Customer Experience Crossroads

Pondering GM: were they living in a cone of silence?

Watching the GM saga unfold, the most striking thing is how long it took for changes to be made, in the face of clear data.

I recently came across an old news story about GM -- around 1999 or 2000 was when the analysis was written. It was course material in a marketing management course. The how-not-to-manage-your-marketing-function part of the course.

The article talked about the pressing needs: To rationalize the brands and banners. Rationalize the dealer network. Get a better fix on consumer desires. The same article made reference to these problems having been in place and observed at least a decade before. 

It makes me think how truly impressive it is when a company can make big changes without a huge crisis. It speaks well of a whole culture when this can happen, not just of an executive. Because the example we have of GM is of a whole company that seemed to be living in a cone of silence half the time.

The service experience: GM vs Acura

Let me illustrate just how huge the cone of silence was by telling you about my 1989 Acura Integra.

The Integra was a delightful car, totally fun to drive and the perfect accessory for a young career woman. When I took it in to the dealership, here's what it was like: 

• Everyone was sharply dressed.
• The place was clean, and they served free coffee.
• They had a van that would drop you off if you worked nearby, or drop you at a transit station if you didn't.
• When you picked the car up, it was always freshly washed
• There were little paper things inside so you knew no oil from the mechanics feet got on your carpet or seat
• The whole thing was a pleasure. I actually enjoyed the ritual of it. I felt like I belonged to an exclusive club.

A few years later, I accepted a fabulous position as a regional manager for a bank. The job came with a car, and my market area included Oshawa, home of three GM plants and the head offices of GM Canada. I wore out three cars on that job, all pretty good vehicles, actually. Two Grand Prix and a Grand Am. No problems, just a lot of driving.

But here's the customer experience at a big GM dealer in Oshawa.

• The reception area was so dirty, I didn't sit down
• I actually didn't put my purse or briefcase down either, because the cement floor was pretty awful too
• There was a beat up wooden podium that served as a counter. It looked like it had been repainted about a hundred times.
• The guy serving me was dressed in oily gray coveralls
• I wondered if I was in the right place
• I felt like I had stumbled into some kind of guy's clubhouse
• They didn't wash the car. In fact, I kind of took a good look at the seat before I popped my suited behind down
• I never went back

If you see it once, it's a pattern

OK, it was one dealership. But there's a good saying in the world of sales and service: "if you see it once, it's a pattern." There are no isolated instances. If some bad thing is happening in one place, it's happening in other places.

Did no-one know how the industry was changing? Or did no-one care? Or did they think that it wouldn't really matter? Or did people try to make changes but just give up due to the tremendous inertia in the organization?

Things may have changed a lot at that dealership. But how would I know -- I never went back to check. And that is just the reality of dealing with consumers. Once we write you off, you're gone from our world.

GM seems to have a game plan now. And good luck to them implementing it, because they have a BIG hill to climb.

Designing Experiences: prototype, pilot, tweak and adjust

James Rait posted some interesting commentary in Design-at-the-Edge in response to my Curves pieces from last week. Mr. Rait's wife is a Curves member, at a location where they sometimes give away doughnuts. [I know, it's hilarious, except it illustrates just how difficult it is to manage services with consistency to standards.]

I had outlined some possible backfires to the adoption of RFID tags to plan and track individual goals and progress. These were: [1] staff having to take their own initiative to interact with clients, instead of being forced to do it by the operational routine; [2] two classes of member emerging; [3] clients losing the happy ritual of taking their pulse rate together.

Mr. Rait, a guy with serious industrial design credentials, proposes some interesting alternative solutions to these issues in his post, here.

He also suggests that running some live market tests would have uncovered the potential issues I mentioned. I would be amazed if they had not done live market tests, actually. The execs at Curves have strong marketing backgrounds, and with 10,000-plus locations, I assume their budget supports quite a bit of research.

