When It All Comes Together
It seems to be a sad fact that most of us will encounter mediocre (at best) service unless we’re able to afford those high-class products and services that come with correspondingly high-class service as part of the package. “You get what you pay for” is the oft-repeated mantra.
I recently had one of those “serendipitous” moments when a query I sent was actually turned around promptly, politely and helpfully. By “helpfully”, I mean that the person handling it used their initiative (or had sufficient authority/experience to do so). Of course, maybe they didn’t follow “policy”, but who cares if it resulted in a good customer experience?
Originally when I approached the business concerned via their “Contact Us” link on their website, I was given the “usual run around”: request for additional information and “stock answers” without moving my case forward. Finally, I resorted to “tweeting” on their Twitter feed and was given the “magic email address” that resulted in the great experience.
Sad that I had to resort to publicising the issue on Twitter though…
The problem I see is that more and more commentators are now advising people to tweet, to get the problem out there in the open where thousands of others may see it and the organisation is forced to do something.
What does that say about service or attitudes? I accept that some organisations have been badly affected by the social distancing rules arising from the coronavirus epidemic, but is this a reason not to at least try? Even a simple message on a website may help.
When I run “Customer Service” or “Customer Experience” workshops, one of my first points is that, if people “got it right first time”, there’d be no need for “Complaints Departments” or “Customer Service” staff. The fact that we don’t get it right has spawned an entire (and growing) industry based around “Customer Service/Experience”, “Process Analysis”, “Suggestion Boxes”, “Product Training” (sometimes vital, I admit) “Staff of the Month” – the list goes on.
Isn’t it a sad reflection on life that, when we do encounter that occasion where they “get it right first time”, we are so surprised?
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services. For strategic questions that you should be asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.
Labels: Customer Care, Productivity, Teamwork
"Just Culture"
How many of us have been guilty of “finger pointing”, “blame gaming” or “witch hunting”? I certainly have. The human mind naturally looks for reasons that something happened – the simpler, the better. It’s easy to understand when just one part failed, one person didn’t do their job correctly, or when bad weather rained the match off. One cause = one effect = case closed.
In some cases, this does happen. In many, things are more complicated.
I work a lot with the aviation industry. When a plane has an accident, it’s big news. Thousands of people die every year from car accidents or gunshot wounds than from aircraft accidents, but we rarely hear about these. Aircraft accidents are rarer, and usually happen at high altitude to lots of people all at once. The skies are not a natural human element. Yet aviation is one of the safest industries in the world because people:
Share knowledge and experience of what went wrong
Work to fix it
Check that whatever’s been proposed as the “fix” is being implemented
Contrast this with others (I won’t name them) where certain senior figures are seen as all-knowing and therefore incapable of making mistakes; yet they do, often with fatal consequences.
In aviation, accidents are usually the result of several problems all occurring together or in sequence to cause something to happen. “Pilot error” or “human error” are often the first suggested causes of an accident. At times, this is the case. Looking at the problems experienced by the Boeing 737 Max, a number of factors combined to cause the problem. Cold comfort to those who lost loved ones in the accidents that followed…
“Just culture” is the name given to a culture which looks to establish the causes behind an incident without necessarily assigning blame to any one individual unless it is clear that that individual was indeed the sole cause.
Take the following:
- It’s late at night at the airport
- People in charge of servicing aircraft are tired
- An “urgent” repair comes in
- There is pressure to get it ready - fast
- A small part is needed; a mechanic goes to the stores
- The stores are poorly lit; the supervisor is out on their break
- Several other parts look identical with only 1-2 millimetres difference in dimensions
- A stores clerk earlier didn’t place the parts in the correct location
- The serial numbers aren’t marked on the parts due to their size
- Poor lighting prevents the mechanic checking them properly
- The mechanic grabs what he/she thinks is the right part and returns to the aircraft, fits it and reports to their supervisor that the job is done
- In their rush to get the aircraft out, the supervisor doesn’t check the work properly
- The aircraft is released for service, takes off and the part shakes loose
- The aircraft crash lands and a near-fatal accident is just avoided
Who is at fault?
As we can see, a combination of circumstances has occurred. “Just culture” would see this and conclude as such. Processes would be reviewed to ensure that the events above could not recur and personnel involved might need extra training. No one was solely to blame.
The problem for many is that this can be a complex and time-consuming process and doesn’t result in one clear “problem area”, but rather many. Easier to point a finger at the first easy target and blame them.
As life becomes more complex and interconnected, we as leaders need to bear this in mind and understand the complex interplay of relationships, departments and teams.
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services. For strategic questions that you should be asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.
Labels: Crisis Management, Customer Care, Leadership, Productivity, Teamwork
What The Numbers Tell Us?
Now that vaccines are finally becoming available, we are (I hope) exiting the coronavirus pandemic that has impacted the whole world. Governments, businesses and people have had to adapt to a world where a new “social distancing” was the norm as we struggled to understand the nature of the virus, how it spread and to develop preventative vaccines. Our lives changed forever, and I suspect that many of these changes will continue even after “herd immunity” is achieved.
One of these aspects of life will be work.
