Category Archives: Business Planning

Some gratuitous advice for customer service managers – 7 handy hints

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I make no apologies for the fact that this week’s post is something of a rant. But in venting my spleen I hope to offer some invaluable and sincere feedback to customer service managers everywhere.

Over recent weeks, I have had numerous phone conversations with front line customer service staff working for utilities, telcos and financial institutions. From my personal experience, these companies appear to be among the most frustrating companies to deal with, but my comments could equally apply to retailers, hotels, travel agents, software vendors, local governments or logistics companies.

Here are my suggestions on how customer service managers could improve their performance:

1. Train team members on the full product or service life-cycle – There is nothing worse than being passed off to a never-ending chain of “specialists”, people who know only their own few centimeters of the billing or fulfillment process (albeit their knowledge is probably several kilometers deep…). I am not saying they all have to be experts at everything, but having at least a common and consistent understanding of the end-to-end process would be a great start.

2. Update all team members on latest product and service changes on a timely basis – Following on from the above, I get really annoyed when given contradictory information from different client-facing employees, especially when the person I am speaking to is clearly not up-to-date with the company’s own offerings.

3. Tell the teams not to keep blaming the “system” – For one thing, the “system” is only as good as the humans who designed it. For another, the “system” is not some abstract or imaginary force over which nobody has any control. Often those designers are their colleagues. So in criticising the system for any shortcomings, the customer service representatives are in effect criticising their fellow employees and by extension, the company itself.

4. Listen to customer feedback relayed by the front line employees – For the most part, customers actually want to help service providers to do better. They don’t give their feedback so it can be ignored and disregarded – they would like it to be acknowledged, followed up and acted upon. No doubt most front-line employees would also like to think they are being taken seriously – but often I think there is an element of “shooting the messenger” which dissuades employees from raising genuine customer feedback and criticism with their managers.

5. Give customer service teams clear parameters to exercise their discretion – I understand that organizations require consistency, and they also expect adherence to operating guidelines and protocols. However, it gives me very little pleasure to have to go over the head of a front line employee to speak to a supervisor or team leader, who then ends up making their subordinate look ineffective because they have the “power” to reverse that erroneous charge on my bill. Rather than forcing customers to escalate issues in order to get attention from further up the chain of command, how about providing front line teams with more individual discretion as to how they can resolve customer complaints? I once heard of a major hotel chain that empowered front desk employees by granting them a program and quota of refunds, rewards, upgrades, discounts which they could allocate and award as they saw fit to address guest issues.

6. Learn to be more customer-centric, not product-led – So many service providers like to believe they focus on the customer. In fact, we know that customers are managed according to the products they purchase and the services they subscribe to. How often are internal systems jargon and inward-looking product terms used as a justification for a particular client outcome? To me, this demonstrates that many organizations are not interested in serving their customers – they are often rigidly organised around product processes and internal systems.

7. Don’t expect customers to train customer service staff (and certainly not for nothing) – Finally, we know that many organisations record in-bound customer calls. Sometimes, they bother to listen to the recordings. Occasionally, they might even contact the customer to seek more information. But rarely, if ever, do they contact their customers to say they listened, they heard and they did something about the issue. Sure, feel free to use my customer feedback for “staff training and coaching purposes”, but please give credit where credit is due. A voucher or a discount off my next bill would be a nice gesture!

While most retail markets are competitive, and customers have at least some choice between providers, the reality is that we all need access to gas, water, electricity, telecommunication and banking services. All of these sectors are highly regulated (and in some cases they also enjoy government protections), which by necessity reduces the amount of choice. Wouldn’t it be nice if these powerful and monopolistic companies used their enviable market position to benefit their customers, rather than taking them for granted?

Product Development 101: What we learned at Start-Up School

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Lean Model 001

Another large turn-out last Monday evening for Melbourne Lean Start-Up’s monthly event, hosted by Inspire9 and supported by SmartStartCity, Kussowski Brothers, Blue Chilli and AlphaStation.

This month’s theme was “Validated Learning – what to do before you launch your start-up” or as I like to call it, “Product Development 101”.

The evening kicked off with a lightning talk video presentation by Ash Maurya discussing his lean canvas 1-page business model. Well worth investigating before you even start writing a single line of code!

Next up, Tweaky offered some insights on the value of using PPC (Pay Per Click) pre-launch analysis targeting Search Intent (Google) and Demographic Intent (Facebook) to generate interest in your new product.