Sometimes it takes a while to understand what is going on. Plus the hype surrounding new technology can generate enough excitement to mask the longer-term impact. These phenomenon would have been unlikely to come to light in a short test. And if the test markets were conducted with the very best franchises -- which is usually the case -- these individuals may well have responded differently than the average.

I suspect the social evolution is not yet done. [There's lots of observing still to do. Yippee!]

Mr. Rait's post made some other interesting points about design in general, which I'll pick up tomorrow.

If you go back to read the Curves posts, note the passionate comments from one fan of the company. This kind of evangelism is a huge asset to a brand.

The photo came from a film in the Prelinger Archive, Exercise and Health, 1949.

The Power of a Good Story

There's nothing like a good story to motivate people to act.

Stories are how we humans have communicated meaning for millennia. When we find out what whales are talking about, my guess is it will have something to do with story-telling.  When managing change, I encourage clients to figure out the story -- not the PowerPoint, not the business case, but the actual story that communicates what is changing and why it's important. The story you want repeated peer to peer, that crystallizes real meaning for people. 

John Wood, the guy who started Room to Read, and has now written a book about his experiences, reminded me of this. Room to Read is a charity dedicated to building schools and putting books in the hands of the world's poorest children. He's been profiled in FastCompany, and the organization has won all kinds of social capitalist awards.

His book, "Leaving Microsoft to Change the World", contains some interesting examples of change management and leadership.  Some of the things Wood thinks are important for success, like working ridiculous hours, probably aren't important.* But through luck or intention, he did a lot of things right.

Using a Good Story

Wood tells some great stories that illustrate the hunger for learning of children in developing countries, and the ingenuity and commitment of their families in acting as the charity's local partners. And he hears some pretty amazing stories, too, that people have told him -- because they saw someone they thought might be able to help. They didn't make the case for books -- they took him to visit a school that had none. 

If you want to change the culture in your organization, start by listening to the stories people tell, and listening to the stories you yourself tell -- you'll learn a lot about the culture, about what is important, and about what people are paying attention to.

"Nobody Ever Washed a Rented Car"

I'm not sure who said this first, but Wood says it again in his book, and he's so right.  For Room to Read, this means asking the local village to raise half the funds for a new school or library before construction starts.  These are called "challenge grants", and they give the village a commitment to the project that far exceeds what an outright gift would create. 

It works the same way in business. Ever wonder why so many head office projects die in the field?  Maybe it's because there was no room left to create. There is great joy in creating, in solving problems, in adding our own brushstrokes to a project.  If you let people do that, they have real ownership in both the project and the results. If it's all about you, your plan, your goals, your year-end bonus, why should anyone else care?

"Stop Talking, Start Acting"

Don't wait to get everything completely right.  Just get moving. This is one of the great lessons that Jim Collins told in Good to Great, and it comes up again in Wood's story. Once you know the direction, start building momentum. 

An executive I used to work with told me something amazing once. He said: "We'll figure out how to do it after we land the deal."   A great sales manager once joined my weekly sales team meeting. A couple of our reps didn't have a lot of appointments booked for the week.  His first question? "What are you doing this afternoon?"

I'm working on a book right now, and I can tell you something: there's no amount of planning that is a substitute for sitting at the keyboard and writing.   You want to make something happen?  Just start. 

Tying Investment to Results: the Donor Experience

I think most people who grew up in a large, successful corporation learned to stay on top of their numbers. I know I did. And Wood has brought this discipline to the charity, which tracks and reports how many schools, how many books, how many scholarships.

Even better, in the early days, if you gave them enough money to fund a school, they actually put your funds toward a specific school, which contained a plaque with your name on it.  Someday you might trek to it and have a look for yourself. This has been very important to donor motivation.

A look at their web site made me wonder if they are still doing that, and if they can still do that now that they are bigger.  It was a brilliant strategy and I'm sure was a factor in their early successes.

