A Rave Against Miserable Customer Service, Lousy Leaders and Protectionist Policies
Filed under: Customer Service, Leadership, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Social Commentary, Surviving Lousy Leaders
One of my favorite, provocative business thinkers, Gary Hamel, says what we’ve all been thinking about in his Wall Street Journal blog post, “Too Many Industries Suffering from Detroititis.”
While the term “Detroititis” is not yet in common use, it isn’t hard to intuit the meaning. A mix of myopic thinking, short-term management approaches and a damn the consumer mentality, all jump to my mind.
Hamel appropriately skewers the U.S. airline industry for suffering from a chronic case of this newly named malady. He also chastises the U.S. government for propping up this industry with a “blatantly protectionist policy” that bars foreign ownership of U.S. air carriers.
Note from Art: this protectionist policy and the adverse implications for consumers and for society speak to the heart of my post: If Ayn Rand Could See Us Now.
The U.S. airlines are easy and deserving targets. It is nearly impossible to find any customer satisfaction, much less enjoyment flying with these broken-down flying bus companies. (Apologies to any bus companies that I’ve insulted.)
More often than not, you deal with ridiculous lines, grumpy attendants and flight personnel that visibly hate their jobs. Most of the customer service practices recently put into place are shortsighted and designed with the carrier in mind, not the customer.
In the vernacular of one of my favorite recent books, Tuned-In, the carriers truly do create remarkable customer experiences. Unfortunately, they missed the memo on making these experiences positive ones.
The contrast between the customer experience on a U.S. Air Carrier and an overseas carrier is stark. Fly Singapore Airlines or JAL and you’ll spend most of your trip in shock over how nice the experience can be. Something will feel very different and out of place. The poor treatment is gone, replaced by great service provided by people that seem to enjoy creating nice experiences for customers.
Other than the cathartic exercise of criticizing the U.S. carriers (of which I have over 1 million miles on), there are a few reminders for all of us in our businesses as we work to immunize our thinking against the deadly disease of “Detroititis.”
- Keep the government out of the business of artificially protecting under performing industries and companies. Hamel is right. If Singapore Airlines wants to compete for routes in the U.S., they should have that option.
- Evaluate what your customers truly think about their experience with your firm and DO SOMETHING to improve the experience. The airlines employ legions of marketing people to fly around the globe and evaluating customer experiences…but nothing seems to come out from this effort other than dumb policies and new fees.
- Fight for the customer like you livelihood depends upon it. It does.
- As a leader, work unceasingly to instill a sense of pride and commitment to customers in your workplace. If your business is a high-contact customer business, every person that touches a customer must strive to create a positive experience. Working a ticket counter at terminal B at O’Hare may involve dealing with thousands of people per day who are stressed and frustrated. Take away a little of their stress and frustration, treat them like humans and show them that you care! Send thousands of people home everyday with an improved experience, and maybe your business will improve. Go figure.
- No one ever wants to talk to someone that they cannot understand and that they cannot hear on the telephone. Stop subjecting us to these horrendous phone experiences. If you are in charge of this area of your customer experience, what the blank are you thinking?
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The people that I don’t get are the managers and leaders responsible for managing and leading the customer service representatives in organizations that clearly have lousy customer service. Fire yourself, please.
The customer experience at Gate C14 starts at the top of the organization. The same goes for your firm. Unfortunately, we can all learn a lot about what not to do from the auto companies and air carriers in the U.S.
Now quit reading and find something that you can do to improve the experience for your customers!
Does Your Dashboard of Performance Measurements Include a Warning Light?
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leading Change, Surviving Lousy Leaders
Count me as one of the last idealists. Or perhaps the last of the naïve idealists. In a world filled with Quality Management Systems and Performance Measurement techniques backed by legions of people trained to implement and sustain quality performance, it seems reasonable to me that organizations are capable of not only keep themselves from imploding, but that they are armed to the teeth with tools to ensure prosperity beyond the wildest dreams of Dr. Deming.
As an aside, Dr. Deming once famously indicated that it was his hope that his legacy was to keep U.S. companies from committing suicide. Perhaps it is good that he is not here to see the firms elbowing each other out of the way in an attempt to get to the front of the line on the edge of the cliff.
- The U.S. auto companies are almost finished carrying out their joint suicide pact in a world where the rules for success as an automobile company are on display for everyone to see.
- Motorola, an icon of U.S. electronics has systematically destroyed itself by flailing and flailing in the mobile device (read: cellphone) world, and stands a reasonable chance of failing to survive without drastic action. (See my earlier post on the Dollar Bill Auction to get a feeling for Motorola’s problems.) The fact that Motorola is a Baldrige winner, one of the founding fathers of Six Sigma and an organization staffed with brilliant engineers, yet it cannot seem to engineer success is both puzzling and frustrating.
- Earlier this week, Boeing indicated that they would again delay the launch of its now several years late and much hyped 787 Dreamliner. The article indicated that the latest problem had to do with quality issues related to a new type of fastener required for the high tech and lightweight materials being used in the plane. The advance sale of 900 of these puppies at $178 million a piece and the expected 20% fuel consumption savings has customers hopping mad over this latest in a series of seemingly endless project management and supply chain problems.
- Financial services, banking, investment banking. Ugh. These icons of risk management succeeding in maximizing risk beyond their wildest expectations.
How does this happen in a world filled with balanced scorecards and legions of certified quality professionals constantly measuring, monitoring and striving to improve performance? I suspect that my own answer is that while we have ample tools available for our use in building, the one tool that we haven’t yet mastered is staring back at us in the mirror.
In discussions and lectures with the up and coming generation of leaders, there is widespread cynicism over the intentions and the capabilities of many of their firm’s senior leaders. There is little faith expressed that their leaders understand their firm’s key drivers and little confidence that the leaders are taking actions and measuring performance based on anything other than preconceived notions of what they think is right. Fewer organizations than you might think are doing anything to engender employee satisfaction…which is ironic given the mountains of data that indicate that employee satisfaction flows through to customer satisfaction and strong financial performance.
This current generation of senior leaders is failing, and the very imbalanced scorecard is visible all around us. The business cycle is one thing, but our problems go way beyond the business cycle to our preconceived notions of how to lead, how to run businesses, how to fuel innovation and how to create an environment where talent and calculated risk-taking are carefully cultivated.
Many organizations are hives of activity with no vector and the output is chaotic. Firms and top leaders need to quit guessing and start using the tools available to identify key business drivers and to measure and monitor the efforts and outcomes of focusing on those drivers.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned crisis to engender creativity. Well, we have one. In spite of the difficulties, it’s a great opportunity for organizations and leaders to quit paying lip-service to cliché’s like customer-satisfaction, performance excellence and quality. It’s a big world with a growing population and while the forecast is stormy now, the seas will eventually calm and the sun will shine. It will be interesting to see who has the courage and fortitude to do the things necessary to make it through the storm. Even money that we find a whole new generation of leaders in the process.
-
Podcast
-
Available Now!
-
Practical Lessons
-
e-book
e-book-Leadership and the Project Manager - Developing the Skills that Fuel High Performance
