Great Expectations
There is a lot of loose talk around customer care or
customer experience. Lots of business people talk about it but few organisations
actually deliver excellence consistently, over time.
At Pearl Lake Leisure Park in Herefordshire, Glenn Jones and
his team have been working hard in this area over many years. They have tried
to look at just about everything they do from a customer perspective.
This beautiful venue is primarily for holiday homes, but
touring caravans and campers are also welcome.
One day a honeymoon couple arrived, but shortly after erecting their
flimsy little tent, the skies opened and prolonged rainfall meant that the new
visitors were soon cold and very wet. Glenn and the team simply re housed the
couple into one of the superb new holiday homes for the duration of their stay.
All their kit was cleaned and dried by the team........
As Managing Director, Glenn is never, ever satisfied that he
is doing enough for his customers. Perhaps that is the reason he has taken his
2001 Customer Survey score of 80% to a staggering 91% in 2011.
Let’s listen to how he does
it.Labels: Great customer service and how to achieve it
Below the water line
In any business there are always jugular issues, below the water line things, that if left unresolved to the satisfaction of all parties, will sink the ship.
Twenty five years ago our Relate counsellor said, “You’ve come here today because your relationship is in some kind of ditch. Well, after a few meetings with me you will both climb out of the ditch. If you climb out on the same side you will go off and have another go at your marriage. If you climb out on opposite sides, there will be a parting of the ways.” I looked across at my first wife; she nodded her assent and so we went for it.
It’s exactly the same in the Boardroom. I’ve had many situations over the years where, during this process of self discovery that we call the Growth Cycle, one or more parties have stormed out of the room in a highly charged emotional, verbal and sometimes physical state.
Eventually, no matter how upset they may be, the best option for both themselves and their business, is to return to the table and face the issue that caused the problem in the first place. And yes, they will find out which side of the ditch they and their colleagues are on.
And that is a result for all concerned.
Value
The demands of business are such that we can so easily lose sight of our values, or even worse, forget what it is that really matters to us.
Back in 1955 a well meaning uncle gave me a copy of Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing by Bernard Venables. It is a paperback of cartoon sketches showing Mr Crabtree and his young son Peter fishing for various species during the different seasons of the year.
I read that book so many times as I grew up that the pages eventually disintegrated and fell out; my favourite fish became the perch. When I was 28 and looking for a place to live the words on page 95 of the book kept flashing across my mind, even in the middle of the night ....”if you want to catch really big perch ....fish the River Wye at Hereford.”
So one day in 1977 I visited the place, walked over the old Wye Bridge by the Cathedral, down the bank and scooped out a handful of water to drink. In that moment I determined to spend the rest of my life living in this lovely city. Two weeks later I arrived with nowhere to live, no work and very little money.
And now, thirty four years on, it is great when a client postpones a meeting at short notice; I can be on the river in under six minutes.
Someone once said to me “You know the price of everything, but the value of nothing” They may have been right, the book cost five shillings, but how do you put a value on that?
Labels: personal values and business
Engaged to be......
It seems that there is more pressure than ever from people and organisations that want to engage with us, in one way or another, all the time.
It is easy to see why this could be when cars, banks, hotel rooms and even beer could be seen to be more or less all the same, whatever the branding says. How else do we differentiate our product and /or our service without the relationship element?
Lucy Kelloway, who writes for the Financial Times is all for this development; she claims that certain professionals, especially those that work random hours, need to be more flexible on holiday. This means taking your smart phones, laptop and mobile internet along with your bucket and spade. She has invented a new word to go with it; we need to go on "worlidays" now, spending at least some time every day in touch with our business.
But I don't see it that way. Having just spent twenty one days in a tent somewhere in deepest France without a Blackberry or a 'to do' list, the engagement was with French people, the language, the countryside, the food and the wine.
The key thing here, for all of us, is to choose if we can, with whom, how and when we engage.
Labels: Engagement with people and organisations
Fishes and wishes
A holiday break is a great time to review one’s life, to think about the things that are working for you and the things that could be better. For many of us it is that often elusive balance between work, family, hobbies and community.
