Great Service Starts with Mastering the Basics

…Not Mastering the Basics – “Turn the cup over if you don’t want coffee.”

A colleague of ours was at a banquet with a client a couple nights ago.  Early in the dinner, before salads had been served, one of the wait staff came by and offered coffee to the client.  The client declined, suggesting he would wait until after dinner.  The waiter then snapped, “Well, turn your cup over if you don’t want coffee!”  Appropriately reprimanded, the client returned to his conversation with our colleague.

I suspect that somewhere along the line the banquet server had been trained that if the coffee cup is turned up it means the guest is ready for coffee.  And, if it’s turned down, that means no coffee.  So, he probably figured he was doing his job pretty well.  Unfortunately, neither my colleague nor his client felt too great about the experience.  The banquet server missed one or more basic concepts of service delivery:  seeing the situation as the customer sees it, having empathy for the customer, the customer is always right except in those cases in which the customer is wrong (this not being one of those cases) and/or your guests are not paying to be at the dinner so that they can get your lecture on dinner etiquette!

An understanding of those basic aspects concepts would suggest that the server could have just said, “Yes, Sir” and moved on to the next guest (remembering, of course, to come back and serve Mr. Big Client coffee after dinner).  What should have been a simple transaction with no effect on the future purchases of guests, threatened to drive them away forever.

Unfortunately, service and treatment like this is not uncommon.  Recently, my wife and I were having dinner with a couple of friends in a restaurant billing itself as a 4-star quality experience.  One of our dinner companions ordered a very lovely looking (and tasting!) version of chocolate mousse pie.  The waitress delivered the dessert without utensils and quickly turned and walked away.  Our companion was left with only her coffee spoon to eat the pie.  (Strike 1!)  So, we waited.  And waited.  And, waited for the server to return near enough to our table for us to be able to flag her down.  Unfortunately, it was near closing time for the restaurant so our server was on the far side of the dining room re-setting tables for the next day, so she was not exactly attentive to our needs.  We assumed that her after work plans were far more important than our needs for a fork! (Strike 2!) 

When our companion was finally able to ask for a fork, rather than just get the fork quickly, efficiently and with a smile, the server was prompted to exclaim, “A fork?!  Most people eat dessert with a spoon.”  (Strike 3, you’re out!)  Now, the dessert was actually pretty darn good – good enough to motivate a return visit.  But, our collective memory of the place will always be tainted with our memory of the server’s rebuke. 

Both restaurants – rather than creating memories for its food, or attentive service or great ambiance – became places that you get lectured by the staff…not the kind of memories that get guests to come back.

Heck, we get enough of that at home from our teenagers!

Questions to consider:  What are the “basics” of service delivery in your organization?  How are those “basics” built into your training programs and reinforced by leaders?  How well do your frontline service execute on the “basics?”  To what extent do they look at the world from the customer’s point-of-view?  What education/information do they need to help them get it?  How do you know what your customers think of the service they are getting?  What’s your recovery strategy when things go awry?

Delivering the basics well may or may not lead to great customer loyalty.  But, mastering them will at least keep you from driving customers away.

Pitfalls in Succession Planning and Talent Management

Succession Planning and Talent Management have become hot topics in the Human Resources and Human Capital Management world over the last few years. And, for good reason – effective leaders continue to be one of the most precious resources in any business. Effective Succession Planning/Talent Management processes offer the hope that the organization can sprout an endless supply of the leadership talent necessary to deal with rapidly changing, chaotic business environments.

The stakes are huge -- done well, the talent management process makes a major contribution to the success and sustainability of the organization. (One client of ours first instituted a succession planning/talent management process in their organization about five years ago. That enabled them to identify leadership candidates who have since helped the organization successfully grow over 30% per year.) Done poorly, or not at all, the talent management process can cause significant harm in organizations of any size and in any industry. (A more recent client is only now starting to put a process in place. Partly as a result, the client has had the wrong leaders in the wrong roles and the company’s business has shrunk each of the last several years.) In addition to enabling or preventing success, the Talent Management process sends powerful signals about how to succeed in the organization – those results, behaviors and values become embedded in the organization for the long term.

With that in mind, here are some of the key pitfalls we’ve seen organizations fall into in their Succession Planning and Talent Management process:

1) Not having a Succession Plan or Talent Management process at all. As much press as Succession Planning has garnered lately, and as headline grabbing as some of the failures have been, we continue to be astonished at the number of organizations that have no process in place for identifying and developing the talent they need.

2) Not identifying the key business and organizational issues the company faces. Many Succession Planning processes are just designed to fill empty spaces in the organization chart. Done correctly, the Succession Planning/Talent Management process must be "future-oriented" and develop leaders who can operate effectively in the future.

3) Not translating the key business and organizational issues into the capabilities and competencies required for success in the future. So, the organization ends up with leaders perfectly skilled for a world that doesn’t exist any longer.

4) Building only a partial profile of the capabilities, competencies, personal characteristics and values necessary for success in a specific job role. Values and fitness for a specific job role count. Merely evaluating candidates on their technical/function skills or past performance is probably the number one reason leaders flunk out.

