We love our car dealer, we actually do. They look after us well. You could picnic on the floor of their service department, it's so clean. The organization prides itself on service, and wants to do well on the customer satisfacton index.
In fact, they are so focused on this that they help their customers anticipate and respond to the questionnaire even before it arrives!
"...please take the time to complete the survey with all 10's if we met and exceeded all your expectations"
It's hard to say what impact this approach is actually having on the feedback they receive. Certainly the letter provides a clear indication that they are trying hard.
One thing I do wonder about is this -- does their approach mean that their actual results are almost useless to them in terms of monitoring and improving? It might. You'd need a statistician to help you determine this based on comparing sets of data.
There's an interesting thread on LinkedIn discussing the challenges of actual cheating on this kind of survey, and how it can be detected using statistical methods.
My take:
If you want to know what's really going on with your customers, you probably need to go beyond this kind of automatic approach. Or at least supplement it with some telephone interviews or some good qualitative research.
Another problem with expectations is that they are always moving up, based on your past performance. So exceeding expectations becomes exceedingly difficult.
The procurement process, and it's main product, the Request for Proposal or RFP, was once useful, but has become a barrier to innovaton and productivity.
Let's look first at the reasons why:
There is a desire for fairness and consistency.
While fairness is admirable when it is reducing corruption and patronage, it also suppresses merit. It favors the familiar. It favors the formulaic.
The investment of time is all on the side of the supplier.
The decision-makers sometimes decline to meet or talk to the suppliers being asked to bid. Usually. The rationale - hey, they're busy people, they don't have time for a bunch of conversations. This is a major suppression of collaboration and idea exchange, which again results in a suppression of innovation. Buyers who had to invest the time to actually talk to all suppliers would reduce their short list. They might stop focusing on price, and instead focus on judgement. Like who they are motivated to work with. Who they think is triggering useful thinking. Who has better ideas.
There is frequently no clear definition of the challenge, but there is sometimes a specification of solutions.
This is so upside down it would be laughable if it weren't so common. The best consultants are those that help redefine the essence of the problem, then engineer elegant ways to address it. Sometimes much less expensive ways.
Systematic extraction of collaborative
effort. Lack of trust
It is through collaboration, especially in the discovery phase,
that considerable value is added.
If there is any hope of collaboration throughout the project, it should start at the beginning, when the work is being designed.
One of the worst parts of the whole procurement
process as it exists today is that new relationships begin with a lack
of trust and a lack of disclosure. Not a great way to start a working
relationship where trust and disclosure are going to be absolutely
essential for success.
When you are awarded a project under these conditions, you are often starting over when you actually sit down with the client.
The traditional RFP starts with the notion of specifying the process or "work product", and asking for pricing.
While this may make sense for road-building (road builders may disagree!), it rarely makes sense for the kind of squishy and amorphous situation that most business executives are facing today.
No budget disclosure
The underlying belief here seems to be that if you tell the supplier your budget, they will spend all of it. Or perhaps they will not fine tune their proposal enough, not be as aggressive as they could have been on pricing.
This lack of budget disclosure also leads to a frequently encountered situation. The client suggests
they are prepared to invest in a BMW. So you propose a few
options. BMW, high-end BMW, and perhaps a very nice Toyota, in case they
didnt know what BMWs actually cost.
Client then discloses that in fact they were thinking in terms of a BMW motorcycle.
Yikes. I just spent three days wasting my time and a bunch of other
people's time designing the wrong thing.
Plus, there almost always is a budget. On a recent situation, a team I was on was asked to trim a very specific amount of money from a large quote, in order to fit a budget window that we had not been given. Where is the logic in this?
Let's turn this upside-down
Start with the investment
An improved RFP process would start with the investment -- what the
client is prepared to pay for a solution -- and invite proposers to say
how much they can offer within this budget (or perhaps less).
This approach would solve a problem that we often face as suppliers -- an unwillingness to state even a range of value. It means that the suppliers, without the benefit of looking at your financial information, have to determine what the value of a good solution is to this specific challenge.
But inside the firm, you do understand if it's worth $10,000 or $100,000 to get a grip on this issue.
This virtually guarantees you will receive a template solution. Or your bidders have to take some wild guesses about what might be going on and design to that.
Disclosure
Make me sign the non-disclosure, then give me some real disclosure to work with.
Focus on capabilities and fit, not pricing
You don't want to wear the cheapest shoes, do you? Did you choose your employees based on getting the cheapest people you could get? Or were you looking for a combination of skills and fit? When you go for a haircut, are you going for the $10 standard bowl, or are you paying a fat premium for skill with scissors?
A focus on price can only be based on an underlying assumption that every haircut is the same. Of course they are not the same.
Knowledge-based services are not as fungible as they might appear on the outside.There are tiers of value. If you want the top tier, you have to pay for that.
It's time for a change
Managers regularly try to circumvent the purchasing process. I do not think they do this because they are lazy, corrupt or incompetent. I think this is solid evidence that the process is not serving them well.
All processes must evolve. It's time for purchasing to evolve to fit
the needs of a knowledge-based economy and the need for innovation to
drive competitive success.
Today's article was triggered by seeing a post on LinkedIn from Solution Focused Alan Kay, which instantly combusted with a pile of simmering frustration to produce this article. And therein is the virtue of collaboration -- the best stuff comes from human interaction, not isolation. Something to consider the next time you want to issue and RFP.
