261: Creating Conditions for Uncommon Service
Dear friends
My coaching practice has, as it should and all things do, evolved since I started it in September 2019. I recently rewrote my website’s copy to reflect those changes.
If you have the time, I’d appreciate your feedback – especially about the pages What You Can Expect and Coaching Options.
As my work with executives has progressed, I’ve become acutely aware of how busyness and reactivity are crowding our first principles strategic thinking. To provide a counterweight, I’ve developed Leadership Learning Immersions to help leadership teams sharpen critical thinking, deepen trust, develop shared language and create greater capacity to navigate complexity.
With two successful test runs under my belt, I am now ready to roll out the offering. If you’re interested in knowing more or have suggestions about how to improve it, please contact me.
/strategy
Two months ago, I introduced you to Frances Frei and Anne Morriss’ guide to creating excellent customer service, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business.
Their formulation is simple – excellent service results from intentional organisation design amplified by an appropriate culture.
Excellence = Design X Culture.
Their take on the conventional gap analyses used, often by default, in strategy processes is powerful:
“It’s simply human nature to want to avoid weakness or to use your weaknesses as a guide for where to improve. Indeed, most gap analyses are built on this idea and then color-coded to reinforce the point: hunt down your biggest flaws (the red ones) and improve them; now move quickly on to the yellow ones. But this approach can be a disaster. When your weaknesses are enabling your strengths, reducing the gaps between you and your competitors can actually undermine performance, turning a well-intentioned improvement effort into a strategically dangerous paint-by-number exercise”.
Gap analyses are useful. How we use them is critical. Not every weakness should be addressed, they can be a source of strength. Deliberate underinvestment in one area can allow for overinvestment in areas important to your customer.
“To achieve service excellence, you must underperform in strategic ways. This means delivering on the service dimensions your customers value most, and then making it possible — profitable and sustainable —by performing poorly on the dimensions they value least. In other words, you must be bad in the service of good”.
Frei and Morris remind us, customer service can only be funded in one of four ways:
- Charge customers extra for it.
- Make cost reductions that improve service (eradicating friction that complicates the customer experience and costs).
- Make service improvements that reduce costs (for example excellent customer service that creates word-of-mouth reducing marketing costs or, in the example of Progressive Insurance that sends out an immediate response team to assist clients who’ve had an accident, fraud risk).
- Get customers to do the work for you (when self-service improves the customer experience).
Keep that in mind when you’re having conversations about improving customer experience – someone has to pay. Making it that blunt helps focus your analysis and action.
I have created this 24-page snapshot so you can explore their work in greater detail. If you enjoy it, please share it with your networks.
//self
Amy Edmonson’s Right Kind of Wrong tells the story of Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater, one of the world’s largest hedge funds.
Today he is worth $14 billion. Leaving aside for the moment the ethics of that wealth, in 1982 at 33, seven years after founding his business, he had lost everything, couldn’t afford to pay even household expenses.
He comments, “In retrospect, that failure was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It gave me the humility I needed to balance my aggressiveness and shift mindset from thinking, ‘I’m right’, to asking myself ‘How do I know I am right?’
Frei and Morriss remind us that being bad in the service of good requires clarity about what our customers want.
Dalio’s, shift from “I’m right” to “How do I know I’m right?” is the same discipline of self-awareness, sharpening judgement and making intentional trade-offs.
If we’re not applying strategy and intention to our own lives, we’re unlikely to get it as right as we could in our businesses.
///soul
Our lives are not problems to be solved. They are not a constellation of problems to be diagnosed. They’re complicated experiences to be understood. They’re stories, complex and ever-unfolding.
In Soul Therapy, psychotherapist Thomas Moore notes, “Diagnosis can take away the individuality and complexity of a client’s experience. It puts a client into a box. It serves the therapist more than the client”.
He cautions us not to adjust our lives’ stories “… so they fit into a box of syndromes and disorders. Each time you tell a story it is different—different nuances and tones”.
I have seen as clients reformulate their sense of themselves, so some memories retreat and others come to the fore. Binary diagnoses – ‘I am this or that’ — weaken and as complexity deepens, so their possibilities increase.
Strategy and soul are best served by close attention to the stories we tell.
Each person is unique, so is each business.
In a world of templates and diagnostic tools, it is easy to pretend otherwise and when we do, we lose our place in the world (and the marketplace).
Building our capacity to navigate complexity enriches both our lives and our leadership.
All the best
Karl
PS: I am fully booked until the end of October but have space for three new clients from November. If you’d like to start working with me before the end of the year, please contact me.