GetViable followed up with a discussion of the old-age conundrum for any new product or business: “Have you built a solution in search of a problem?” And even if you have correctly identified the problem, is it actually worth solving? The bottom line was, talk to your customers, listen and learn about their problems, then figure out whether they are willing to pay for your solution (and how much).

Then Flippa talked about the value of “observing your customers in the wild” – to gain insights and identify opportunities. Again, talking to and engaging with customers is critical to the product development process.

Finally, Envato presented some models and processes for collaborative design, essentially taking a look at user-centred design within a lean start-up context.

It’s very easy to lose sight of fundamental product development principles in any business start-up, especially for tech-based projects. But what each presenter stressed was the need to do your homework, to apply a coherent and sequential methodology to your new product development, and to adopt a continuous feedback loop to capture market insights and embed customer learning into the process.

To summarise, here is a tried-and-tested Product Development Cycle I have used for many years:

  • Idea
  • Market Research
  • Design Specification
  • Business Case
  • Build
  • Pre-sell
  • Production
  • Launch
  • Evaluation

Repeat ad infinitum.

Disclosure: The author does not have any connection to or commercial relationship with the presenters or sponsors mentioned in this blog. He did manage to grab a couple of free beers.

6 Melbourne Start-Ups to Watch…

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LogoRecently, I blogged about Audiobus, and the success of its collaborative approach to app development. So last week, I attended a very entertaining “pitch’n’pizza” evening for start-ups, to see what other interesting things are going on in app and content development. The event was organised by Lean Startup Melbourne and hosted by inspire9. Other support came from BlueChilli, General Assembly, Startup Leadership, PlayFi and Kussowski Brothers.

The idea was a mix of Open Mic Night, and “Dragons’ Den” – 6 start-ups presented their pitch to a panel of VC’s and angel investors, in front of an audience of 300+ friends, colleagues, hangers-on and curious onlookers all fuelled by free beer and pizza.

Melbourne is something of a “Silicon Laneway” – not quite a valley, but more of an alley, given the city’s landscape of back streets and converted warehouses that are fostering a culture of start-ups, digital creatives and social media entrepreneurs.

On the night, the 6 hopefuls that presented were:

  • Tablo – a self-publishing platform for authors – sort of Bandcamp for books, but with even better content distribution
  • PetHomeStay – an on-line booking system for pet owners who want to leave their animals with a trusted pet lover while they are on holiday
  • CareMonkey – an app that shares childrens’ health care needs with relatives, schools and sporting clubs, so that teachers, coaches and carers have relevant support information at their fingertips
  • CoinJar – a platform that enables consumers and merchants to transact with Bitcoin
  • Fairshare – an app designed to take the hassle out of shared living (but not to be confused with FairShare….?)
  • SwatchMate – a combined app and smart phone device for matching colours, primarily for painting and decorating

Each presentation was of a very high quality, although some were more polished and rehearsed than others, and only a couple really shone through in terms of having both a great idea and a great commercial offering.

The questions asked by the panel of experts provided some helpful insights on what makes a successful or engaging pitch:

  1. Why? Having a personal experience resonates, and can avoid the awkward “is this a solution in search of a problem?”
  2. Competitors? What makes you different – smarter? cheaper? quicker? Are you truly disruptive or innovative? Or have you just designed a better mousetrap?
  3. Commercialisation? Show me the money! What’s the business model? Where is the revenue coming from? (“Simple is not always best, but best is always simple”)
  4. Customers vs Users? If the paying customer is actually different to the end-user, then make sure this is clear and you have a strategy to connect the dots and to monetize the key part of the transaction
  5. Real world vs On-line? Are you replicating something which already happens in the real world? Can real world transactions easily dis-intermediate your on-line business model?
  6. App or Website? Is it a dedicated app, or is it a website that works well on mobile devices? Going for a well-designed website may be cheaper, and lead to greater/faster customer adoption.

And in keeping with the spirit of this blog, I would add that the essence of all of these new businesses is having interesting content and a meaningful way for people to engage and transact with it.

At the end of the presentations, the panel selected their favourite pitch (the winner getting the chance of a meeting with the VC of their choice), while the audience voted for the people’s choice. Not surprisingly, the panel went with CoinJar, while the people went for Tablo (which also got my vote).

