A while back I picked up The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs by Bill Price and David Jaffe which is based upon their experience with customer service at Amazon. The premise of the book is that if you’re in the online game your customers don’t want to talk to you or interact with you. They want to get what they want, anytime they want, with no need to “touch” you in any unplanned way. The goal being customer service eliminates itself rather than staffs up to process more volume. Another one of those ah ha moments where you say to yourself why didn’t I think of that.
How to do it, or at least my interpretation of how to do it:
- Capture all touch points between you and the customer.
- Classify the why or reason for the touch. Keep the options simple, less than 30, refine over time.
- For each reason identify the cause, it is the causes your going to go after, not how to handle more touches faster, but rather what caused the touch and how do I get rid of it.
- Create a touch index, a rolling 6 week total of all touches over some measure of your volume of business. Chart it. It should be driving down, especially if your volume of business is driving up.
- Some touch reasons take longer to resolve or require multiple touches to close them. My recommendation is go after these first – things that take time and more than likely allot of back and forth are the most frustrating for your client and the most expensive for you. Once these are closed than go after the volume one touch reasons and close them in order of highest to lowest volume.
This approach should build momentum. It is likely going to be hard to get rolling because everyone is so busy fighting fires but as they put out the cause of the fire they should find more and more time to invest in proactive prevention rather than reactive customer service.
Pretty simple. I wish I could take credit for the insight. And like everything, hearing it second hand from me doesn’t do the system any justice at all. Get the book!
From The Globe and Mail
“nothing like this could have been organized on such a scale and with so few resources before the dawn of social media”
There are no more barriers other than the intellectual capacity and bravery required to launch.
I have been alive for over 17,000 days. Generally speaking I have used a washroom in one form or another let’s say at least 5 times per day. That means that I have had a washroom experience at least 85,000 times in my life. I’m going to renovate my bathroom. When meeting with the contractor I have experienced so many washrooms that I can easily describe what I want, and guess what, so has she and if I picked the right person she not only uses them but has also built many, many as well. Very easy to describe the entire project, get a quote and easy to evaluate progress. Doesn’t always go perfect but at least there isn’t allot of debate about the fact that the room should have a toilet.
Why then do we take this same approach to building software? To building something that we likely haven’t experienced before, can’t describe well, and we’re not too sure how it should work. And then we need to have someone build it who probably has had the same or least experience and on top of that they have to try and decipher what we want. Why also does our fear of not getting what we want drive us to get greedy and ask for everything? Dumb. If you have 10 things your software should do, use an 80/20 rule. Build 2, evaluate deliverables daily, when done, use the software and experience it fully, revisit the remaining 8 items and I think you will be surprised to find that they no longer apply, you now have a new list of 10 things you want to add. Don’t get dumb and go for all 10, do 2, repeat, enjoy. Stay regular. Couldn’t help the pun.
I just picked this up from Seth’s Blog and watched the video he linked to. Watch it. Seriously.
It is so important to know who you are and what you do and more importantly what you aren’t. You must know where you stand and have the discipline and the courage to say no to what you are not. I’ll say it again the discipline and courage to say no because there are going to be allot of bigger guys out there screaming at you to say yes.
I think this applies to everything in life. This just isn’t business 101. This is life 101. It just so happens it is a good formula for running a profitable business.
Do you know what you are? Are you flavor of the day? Or are you passionately committed to what you believe in and what you are doing?
The old way; a complex topic needs to be discussed and the agenda holder wants everyone to come together to review because it is too complex to resolve any other way; a meeting is called, which takes considerable time to coordinate attendees, time, place and agenda; all come together; usually someone is late so you wait; whoever called the meeting presents their topic; whoever is loudest takes it from there; all throw comments in as they hit them; others stare at the ceiling; and round and round it goes; usually no one is comfortable reaching a conclusion because whatever was presented is new to them and they need time to think; meeting is adjourned to be reconvened later and typically no decisions are reached. You can easily lose a day to this type of event.
The better way; a complex topic is shared via a wiki, video, shared doc, google wave (I can’t wait!) and everyone is asked to give it some thought and post their conclusions when ready to make a contribution; sometimes the topic is hostile or the frequency of back and forth clarifications are too many so sometimes a meeting is needed, preferably video or conference call and as a last resort physically with preferably no chairs to get too comfortable in; whatever hostility or confusion was present is quickly resolved because all involved are well versed on the topic; decisions are reached and meeting is adjourned.
I don’t understand why anyone accepts being called to a meeting to discuss a topic that is too complicated to present for review beforehand. Who in their right mind is going to walk into a room, get hit with something complicated and try to reach a conclusion on the fly. And probably spend hours debating it. It just doesn’t make sense to me. We have so many ways to communicate complex information quickly, easily and cost effectively and we have the means to collate responses when best for those who are considering the information to respond. When they have thought it through, reflected, and have something to weigh in on and quite possibly they don’t have an opinion so they can opt out and not get distracted by whatever is happening.
I can hear it now. How do you team build, get to know each other, have face to face time, etc. etc. You get together to do just that. You socialize, have lunch, stop for a chat, whatever means of socializing with your coworkers that you prefer. This is good stuff. But it isn’t the forum for complex information processing and decision making and from my perspective meetings aren’t the best forum for it either.
