Wednesday, 9.33pm
Sheffield, U.K.
Success is really about expertise. – Steve Young
I’m on the sixth post going through John Seddon’s “Freedom from command and control”. You can find all the posts here.
Seddon has a basic model in his book for any service that has a structure where the customer has something that’s broken and needs it fixing – he calls this a break-fix archetype.
Something has gone wrong so you get a call.
That’s a form of customer demand.
The first assumption is that this is a bad thing. You should prevent customers from getting to you at all costs – you need a dial control system – press 1 to hold forever – and so on.
Or you need to build a call centre to handle all these calls.
Or, these days, use a chatbot. Or an AI answering service. There’s one being promoted now that has a human type voice and can answer millions of calls.
But before you do anything at all you really need to understand why people are calling in the first place.
If things are going well there should be no reason to call at all, should there?
The call is actually a signal – a sign that something is going wrong and needs fixing.
The first thing you should do is start listening to calls and answering them. Try and understand the problem.
And here’s the second mistake people make.
They assume that their most experienced people are too valuable to spend time talking to customers so they get low-paid temps or administrative staff to do that instead.
But these individuals lack the experience needed to really understand and diagnose what’s going on.
So they might spend more time on a call and get things wrong and create more problems than if one of your experts had a five minute chat and worked out what to do.
The second correct step is to get someone who knows what they’re doing to have a chat with the person that has a problem.
Which will then lead naturally to the next step which is to figure out what needs to be done and respond to the customer, ideally resolving the problem.
This is really hard to do – managers have to find something to do with their time so they end up measuring things and trying to find incentives – rather than just paying people and letting them get on with their work.
If you’re just starting a service business this is something worth thinking about – because it’s going to be difficult.
Don’t try and measure and incentivize people in a bid to motivate them.
Let them be motivated by being able to do a good job and make things better for customers.
Pay them a salary, rather than bonuses or commissions or some other fancy stuff.
If you need someone on your team it should be on a salary.
And their job should be to talk to customers and deliver what they need.
As a manager, your job is to help them do that – getting them resources and getting roadblocks out of the way.
Why do this?
Because no one grow a business by focusing on costs.
Focus on delivering value – and doing that will drive out costs.
That’s the way to succeed.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
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