Now this is how organization should communicate with their customers:

"Broadband. How that word excited us. What sweeping vistas of possibility it conjured in the mind's eye. What wondrous traffic it ushered through its mighty doors. What a leap forward from the drudgery of dial-up.

But what is it today?

Standardband. Same-as-my-Dadband. The 'information superhighway' is now everyone's M25. Increasing one lane at a time. Another small step for Internet-kind. Well isn't this the 21st century? Give me back the leaps.

Give me the potential to reach speeds that will make me dizzy. Let me download without limits. Build this new online world on the principles of honesty and value, and always listen to what I may say. Bind me not by annual contracts, but win my loyalty through effort. And give me telephone support in case I tire of reading text.

Don't cease to innovate. Don't give me less than the best.
And don't ever cap my dreams."

It's BeThere broadband. Someone's been reading The Cluetrain Manifesto. Thank God. More please.

What's your customer manifesto?

What is it with Gillette? I had just come to terms with needing two blades in my razor. Then they brought in that third blade with the Mach III. “Interesting development, but sets a dangerous precedent. I don’t think there’s room for many more blades in that thing,” quipped Tom Peters at one of our ecsw.com conferences.

Turns out he was wrong: last count there were FIVE blades, and still counting.

What Gillette is doing, of course, is keeping its edge. Or, er, edges. As Shaun Smith points out in his book mentioned below, the old days of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ are gone. Constant re-invention is how to keep ahead of customers. You need to think of yourself and your colleagues as one of those Gillette razors.

"Pan-Am, Wang, C&A, Swissair. Where are they now? Engineers have a term for this: entropy, the natural tendency for things to lose energy and become less effective over time. Strong service brands avoid withering away by constant re-invention to keep ahead of customers." - Shaun Smith, co-author of Managing The Customer Experience

So, there you have it: you are a razor. Go sharpen yourself. I must be doing something wrong, though. I still manage to remove more flesh than stubble, no matter how many blades and lubricating strips Gillette stick in that thing.

Picture credit: www.worldnetdaily.com

Labels: product development

USEFUL CONCEPT TO EXPLAIN MY RANT ABOUT TARGETS, BELOW: Goodhart’s Law. Named after a chief economist at the Bank of England. Goodhart’s Law states that if a measure becomes a target it loses its value and ceases to be a measure. Controlling an indicator of a problem will not cure the problem. Goodhart himself phrased it like this: `Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes’.

SOURCE: Central Banking, Monetary Theory and Practice: Essays in honour of Charles Goodhart, page 96. Systems thinking, as practised by Toyota and other high-performing organizations, stresses that target-based systems distort behaviour and make your organization inflexible. John Seddon’s book Freedom From Command & Control is helpful in understanding systems thinking and how you can lead more effectively by using it. Peter Senge's work is also instructive on systems thinking and how it can help you avoid falling into the trap of target-based attempts to lead change.

More on the misuse of targets in attempts at leading change - which is obviously a bug-bear of mine - in The 60 Second Leader, my book, due out April in the UK and June in North America. Damn, I plugged. But, I'm angry about this target nonsense, so researched it and put it in the book. So that plug was based on passion, not self-promotion. Honest.

This is relevant to leadership and customer issues, so I'll post this in both blogs.

From BBC News today comes another example of how people cheat when they have to work in a target-based performance management system - even with the best intentions and even the most senior people (what, you only expect call centre agents to cheat their targets? Target-based systems distort everything and most people's behaviour).

Again, this one is from the National Health Service, and follows on from sporadic stories of ambulances having to wait outside hospitals with patients in the back (because the Accident and Emergency 'waiting time limit' for patients, imposed by central government, is measured from when they come in through the door, and the hospital would have broken its limit and been penalised if the patients waited inside the hospital for treatment, so they were kept in ambulances).

This isn't evidence of pernicious people. It's brilliant, dedicated people pushed into ludicrous behaviour by top-down target-setting. Top-down targets distort. Check out any of the lean service analysts and consultants to see how flawed the whole thing is. Anyway, here's the latest example of what bad targets do to good people - and the terrible damage it does to the reputation of a much-loved institution:

FROM THE BBC

Patient waiting lists 'manipulated'
Last Updated: Saturday, 07 April 2007, 12:28 GMT

A senior cancer specialist has admitted giving patients unnecessary treatments to manipulate hospital waiting lists.

Chris Hamilton, consultant clinical oncologist at Hull's Princess Royal Hospital, told the BBC the problem was a government requirement that all treatment began within 31 days of diagnosis.

He says it means some low-risk patients are being treated before more urgent cases.

Mr Hamilton told the BBC he had given some prostate cancer patients hormone therapy to move them down the waiting list.

He said: "You're caught in a bind. Either you give them unnecessary treatment with hormones and reclassify them or you put them to the front of the queue where they shouldn't really be."

He added that he knew other hospitals were carrying out a similar practice and he had informed national cancer director Mike Richards.

The Prostate Cancer Charity condemned Mr Hamilton's claims saying it was "deeply unethical" to give patients treatment they did not need.

Dr Chris Hiley, head of policy and research, said: "It would be totally unacceptable if hormone treatment were being prescribed for men with prostate cancer simply in order to meet treatment target times - when it is not required to treat their cancer.

"It has nothing to do with patient centred care or good medicine.

"When men are diagnosed with prostate cancer, they need personal support and timely treatment. Providing the wrong treatment to meet NHS targets shows no regard for what patients need - the right treatment given at the right time with care and respect."

Labels: lean service, targets

There's a nice example from Marion Janner in her latest post over on the Bright Blog of how a bit of imagination and improvisation can improve the customer experience no end - in this case by overcoming boredom and lethargy, a constant problem in any institutional setting, with the spontaneous help of a paper plate adapted as an indoor Frisbee to lift the spirits of a group of patients in an acute mental health ward.

Here's what Marion wrote:

"Two of the things that impressed me most were improvisations. One of the dynamic HCAs who is an activity co-ordinator...described how there was a rather lethargic atmosphere on the ward one day. Spontaneously she found a paper plate and suddenly there was an animated game of indoor Frisbee!

And a ward with a kitchen which has no oven (excessively risk averse planning, presumably) hasn’t stopped the creative ward manager from regular cooking sessions for patients. They use a bread-making machine, make microwave and freezer cakes and harness the relaxed sociable potential of communal meals there."

This use of improvisation and initiative isn't trivial: it's vital. And it's often cost-free. Read Marion's latest post to see how the culture of improvisation she describes is an integral part of the overall culture of extremely good customer care the hospital she was visiting operates, and how it centres on allowing frontline people to take the initiative to enrich people's lives.

Leaving customers sitting around bored is probably one of the worst things you can do. It's exactly what Easyjet did to me a couple of weeks ago: crammed all of us into a small departure lounge with stairs leading to no plane (we could all see there was no plane, but they crammed us into the tiny departure gate area nonetheless), many people having to stand because there weren't enough seats, and the gate staff walking backwards and forwards among us doing important things with tickets, doors, phones, and other procedures without for a moment thinking their job might include talking to the customers and giving us a clue as to what was going on - or even a clue that they noticed we were there. We just sat - or stood - there for half an hour till the plane arrived and we were told to board, with no explanation or apology.

At Southwest Airlines the gate attendants have a stock of pipe cleaners under the desk. If a plane is delayed for any reason, rather than keeping people waiting with no messages or interaction from the gate staff whatsoever, they take out the pipe cleaners, hand them around and offer a prize for the best pipe cleaner figure customers can come up with. Maybe you don't want to play: but it's better than being ignored.