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We give our clients homemade chocolate cake

12 Jun

Rebecca Burn-Callander, Real Business, 12 June 2009

Dominic Monkhouse has made a career out of rejuvenating businesses in the tech industry. He took Rackspace from nothing to a £30m turnover and is now MD at PEER 1 Hosting, a global hosting firm. Here’s how he’s keeping clients sweet in a recession.

“We are a technology company,” says Monkhouse. “But first and foremost we’re a service company. It’s hard to get that across with a PowerPoint.”

To win new business in an incredibly competitive and saturated sector, Monkhouse has some unusual techniques. “We give all our new clients homemade chocolate cake, or carrot if they prefer, when they visit our offices,” he says. “Elsewhere in this sector, you’d just have some chaps in grey suits turning up and going through a slide deck.”

And its not just about the cake. Monkhouse has tweaked the whole company culture to be as welcoming for prospective customers as possible. “We invite them to come and spend the day with us,” he says. “It gives them an insight into who we are.”

This might sound hokey but there’s a sharp business case to this seemingly fluffy proposition. “We’re selling to technical people,” says Monkhouse shrewdly. “If we create an atmosphere here that they like and a company that they themselves would like to work for, it’s good for us. They may not be able to actually join the company but they’ll buy services from us.”

The proof is in the figures. The european turnover of the firm has hit £3m and PEER1′s customer feedback is outstanding, despite using the stringent “Net Promoter Score” system, which classifies anything beneath a nine out of ten as worthless.

And Monkhouse reveals another killer tip: “We offer new staff £1,000 to leave the company in the first two weeks,” he says. “If they stay, we know they want to be at the company long-term and fit into the culture.

“What you say at a pitch isn’t going to make the difference,” he concludes. “Being able to show that your staff yearn to belong communicates a whole lot more about the quality of service you deliver than a slide deck ever could, and that wins pitches.

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What I wish I had known 10 years ago – Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

7 Feb
Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

You see, its nothing more than just plain old common sense. You find something you can be passionate about and turn it into a business. Then you surround yourself with like-minded people who share your passion and you can change the world, well at least a little bit at a time. Yvon Chouinard puts it all so beautifully. He even seems a little embarrassed about having been so successful without any formal training. But i don’t think formal training exists for the leadership he displays, you either have it in your heart or you don’t, it’s a long long way from the business school taught spreadsheet driven way of profit maximisation. It shows how the concept of find a job you love and never work another day in your life can be put into stunning effect. He creates a place where others want to work and that’s a damn fine thing to achieve! His goal isn’t to make money, that’s an outcome of what he does through the good economic times and the bad, he aims to make amazing clothing for the sports he loves. He often forgoes short-term profit to look after his employees or in the pursuit of excellence – values driven business to the core. The book takes the concepts of the service profit chain model and walks you though their genesis at Patagonia. I can’t recommend this book enough, I loved it. I only regret I didn’t read it years ago.

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Radically over deliver

7 Feb

image

The least I could do

One way to think about running a successful business is to figure out what the least you can do is, and do that. That’s actually what they spent most of my time at business school teaching me.

No sense putting more on that pizza, sending more staff to that event, answering the phone in fewer rings… what’s the point? No sense being kind, looking people in the eye, being open or welcoming or grateful. Doing the least acceptable amount is the way to maximize short term profit.

Of course, there’s a different strategy, a crazy alternative that seems to work: do the most you can do instead of the least.

Radically overdeliver.

Turns out that this is a cheap and effective marketing technique.

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I read this blog post by Seth Godin and thought yes indeed, spot on. The counterintuitive customer loyalty building that great service experience brands just do and the normal behaviour exhibited by the rest. I have long since stopped wondering why everyone doesn’t get it and instead sort out the best companies to benchmark and copy.

Once we (PEER 1) have hired a new member of our growing UK team and we feel sure they have the right attitude there is still that period of adjustment before they can instinctively trust their own judgement, they will have experience life inside other organisations with rules and processes designed to stop them giving no more than enough. Once they know we trust their judgement they don’t look back. Its take now more effort to do the right thing but its a whole lot more satisfying – for the team and the customers.

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UK Customer Experience Awards

26 Nov

“Will I be the guest speaker, just tell a few stories from the front line of customer service and hopefully be entertaining?” I can guarantee the former, so yes. I was absolutely delighted to be asked to attend the UK Customer Experience Awards ceremony at One Whitehall last week. This is the UK’s most highly respected organisational awards, established as long ago as 1994, the award has become the benchmark for companies claiming to be customer focused. Thanks to John Hughes at Customer Service Network for the invitation and his masterful hosting of the day.

It was great to be involved. The award recognises organisations in the UK that excel at delivering customer service and it’s so energising to be in their company, no also-rans, no inconsistent deliverers and not surprisingly Orange mobile and South West trains weren’t in the room. Though they did figure in my stories, as did Continental Airlines whose service to me in the USA, a few years ago, has yet to be bettered.

The benchmarking and sharing nature of the awards is fundamental to their long running success. The team of assessors (I am one) help organisations find their strengths and weaknesses, provide benchmarks and guidance to help them improve service performance.

