will surely evoke my intrest.
But the reference that nytimes shows is not contextual. Even if you are reading a business article it is suggesting some political article so reader will not be interested. So despite introducing something out of the box nytimes lost to milk the opportunity. Am sure they will fix it very soon.
New ideas are very important but executing them to get maximum return on investment is equally important. Give your customers reason to stay on with you. And keep them happy during their stay.

Photo credit nytimes

Surprise me!

People love positive surprises. They feel pampered, special when something\someone amazes them. It is surprise that make people travel across the world to visit different places to see different culture, nature or history. Creative advertisements surprise people and we tend to remember those product\services more whose story surprises us. Discounts are also a form of positive surprise (omg, 30% discount on my favorite clothing!) that make people flock to shops. Touch-screen computers are surprising people that computers can be so easy to handle; hence they are and will be so popular. A easy to use product feature surprise you every time you use it and forces you stay longer with that product.
It is beyond doubt that pleasant surprises works wonder for relationships.
So create surprises and your customer will surprise you back with their warmth and their prolonged association.
Did you surprise someone today? 

Photo credit Tetsumo

Breakfast at hospital

My daily routine breakfast joint was closed today morning. I was on my weekend bike ride so thought of stopping at one hospital. Why hospital? I don’t know, to be very frank. I have seen that hospital many a times during my various journeys and some light lit in my mind today that let’s try breakfast at that hospital today. I’ve seen that good hospital have average cafeteria and I was looking for some change (that’s the thing I hunt for everyday).

I entered the hospital and was greeted by cool air-conditioned breeze. Outside it was hot and just about right temperature inside made the first killer impression on me. Decor of the cafeteria was really good with well spaced tables. Chairs and tables are light green and white (sorry am not too fanatic about colors so they might be some shade of green or some shade or cream\white) with few well trimmed plants lined on one side. Place was spic and so are the clothes of serving staff. Clothing of staff was not mundane; it was some pleasant flowery shirt with blue (that one you can guess) pants. Prices were pretty reasonable and quality of food was remarkable. I never expected this quality of food from a hospital cafeteria so it was very pleasant surprise. Entire staff was of very happy demeanor and people will really require that if they are in hospital. So overall it was awesome experience. I’m happy that my mundane breakfast joint was closed today.

Sometime I wonder that if one hospital cafeteria can give you such a good foodie cum good ambience experience why can’t the restaurant that are in the business specifically for food and ambience?