When you think about motivating your own team, consider whether they can see the chain that ties their efforts directly to results. The more visible the link, the more ownership you will have. No matter what the role, find the link to the big goals and results for the organization, and people will feel part of something more important that will help them survive the drudge that goes with all roles.

One definition of leadership is that a leader is someone to whom you will give your discretionary effort.  People need a reason to make that particular donation.  Did you give them one this week? 

"If you ask people to reach deep, to think creatively, and to produce extraordinary results, they usually will.  Too often in our modern world, they are simply not asked." 

                    ~ John Wood

References:

Wood, John. Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children. Collins, 2006.

*Something about Wood's verbal style reminded me a lot of Bill Rancic, the guy who won the first Apprentice contest: it's that same frenetic optimism unsullied by irony, untouched by failure. Or perhaps I'm just jealous because I haven't founded a global charity success story, and haven't yet finished my own book.

Resistance = Engagement

I had an epiphany recently about change management:  resistance = engagement. 
The epiphany was inspired by a familiar scenario described to me by the sponsor of a major CRM initiative.  It goes something like this:

"We've been keeping people informed with regular communications about the project.  The project team has representatives from across the organization.  The senior executives in every division have been kept involved at our quarterly meetings. 

We need the business-line executives to take ownership as we move into the implementation phase.  Everyone says they are on side.  We feel like we are doing all the right things... but nothing seems to be happening. What are we doing wrong?"

Let's leave aside what the "right things" are for now, since those are often somewhat unique to each organization's culture and each project (despite what the project management books tell you).

But I can tell you how you can spot real engagement at the level of senior managers:  when they start to disagree, ask for changes and generally be difficult, that's engagement. 

When no managers are creating problems for the project, nothing's happening.  Another client refers to this as "friendly nods and grunts".  That's when you have people at meetings saying, "yeah that all sounds great, let me know how we can help", but they have not put a single action item on their own to-do list.

Real business-line managers don't behave this way when they have taken ownership of a problem.  They start telling you why your schedule is impossible, or why your training plan needs to include another group, or why your new software doesn't take the ancient computing equipment into account.  That's what engagement looks like.

But we all think engagement = agreement.  It doesn't.  You know when people are truly engaged when they start to resist.  If you have no resistance, no one is paying attention. 

Acknowledgements:

You too can make cool signs like this with Sign-Maker

The truth about change management

Significant changes often begin long before they are visible.  Inside the egg, the chick is silently growing and changing.  The first cracks before hatching seem like the start of something big -- but the big thing has already been underway. 

There's a wonderful piece in Strategy + Business this month by Skip Griffin Jr., who tells the story of the American Civil Rights movement as a transformation project:  Beauty Parlors, Barbershops, and Boardrooms. [Free registration required]

Griffin acknowledges the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., but places it in a context of the twenty years that came before King's famous speeches.  Griffin says, "Many people think of the civil rights movement as a wave of change sparked by a few charismatic leaders", but in fact it was not spontaneous, and was built by deliberate effort by a large number of people over a long period:

"By the time Rosa Parks's feet got tired, a large field of conversational energy was already in place"

Griffin, who now helps people and organizations with transformational changes, says that to understand a change, you need to understand "the parts that are less visible:  the deep, profound patterns of activity under the surface".

His conclusion, in terms of corporate transformation projects:

"It's not just the structures that have to change. And it's not just the culture out there in the organization. It's the culture in here, in ourselves, as well -- the culture that leads us up to the threshold, and then, if we're ready, give us the courage to step across."

His words reminded me of a metaphor used by Jim Collins in Good to Great.  Collins says we tend to hail improved corporate results as being the result of some recent, short-term initiative, rather than the culmination of a long process of getting many things right. 

I don't believe we can actually make people and organizations change.  They change themselves.  When the time is right, we can make the hatching easier.  We can sometimes help the fertilization process.  But there is no real way to rush the embryo into being a chick.

