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I’m sorry
/in Extraordinary Customer/Client Service/by Tom DoescherWhy are those words so hard to say? We’re currently reading a great book, Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, by Kerry Patterson and several other authors. It’s a book we would recommend to almost anyone because it will help you in business, at home, or in any relationship. We will probably comment on it more in another blog, but today we wanted to highlight one of the authors’ recommendations. They suggest that when you realize you’ve made a mistake, it’s important to start with an “apology,” which they define as a statement that sincerely expresses your sorrow for your role in causing difficulty for others. Many of us have received what we called “qualified apologies,” and maybe we’ve even delivered a few — something along the lines of, “I am sorry you felt that way about me embarrassing you in front of your friends.”
The other day we had an episode at our auto dealership. We’ve done business with them for a long time, and we’ve always received great service and had positive experiences. We were leasing a new vehicle, and we noticed a slight problem in the transaction. When we brought the problem to their attention, the finance manager took total responsibility and offered an unqualified apology for his oversight. He also solved the problem immediately.
Do you and your team take total responsibility for customer/client problems, or do you place blame elsewhere?
In the story above, the dealership made a mistake — but the way they handled it has made us even bigger fans of their establishment. We all make mistakes; it’s how we handle them that separate the great from the average.
Happy associates equal delighted customers/clients, part 3
/in Ideas to help you build a solid team/by Tom DoescherThe final job misery factor, according to Patrick Lencioni (see part 1 and part 2), is immeasurement. Team members need to gauge their progress and level of contribution for themselves. Question/discovery No. 1 in the book First, Break All the Rules, by Marcus Buckingham, is: Do I know what is expected of me at work? This one is somewhat counterintuitive. It seems like accountability has become a bad/evil word. But the truth is, people want to be held accountable.
Another one of our all-time favorite books is Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, written by Louis Gerstner. It is the story of how he and his team saved IBM in the early 1990s. In his concluding comments, Gerstner speaks about measurement. He says, “People do what you inspect, not what you expect.”
Do you measure what is important to your business success? Do all of your team members have clear goals? We can’t tell you how many times we’ve heard stories about team members who were demotivated because they did not receive any specific — or even any fuzzy — goals. They did their best, only to be criticized by their supervisor, who would say, “That’s not what I want or what we need.”
The cool thing about attacking these three traits — anonymity, irrelevance and immeasurement — is that they are not rocket science or proprietary, and they do not cost any extra money. As a well-known advertisement proclaims, “Just Do It!”
Happy associates equal delighted customers/clients, part 2
/in Ideas to help you build a solid team/by Tom DoescherThe second job misery indicator, according to Patrick Lencioni, is irrelevance (see part 1 from 9/30- Happy associates equal delighted customers/clients). Lencioni would say that human beings need to be needed, and they need to be reminded of this pretty much every day. Remember the story about the janitor at Michigan State? Did Tom Izzo find a way to help make the janitor’s job more relevant?
We see similarities between relevance and purpose — which is one of three traits that motivates us, according to Daniel Pink in his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Pink defines purpose as a desire to be involved in a cause larger than oneself. We know a lot of you are probably saying, “Yeah, right.” It may be easy to motivate the team if you’re sending a man to the moon, but what most of us do on a day-to-day basis is pretty plain vanilla. Still, Frank Moran, founder of Plante Moran, was able to create just that — the feeling of being involved in a larger cause — at an accounting firm, of all places. He would say, “Plante Moran is the Mayo Clinic for businesses. At one end of the building is a long line of successful business owners looking for help with their businesses, and at the other end of the building is a long line of well-educated, talented, resourceful professionals desiring to help businesses achieve their goals.”
How do your associates feel about the relevance of their job? When they refer to the company, do they say “we” or “they”? If you have a profitable business, you are very relevant to your customers/clients. As the leader, do you connect the dots for your team?