Indicators of Poor Listening

In the customer service environment, you cannot afford the luxury of failing to listen to your customer. Periodically, you should do a self-check on your listening style to see if you need improvement. If any of the following events occur, you may need to refocus.

• Customers  specifically request to speak to or be served by someone else.
• You find yourself missing key details of conversations.
• You regularly have to ask people to repeat information.
• You walk away from phone calls or personal encounters not completely knowing what action is required of you.
• Customers often make statements, such as, “Did you hear what I said?” Are you listening to me?” or “You are not listening.”
• You find yourself daydreaming or distracted as the customer is speaking.
• You miss accompanying nonverbal cues sent by the customer as the two of you communicate.

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.

Fringe Benefits

Fringe benefits are any benefits received by employees in addition to their regular pay. They include paid vacation, sick leave, welfare programs, and health and life insurance. The cost of fringe benefits is increasing much more rapidly than wages. One fringe benefit that unions have been stressing recently is the pension. Pension funds are certainly not small.

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.

Taking the Office Charge

Once your office is settled, you should make an inventory so you will have proof of what you own. To make a simple office inventory:

1. List each item, the year it was purchased, its original cost, and its present value.
2. Also list the model number, brand name, dealer’s name, and a description of the item. Save and attach receipts.
3. Keep a copy of this inventory in a safe place other than your office (a safe deposit box, for example).
4. Update the inventory regularly, possibly as often as every three or six months while you are still buying major items for your office. At minimum, update it once a year.

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.

Beyond Customer Satisfaction

Satisfying the customer is no longer the ultimate business virtue. Companies need to look for ways to create and increase customer loyalty. The key to this new loyalty-centered approach to customer relationships is creating and managing the customer value package – the combination of factors (price, product quality, innovation, and company image) that creates what the customer perceives as superior value. Five steps are recommended:

1. Clearly define and communicate your objectives. The company needs to make sure that every stakeholder clearly understands the importance of  creating and delivering customer loyalty and knows how to make it possible.
2. Let customers define, in their own words, their criteria for quality, price, image, and value. The company needs to distinguish between basic requirements and loyalty builders. Meeting the basic requirements will get the company on the approved vendor list, but generating loyalty will encourage a customer to stick with the company during difficult times.
3. Conduct a critical need and value assessment. The company must set priorities among important customer requirements and determine the relative importance of these aspects of the customer value package.
4. Develop an action plan and move to implementation. This turns management of customer loyalty into a way of doing business. The company must make sure that the voice of the customer becomes the principle around which the business processes are organized.
5. Monitor the marketplace and organization results. Managing customer value is not a one-time effort, so all the loyalty-building components of customer value have to be monitored regularly with a focus on the relationship between customer value, customer loyalty, and financial performance.

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.

 

Diet and Fitness

Growing evidence indicates that reduced intake of salt and saturated fats and increased consumption of fiber – and vitamin-rich fruits and vegetables are steps that can greatly increase the body’s ability to cope with the physiological effects of stress. Regular exercise also helps. People who exercise regularly obtain many benefits closely related to resistance of the adverse effects of stress. Fitness reduces both the incidence of cardiovascular illness and the death rate from such diseases. Similarly, physical fitness lowers blood pressure, an important factor in many aspects of personal health. It is not surprising that growing numbers of companies are taking steps to ensure that their employees engage in regular exercise.

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 Importance of Motivation

One of the manager’s primary tasks is to motivate people in the organization to perform at high levels. This means getting them to work hard, come to work regularly, and make positive contributions to the organization’s mission. But job performance depends on ability and environment as well as on motivation.

To each high levels of performance, an employee must want to 1) do the motivation, 2) be able to demonstrate ability, and 3) have the materials and equipment needed to maintain the environment. A deficiency in any one of these areas will hurt performance. A manager thus should strive to enter that all three conditions are met.

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 Personal Touch

• People like to buy from people
• You build a business one customer at a time, one purchase at a time
• Use the customer’s name in all written communication
• Courtesy, manners and politeness are keys to building trust, respect and loyalty
• Use names regularly in conversation
• Accommodate the customers special requests wherever possible (impossible is a subjective statement)
• The first sale you make is yourself
• Rapport is a skill that can be learnt
• No-verbal communication is the most important and quickest route to reaching people
• Get to know your customers—all of them
• One hundred percent attention at all times
• Make every customer feel like your most special customer (not your only customer)

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 Critical Incident Appraisal

Critical Incident Appraisal focuses the rater’s attention on those critical or key behaviors that make the difference between doing a job effectively and doing it ineffectively. The appraiser writes down anecdotes describing what the employee did that was especially effective or ineffective. With this approach to appraisal, specific behaviors are cited, not vaguely defined individual traits. A behavior-based appraisal should be more valid than trait-based appraisals because it is clearly more job related. It is one thing to say that an employee is “aggressive,” “imaginative,” or relaxed,” but that does not tell us anything about how well the job is being done. Critical incidents, with their focus on behaviors, judge performance rather than personalities.