Acknowledgements:  the image above was created using photos from Dreamstime

Engaging Your Team - Start with Better Meetings

Becoming more customer centric always involves people and change.  A lot of clients tell me "we don't do change management well".   If this describes your organization, you're in a big club.  But the key to change management is not all about the giant project plan for change management.  It's much more about doing the small things well, to engage people and start conversations.

Because where change is concerned, conversation is action.

You can start to shift in a more positive direction by taking small steps.  You might be surprised how well they work.  Here's a fresh example from yesterday.

I was having lunch with a client who was holding a large meeting later in the day around their CRM initiative.  She asked me for some ideas about energizing the meeting, which I was glad to provide.  Judging by her e-mail this morning, the meeting was a success:

My meeting yesterday went really well!! People commented on how great the session was at the close and afterwards. In addition to our group notes, we also now have a written record of their ideas in their words.

Here were a couple of the things which worked so well for my client, (a clever individual and a fast learner): 

1. Ask everyone in the group to fill in a simple mind map to do a brain dump on the topic to get things rolling (Download SimpleMindMap.pdf )
2. Post the mind maps on the wall, and get everyone to walk around the room in pairs to read the other maps. 
3. Start the discussion by asking people for the common themes they saw

This approach gives everyone a chance to be heard.  It clears up all the brain clutter on the topic and gets it down on paper before you even start.  It's a much faster way to share a lot of information quickly than by going around the table for everyone's input.  It quickly helps people see where there is common ground.  And it surfaces fresh ideas and issues in a non-threatening manner. 

Now my client is a pretty capable individual, and I bet her regular meetings are usually pretty good.  But she took a couple of simple ideas and leveraged them to make a potentially painful discussion about CRM implementation challenges an energizing meeting that got people excited about the project. 

To close the meeting, she asked everyone for their personal action steps to take towards the vision.  So people left the room talking, having made a personal commitment to take some small step. 

If your meetings are full of telling and selling, you might try a couple of these techniques to get things moving in a fresh direction. 

Acknowledgements:
Suzanne Bergeron, who taught me the gallery walk technique
Pat Sabena, who taught me this simplified approach to mind-mapping

Appreciative Inquiry: The nicest thing to happen to change management in a long time

  Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a whole system approach to change, that delights in the ability of people to organize to help themselves move forward. 

It might sound flaky, but it's proving to be one of the most effective approaches to mobilizing people ever discovered.  Even better:  people enjoy the process. 

Instead of thinking of organizations as problems to be solved, AI looks at organizations as evolving, living systems to be embraced. 

Instead of looking for "the answer", AI looks for powerful questions to ask.  When people start asking powerful questions, powerful new directions and ideas start to emerge. 

AI is part of a growing body of knowledge called Positive Organization Scholarship (POS).   

If you're going to be in the Toronto area on September 14, you can attend a day-long session with David Cooperider, best known as the originator of much of AI theory and process.  Check out the attached PDF for details.  Download david_cooperrider.pdf

(Disclosure: we are not a sponsor, just planning to attend, and the price is right.  Don't miss this opportunity to meet some great people, learn some new things, and get charged up)

To find out more about Appreciative Inquiry, the AI Commons is a good place to start, as it contains quite a few free resources, case studies, and tools. 

The Ross School of Management at U Michigan maintains a knowledge base on Positive Organization Scholarship, which will give you a better perspective of the number of people working in this field, as well as some excellent resource lists and introductory reading.

These are some of the best tools I know of to get those transformational improvements in customer experience that I know of.   It's not about HR -- it's about the people who are on the front lines. 

Crossing the Chasm - mystified by RSS

Some of my friends think I'm an early adopter of technology.  Not really.  Not by the standards of Geoffrey Moore, anyway, author of Crossing the Chasm. (Wikipedia brief summary)

I do have this blog, but so do 8 million or so other people.   

I was thinking about this as I wondered again how to get organized around RSS.