Archive for the General Category

Frogs, fake coins and drivers license photos.

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Is all this technology just making processes even more complicated that they were?

I don’t know about you but I sometimes find maintaining the on-line lifestyle that has developed around us quite a challenge. My email seems to consist of a constant stream of on-line statement alerts from credit cards and bank accounts, requests for me to register on-line and ‘go paperless’ and demands from airlines for me to ‘check in’. 

It would be interesting to analyze how much time we spend maintaining this type of stuff. And what did we do before all this on-line engagement? Drop into the bank to pay a bill. Stand in line at airports to check in with bulky paper travel documents that arrived in the mail weeks before. Write letters to credit card companies to tell them we had changed address.

frogOn a recent trip back to the UK I spent a day dealing with personal admin that can get even more complicated when your life exists in more than one country. One item in the mail was a letter from the DVLA (The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency – the body in the UK responsible for issuing your driving license) informing me that my UK photo driving license was about to expire. The options were to rescind it as I no longer needed to drive; do nothing in which case it would be cancelled and should I drive in the UK after expiration I could face a fine of £1,000; or renew the license by confirming some personal details and providing a photo of myself that was less than 30 days old. This option was accompanied by a further stream of requirements – in the photo I should keep my mouth closed, not smile, remove my glasses if I wore them, make sure my eyes were open, ensure no-one else was in the picture, etc, etc.

There were two more options. I could acquire the required photo and mail it to the DVLA with the signed application form and fee of £20. Alternatively, I could visit a main Post Office where they would take my picture for me and electronically transfer the details to the DVLA. With this option there was an additional £4.50 charge but my application would be guaranteed as correct by the Post Office and my new drivers license would be with me in less than 7 days. I thought I would take this option and headed off to a main Post Office near me that I identified via a quick search on the web site detailed on the application form.

 At the Post Office, I asked at the Customer Service desk and was directed to a booth with curtains around it. I felt a little uncomfortable about entering the booth but once inside I was faced with a high tech counter, a complex looking camera with a tracking system to adjust to my height and a pleasant Post Office clerk behind a glass screen who started to process my details. All was going to plan at this stage.

The time came to take the photo. The clerk tried to adjust the camera up via her control panel but it appeared to be stuck. ‘We’ve had a lot of kids in this week’ she smiled. ‘I think it’s broken!’ After a few more tries and the assistance of a colleague they reached the conclusion it was broken. I could now travel to another main Post Office (about half an hour drive away) or simply go back to the more conventional method – get a photo of myself and mail it in. I asked the clerk where the nearest photo booth was and she said she thought there was one in Tesco (the UK’s leading supermarket chain) just down the street. Slightly irritated, I set off to Tesco.

The Tesco store was an older, town center store. It was uncharacteristic of Tesco’s modern, 24 hour, out-of-town stores but I quickly found the photo booth. It required 4 x £1 coins, which was exactly what I had in my pocket. I sat in the booth, read the operating instructions and inserted the 4 £1 coins. The last coin was rejected several times and on closer inspection I realized it was a fake! I’d read in a newspaper on the plane that hundreds of thousands of fake £1 coins were circulating in the UK. They were made of lead and sprayed gold to resemble the real £1 coin. The problem was so rife and there were so many in circulations that most stores just accepted them as regular currency. The modern photo booth on the other hand was having none of it – its complex coin recognition technology was functioning perfectly!

I tried to eject the 3 £1 coins already accepted by the machine to no avail. It constantly requested me to insert another £1 coin that I did not have. In the end I got out of the booth and looked for the customer service desk aware that someone else could take advantage of my situation and enter the booth, add a £1 coin and get their photo done. A store assistant told me that there was no customer service desk in this older store and that I should speak to the operator on the far till. He was helpful and said someone would be with me shortly so I returned to the booth to guard against someone else jumping in. After 10 minutes or so, no one had arrived to help me so I returned to the operator. He looked apologetic and said he would be with me shortly.

I went back to the booth. Not wanting to be beaten by the booth or the fake coin, I looked again at the instructions and it appeared to say that I could have an option of just 1 photo instead of the customary set of 4 for just £1. Perfect! I only needed the one.

I started adjusting the seat so I was at the correct height indicated on the screen and pressed the green button.

‘Ready? Smile!’ a happy electronic voice announced. And with a flash it was all over

‘Smile’ I thought. I’m not allowed to do that according to the instructions.

 It was then that I realized to my horror that I had selected an option obviously developed for kids. The £1 option was for a picture of my head superimposed on a range of cool backgrounds. In this case my head had been superimposed on a cartoon picture of a frog sat on a lily pad! As the delightful portrait was printing out, the store clerk arrived to assist me. ‘I’m not sure that’s going to work on my drivers license’, I said showing him the picture. He laughed.