The strength of the critical incident method is that it looks at behaviors. Additionally, a list of critical incidents on a given employee provides a rich set of examples from which employees can be shown which of their behaviors are desirable and which ones call for improvement. In drawbacks are basically that: 1) appraisers are required to regularly write these incidents down, and doing this on a daily or weekly basis for all employees is time-consuming and burdensome for supervisors; and 2) critical incidents suffer from the same comparison problem found in essays—mainly, they do not lend themselves easily to quantification. Therefore the comparison and ranking of employees may be difficult.

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.

Trend Analysis

Managers must often determine whether the variations in business activity indicated by statistics have any regular pattern.

Trend analysis, also known as time-series analysis, is the examination of data over a sufficiently long time so that regularities and relationships can be detected, interpreted, and used as the basis for forecasts of business activity. Such an analysis generally explains changes in terms of three factors: seasonal variations, cyclical variations, and secular (or long-term) trends in business growth.

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.

Traditional Manager Vs. Customer-focused Manager

A traditional manager focuses on current goals. Their time and their energy is preoccupied with a series of probably corporate internally focused objectives – whether this is making a sales target, budget, profitability or some other goal, such as market share. On the other hand a customer-focused manager is led and empowered by a vision. A vision based on quality as well as quantity and results. A vision that inherently has a customer satisfaction measure and a vision that creates a feeling of pride and satisfaction in working in that way.

A traditional manager is largely reactive – making decisions, implementing plans based on the input of those above them, around them or in the external environment. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ would be a common maxim. Today’s manager is largely proactive – ‘If it’s not broken, break it,’ because it’s going to be broken very soon. Today’s manager doesn’t wait for things to need a reason for change; they change things for the sake of it. Whether this is just simply the office layout, the times people take their lunch, company policies, prices, brochures, and markets – everything else has to be a proactive activity today. If you wait for the market to change you will probably always be one step behind. One step behind what the customers need and want and what your competitors are doing.

A traditional manager will often seek, either directly or indirectly, to limit other people’s participation. Typically, meetings between managers are excluded from input from other people, or they don’t involve other people perhaps as much as they should do – this is never seen as necessary. But today it is essential. Today’s manager has to promote involvement; they need opinions, thoughts, ideas, and feedback from all levels within the organization. The best way of achieving this is by one of two methods. The first is one we could loosely name ‘random communication,’ where just by simply creating the environment where people can mix and mingle, communicate, participate and share, ideas can be distributed. The other way is by doing something slightly more formal, by putting in place a series of waterfalls or communication falls where information and participation flows around the organization.

Traditional managers will probably reward people based on their qualifications or long service. A more customer-focused manager will reward and recognize people based on their ability to enhance customers and deliver excellence. For example, it is not uncommon for managers to regularly single out for some form of payment, or just simple recognition, those people in a customer service team who have gone beyond the normal levels and delivered something extraordinary during their job. Whether it was staying late sorting out a customer problem, coming up with an idea which helped the business move forward, making big improvements in their own work – these are the things that managers reward.

Another thing that has to change if you are going to move forward and lead successfully in a customer-focused organization is that you have to let go of solving problem yourself. One very successful manager who ran a very effective customer service team had a big sign on their wall. You can come in here with any problem at all, so long as you have one idea for a solution.

A traditional manager also sees their role as controlling information. They will keep their staff and other people on a ‘need to know’ basis. This is not how it works. Information should be shared, but not broadcast. A good manager will communicate actively and pro-actively to all concerned. He or she will keep them informed of the information they need to deliver the best possible service to the customer. This means the information is timely, relevant and understood.

Managing in today’s environment, with the pressures of working with ever demanding customers, will invariably result in matters of conflict and disagreement. Rather that patching these over, ignoring them, or letting them sort themselves out, as is perhaps more traditionally done by managers, these should now be sought out and moderated to a successful outcome.

A customer-focused manager ‘walks the talk’. He or she must act congruently and with the same values and honesty that they want their staff to deliver to their customers. That means they keep commitments, it means they under promise and over deliver, and they make everyone of their employees feel special and a valuable member of the team. Nobody just does a job and goes home, there is a purpose, a value and a mission.

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.