I was on a lake recently and fished hard for six hours without seeing or hearing a solitary fish. I consoled myself with the thought that next day I had been invited to fish a well stocked commercial fishery. That day was spent catching or dropping fish of all shapes, colours and sizes on every single cast for the entire visit.
On reflection I am not sure which was the least pleasant experience – having too little, or having too much.
I meet business people all the time that want to set themselves extremely ambitious Bull’s Eyes. Often it is the older ones that have this irresistible urge to turn a lifetime of hard work into a more tangible and evident symbol of success. A chap in his sixties told me “I’ve always dreamed of driving the grandchildren round town in a Rolls Royce.”
When we do not have enough it is not a good place to be. But there is often a high price to pay for having more than enough. And is it worth it?
Labels: False dreams in business
Natural causes
No matter how you or I may want to run our business, there are some natural laws that, sooner or later, whether we like it or not, simply have to be obeyed.
I was asked to work with a family business recently where the issues were not so much with the business model or the quality of the products or services. It was all to do with the feuding and rivalry between the two sisters and the brother that had inherited the business from their father. With father having passed away recently it seemed to me like the leadership of some forty staff was in freefall.
Despite being equal shareholders, one of the sisters wanted to correspond with me directly but without copying in her sibling directors. I replied to her very first email and copied the other two in. Indignantly she replied that the business wouldn’t have any problems “if the other two would just listen to me”.
The more open and honest transactions can be in business the better it is for the organisation itself and for the relationships between the people running the business.
In family businesses it may mean trying to change the habits of a lifetime but everyone will be a winner in the end.
Labels: Dealing with conflict in family businesses
Nonsense and social media
Point
The problem for those businesses that are preoccupied with all the various social media options is that a lot of activity is not actually a route to market, but more of a dead end street.
Story
I know someone who offers professional services in the HR field. Paula really does spend a lot of time and energy working at the many social media strings on her bow. She blogs on a regular basis and these blogs are available on her website. She is active on Linked In and has joined a variety of groups where there are frequent online discussions. This person spends a good deal of time on Twitter; she follows a lot of people although not many people follow her.
Paula is a PowerNetworker member of Ecademy and attends some of their events in London; she goes to various breakfast meetings and a number of other face to face activities where people swap business cards. She enters everyone’s business cards details on her Outlook contacts. She’s recently set up a small room at home all kitted out to do podcasts.
Now Paula has been working at this business for some five years in conjunction with various associates; people that she has met on the way. She does no customer surveys, she has no facilitated appraisal and she has no testimonials. I asked her if she was making any money. The answer was “no”.
Application
Any service provider needs to offer high quality content to clients and customers; you have to be able make an immediate difference to their businesses and / or their lives.
Secondly you have to be excellent at building relationships with people that want to work with your particular expertise. There will be plenty of people that don’t and that is fine too.
These two points are more important to a growing business than all the social media put together.
Down and up
There’s so much in the media about all the 40/50 somethings that are out of work, but it’s a great place to be if you know what to do about it.
We know lots of these people that are now in the market place and there has never been a better time to set up and run a business from home. The single most important thing to do is to find out what particular expertise you would like to take to market. It never ceases to amaze me how many people do not know the answer to the question: “What is it that makes you special?” It may be the journey of a lifetime to find the exact answer, but we don’t need to be that precise. At this stage we are just finding out where the direction of the business is likely to be.
Secondly we have to start developing great relationships with colleagues, (and this could be the person you sleep with) stakeholders and ultimately customers and or clients. We have to get closer than ever before to these people – we are looking for people that are on a similar journey towards excellence that we need to be on. And excellence is all around us when we look for it.
We need to get over a lack of regular money. There are different ways of looking at money in this context. We sometimes have to start to think differently, do things differently and behave differently. The battery hen gets regular feed, but now you are about to metamorphose into a free range chicken with all the liberation and excitement that means for many. It might be the first time in your life that you are in a position to determine the work life parameters for yourself and your family.
And what could be better than that?