I remember when at the helm of Rackspace (overall winners in 2005) we did over 20 benchmarking visits (visiting other firms to find and copy great ideas) during the year before winning. Hard work pays off tomorrow and plagiarism pays off today – so to speak. Now running PEER 1 Hosting in the UK we are on our own service excellence journey. The start point at PEER 1 Hosting is different, this time less good to great and more great to outstanding. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is already world-class in terms of IT service firms (36 in 2009) so the challenge is to become one of the top service firms in the world in any sector, where scores in the high 70s and low 80s are the norm.

Some of the former winning organisations that offer inspiration today at PEER 1 Hosting are:

Bromford Housing Group (Winners 2007) – Helena has been a great ambassador for the team. I have stolen among other things the rant line and the careers sections of their website and the talent bank idea.

Happy (Winners 2003) – Henry and the team were back in the awards again this year (winners need to sit out for 3 years). I love the relaxed feel of their office and the colourful bean bags at Ocean Village are Happy in origin. I have enlighten on the business value of diversity; we are now actively seeking employees to job share of fill roles part-time. The management training element of the business is outstanding and I have used Kathy (MD) in the past to inspire young managers and will again. Finally, what’s not to like about free ice lollies? So we have bought a freezer for the new office so we can copy this one as well!

Nationwide Building Society (Winners 2002) – It was a long time ago that I saw their first PRIDE values video. The video was an internal communication tool to tighten up the understanding of what it meant to work at Nationwide. I have copied this idea several times already and have another PEER 1 Hosting video in the works – incidentally by the same video crew www.lovefilmproductions.com who did their video a few years ago. From values flow behaviours, at Nationwide they see these at 4 levels with expected behaviours for directors being different to front line branch staff. We have just started to trial some feedback tools with staff in the UK based on the ideas I picked up at Nationwide.

First Direct (Winners in both 1998 and 2004) – I am an evangelist for FD! I have been a customer for so long I can’t remember who I used to bank with and when. Simplicity of service access is important to customers, well FD’s customers. The phones are answered in a few rings by a real person. FD have an algorithm to work out the number of staff they need so you never get an automated voice telling you are so important to them they haven’t got enough staff so they can’t speak to you at the moment – I call this a service denial strategy and it is much-loved of utilities and mobile phone operators (including Orange). Their annual customer churn is 4%, which they also point out is the rate that the population in the UK dies or emigrates; I’m a sucker for a catchy stat! The concierge service is amazing (love to emulate) and the access to on site massage is one we already have plans for.

Rackspace (Winners 2005) – Some of the things we did here were unique and worth copying/doing again. I always enjoyed “free food day”, feed everyone the day before payday with the rationale that the employees will not have any cash left themselves to pay lunch. “Top 10 things you don’t know about me” – all new starters fill this in and it gets emailed around before they start and goes on the wall. In fact, this was stolen from ?Wahtif! and I have used it again and again. The inspiration for the home-made chocolate cake to be severed to visitors came from their amazing welcome tray (see the image at the top). At Rackspace they were baked by Sam’s mum and at PEER 1 Hosting they are lovingly prepared by Nicole at Love Yum. Image(060)Corporate values on the wall in the open space and not forgotten gather dust on a shelf, staff recognition based on  expressing these values – both these were picked up from ?Wahtif!.

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NPS drives itlab to new heights

4 Nov

image I love the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and defend it regularly against criticism.  Many of the critics comes from the customer survey industry, who it must be said have a vested interest, a regular single question sort of makes they long annual surveys and expensive analysis redundant. My defence is primarily on the grounds of action – a monthly or quarterly NPS score is easy to understand and galvanises action in the company to improve. My experience is that if used with rigour it can live up to the title Frederick Reichheld gave the article in the Harvard Business Review where he first highlighted his thinking – "The One Number You Need to Grow." Using the NPS also allows for comparison across competitors and sectors, giving the score much more validity with staff and customers. I use to work at itlab and take some of the credit for starting them off on their NPS journey. When we began, the NPS was below zero and just as I left, the survey returned a score of 55. It is great to see their progress continues. Below is an extract from their quarterly newsletter. Well done people!

The magic number that keeps growing

As you know, we run a very tight ship when it comes to meeting standards and offering great service. That’s why we continue to use Net Promoter to measure our success.

The results from last quarter (53%) put us above software giants, banks and American Express! This time around we’ve managed to hit a truly world class 76%. This puts us right up there with global service leaders like Apple and Google, and leaves the average score across all sectors (37%) in the dust.

WordPress Tags: One Number,Net Promoter Score,Frederick Reichheld,Harvard Business Review,competitors,itlab

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Win the Battle with Remarkable Customer Service

24 Oct
Marks and Spencer, The Mercat, Kirkcaldy

Image via Wikipedia

Rajan Sodhi thanks for your comments. Some coverage in BIG Marketing for small business of a piece by Steph Welstead of Growing Business.