 Well, I’m not sure what the moral of this story is? I quite like our self-service, on-line world but I sometimes wonder whether all this technology makes the process even more complicated than it was before. All I can say is that my kids loved the picture of me as a frog. And the store clerk swapped my fake £1 coin for a real one and just dropped the fake one in his till to go back into circulation.

3 Steve

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Who’s to blame?

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

 

Nobody can have missed the Toyota recall story. It was all over the media.

I watched Toyota President Akio Toyoda, (great grandson of the founder), testify in front of three Congressional Committees. I couldn’t help feel for him. After all, he was dragged in front of a braying audience of American congressmen in a country that was alien to him. Many would question the motives of the congressmen which probably had little to do with whether a Toyota Prius was going to stop when you hit the brakes and more to do with their personal profiles. I’m also sure that under the very conservative, considerate and polite nature of Japanese culture he would not have expected the same treatment at home. No wonder he looked nervous!

Something I have always instilled in my colleagues is that if something goes wrong, don’t dwell on it. Analyze what happened and try and understand why, take two or three learning points from the situation, learn from them and move on. I know it’s not always as clean cut as that but I have found it a good rule to follow over the years.

It takes me back to something I learnt back in the 90’s when I was working for a major retail bank. I was seconded to the Total Quality team for 18 months. Back then, Total Quality, or Total Quality Management (TQM) as it was commonly referred to, was all the rage. It was the latest management fad that was going to propel companies into a new era of harmony with ones customers and staff because everything would work as it was meant to. There were many gurus on the subject as their always are and my bank followed the teachings of Phillip Crosby, an ex ITT executive who had made a small fortune advising and guiding organizations through the TQM maze. He wrote a book called ‘Quality is Free’ in 1980. You couldn’t argue with much that Mr. Crosby preached as it was common sense – he just packaged it in a way that was easy for most of us to digest.

That said, part of his teaching which I have always followed is that organizations should adopt a ‘no blame culture’. The theory went that when something goes wrong in an organization, the tendency is for management to look for an individual or group onto which they can pin the blame. As we all know, that rarely resolves the problem. The reality is that when you analyze the cause of any failing, you begin to see that it is outdated processes, poor education and antiquated working practices that usually cause the errors. The individual is just a cog in the corporate machine and will keep doing the same thing, regardless of whether it’s right for the organization or not, until the process is changed. Crosby also taught that the best positioned individuals in an organization capable of identifying how processes should be changed are not the highly skilled and highly paid executives but the guy who works the process everyday and usually takes the flack from customers when things go wrong. Give him the right education and tools and he will come up with a solution. How many times have you heard in a store, at the airport or in a hotel when something goes wrong – ‘I’m just doing my job. What they need to do is x but who am I to tell them?’

 So going back to Mr. Toyoda, sure Toyota is going to suffer some reputation and market share damage over the short to medium term but it’s a strong and respected business and I don’t doubt it will recover. As for those Congressmen in Washington, they might think they have the right man but they haven’t. In fact, there isn’t a right man. Something is wrong with the processes in Toyota and I have every confidence they will work with their employees to find a solution.

It won’t stop me smiling at the bumper sticker I saw recently. ‘If you can read this and are driving a Toyota, you’re too close. Try your brakes’.

Steve

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Appropriate ways to motivate your employees

Monday, January 25th, 2010

I was recently reading an interview with Jeffrey Katzenberg, (he was the CEO of Disney, ousted by family members I seem to recall and is the ‘K’ in the DreamWorks SKG film company – the ‘S’ is Steven Spielberg and ‘G’ is David Geffen if you were wondering!), where the interviewer asks him to comment on his legendry work ethic and what he expects of others who work for him. His reply: ‘If you don’t come in Saturday, don’t bother coming in Sunday’. That made me ask myself the question, ‘How does that relate to what we at Grass Roots promote in the performance improvement industry?’

Not very well, I think. Quite apart from the work-life balance concept, in our world we work with employers to develop programs that positively improve behavior and drive performance by motivating and recognizing their employees. There is still a school of thought out there that says, ‘they’re paid a salary to come to work so why should I do anything else?’, although I’m pleased to say we see less and less of that attitude. That said, with the popularity of programs such as The Apprentice that relies on the ‘You’re Fired!’ approach, we may not have come as far as I would have hoped.

I always think that when setting objectives for employees during their working lives, there are three properties we need to strive for. They are what I call The Three A’s – Aspiration, Achievability and Appropriateness.

With aspiration, we need to set goals and objectives that employees feel they want to achieve. I see many contact centers introduce programs that focus on productivity – how many calls you handle in an hour, what your wrap up time is, how much CRM data did you capture from the customer. There’s nothing wrong with those objectives as they will reflect the business drivers but let’s be honest, working in a contact center can be a pretty thankless existence. If that’s all you’re measured on, it’s no wonder the staff turnover rates in the contact center industry are so high. Why not focus on delighting customers, making customers feel they have been treated well or their questions answered fully. Then the customers thank our workers, they will feel good about themselves and proud of their roles. They will aspire to delight more and more and productivity will probably exceed the objectives we set earlier.

