It took me 30 something years to fully appreciate what he meant but when I did it was a great lesson. When a new business (read accounting or advisory practice or any business for that matter) is started hunger for growth leads to the founder(s) being very active on the marketing front. They spend a lot of time working ON their business as Mr. Gerber says. Read more…
Popularity: 41% [?]
In 2002 I published a lengthy White Paper on the competitive landscape of the accounting profession. Ten years have now elapsed so I thought it would be an interesting exercise to review and update it. I’m pleased to say that for the most part my thoughts relating to the changes, challenges and opportunities faced by the profession have been close to what’s actually happened. I intend to release a revised White Paper in due course but I thought it would be timely to invite you to re-visit one part of the White Paper that I think is very important in the current economic climate. Read more…
Popularity: 36% [?]
As I have discussed in a previous blog posting, time and billing systems that are in general use masquerade as practice management systems but even those that have the potential to provide useful management information are not generally used for that purpose. The only “management” support they give is to monitor time charged by people for billing purposes. Read more…
Popularity: 82% [?]
Most accounting firms offer pretty much the same work product as every other firm in the industry. Traditional compliance services have the character of commodities in the sense that customers find it difficult, if not impossible, to make a judgment as to the quality of the work product and must therefore form their value judgment on the basis of their experience with the firm. Read more…
Popularity: 28% [?]
My daily ritual starts with an investment of 2-3 hours “sharpening the saw” as Stephen Covey puts it. Typically this will consist of a 1 hour workout followed by a visit to my favorite Starbucks store for some reading and reflection. These couple of hours are the most important in my day because I know they are good for my mind, body and soul. They set the scene for the rest of my day.
The service experience I have at Starbucks stores is, for the most part, very good. But like all businesses it’s occasionally disappointing. The challenge for every business is that the bad experiences will always be judged by reference to the good ones so the better you are on average the worse your customers feel when you let them down.
Earlier this year I made several bad choices when I was skiing at Heavenly, South Lake Tahoe where I spend most of my time when I’m in the US. The consequence of these choices was a broken arm and two broken ribs. Needless to say I was not a happy chappy. In fact, because the arm was broken at the top of the (not so) humerus bone it could not be set and all I could do is wear a sling for 5-8 weeks. This stopped my workouts but it did not stop my Starbucks visits.
The first morning I visited the Tahoe store with my arm in a sling the delightful baristas on the early morning shift who always give every customer the warmest greeting imaginable wanted to know the full story so, basking in the attention and looking for sympathy, I naturally obliged. While I’m talking about this I want to share a very important point. The “welcome” you and your team give to your customers and prospects is one of the most, if not THE most, important drivers of customer delight. In his great book, The Invisible Touch, Harry Beckwith reports on a survey of 200,000 customers of VetSmart, the business that provides the veterinary facilities for the Petsmart chain of stores in the US. The survey revealed that the greeting was the single key to customer contentment. He said:
Of the pet owners who reported that they felt “very welcome” when they entered VetSamart, 98% reported that they were very satisfied with their overall experience. No other factor–the reasonableness of the fee, the cleanliness of the facility, or the clarity with which the vet communicated to the pet owner–mattered remotely as much as the greeting.
This is precisely what we hear from the clients of professional service firms all the time when we conduct Client Advisory Boards and it’s why we believe your Director of First Impressions is so critical to the success of your own customer service strategy. The welcome establishes the mindset that frames the rest of the visit and therefore the entire experience. If the welcome is ordinary or, worse still bad, it’s downhill from there but I digress…
Two days later when I visited the store one of the baristas who I shall call Heather (because that’s her name) gave me a get-well card signed by her and her co-worker Nina. It literally blew me away. Jan Carlzon, when he was the CEO of Scandinavian Airlines coined the phrase “Moments of Truth” in his book of the same name which is listed amongst the 100 most important business books of all time and definitely worth reading. This phrase is now well entrenched in the customer service vernacular. Now, the great service I always get from (most) of the Starbucks crew is not a Moment of Truth–I’ll call it a MOT, that has become my expectation, but receiving that card was a MOT. It told me that these people actually care as opposed to just going through the motions of customer service.
However, there can be “good” MOTs and “bad” MOTs often from the same establishment. Here is a bad MOT that I experienced at the same store, same time in the morning (5:30am) but different baristas. This store opens at 5:30am every day. I’m there withing 5 minutes of that time. About 2 weeks ago, I get to the store and I see a guy walking around outside and frantic activity going on inside the store. I attempt to open the door and the barista inside looks at me with a frown and waves me way as he goes on with stocking the food cabinet. His co-barista goes about her work intentionally not having any eye contact with me or the other gentleman standing at the door. That was bad enough but it was 28 degrees F which is 4 degrees below zero or, to put that another way, damn cold. I waited for another 5 minutes then decided to visit another coffee shop. This was a bad MOT.