Most of the e-mail marketing I get is tiresome and banal. There's little to engage the imagination, no sense that people understand my world or even want to. It's all designed to push me to their website, where I am pushed to engage in a sales call, and have trouble getting any real information. (I recently read that the biggest complaint that users of B2B web sites have is the lack of price information. Yup, no doubt about that one.)
Many of the newsletters I get are not much better -- all pitch, all the time.
Every now and again, something breaks through in a significant way and catches my attention.
"A day in the life of a Focus Group Moderator, are we correct?"
Two things done right here. She has a clue what I do for a living. And she asks a relevant question that makes me want to read on. So I did!
Tell a story
I loved this part. She talked about some fairly typical challenges that people like me have. How projects start out simple enough then quickly become complex. How timelines shrink. How we need to deliver within the original price even though things have changed. A little exaggeration for emphasis.
I kept reading and reading, right to the end.
Some decent pricing information provided -- not a lot, but enough that I didn't assume "I can't afford this". And a teaser that she would tell me more.
Anticipated some of my obvious questions and answered them in the story she told.
A picture of a real person. Amy herself, of course. There's nothing like a real person's picture to add credibility.
Made me feel like a) she's kind of cool, b) she understands my world and c) this might be a service I would want to use sometime.
My takeaway
If you think you understand the world of your customer, show them that. Prove it.
Tell stories instead of relating facts, to engage and intrigue. Show how you make a difference.
Advice we could all use.
Hey Amy, thanks for making my day, and inspiring this post!
In our culture today, we tend to leap from problem to solution. We have been rewarded with this approach most of our lives.
But when you are looking for fresh ideas, you will get farther if you change the solution into a lot of questions.
For instance...
I wanted to go to the gym more often. This is a problem many of us have. I had memberships I didn't use. I found it painfully boring. Net result: not working out enough. Common solutions: be more disciplined, book time in my calendar, yada, yada, yada.
What worked
Asking the question,"what would make workouts more fun" took me in a totally different direction.
I got a workout buddy. We've now been going at least once a week for three and a half years.When we miss the workout, I don't just miss the workout, I miss the catch-up.
We could ask a lot more cool questions about workouts that would take us to Catalyzing Questions -- questions that show the way to different solutions.
Such as... how could I make money working out? How could I work out at my desk? How could I make working out as much fun as watching TV? (Hey, I guess that's why there are TV's in the gym now!)
Get unstuck
Asking different questions can get you unstuck in a big way. It's a powerful tool, whether your problem is dirty dishes piling up, or feeding people during space travel.
Everyone is dealing with a lot of change these days. [Holy state the obvious, Susan]
So if you can save them from making changes that don't fix a problem, you should.
Case in point - the Microwave.
We've owned two microwaves before this week, when we bought the third. The first one was bought about 1985. The second one - a Panasonic - was bought sometime in the mid 90's. [My spouse says February 26, 1996. He keeps excellent records, apparently. And apparently we get the appliance buying impulse at the same time every year!]
It's still going strong, actually, but we are renovating and wanted a smaller one.
Off to our friendly neighbourhood Sears, and Bay department stores, after doing some requisite online searching. [Aside: like many in a small inner city house, we were searching based on size, not features. Even though I was really hoping for stainless...]
We picked up another Panasonic. Pleasant surprise: the controls are almost identical!
How is this possible, when the last one is more than 15 years old?
It's possible, because some unsung genius over at Panasonic has set up some rules. And the rules say you don't change things unless you can make them better. And the better has to be enough better that it offsets the nuisance of learning a new system.
Which means we already know how to set the clock. Which took about a nano-second after we plugged it in. Thank you, Panasonic! You had a simple control panel that worked, and you kept it. [Probably a big money saver, too.]
There are improvements, in fact. It's easier to see through the window. It's smaller. It's a lot quieter. Nothing to learn there, just stuff to enjoy.
Learning new systems is a feature of everyday life now. And not always a welcome feature, let's be honest. I love Office 2010, but it was a little hill to climb. Not a big climb, a hill. But it made me wonder how many iterations I will need to learn before the end of time? [My personal time, that is.]
So hats off to you, whoever is designing control panels at Panasonic. I thank you for making my life a little easier. You spent your time fixing things that needed fixed, not things that didn't.
We've just launched our newest e-book designed to help people write better surveys. It's written for average business people, consultants, freelancers, coaches, professional speakers, workshop leaders ... you get the idea. Anyone who is looking for a fast focused resource to help them right now, and save a ton of time.
This goes way beyond the FAQ in your online survey provider, I promise. Plus it's organized all in one place.
I've been dabbling in a little online selling of late, for a couple of reasons.
One client suggested he pay me with his company credit card so I didn't have to deal with the delays from their payables department.
I've sold a few things online, (such fun!)
Net result, I'm running a balance.
But PayPal isn't relaly integrated into my business accounting system, so I'd really rather make most payments using my credit card. Plus, of course, there's the points involved.
But PayPal won't let me do that until the balance is gone.
Deposit taking institution, or not?
I've been wondering why PayPal is not regulated as a deposit taking institution (aka bank) for a while now, given the balances they must surely be holding.
So I'm guessing PayPal is trying to mitigate this challenge by telling me I have to have NO BALANCE before they will let me use another method.
Big pain in the rear end.
Just one more way in which technology and the ways we want to use it continue to outpace the rate at which we can develop policies to control the whole thing, and even regulate it.
Anybody know the real reason for this policy? I'd love to hear from you.
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