Fire your grumpy staff!

4 Aug

Dominic Monkhouse, Real Business, 4 August 2010

I can’t for the life of me see how great customer service can be delivered by staff who hate or – or don’t enjoy – their jobs. Great service experiences are always a result of someone who is engaged and sees the problem through the customer’s eyes.

The very best experiences often include staff overriding the company process, procedures and systems to do the right thing. That is why companies should at least try to ensure employees aren’t unhappy and don’t hate where they work. It’s a shame not everyone feels the same…

I speak from (unfortunate) experience.

As a consumer I am subjected every day to mind-blowingly rubbish customer service. I was recently forced to speak to an employee at Orange – Orange telephone support; where customers go to die. All I wanted was to edit my account name. There was no reason for me to do this by phone, except that Orange’s spectacular failure to understand its customers and the service they really want left me no choice.

And another example of appalling customer service: I recently bought an iPad. It arrived the day before the official Apple launch day and I got on the web immediately to get the SIM activated. But the website activation functionality didn’t work and I got a popup telling me to call them. My heart sank. I spoke to three people (but was on hold most of the time  – honestly, they have been experiencing “higher than expected call volumes” for so long now, I just wonder how they keep getting caught out!?), responses varied. First: “iPad? What’s that?”; then: “We don’t support it but, yes, I know what it is”; and finally: “No problem, I can do that for you.” They did but it took three hours!”

But then something happened to restore my faith. There are those occasional companies where you find employees who do go to the extra mile.

Flying back to the UK from Texas, my flight to Denver with Continental Airlines was delayed because of snow. I was rerouted to Houston rather than New York in an attempt to get another flight. Larry (his real name) now holds the record for ignoring a human being standing six inches away and attempting to make eye contact. Eventually – and unhelpfully – he told me to fly to Amsterdam. Did he not realise that there’s a sea between the UK and Holland?

Luckily for all of us, another check-in assistant noticed how unimpressed I was. Tina went out of her way (several quick phone calls – while checking in another flight!) to make sure I made it onto a flight to Gatwick leaving in the following 30 minutes. They wrote down my boarding details on a post-it note and I was able to board very easily and took the last seat in first class. Apparently, you can’t legally fly without a boarding card but you can’t print one within 30 minutes of take off, either.

Two weeks later, I received a hand-written note to thank me for flying with Continental and to say thanks for giving them the opportunity to make my day. I wrote back to thank them and to commend the employees who had gone above and beyond to get me home despite processes and systems.

Although this isn’t standard procedure, the company obviously places a great emphasis on allowing staff personal latitude to deliver outstanding customer service. Fantastic!

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the truth about what motivates us

1 Jul

Its counter intuitive but money doesn’t motivate us, NOT EVEN sales people. Well, once the work we do requires some thinking! A video from the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) animated talks series. Fantastic – but once you watch it what are you going to do differently?

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Offering a grand to quit and cock-up of the month – how I built my dream team

16 Jun
Coloured pencils 

Image via Wikipedia

16 June 2010 by Sophie http://www.smarta.com/blog/2010/6/guest-blog-offering-a-grand-to-quit-and-cock-of-the-month—how-i-built-my-dream-team

Dominic Monkhouse is the UK managing director of web hosting business PEER 1, where he’s recruited more than 20 people since joining. He shares his most effective – and often unconventional – tricks for finding and keeping great talent.

Ask interviewees to draw a picture

The first thing I do when I interview people is hand them a blank piece of paper and a bunch of coloured pencils and ask them to draw whatever motivates or inspires them. The first part of the interview is talking about that. I didn’t even take cv’s into the 15 interviews I did last week. A cv is just an indicator the person’s got the technical abilities to do the job. It doesn’t say anything about them.

I always ask people what they like doing outside work. I’m not going to hire someone who can only say, “I like to spend time with my family” – how dull! I don’t want dull people to work for me, because my customer would find them boring too.

Get people inside and outside the company to help interview

I interview every single person we hire. I owe it to staff and customers to hire good people. But I get the other staff involved in interviewing too. Everyone is looking for the same thing, the same energy. We look for people who are self-motivated and have passion, who can take the initiative.

You can get another business owner or entrepreneur to interview alongside you. It really helps because sometimes you’re so vested in wanting to hire someone, you end up just hiring the least worst person you see. It helps to have someone who doesn’t have emotional interest in the business there to see things objectively. For example, I’ve used marketing agency bosses to hire marketing people before. The candidates don’t mind. It might be a bit more intimidating for them, but I’m not looking for someone who’s easily intimidated.

Ability testing

As well as phone and face-to-face interviews, we use strength finder tests, so we know the person can do the job and get on with it. So we’ll test for a sense of responsibility, which means they self-manage. We look for achiever strength, which means they don’t just want to go and lie on the beach.  Buy a book called Strengthsfinder 2.0 – it talks you through the test and what strengths you should look for in each role. You use a code in the back which gives you access to the test. We buy 15 or 20 at a time, for around £7 each. The cost is worth it.

Offer people £1,000 to quit

Within the first two weeks of joining a company an employee knows whether they’ve made a mistake and if the company’s not right for them. But the employer can’t tell that. So we offer new recruits £1,000 to walk away after those first two weeks. If they don’t take it, it means they’re happy, so you know it’s the right decision. But it means they’re forced to think about it.

If you don’t try to have that conversation that early on, the next break point is after three months, when you’ve realised the person isn’t right. The cost of finding someone again is huge. And it might be that the next person isn’t right, and the person after that – in which case it could be nine months before you find the right person.

The two-week idea saves you the three months trying to work out if the person’s right, and if you have to spend that £1,000, it’s money well spent. It means you can crack on. Although no one’s ever taken the money and left us yet!

Keeping good people: cock of the month

I want to keep my team happy. So I give them free breakfast, free fruit in the office, we have Beer Fridays (free beer!), a mini-bar, a dartboard, a Wii. We have free food day the day before payday, when everyone’s skint.

We always talk about the state of our finances, which is something too many small businesses are nervous about doing. It should be transparent – it makes the team feel part of creating the success.

We celebrate our failures as well as our successes. We have a ‘cock of the month’ award for the biggest mistake made. It’s an actual model of a cock – or a rooster, I should probably say! I’ve won it myself before.

The little black book

You go to other people’s offices where a chair’s broken in the meeting room because no one thinks it’s their job to fix it – it just creates a bad impression.

So everyone gets a little black book when they start. You write in it the stuff we should change, things you don’t think work in the company. But I don’t have time to fix all those things – so I tell the team that if it costs less than £100 to fix, and it makes the business a better place to work, just expense it and do it. Once every six months we sit down and look at everyone’s black books and share them to fix the bigger problems in the company.

Keep finding ideas

Lots of ideas I get come from other companies I’ve visited or work with. Or ones I’ve spotted in ‘best companies to work for’ lists – you just give them a call and ask if you can see how things are done. You just need to keep bringing in ideas that work for other businesses.

Find out more about PEER 1 Hosting

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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.

—————————————————————————————————

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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