The following day when I visited Starbucks, the young man who was on the previous day’s shift was there and I asked what had happened. He gleefully acknowledged that it was his fault, he was late getting to the store and went about this work as though nothing had happened. I think he apologized but the moment certainly was not memorable.
This experience begs the question: what could the baristas have done on the day they were late opening? One option was to do what they did — piss off a couple of customers while they work like crazy to get the store ready. Another, much better choice in my view, would have been to let us into the store (remember there were only 2 of us and there are rarely more than 3-5 customers before 6am anyway.) The baristas could have then said “We slept in, sorry. It’ll take us a couple of minutes to get ready. If you’d like to take a seat we’ll get your order ready as soon as we can and your the beverage of your choice will be on us.” A response like this would have immediately turned a bad MOT into a good MOT. I know what the margins are in this business and I know the lifetime value of a customer. It would have cost the company a few pennies, it would have given me and the other guy something positive to talk about and it would have given the baristas a sense of having recovered from a bad situation.
I’m not going to stop going to Starbucks because of this experience. It is one bad one out of several great ones and many very good ones. The team at this particular store, and the one I frequent when I’m in Reno, deliver a consistently good experience so the business has a good solid balance in what Stephen Covey calls its emotional bank account with me. Because the balance of the emotional bank has steadily increased, the occasional withdrawal for bad service or an unpleasant experience can easily be accommodated but a string of bad experiences will ultimately result is a lost customer. Importantly, a successful recovery from a bad MOT results in a large deposit but an unsuccessful response to a bad MOT results in a large withdrawal.
Most businesses today offer their customers a reasonably good service experience when things are tracking along in an orderly manner. But they get tested when things go wrong and it’s precisely at those times they have a great opportunity to actually show what they’re made of. These are the MOTs that should be embraced as opportunities to exhibit greatness. The biggest challenge to delivering a great customer experience comes not from a willingness of team members to do the “right” thing but their failure to know what that could be (i.e. a lack of ’scenario training’) and, perhaps most important, the company’s failure to empower them to make fast decisions in circumstances where a rapid response is called for. Once team members “get into the swing” of delighting customers it becomes second nature.
Regular scenario training is one way to get this happening. Use Towards Awesome Service as a catalyst. This needs to be supported by a policy of publicly celebrating service failures and recoveries so that all team members fully understand that failure is an opportunity for greatness to be revealed.
Popularity: 18% [?]
Time-based pricing is the most common way professional service firms charge for their services. A case can be made for this method of pricing but that is not my purpose in this post. What I would like to share are my thoughts about are some of the challenges I see with this method of pricing and how it has negatively impacted firms more than their clients. Read more…
Popularity: 80% [?]
For several years I have been expressing the view that outsourcing abroad some of the less valuable aspects of compliance services is (or should be) an inevitability. I still firmly believe that will happen but I can’t help being amazed at the resistance that is being shown to it from (some) professional accounting bodies, governments and most firms. Read more…
Popularity: 69% [?]
I’ve been working on the leadership component of the new Boot Camp program and have given it a major re-work because I believe that leadership is the principal success driver in any organization. Anyway, one of the things I really want to emphasize is the need for people to focus on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. This may seem counter-intuitive but it makes all the sense in the world. Read more…
Popularity: 57% [?]
The Cherokee Indians, as is the case with all native people, use insightful stories to convey meaning and seek understanding of people and their behavior. One such story that the elders tell their children is about fighting wolves. They say that inside every person are two wolves constantly fighting. One of these wolves is an evil character who is angry, jealous, lazy, impatient, self-centered, egotistical, negative, irresponsible and unforgiving. The other wolf is loving, kind, generous, humble, caring, enterprising, positive and responsible. Typically, a child when told about this will ask “which wolf wins?” To which question the elder will answer “which ever one you feed.” Read more…
Popularity: 19% [?]
I was talking with a young Australian Chartered Accountant recently and he told me he had just received his full CA qualification and was planning to leave the firm he’d been with for several years. When I asked why, he said he was sick of working for a dictator!
I recall reading an excellent comment on this by Hans Finzel in his book, The Top Ten Mistakes Leaders Make. I quote:
No one likes to live under dictators–they take all the fun out of life and work! Dictators in the business world hog all the decision-making. They feel that by virtue of their ownership, position, intelligence, or birthright, they are in charge of every key decision that will be made in the company or organization. These traditionalists do not see the value of facilitative leadership or the power of teams. Needless to say, dictators attract weak workers and cannot create a positive, empowering workplace.
I often wonder how common this style of leadership is in professional service firms. I believe it’s more common than many people think or are willing to acknowledge. What a huge cost that is to the growth of the firm, its clients and especially its team members.
Popularity: 13% [?]