Disclosure: The author does not have any connection to or commercial relationship with the presenters or sponsors mentioned in this blog. He didn’t even get there in time for a free slice of pizza or bottle of beer.

Corporate Governance – exercising a “duty of awareness” in the age of social media

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Do we need a new theory of Corporate Governance? Is it time to look at a new model that reflects the current environment in which businesses operate, an era characterised by:

  • social media,
  • corporate and social responsibility,
  • shareholder and consumer activism,
  • increased market connectivity, and
  • rapid generational change?

Has the law fallen behind in being able to regulate and oversee contemporary corporate behaviour – where compliance with and adherence to the letter of the law may no longer be enough to meet community standards or satisfy shareholder expectations?

The question arose during a roundtable discussion I attended recently, comprising non-executive directors, entrepreneurs, corporate advisers and governance experts. Some of the issues we kicked around included:

  • the efficacy of running more frequent board interaction via the use of technology (as opposed to the standard face-to-face monthly board meeting);
  • the ethics of minimising cross-border taxation by multinational companies (even though it may be legal under international tax law);
  • the imperative to develop more inclusive and diversified boards (including networking into broader stakeholder groups);
  • the perils of ill-considered public comments made by CEOs (and the resulting social media backlash); and
  • the risk of harking back to some “golden age” of corporate behaviour (assuming such an era actually existed)

Our current perspectives on Corporate Governance largely derive from the late 1980s and early 1990s when a series of authoritative studies and reports led to new Codes of Practice and updated corporations laws – I’m referring to the work done by and in the name of Tricker, Carver, Monks, Cadbury, Greenbury, Hilmer and Hempel. And while in recent years we have seen increased scrutiny on CSR, directors’ remuneration and financial oversight by boards (plus Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank and IFRS), the reality is that most of the earlier Corporate Governance reforms were introduced just as the internet went public and just as financial markets were being deregulated. So it could be argued that the reforms were ill-equipped for, or could not have anticipated, the changes to come – witness for example, the SEC’s recent approval of social media as an appropriate platform for corporate disclosure.

In Australia, Corporate Governance is described simply as “good decisions being made by the right person”, and the obligations of company directors are summarised as follows:

  • your primary duty is to the shareholders;
  • you must act with appropriate due care and diligence;
  • you must not allow the company to trade while insolvent;
  • you must exercise your powers in good faith and in the best interests of the company;
  • you must not improperly use your position of (or information obtained as) a director to benefit yourself or another person, or to cause detriment to the company.

On one level, the test of whether an organization has exercised good judgement in making a decision is, “would you be embarrassed if this was reported on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper?” At another, Corporate Governance is reduced to a compliance checklist of risk mitigation measures.

The Australian courts (in the OneTel and Centro cases) have expanded and reinforced the duty of care (particularly in relation to the business judgement rule) to place greater accountability on individual directors to consider what a reasonable person would do in exercising their duty of care and diligence:

  • To understand the fundamentals of the business
  • To keep themselves informed of the company’s activities
  • To monitor the company’s activities (e.g., through active questioning)

The question we should be addressing is: “Does imposing a broad duty of care and specific fiduciary obligations ensure an appropriate level of Corporate Governance?” I would argue that in light of a rapidly changing operating environment, we would be well-advised to exercise a “duty of awareness” in respect of our Corporate Governance standards. In my view, directors need to take a wider perspective in understanding and monitoring the business fundamentals and the company’s activities. Some may argue that this is not a new duty, it has simply been forgotten in recent times – and in the era of social media, when it is far easier to “get caught out”, it would be prudent to have more regard for the broader context.

A “duty of awareness” offers an appropriate counter-balance to the numerous areas of self-regulation by industry sectors and by individual companies. It provides an objective test for assessing “if not, why not” explanations required under both voluntary and mandatory Codes of Practice – i.e., did the respondent take into account all relevant factors, and did the respondent adopt a sufficient level of awareness in evaluating its options under a chosen course of action?

The “duty of awareness” means that at an individual level, directors would be obliged to reflect on their contribution to and participation in board decisions; boards would need to consider the likely impact of their decisions on the company’s performance and on wider stakeholders; and companies would be expected to have regard to their standing as a good corporate citizen, not merely a compliant one.

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Andrew Donovan of Thoughtpost Governance and Dale Simpson of Bravo Consulting Group for their invaluable contributions to this article.