The most inexpensive yet impacting way for small businesses to compete with the big boys is to lead with remarkable customer service. I know you’ve heard this before, and I’m almost certain you’ve made a similar claim – “We have great service” or “Our service is why people buy from us” – and yet more often than not, the service isn’t that remarkable. In fact, it’s fairly ordinary. Many mistake providing friendly, attentive service as exceptional when it’s actually the simple expectation or norm. So, what does remarkable service look like?

In an article titled Service-Led Battle Plan by Growing Business, business operator and customer service evangelist, Dominic Monkhouse reveals his approach to taking on his former Internet company (and industry leader) with a commitment to delivering remarkable service. He outlines his philosophy that every instance of human interaction is a moment of truth for a business – something he learned during his early days at retail giant Marks & Spencer.

Read full article

Connect with Dominic Monkhouse on:

LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter, or FriendFeed


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the best service is no service

12 Oct

I spoke at Internet World (#IWEXPO) in London on the 29th April on my passion for customer service excellence. I stole the title of my brief talk from the book by Bill Price (click here to read review and buy the book) about his experience at Amazon. At Rackspace and itlab I have seen the use of NPS drive huge improvements in customer experience over time. Superior customer experiences are only possible with engaged employees and I mentioned some easy to emulate tips on engagement. Some of the financial models that show the bottom line value of having happy staff delivering world calls customer service get a mention – including the real world impact of NPS on growth from existing customers. In 1 example I discuss the introduction of some self service tools that have a huge impact on service and show how it is possible for all firms to emulate Amazon in quadrupling revenue without adding support head count or in the case of Pipex Hosting deliver better service with fewer staff. Finally I used itlab as a case study to show how this firm was transformed in a 2 year period from loss making also ran into a financially stable great place to work delivering awesome customer support.

view the video of the presentation

download the slides


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be kind – pass it on

12 Oct

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Amazingly simple and interesting viral idea. At itlab we gave all new employees £5 and ask them to go forth and commit random acts of kindness, part of helping them see how to live the core values and learn to deliver on Service ObsessionTM.They then shared their daring dos; some bought chocolates and tried to give them away to very suspicious passersby, others donated to the homeless or bought multiple copies of the Big Issue, some acted solo whilst others teamed up and pooled their money – whatever, it didn’t matter it was the doing something that counted. So I was intrigued to read about a scheme to spread random acts of kindness even further. KIND sells healthy snacks through a host of stores in the USA including Starbucks and their rational is that happy people are healthier and kindness causes happiness so KINDED is a brand extension and fits with their core values. Well done to you! Oh and they also donate at least 5% of their profits to fostering global kindness.

In case you cant picture it this is the sort of behaviour they inspire; “someone held three sets of doors for me as i was rushing to the train”, “someone sent a tart to my table at le pain quotidien”, “a total stranger paid for my sandwich”, good on them.

WordPress Tags: random kindness,BEKIND,KINDED,KIND,Service Obsession


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Service Standard: Good Start, But Don’t Stop There

5 Oct
Misleading Customer Service Kills Your Business

Image by libraryman via Flickr

"…universal truths by which all customer service can be measured. This can’t be the case."
Frankly – that’s just plain wrong. There ARE universal truths about customer service and if the ICS audit seeks them out then it will be a step forward.
For example, I can’t for the life of me see how great customer service can be delivered by staff who hate or even just aren’t enjoying their jobs. So, if the ICS seeks to measure staff engagement this is a great precursor to ensuring client delight. Note – delight! If the objective is to deliver customer satisfaction, you’re wasting your time – and believe me you will attain your goal of delivering a mediocre service if you are a local garage or a global bank.
Firstly, hats off to any firm for going through the audit process. It means they want to improve and are seeking to benchmark their performance – THIS IS A KEY STEP! Without a benchmark you have no idea where you are on the journey. As I am not a journalist, I am not genetically prone to see the world through a more than half empty glass. I take a less cynical view and as 95% of firms don’t do anything serious to improve customer service applause to those that do.
As a consumer it’s a shame more companies don’t try harder to delight, as every day I am subjected to mind-blowingly crap customer service experiences. Only yesterday I called the Orange call centre and in the end lost the will to live after 20 minutes on hold – a great example of denial of service. What did I want to do? I wanted to edit the account name. No reason to force me to do this with a person – I should have been able to do this via the account portal but you can’t because it can’t, nor can I email them my request because this isn’t an option. Result – spectacular Orange failure to understand its customers and the service they really want.
Here we are in 2009 and ten-years since it first re-wrote the rulebook, Amazon is still a guiding light on how to deliver online customer service. Others still can’t see the light or can’t find the will to follow.

WordPress Tags: Customer Service,customer engagement,client satisfaction,benchmark,performance,applause,consumer,Orange


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Office Hero – Matt O

9 Feb

Matt O named as a finalist in the Office Heroes Awards. Every office has its unsung hero. Working tirelessly behind the scenes, no job is too small, too demanding or too much trouble. Yet all too often, these employees don’t get the recognition they deserve. Matt made it through because he has repeatedly gone the extra mile, contributed to their company’s success above and beyond their job description and led outstanding growth or improvement of a department. Read all about it ………

WordPress Tags: employee,recognition,job description,growth,department,Heroes

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