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Service from Untrained Professionals

In a comment on a prior post, Crystal made some excellent points. Among them were:

Weeding out the wrong candidates is definitely a must because all the training in the world would not prompt an employee who is not customer service oriented to assist a potential customer. Unfortunately for a vast majority of the Caribbean this is not an option. Many businesses taking this route will be left with closed doors. It is difficult for them to attract employees much less the right employees. I have witnessed quite a few instances where customer complaints have resulted in a mere slap on the wrist or no consequence at all to the employee, all because business owners need these employees to keep their doors open. I believe that it would take an instance of outright theft for them to let an employee go.

There is some definite truth to this, as the difficulty of finding employees in Trinidad, and to a lesser extent, Barbados is well documented. Yet, the lack of service in Jamaica which has rampant unemployment, does not bode well for that theory. However, I would argue that the general service level in Jamaica is higher than it is in the other islands; this from personal experience, perhaps due to the greater difficulty in finding one in the first place.

Too often business owners in the Caribbean do not reflect the attitude that they want their employees to portray. Many treat their staff with disdain, mistrust and so they reap the benefits of their deeds.

I believe that this is the crux of the matter, and is reflected in the book “Why Workers Won’t Work” and other studies and reports. Incidentally, a summary of the book is available at our website.

Not to say that the employees are not a fault, many refuse to utilize the training given seeing the current job as a stepping stone and so they are not required to give their all.

Let us say that they are not taught how to give it their all, especially in a customer service relationship.

My wife suffered recently at the hands of a doctor who had no problem having her patients wait for hour without apology. She also “prescribed” J$4000 of Herbalife products when she came in with a stomach ache… none of which happened to be covered by insurance, but which she made a profit as a distributor in her multi-level marketing “business.”
Where does a doctor learn customer service skills? Or an accountant? Or a lawyer? Certainly not in school.
Yet, they are called upon to use their undeveloped skills each and every day with an unsuspecting public.
In our small economies, I imagine that 90% of high school graduates will have occasion to work in a customer service capacity at some point, without a single hour of customer service training whatsoever.
The problem is that we are all able to pick out bad service when we see it, but terribly poor at seeing and stopping ourselves when we are the ones delivering it. We just don’t have the right capacity.
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HRMATT Conference Slides and Audio

The outputs from the HRMATT conference from my speech on “The Trinidadian Executive in Jamaica” can be received by sending email to hrmatt2007@aweber.com.

Both the PowerPoint presentation and the audio from the speech can be accessed through the email.

Instructions:

1. Send email to hrmatt2007@aweber.com and wait a few minutes
2. Follow the instructions and click on the confirmation email
3. The email with the information should be received within a few minutes

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Email is Easy to Write (and Mis-Read)

Here’s an interesting article that all Caribbean professionals should read, because there is a lot to learn from professionals in other countries who have spent more time using and abusing email.

Here is an excerpt:

[…]e-mail generally increases the likelihood of conflict and miscommunication.

One reason for this is that we tend to misinterpret positive e-mail messages as more neutral, and neutral ones as more negative, than the sender intended. Even jokes are rated as less funny by recipients than by senders.

We fail to realize this largely because of egocentricity, according to a 2005 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Sitting alone in a cubicle or basement writing e-mail, the sender internally “hears” emotional overtones, though none of these cues will be sensed by the recipient.

Read carefully!

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Customer Relationship Value vs Customer Lifetime Value

An interesting article in this month’s Harvard Business Review describes the difference between Customer Referral Value (CRV) and Customer Lifetime Value.

CLV is more well known — it is the lifetime value of a customer to a particular company. The value is computed by taking a sum of their purchases from the company over time.
CRV is more tricky — it is defined as the value of the customer’s referrals over time. In other words, it is the degree to which other people do business with the company as a result of being referred by that individual.
What is interesting is that the two are not necessarily related.
Miss Mattie, who rarely frequents the store and hardly buys anything when she does, could turn out to have very high CRV if she happens to be the helper of the richest family in the district, and her sister also happens to be the helper of someone else in the same family.
In an earlier post, I made the point that traditional CRM is too shallow an instrument to measure the value of a customer in Caribbean economies. I argued that the person’s network was just as important, and to ignore the Miss Mattie’s of the district is to do oneself grievous harm.
This new measure is, I think, an important one in understanding retail behaviour in the region, marked as it is by vast disparities in income and education. The societies are small, and CRV is critical to understanding the importance of customers by beginning to understand the quality of their networks, and the likelihood of them giving a positive referral.
When the CRV is known, companies can make intelligent decisions about how to market and advertise to each customer. Such an analysis is sure to produce some surprises.
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Almost the Last Day to Vote for My Proposal

In a prior post on Sep 20th, I mentioned that I had entered my proposal to write a new, hopefully revolutionary, manifesto on the skill of time management.

What I have neglected to mention is that since my last update on Sep 23rd, the proposal has garnered 435 votes. So far, it’s the most popular proposal of the 11 being offered up this month.

I have no idea what the threshold is to be asked to take the next step and “write a manifesto” but… if you haven’t voted, please do so.

The final date is Friday Oct 19th.

The title is “On Time Management: Toss Away the Tips, Focus on the Fundamentals”

Click here to be taken to the proposal.

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Culture Change Gone Bad

While a culture change is very hard to do well, it is very easy to do badly.

In this article from CNN, entitled “No storybook ending after tycoon dolls up vilage,” a millionaire adopted a US town, and attempted to give it a makeover.

As could be predicted, she ran into resistance, as the towns-people gradually developed a hostile resistance to her ideas and interventions.

I think she misunderstood her challenge — it was not to change the physical environment, but instead to cause a shift in the culture of the people in the town.

This is a mistake that CEOs often make – believing that money can buy just about anything.
Sometimes it can buy hearts and minds, but when it does the kind of people who end up being bought are usually not the strongest characters, and they are not likely to stay bought for long.

This approach just does not work, as this tale amply demonstrates.

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Heedless Self-Interest

In an article from the New York Times, I found the following quote:

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said F.D.R. “We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.


In a prior post, I wrote about the importance of appealing to people’s self-interest as a way to change the culture of a company. With more information, I argued, people naturally do what’s best for them and others, once they can see the apparent interconnection of all that is.

The Course in Miracles says that the fact that we are all connected means that attack is impossible, as it rests on the idea that we are somehow separate.


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Updating The One Page Digest

The One Page Digest is almost a year old, in terms of issues.

It has been a useful addition to the Framework Info products, and a good way to share useful links quickly and efficiently with the over 288 subscribers it currently enjoys.

I am wondering whether or not it should be changed or upgraded in any way. If anyone has any useful ideas, please either share them here or send your feedback to me personally.

Most of the back issues can be viewed at http://urlcut.com/digesthome