Improving Business or I Feel Your Pain
A client recently asked me, “How do I know where to start improving the business.” Simple, what are your customers telling you?
A required component of an ISO9000 or AS9100 Quality Management System is a customer feedback system. You have to do it, but are you making it worthwhile? A good auditor will ask to see proof the data you are gathering is meaningful and being used appropriately.
Two years of data from happy and satisfied customers with no complaints merely means your method of measuring customer satisfaction is not effective. You must do better. You’ll get away with no complaints for maybe one year, go back into the audit with two years of no complaints and your auditor could say, they don’t believe your customer feedback program is effective, everybody has complaints.
There are many ways to get customer feedback, and unfortunately the type of business you are in effects how you measure it. Boeing is going to do it differently than a manufacturer of pots and pans will. So I can’t give a one size fits all answer.
I sometimes find it effective to ask the question, “where is the pain?”. What pains your customers? Delivery? Packaging? Pricing? or maybe their customer returning your product?
Sit down with your customer and find out where their pain is. Call the meeting Customer Satisfaction record it and stick it in the Customer Satisfaction file. Create a Corrective Action or Preventive Action for it and get it closed out.
The ISO9000 and AS9100 Quality Systems are customer centric, get close to your customer with your customer satisfaction program and make it painful for them to give your business to someone else. Pain causes change, make it good change.
The Most Powerful Word In Business
The most powerful word in business is “NO”
It is the superhuman word that can in a single utterance:
Protect your reputation
You can’t be late or over budget or mess up a project if you don’t take it.
Increase the strength of your bargaining position
If you don’t agree to take the assignment or deal, it’s up to the other person to bring you back.
Instantly make you the most important person in the room
You are the show stopper, you are the one that has to be dealt with.
Make you so totally non-relevant.
You are the one they move on without. Not part of the team.
Use “NO” but very very infrequently.
Only use “NO” if you have the power to wield it. Lower level employees have no power and using “NO” is essentially saying, “I am a problem employee, please lay me off”.
Possibly only one person in an organization truly has the power to use “NO”.
Be prepared to lose big, to walk away and have others walk away when you use “NO”.
The Word “YES” is the most dangerous word in business.
Everyone in an organization has the power to use “YES”. It can destroy you.
It can kill your reputation by over extending you.
It can kill your bargaining position position by rendering your position moot.
It can make you the most insignificant person in the room by making you an “already dealt” with.
It can make you relevant, you are on-board, you are part of the team, you are part of the solution.
Online Customer FeedBack
Or Customer Feedback made easy.
We all have to listen to the customer and we also have to prove we listen to the customer.
In these days of 24/7 expectations and global email our customers can be anytime and anywhere.
A solution I use is an online support ticket system. These systems were originally written by computer support desk personnel as a way to keep track of support requests, including documentation of the back and forth responses.
Document customer requests and responses to customers. What’s not to love?
I use an online system and you could to.
Assume your product is bluewidgets, you could open a domain called bluewidgetssupport.com and install the support ticket system.
Or the entrance to the support ticket system could be a button on your company’s existing website.
Any time a customer opens a support ticket an email would be sent to you and anyone else you deem worthy of receiving notice. The email has a link to the support ticket system and you answer the ticket within the system. The answer is now documented and including the response time it took for you to address their needs.
Anyone with a log in (administrators) can review and comment the customer feedback log.
I use bluehost for a website. If this approach seems worthwhile here are the steps.
1) Open an account with an hosting service such as bluehost.
2) Get a domain name such as bluewidgetssupport.com
3) Using the fantastico installer, install a support ticket program such as PHP Support Tickets. The program is free and open source, if you use it please consider making a donation to the authors, we did, 50$USD. (When we made a donation the US Dollar was worth more. The authors are British based.)
4) Configure the support ticket system.
5) Tell customers about the site, we gently suggest if they have 2:00 AM problems to use the site but they are welcome to call anytime during regular business hours. Put it on your literature.
May I suggest if you do decide to go this route and open an account with bluehost please use the banner below to get to the bluehost website. I will get a modest commission for delivering sales contacts their way. I have used bluehost for over 5 years with no issues. Click on the banner.
If you’d like me to set up the support ticket system, I can do that. Email me at qualityisbusiness@gmail.com to open the discussion.
Can There Be Significant Progress Without Pain?
Can people be shifted out of their day to day routine/comfort zone with out pain? We all face the challenge of causing change and many times that additional work or care in doing a job can mean the difference between getting on or moving forward.
Financial rewards work well but we can’t be doling out bonuses to insure people do their jobs, can we? That would lead to financial chaos, merely the administration of the bribes would be near impossible. Who gets bribed what today?
Clearly the whole ISO/AS audit thing is based on the “we are coming to look at you, get your house in order”, fear thing. The threat of bi-yearly or yearly reviews goes a long way to helping get it done.
In the ISO/AS Quality Standards they have tried to build in a mechanism for advancing an organization. In as much how advancement could be institutionalized they have done a good job.
The emphasis on customer feedback is intentional and based on the theory the customer knows best where your problems are.
Institutionalizing customer feedback is one of the toughest areas to effectively implement a working strategy.
The yearly performance review is another example, and for some of us our ISO/AS score is has a direct bearing on our review.
