Transformational Change
becoming a five star business.
I have the privilege of working with a client at the moment who has a business in the tourism industry. The business is in a tourist mecca and business is good. Patterns of traveller behaviour are changing and they are adapting pretty well to that.
This is no fix-up job. They are absolutely ok as they are, but for my client, that isn’t good enough. He wants to up the ante and we talked for s long time about how we could approach this project.
In the end, we settled on a very simple metric. Customer feedback. From that we named the project so it says exactly what’s in the tin. Five Star Excellence. The game we’re playing is calibrating a business so it only receives five star reviews from customers all over the world.
Don’t get me wrong. These guys get fabulous reviews most of the time but inevitably there are some pretty embarrassing ones in the mix. Now, this business receives customer service information done by a third party on behalf of MBIE.
As soon as I saw this data, I knew something was wrong. They claim to use NPS (Net Promoter Score) but however they’re doing it looks nothing like my reasonably deep understanding of how NPS works. The results showed an aggregated NPS score of 95. I’m pretty sure if Jesus returned with a band of angels in attendance, they would possibly struggle to get over 30.
The written feedback was absolutely glowing also which told me a story. This survey process was specifically designed to paint a glowing picture of the industry and its players. It made me wonder what earthly benefit “back pats” and “attaboy” compliments provide.
I’ve used NPS myself and it has always been to reveal what could be improved on. I can think of nothing more toxic to a business than being given a false sense of achievement.
So we come back to my client. He knows that do a good job because their customers tell them directly. But there is a yawning chasm between doing well and becoming a 5 star business.
So I’ve developed a 27 week programme for them that is based on my Continuous Improvement work. Now, I don’t use Kaizen or Six Sigma or any of the traditional tools. I very simply see continuous improvement as a mindset shift that asks the basic question of every member of the team – “what can I do to make one thing in the business better than it was yesterday?”
For me, continuous improvement, when properly embedded as company culture, provides a tremendous advantage over competitors because to get to the place that it is happening every day, the team have changed at an almost granular level.
At the first meeting where we discussed this with the team, I said something that was a little alien to the crew. I told them that if the answer was ever “if only the bloody customer would…” then the wrong question has been asked. Why? Because we don’t have any control over the behaviour, attitude or personality of the customer. Where we have “agency” as the cool consulting kids call it, is over our own behaviour, attitude and responses. As soon as we blame someone else for what has happened, we become powerless to do anything about it.
So no matter how appalling a customer may be, in this continuous improvement mindset, we can always look at what happened and establish at a policy or process level how we could have operated to achieve a better outcome.
This sounds simple, but if you think about the tremendous suck towards blaming some arsehole who is determined to find fault no matter what, you need to have some different thinking embedded pretty deep. The discipline of maintaining objectivity, dignity and the resilience to work through a problem to a good outcome.
It takes time and a lot of goodwill and the process tests the patience and patterns of everyone. But, to become a 5 star business, it is essential.
Now you might assume that in a tourism business, the bulk of the heavy lifting would be with the public facing team, but that is completely wrong. Mapping the customer journey through a tourism business highlights the multitude of touch points throughout the business and each of these is an opportunity to delight or dismay a customer.
So we are picking the whole business apart (figuratively, not literally) and looking at the component parts in isolation insofar as how well they do their own jobs, but more importantly we’re looking at the connective tissue that binds each part interacts with the one before and the one after.
Interestingly, the company policy has been (until yesterday) that the customer feedback they receive directly from customers is viewed by the Operations Manager and occasionally the GM, but no-one else. The first change I recommended is that every bit of feedback is available to all team members and they are encouraged to read it.
The only editing of the feedback is to remove identifiers such as name, email and phone number so discussion about it doesn’t become a conversation about a customer. That isn’t important. What they say about their experience is. Also, mildly controversially, I recommended that if feedback contained specific reference to a team member by name (good or bad) that shouldn’t be redacted.
Why is that? Because the purpose of the open feedback process is never to chastise a team member, but a chance to objectively look at what went wrong and how not to fall into that trap again.
We’re just at the start of this journey and I’m still putting the finishing touches on the programme sequencing, but I’ll report back later about how we are going.
If you’d like to discuss how to transform your business into a 5 star operation, please give me a call. I’ve done a lot of work to create a programme to achieve this and I’d be delighted to share some insights with you.
Phone +64 275 665 682
Email john.luxton@regenerationhq.co.nz
Contact www.regenerationhq.co.nz/contact