5) Accepting “he’s a good guy” as a valid assessment of a candidate for a future promotion. (Or its common corollary – “Hey, I worked with this guy at the last place I worked. He’ll be great here.” Often from someone who is already not so great here!) Effective talent management requires rigorous, data-based assessments of the performance and potential of the candidates relative to their ability to perform well in a specific job role in this business and within the value set of this organization. “He’s a good guy” is not exactly “data-based!” :)

6) Confusing “performance management” with “talent management.” Performance management is a “looking back” process. Being successful in the current job is a critical hurdle for candidates for promotion, but it’s not a predictor of future success in a different job role. Talent Management is a “looking forward” process. Candidates need to be assessed relative to their capabilities to fill the future role, not the past role.

7) A lack of straight talk – not being frank with candidates about their strengths and weaknesses. Or, holding a different conversation about a candidate upwards with your boss or bosses – “This person is really challenged by these issues.” —than the feedback you provide the candidate – “I ranked you as my number one person.”

8) Not creating accountability for developing future leaders – the most simple and basic requirement is that every leader must have developed at least one “ready now” candidate for his/her own job before they can be promoted.

9) Whiffing on the development planning and execution part of the Talent Management process. Common pitfalls include not providing sufficient development opportunities to enable candidates to address their needed improvement areas, not specifically tying development activities to Succession Planning/Talent Management process outputs and not executing, tracking or following up on development plans.

10) Not using the output of the Succession Planning process to fill jobs or to build the candidate pool for filling jobs. We’ve seen organizations build elaborate talent management processes to identify and groom their leaders. Then, they ignore the results because “Joe’s a really good guy. Let’s promote him.”

11) Over-relying on the output of the Succession Planning process to fill job openings. The Succession Planning process should produce a pool of candidates to fill open positions. Blindly plucking someone from the pool and inserting him/her into the job is not a good idea either. The candidates in the pool need to be fully vetted for the position at the time it opens up.

12) Not measuring the process or the outcomes of Succession Planning and Talent Management efforts. The process must be measured and the data used to improve the system over time.

13) Adopting a “check-the-box” mentality toward Succession Planning or viewing the process as a one-stop process. “Ok, we did that. The Board/CEO/my boss is off my back. Let’s go back to running the business.” Regularly assessing the issues facing the organization, translating those issues into the capabilities required for success and then building succession and talent management plans to develop those capabilities play a critical role in the overall performance management cycle of the business. They need to become a regular part of the business review process and/or have their own operating processes (like the Session C process at General Electric).

As always, we invite your comments…What succession planning/talent management pitfalls has your organization bumped into? How did you overcome them? What practices have you adopted that really enable the process to be effective?

Creating WOW! Part 2

Hertz, Boston Logan Airport

This is a major shout-out to my new best friend, Brian, and his team at the Hertz (http://www.hertz.com) facility at Boston Logan Airport. I’ve been a pretty loyal Hertz customer for most of the last 20 years. Friends and colleagues often question the sanity of paying extra for Hertz car rentals versus many of their competitors. Here’s why…

…My family and I were traveling in the Boston and Southern New Hampshire area for part of our spring break trip. On the plane after dropping off the car, Heather discovered that she had left her glasses in a storage tray in the car we had been driving. And, we discovered that we had also left behind a hat and a pair of mittens in the same storage tray. I’ve been renting cars for over 20 years. In that time, I’d never left anything of substance behind, but always assumed that if I left it in a car that would be the last time I ever saw the article.

We called Hertz as soon as we got off the plane to see if the items had been found. The representative searched for us, but couldn’t find them. However, it was late on a Sunday night so he suggested that we call back the next morning and talk to “Brian” who handles lost and found among other responsibilities.

Monday morning I called Brian and left a message. Figuring this experience would be like most others with major corporations, I didn’t expect to hear back from him for a few days, if at all. Our first surprise then came when Brian called back within about 10 minutes. The good news was that he had already found the glasses and the mittens. The bad news was that the hat was missing. We were elated to know that the glasses had been found. Then came surprise number 2 – Brian asked if we knew that one of us was also missing a Palm Tungsten T5 PDA. The shock to us was that we didn’t even yet know that the PDA was missing. We had him check a couple entries to verify that the PDA belonged to me. Then, came surprise number 3 – Brian said he could ship the items back to us immediately if we could give him a shipping company account number. I was out of my office so I told him that either I could call him back with the number or he could pull it out of the contact file on the Palm handheld. (Sure, I thought. Who is going to want to do that?) Within seconds Brian pulled up the number, confirmed that it was the right one and said that everything would be shipped for delivery the next day. Sure enough, it all showed up Tuesday afternoon.

Epilogue to the story (Surprise #4): About a week later, the hat that apparently had not been found showed up unannounced in a separate package in the mail. Brian and his team stayed on the hunt long enough to find it.

We, of course, were delighted on many levels. Brian and his team saved us hundreds of dollars and countless amounts of hassle by finding the glasses, the Palm and the other items. His courtesy, energy and enthusiasm on our behalf far exceeded what we expect and get from most service people these days. And, his initiative in finding the items in the first place, making getting them back to us by finding the shipping company account number and staying on the project until all the items were returned was truly astounding.

In all, Brian’s effort added up to a phenomenal WOW! experience that earned our loyalty to Hertz for at least the next 20 years!

Questions to consider: How many “Brian-type” employees work in your organization? What are they doing to create WOW! experiences for your customers? Where does your organization fall short? To what extent do people have the latitude to WOW! the customers? To what extent do they believe it’s their responsibility to do so? What’s the value of a long-term, loyal customer to your organization? What are you doing to ensure you create more of those type customers?