That’s why most of us make stuff up about the reality of our current situation. We are dishonest and manipulative about it to make ourselves feel better. And we will go to great pains to protect our made up version of the story – cause that is all it is – a story. It isn’t reality and it isn’t the truth.
However, what most people don’t realize is that if your on a journey and you have places to go, people to see and goals to accomplish, then fooling yourself and others about reality is a really bad idea. If I can’t describe and therefore don’t know where I am how can I possibly plot a course to where I want to go? And worse yet, if I am the leader of an organization and I convince others that my made up story is true, how can those who follow me truly plot their course?
Making up stories and defending those stories takes allot of energy. You have to first make them up, defend them, convince others, remember them and then keep promoting them. Whereas describing a situation in gory detail and dead honesty is really simple and once done you can then immediately talk about the discrepancy between your reality and goal and what actions you need to take to get rid of the discrepancies. No more to it then that. No stories. No drama. Just next steps in the right direction for the journey you want to take. Sink yourself in reality, you get used to it after awhile and it actually starts to feel really good. Honest.
My bike has 1 seat but 2 sets of pedals. Okay it is my imaginary bike but let’s consider the possibility. I jump on and I have to decide which set to use. I might put 1 foot on 1 set and 1 foot on another. I might reverse my feet. I might try 1 set then the other or I might just give up and push myself along. Or worse yet, I might just give up bike riding altogether because it is just so complicated.
It seems to be in our nature to over engineer. To add too many options, umpteen different ways of solving the same problem, pricing schemes that need pages to explain and pages and pages of detailed billing to verify. Software that let’s you do everything but what you want to do really simply. A proposal that is lost in pages of “trees” verbiage, so much so that you can no longer see and appreciate the offered solution or “forest” if you will.
What’s wrong with simple? What’s wrong with my old bicycle that has just 1 set of pedals?
If I have a scarcity world view:
- I horde what I have
- I focus on keeping what I have
- I constantly compare what I have to what you have
- I play me too – if you get that than I get this – if you do that, then I get to do this
- I have closed dialogues – not open and sharing discussions
- I assume distrust
Pretty easy to see that scarcity will just beget scarcity. It doesn’t create anything. It is a negative worldview that leaves all of us fighting over a smaller and smaller pie.
Throw out scarcity! Get generous. Share what you have. Celebrate the rewards of others. Forget me too and start the dialogue about what could be created together from what we have together. Trust till proven otherwise. A generous worldview creates – a scarcity driven mentality is a problem rather than goal oriented view and it creates nothing.
Good leadership is really clear about where it is going, aligning goals and collating ideas, feedback and suggestions all while enforcing the rules of how everyone works together. It doesn’t careen wildly in knee jerk reactions to every complaint, criticism or failure. It has a firm and fair hand.
I think of it like a bus. Everyone knows the destination, knows it isn’t up for debate and realizes that the passengers have to adhere to the bus rules. And everyone knows they don’t have to take the bus if they don’t want to.
My bus rules or the way I like to work together include:
- We don’t “doubt” what can be done, we “wonder” what we can accomplish
- We have purpose, we don’t wander
- We respect each other, are polite but direct, honesty comes before diplomacy or conflict avoidance
- We are independent; we don’t need cheerleaders, hand holding or face time to make each other feel better
- We know time is of the essence and we never waste it
- We don’t quit and we never say “just tell me what to do” we instead say “I suggest we do this”
- We live for vibrant dialogue; we are passionate about our ideas but our egos are checked at the door
- We seek the truth and don’t make stuff up to make ourselves feel better when we just don’t know
- We can just as easily say we are wrong as we can we are right
- We’re never done – mediocrity isn’t in our vocabulary – we continually improve ourselves and our work
- We live to learn, learning inspires, doesn’t scare us
- We set the bar high to see if we can beat it, we don’t set it low to make it easy for ourselves
- We are mindful in everything we do, never mindless, if something becomes mindless we tear it up
- We work hard but never to the point of burn-out, we take our vacation and return recharged
Everyone should know where the bus is going, they should appreciate that the destination isn’t up for a vote – but ideas and suggestions are welcome, and they should take their decision seriously:
- Do they want to get on?
- Is it going where they want to go?
- Are they looking forward to the journey?
- Is there another bus they would rather take?
- Maybe it is time to take a breather and stay off the buses for awhile?
Or maybe all of these buses suck. It’s time to start your own bus! Where will it go? What will your rider rules be?
We shut down servers and went SaaS (software as a service rather than software we install and maintain) to fully embrace the same model that we have moved our software products to. We felt we had to walk the talk and learn from our experience to be in the best possible position to continually improve the SaaS product that we provide (Rise Display Network). This didn’t start out as a money saving thing.
I just finished reviewing our annual fixed asset count and I am blown away by how much hardware and software is marked “No Longer In Use”. I cringe when I look at the total purchase costs. And when I add in the hire that we are about to make and the existing person we freed up whose job it was to maintain this IT monster I am real glad we decided to “Walk The Talk”.
Our move to an all SaaS (well almost, still a couple of things left to convert) has allowed us to focus on what we do best and to redirect the money saved into the value we create, not the administrative IT overhead that was a constant distraction. Why SaaS for us? To better understand all aspects of the software as a service model that we provide and it’s a money thing. We saved and are saving substantially.
