Be Inquisitive in Customer Service

Desire quality, efficiency, and precision

• Focus on the customer’s need for accuracy and efficiency by methodically outlining steps, processes, or details related to a product or service.
• Communication should be tied into facts, not feelings.
• Have details and information prepared in advance and be thoroughly familiar with them
• Approach encounters in a direct, businesslike, low-key manner.
• Avoid small talk and speaking about yourself.
• Ask specific open-ended questions about customers’ background or experiences related o the product or service.
• Present solutions in a sequential fashion stressing advantages, value, quality, reliability and price. Also, be prepared to point out and discuss disadvantages.
• Have documentation available to substantiate your claims.
• Don’t pressure customer decisions and follow through on promises.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures

Audience-Centered Approach to Communication

Beside other things, effective organizational communication is audience-centered approach. Keep your audience in mind at all time during the process of communication. Empathizing with, being sensitive to, and generally considering your audience’s feelings is the best approach for effective communication. The audience-centered approach is more than an approach to business communication; it’s actually the modern approach to business in general, behind such concepts as total quality management and total customer satisfaction.

 Because you care about your audience, you take every step possible to get your message across in a way that is meaningful to your audience. You might actually create lively individual portraits of readers and listeners to predict how they will react. You might simply try to put yourself in your audience’s position. You might try adhering strictly to guidelines about courtesy, or you might be able to gather information about the needs and wants of your audience. Whatever your tactic, the point is to write and speak from your audience’s point of view.

 My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Intrapersonal Competencies

• Self-awareness: Maintains awareness of internal emotional states and has the ability to differentiate between emotional states; awareness of emotional strengths and gaps,
• Self-management: Employs effective personal strategies to lessen or eliminate acting out of disruptive emotional states,
• Self-confidence: Develops and maintains a strong and realistic sense of one’s capabilities and value to others,
• Adaptability: Can adjust emotions, thoughts and behaviors to new dynamic situations; tolerant of different ideas  and perspectives,
• Stress management: Achieves and maintains an internal equilibrium and calmness within a changing environment,
• Responsibility: Keeps commitments to others within agreed-upon parameters on a consistent basis,
• Trustworthy: Knows one’s own values, principles and feelings and acts consistently in accordance with them; acts ethically, fairly and reliably in relationship with others.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

The Dark Side of Technology

Although there is clearly great potential for technology to support brand new product concepts, provide new ways of delivering service, and enable consumers and employees in achieving better quality products and services, there are potential negative outcomes as well. There are many paradoxes of technology products and services for consumers. Technology can assimilate people while isolating them; it can provide a sense of control and at the same time feelings of ineptitude.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Self-Directed Work Teams

A self-directed work team is a group of employees responsible for an entire work process or segment that delivers a product to an internal or external customer. Sometimes called self-managed teams or autonomous work groups, self-directed work teams reduce the need for extra layers of management and thus can help control costs. Such teams are designed to give employees a feeling of ownership of a whole job. With shared team responsibility for work outcomes, team members often have broader job assignments and cross-team to master other jobs, thus permitting greater team flexibility.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Managing for Customer Satisfaction

If you are working in a business that is focused and dedicated to customer satisfaction you cannot manage it in the same way as an ordinary or traditional business – it just doesn’t work. Organizations have found this to their cost. Implementing policies without changing the organization first is self-defeating. The organization will defeat change as soundly as day follows night. However, if you change the organization and the way people are managed and led and you have developed the policies, ideas, procedures, standards and systems will evolve rapidly and effectively.

The first major change has to be  the ritual burning and demolition of the standard organization chart. Customers, suppliers and employees cannot be forced to work through traditional top down hierarchical management systems. Not only does it give people the wrong feeling, it actually just doesn’t work. It’s not that it ever worked particularly well anyway, it was just the thing that everyone used when they put together a large organization.

Today’s manager has to be much more of a communicator than a dictator. They also have to be much more of a facilitator than a policy determinator. People’s aspirations have changed, just as the customers have. They need to be treated in a way that encourages them, empowers them and enthuses them to deliver the best for their customers.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Behavioral Consequences

From behavior of people within an organization come such important consequences as productivity, satisfaction, and revitalization. Productivity refers to the quality and quantity of products and/or services, i.e., the output (in relation to inputs) that is ostensibly the organization’s logical or formal purpose. Satisfaction refers to the positive feelings of the people in a group about themselves and their situation. How much of what kind of satisfaction are they getting? Revitalization refers to the increased ability to cope with and adapt to changes in both the internal and external environments. For the individual this includes growth, in terms of emotional health or skill or learning of various kinds. For the social system in which individuals behave, it means the capacity to change internally to permit more productivity and/or satisfaction in the long run.

Productivity, satisfaction and revitalization are collectively referred as collectiveness. This term implies that to be effective a system must purchase all three. The complexity imposed by these multiple criteria for effectiveness demolishes any meaningful idea of maximizing effectiveness—at best, an organization can only approach an optimization of these criteria. The components of effectiveness may be viewed from the vantage point of any of the principal entities; namely, the individual, group, and organization. The consequences of behavior may vary by entity and category.

A second major behavioral consequence of importance to small groups is cohesiveness. By cohesiveness  is meant the tightness of the inter-personal bonds that hold a group together. Cohesiveness and effectiveness are essentially different concepts.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Bounded Rationality

Bounded rationality involves neuro-physiological limits on the one hand and language limits on the other. The physical limits take the form of rate and storage limits on the powers of individuals to receive, store, retrieve, and process information without error … Language limits refer to the inability of individuals to articulate their knowledge or feelings by use of words, numbers, or graphics in ways  which permit them to be understood by others. Despite their best efforts, parties may find that language fails them (possibly because they do not posses the requisite vocabulary or the necessary vocabulary has not been devised) and they resort to other means of communications instead. Demonstration, learning-by-doing, and the like may be the only means of achieving understanding when such language difficulties develop. (Williamson).

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Motivation Factors

Motivation factors, such as achievement and recognition, were often cited by people as primary causes of satisfaction and motivation. When present in a job, these factors apparently could cause satisfaction and motivation; when they were absent, the result was feelings of no satisfaction as opposed to dissatisfaction.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Attitude

Attitudes are hypothetical constructs, they cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. Because attitudes cannot be observed, a variety of perspectives have developed over the years in attempting to describe what they are. Fortunately, there is now widespread agreement that the term attitude should be used to refer to a general and enduring positive  or negative feeling  about some person, object, or issue.

The effective component  is what is generally  being referred to when people use the word “attitude.” However, attitude theorists recognize two additional components, cognitive and conative. The cognitive component refers to a person’s beliefs (knowledge and thoughts, which sometimes are erroneous) about an object or issue (e.g., “Reebok shoes are more stylish  that Nike;” “Nike Air Jordans are high-quality basketball shoes”).

The conative component represents one’s behavioral tendency toward an object. In consumer-behavior terms, the conative component represents a consumer’s intention to purchase a specific item.

Attitudes are learned predispositions to respond to an object or class of objects in a consistently favorable or unfavorable way.

An attitude is characterized by progressing from “thinking” (cognitive), to “feeling” (affective), to “behaving” (conative).

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.