The New Year is often seen as a time for personal change but Howard Raynor thinks that organisations can turn over a new leaf too.
So the mistletoe finally clears, the hangover looks out lamely across the room and the Christmas tree lights blink their last: 2006 is upon us. How are we going to perform in 2006? Normally we just pitch back in the way we left off what if we take a moment to be just a bit more cosmic? What if we can just have a slightly out-of-organisation experience? Stopping to rethink the assets, rethink the resources, rethink the solutions doesnt require the business to be in an emergency: it just requires us to stand back for a moment.
Questions, questions
Becoming aware of our own favourite behaviours as part of an organisation can reveal alternative ways of solving problems. Posing some interesting questions to help explore new approaches to our business problems is a useful exercise, so I have gathered together some break-the-ice questions: a strategic trivia quiz!
Many of these questions were formulated by Japanese management consultant Ken Ohmae and they are as probing of arts organisations as they are about manufacturing. They work at a department level, or individual person level when you want to get a fresh view on things.
" What is the secret of success around here?
" What are the limiting factors?
" What is the ideal state of affairs?
" Can I imaginatively re-segment the audience or market?
" What are the top five fundamental assumptions about the organisation?
" What are the main uncertainties?
" What is your favourite solution?
" How do you get your ideas?
" What are you afraid of?
" Do deadlines kill ideas?
" What am I most inspired by?
Spotlight on customer service
To try this out, just take a competitive advantage issue of the day it might be sponsorship or facility management. As an issue close to my own heart, lets just put customer service in the test box for a moment&
The secret of success in service is getting the whole organisation, not just the front line staff, to think about and act on the customers expectations.
The limiting factors might include the training budget being under pressure from compliance legislation in lots of other areas. Having to liberate the training budget to develop our customer service edge is clearly a constraint. The other limiting factor is that the education sector does not effectively develop personnel for customer-facing roles.
An ideal state of affairs is where the whole staff is focused on delighting the customer and making them comfortable.
In terms of the market segmentation I know that, in Manchester at least, I am not the only operator in the market who thinks customer service is a critical issue; so I could rethink the resource and collaborate across the city of Manchester with everyone else who is facing the issue. The market for this issue is not just me but everyone in the lifestyle sector. It seems that the top five institutional assumptions about customer service are:
" Service is inextricably linked to pay
" People see service roles as stop-gap jobs
" The issue is too big to do anything about
" Its about attitudes and you cant change them
" Staff turn over is so high, its not worth investing in the training.
I would also add that everyone thinks it is an issue critical to business success. The main uncertainty in customer service is whether training has any positive long term impact on the team. Also, if we were to act as a strategic group across the city, there might be uncertainty about whether we can effectively agree on the priorities.
The favourite solution at the Bridgewater Hall would be to form a team to address the issue.
To solve the problem in a thorough manner I knew I would need to use new ideas to tackle it. To get those ideas I started to meet with hoteliers who have exactly the same service issue but have to solve it in a different way. I did get a lot of new ideas from moving between the two sectors. In fact, the ideas and the issue were so strong that I resigned from my job as the Chief Executive of the Bridgewater Hall to address the issue!
My main fear was that we would make no progress as a city if we all tried to address the service issue piecemeal; we needed a sector move and that needed co-ordination from within the employers group, not the public sector. I confronted my fear by using great ideas from other sectors and combining them with my own knowledge and experience.
In this particular case the deadline of major events coming to Manchester has galvanised us in to action: the deadline makes the issue urgent and important for all of us working in hospitality or culture.
In the end I was inspired by seeing audiences and customers responding to great service in terms of their loyalty and word-of-mouth recommendations. Customer relationships are not about the database; they are about the face-to-face experience and the service environment. There are some great examples out there.
That is how I used strategic questions to rethink one specific problem and to work though a solution.
Have a peaceful, prosperous and questioning 2006!
Howard Raynor is Managing Director of World Class Service Ltd.
t: 0161 456 6007;
e: hkr@lineone.net;
w: http://www.worldclassservice.co.uk.
To read more by Ken Ohmae, try The Mind of the Strategist (McGraw-Hill, 1991)