Organizations that don’t have direct or effective feedback mechanisms to “motivate” have to rely on other means. School, Governmental Departments both state, county and Federal come to mind. Theses types of organizations seem to rely on praise rather than threats.
“Lets all give a hand to our hard working public servants the ……fill in the blank”. Where have we heard this before?
This article is not to debate the merits of public employees or their effectiveness especially unionized ones, but this note I will make. I would love to see an objective Quality Standard with metrics implemented in a few governmental organizations and see some pain and egos/arrogance deflated.
Progress without pain, yes it can happen. A great and motivated leader can make it happen. But what motivates a great leader, consistently? Money or Pain, take your pick.
Give a great leader enough money and they will inflict all the pain you want.
Leadership Qualities
Sometimes we can define an particularly ethereal quality by defining what it is not.
We know the following qualities would not be used in describing a leader:
Ineffective and Unethical come to mind.
Bad leadership is bad in one or both these manners.
Great ideas do not flourish if the management and execution is ineffective and unethical goals can be accomplished with effective management.
Effective:
Ineffective Leadership doesn’t work or create change when it’s strategies fail, tactics are wrongly chosen or poorly implemented. The lack of a strategy, which is surely the most common strategy chosen counts.
Keeping with the premise of this article, Read the rest of this entry »
The Quality Heretic: Forms
The answer to every quality deficiency is not another form.
I hate forms.
Forms are the bane of Quality.
A form is an admission that your process is faulty and you don’t know how to fix it.
Forms rarely fix a problem, forms mainly document who screwed up for later blame assignment.
Forms are target rich environments for Auditors to nail you.
You are they only one who cares about your form.
Bureaucrats who make nothing love forms.
Be ruthless, cut the number of your forms down, cut till it hurts.
Ask the questions:
Who needs what information? Read the rest of this entry »
Emails: Think Before You Send
The “send” button — together with its evil cousins, “forward” and “reply all” — are causing a world of trouble for corporations as they connect to evidence in legal proceedings and create a new mess for in-house lawyers to clean up.
I’ve written about the pitfalls of emails before and it bears repeating. Law firms have specialized software that can find and retrieve documents and emails you didn’t know you had or had thought you deleted months ago.
Use Windows Explorer and search for *.pst. That is the Microsoft Outlook archive file. See how many and how large the files returned are! All those are emails. Think of the gems in there.
“You wouldn’t believe the things that people say — as though they’re just talking to a buddy,” said CIBA Vision’s Meece. Yet these e-mails are saved, backed up, forwarded or otherwise preserved — even when people think they’ve deleted them. “They very well can live forever.”
Yes live forever, and worst case someday Read the rest of this entry »
Toxic Employees
The toxic employee is not merely a bad employee but an employee that causes other employees to go bad. An employee that actively undermines your message and processes
In war the warring factions execute captured spies. This is a realization of the damage that an active agent working within the system can cause. There are no rules that protect a spy.
The comparison is a bit over dramatic in that we can’t execute toxic employees and they do have rules that protect them. Especially in a union environment.
Chances are good if you have a toxic employee you have no idea of extent of the damage they are causing. They don’t do it in front of you, they work when you are not looking.
Good workers will leave or lose productivity when placed with a toxic employee. Other toxic workers stay. Without active management of the situation you will through natural selection create a sick organization. Which quite frankly I am not sure can be cured without removing the root cause. In a union environment removing root causes is against the bylaws.
First line of defense is to not let toxic employees in the door. Insist on references and actually call them. Be very wary if former employers are not on the reference list. Have a line manager call the references, do not let Human Resources call. An HR person will understand all the pressures and laws their counterpoint is operating under and in most cases will not “bond” with the reference and get the information you really want. Also, an HR person will not know the terms of the trade.
Run a background check, look for arrests and convictions. Google their name, any newspaper references will come up. Read the rest of this entry »
Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is mentioned twice, in the Product Realization and Monitoring and Measurement.
This is usually a rich hunting ground for findings for the auditors. “well, yeah we listen to our customers, just the other day….”. Then you realize you are airing dirty laundry you would prefer not be aired for the auditor.
As usual it is best to address this and have a few corrective actions or preventatives on record.
Customer Feedback is tough, how do you get it, and get it in a manner you can use?
I’ve tried the emailed and written letter surveys. Asking: “Were we prompt?”, “Are our instructions clear?”. etc… What usually happens is the Office Manager ends up calling a few good customers and getting a phone interview. Return rates are really low. Read the rest of this entry »
Is The Noose To Hang You In Your Email File?
Emails are discoverable in a court action. Get sued for any number of reasons and the first thing they’ll do is ask to perform discovery on your files including emails.
Every stinking email you wrote including the lame jokes and somewhat inappropriate emails to a partner and those really inappropriate jokes your brother-in-law keeps emailing into you are about to be read by your lawyers at $200+/hr and their lawyers.
It is a real sinking feeling when you see box after box carried out on hand truck to the lawyer’s office for hand reading.
If bad jokes are all you are worried about you are lucky and a lot poorer. But what if an email is found with a smoking gun? Such as, “Fred, I am worried about the nut holding the throttle lever on”. What you have done is hand the opposing legal team a smoking gun. You may have meant that the tool kit does not include that wrench size or it may be hard to procure that size of nut. But you didn’t state any of those reasons you left it hanging, and it just might hang you. Read the rest of this entry »
Next Page »