People became accustomed to video conferencing, interviewing and meetings to keep things going. We realised that, whilst face-to-face meetings were nice, there was no need to be physically present as much as we were wont before the coronavirus (COVID) struck. I personally believe that meetings where people are present in the same room will resume, as will business travel, but not at pre-COVID levels.
With this in mind, will there be as much need for office space, if employees can work from home (WFH)? In some cases, yes. Schools, hospitals, certain government departments, banks, hotels, construction sites (to name a few) will require their people “on site”. However, there may be pressure to allow WFH as “part of the package”, given that we can be contacted 24/7 through modern communications.
This may mean businesses needing less office space, more “hot desking” and less time spent commuting. If this means less pollution from cars and buses required to carry commuters and less congested highways and railways, that must be a good thing?
The flip side is that I suspect that work will intrude more into our personal space. A client was telling me about a conference held by one if his principals for their global network which took place from 7:30pm – 11:30pm his time. The boundaries between work and home life will be even more disrupted for some time, resulting perhaps in increased stress levels due to being unable to completely “disconnect” from work at home.
Another issue that arises is compensation. Now that (with some exceptions), people can “work anywhere from anywhere”, will this affect pay and benefits? Remember also the “anytime” aspect – it may suit someone in country A to work remotely for a company whose customers are in country B because it suits their particular circumstances. What, however, will happen to salaries? Will employers in “low-cost” countries not want to pay higher for people living in higher cost ones? It may not even be a case of different countries – it could be the same country but different regions. How many “rural poor”, for example, might benefit from this?
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services. For strategic questions that you should be asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.
Labels: Career, Customer Care, Leadership, Productivity, Social, Strategy, Teamwork
When Numbers Go Wrong
I recently finished a book called “Humble Pi” by mathematician Matt Parker. The book is a fascinating series of examples of how “human error” can render complex calculations useless, resulting in some spectacular (and tragic, at times) disasters.
Subtitled A Comedy of Maths Errors, the essence of the book can be distilled down to “Rubbish in, rubbish out” (particularly as many of Parker’s examples involve our reliance on computers and the computational powers of Microsoft EXCEL but forget the “human error” factor. Parker’s main point is, if you get the inputs, the sums or a combination of both wrong, you may end up with a problem.
This is not to deny the advances in human knowledge and scientific understanding, it’s just that sometimes we overstretch ourselves - we run before we’ve learnt to walk properly.
Much of our life is dominated by numbers: salaries, cost of goods, returns on investments, power consumption, trade deficits, exchange rates, interest rates, how our business is running and so on. The more we come to rely on machines to crunch these numbers for us in different ways to inform decision making, the more we may be lulled into a false sense of security. Many of the problems narrated by Parker arise due to the proverbial “one in a million” chance of something going wrong in that, the more something is used or run, the more likely “one in a million” event becomes. As long as we’re not the millionth, things are OK.
Take the problems of Cerebral Venous Sinus Thrombosis (CSVT) - rare brain clots - experienced by a tiny percentage of people who received the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. This condition is said to affect c. 4-5 in 1 million people every year. Apparently, it is also more common amongst younger women and may/may not be linked to birth control medication and to the under-30 age group.
The regulator looked into the number of people in the UK who had developed rare blood clots after receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine. It found that 79 people - two-thirds of them women - experienced the clots after receiving a first vaccine dose. Nineteen of them died.
According to the UK medical regulator, 79 people (two-thirds - 53 - of them women) experienced clots after receiving a first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine. 19 died. More than 20 million (suspiciously nice round number) doses had been administered across the UK by the end of March.
So, out of 20 million people vaccinated, 79 experienced clots. Of the 79, 19 died. One could infer that:
- Our chances of experiencing a clot are: (79/20,000,000) x 100 = .000395% BUT:
- The chances of dying if we get a clot increase to (19/79) x 100 = almost 25%/1 in 4
Another way of looking at it is to say chances of dying after receiving AstraZeneca are (19/20,000000) x 100 = 0.000095% or 1 in 1,900 (taking the percentage of total numbers vaccinated).
In neither case are we necessarily correct and it is no comfort to us or our nearest and dearest if we are the “unlucky one”…
There may or may not be a causal link, there is certainly a correlative one, and we’ve heard no reports of similar cases amongst this receiving (say) the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine. The medical world is still unsure of whether the vaccine is what provokes the clots, but a tiny percentage of people (and only those receiving AstraZeneca) seem to have been fatally impacted.
The point is, despite all the clinical trials, AstraZeneca could not have predicted this occurrence, given its rarity. Trials involved a limited number of people over a relatively short period of time. I suspect that there was also pressure to produce a working vaccine ASAP. The medical world’s opinion is that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine outweigh the risks of hospitalisation and death for the vast majority of people. For younger age groups and those with a history of blood clots, it is more "finely balanced”, and they should be offered an alternative.
In short, it helps to be a little bit cynical about numbers (especially whole numbers) and to ensure that we understand how they were produced. From Matt Parker, we understand that there is always a risk that “the numbers” may not work out in our favour for whatever reason.
I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services. For strategic questions that you should be asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610
Labels: Financial, Productivity, Strategy