On achievability, I have to tell you the story about the founder of a mobile phone retailer client we worked for a few years ago. This guy was a self made billionaire and at heart he was a pure salesman. His turnover of staff in sales was catastrophic, exceeding 100%. Theoretically he was losing and replacing his entire salesforce every year – he employed over 6000 sales staff! He wanted us to tell him why so we took a look at the way he ran the business. Once a year he would hold a conference for all his sales staff – he would walk onto the stage in a cloud of puffing dry ice, flanked by two heavies. In each arm he held a glass brief case which was hand cuffed to his wrists and clearly containing dollar bills. He would hold the cases in the air and proudly announce, ‘There’s a million dollars in these cases. Do well and you could earn this next year’. The crowd would roar in appreciation.

I asked his HR guy some questions. How many of the 6000 salesforce earned a million dollars last year? One. How many earned half a million? None. How many earned a quarter of a million? One. And so we went on. The reality was that the vast majority of the 6000 took home less than $20,000 a year. What he was presenting to them was not far off promising they would win the lottery. This was just one of his unfortunate management styles. Needless to say, it was totally unachievable and sales personnel left his company in their droves.

Finally, appropriateness and I think this is where Mr. Katzenberg comes in. If you present your employees with something that is inappropriate, they will not be motivated. I’m sure he was being a bit tongue in cheek with his ‘Saturday, Sunday’ routine but these people do exist. Look out for them! As for the mobile phone billionaire, he sold the business and last I heard he was floating around the world on his yacht.

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Posted in General, Incentive | 8 Comments »

What shape is the economic recovery – at CES 2010 this week

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

This time last year Grass Roots attended the International Consumer Electronics Show 2009 in Las Vegas. As acknowledged leaders in developing and managing incentive programs for the channel, particularly in the tech and telecoms space, attending CES is a good opportunity for the Grass Roots team to meet up with clients and network with the industry for new opportunities.

In fact, from the CES newspaper which is published daily during the show, we identified that Grass Roots works with 29 of the Top 50 electronics brands at CES 2009. I’m on my way to 2010 CES 2010 now and it will be interesting to see how we do this year.

In 2009, CES contained the normal hype of new launches and industry announcements together with exhausting rounds of “after show” parties hosted by the big brands. There were a few black clouds in the normally clear Nevada skies because as we now know, we were at the depths of the worst recession most of us have seen in our living memories.

It was the most frightening time I’ve experienced in my career having travelled through at least two previous downturns – in the final quarter of 2009, clients literally cancelled programs at a moments notice, put them on indefinite hold or commenced major supplier reviews and supplier rationalisation processes. They were black days indeed and I must admit I did not shed a tear at the turn of the year. It was good riddance to 2009!

That said, what does 2010 hold for us all? The BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies with the exception of Russia seem to be recovering strongly if they went into recession at all. The US economy seems to be staggering into recovery but the huge levels of national debt are worrying pundits. The Eurozone seems to be recovering although Greece and Ireland face serious financial challenges and there are worrying noises about the state of public finances in the UK.

In our line of business I’ve always had the advantage of being able to talk to senior people in business that are at the coal face of industry. I’ve found that you can get a good view of how things are doing “from the horse’s mouth” if you ask the right questions.

In that polite banter we all undertake in business, I always try and ask the question: “How’s business?” People are always happy to talk about their own businesses and the answers are always insightful. Here are two contradicting examples which might indicate what we are in for in 2010:

In December I was travelling on a flight from the US to the UK and was sat next to a gentleman who was a senior manager at one of the world’s biggest container port operators. You couldn’t get a better indicator of global trade than container traffic movements so I posed the “How’s business?” question. His answer was startling.

His view was that at the depths of the recession in October and November 2009, container traffic volumes had “fallen off a cliff” declining some 30% to 40%. Since then, things had plateaued but now, in December 2009, volumes were falling dramatically again. “So we are in for the double dip recession then?” I responded. His response was even more alarming. His view was that we were on a “department store” shaped recession – you go down one floor on the elevator and walk around at bit at that level, travel down to the next floor and walk around a bit, then down again and so on to the ground floor! I relayed the gloomy story to my Board colleagues back in the UK.

A couple of weeks later I was at a conference in New York. I got chatting to a Senior VP at a global package and freight shipper we will all have almost certainly used at some point. Another great barometer of business activity, I thought and promptly asked her the “How’s business?” question. Her story paralleled the container story at first – volumes had fallen off a cliff in late 2009 and then plateaued. Now however, volumes were recovering strongly and investment plans that had been put on hold were coming back on stream.

Apart from the obvious conclusion about the world economy being an unpredictable beast, where does this story leave us? I’m not sure but I will keep asking the question of the people I meet at CES 2010.

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