Results experienced by our clients following the implementation of the Gober Method include:

• Staff turnover down from 30% to 12.8%

• 1st time resolution of customer complaints up from 87% to 90%

• Staff satisfaction up from 46% to 79%

• Staff sickness absence down by 25%

• Customer complaints down by 20%

• Recognition in The Sunday Times’ ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’, including top ranking among
‘The 100 Best Small Companies to Work For’

• Rankings in the Finanical Times Top 50 Best Workplaces

• Housing Association, 3 Star Audit Commission awards

This Briefing will be delivered by Mary Gober’s Lead Consultant, Julie Shacallis, at the UNSW CBD Campus from 9.30am – 12.30pm on 12 October 2010.

We have found that Executives appreciate experiencing and evaluating our approach firsthand to gain a rapid and substantial understanding of our work. In this session you will be able to quickly determine if what we offer would hit the mark and fit within your organisation to help you improve specific business results and achieve certain goals and aspirations.

Please click here for more information and to request your complimentary invitation.

We hope to welcome you to the Executive Briefing in October.

People ask me all the time how to maximise the value of a large scale training implementation to deliver a culture enhancement or change. Many organisations are looking to maximise employee engagement, how to optimise relationships across any business both internally and externally and how to ensure that the discretionary efforts of your people are focused to differentiate performance.  There are many excellent training approaches to help organisations develop their people to meet these needs.  The actions taken by the organisation to support and embed any training delivered truly do differentiate a highly-impactful and sustainable change from a short-lived “initiative” which is not integrated into the very DNA of the organisation.

So if you are considering embarking on a major training initiative then it is essential that you consider not only the training initiative itself, but also the effort and focus required post training to maximise the benefits.  All managers know that this is essential, however, sometimes struggle with how to do this. Let me give you some ideas.

Let us assume that you have chosen well. That the training programme delivered is well received and meets organisational expectations. Embedding and sustainment activities now take over – many you can deliver yourself – for some you may wish to work with your training provider. From the many great embedding and sustainment activities that can be undertaken, I have chosen my top 8 activities which will help you get the very best out of the training in the long term:

• Leaders and all managers must use the new skills consistently – they must be role models. Supporting managers either through coaching or more detailed training is a foundation to them being able to develop their own people through feedback and coaching.
• A simple dashboard measuring the impact of the training should be put in place. This should be publicised making links to successes achieved and the use of new skills.
• The new skills should be explicitly linked to the achievement of the company vision and values as well as performance metrics – this can be publicised in company newsletters, in briefings and on internal intranet pages.
• Motivational feedback must be consistently provided when people demonstrate the new skills and when they missed an opportunity to do so.
• Coaching by managers for their staff and peer-to-peer coaching is ideal and an effective and practical coaching programme will accelerate the learning and adoption of new skills.
• Locally within teams, managers must make the benefits of using the new skills or behaviours explicit – wherever they can, they should articulate the benefits of the changes in terms understood by their teams – so that there is a link between successes achieved and the change in culture or use of new skills.
• Regular individual and team reviews of the successful use of new skills should take place – especially in 1-2-1 meetings or team meetings – injecting fun and engaging everyone in how to take ownership for the success of the investment comes in here.
• Demonstration of the skills and behaviours should be recognised and rewarded – they should be clearly represented in competency frameworks, and in appropriate KPIs, so that they are part of standard performance management.

In my experience, if these 8 activities take place consistently, following any major training activity across an organisation, this will differentiate the impact and return from the training, maximising its effectiveness and giving you the enhanced business results you are looking for!

Julie Shacallis, Lead Consultant

There are a few places left on MGI’s dynamic and powerful 2-Day Public Seminar on 2-3 November 2010 in Sydney.

Delivered by Mary Gober’s lead consultant Julie Shacallis, this 2-Day Seminar will give you the heightened motivation, tools and techniques required to deliver consistently superior service.  If you are looking to evaluate the Gober Method to see whether there is a fit with your organisation, this Seminar will enable you to experience the full content and therefore, is the ideal platform to evaluate.

Delegates are attending in Sydney from a wide variety of industries, including financial services, hospitality, retail, banking.  

If you are interested in attending personally or would like members of your team to attend, please click here to find out more.

Mary Gober International ran one of the most highly attended Executive Briefings at Heathrow on 26 May.  Senior Executives from a wide variety of public and private sector organisations attended to hear Mary Gober deliver a 3 hour briefing on The Gober Method for the Psychology & Language of Service.

The Executives in the audience listened to Mary as she demonstrated how her Methodology delivers improvements in customer satisfaction, employee engagement, operational efficiency, regulatory performance and financial results.

Mary Gober will be personally delivering her next Executive Briefing on 28 September 2010 at Heathrow – please click here for your personal invitation.

The percentage of employees stating that they are proud to work for Virgin Holidays following their Gober Method training implementation increased to 95%.  Click here to find out how.

Staff sickness absence decreased by 25% and staff attrition rates fell to 7%, significantly below the national average, after Gober Method training was implemented at West Mercia Police.  Click here to find out how.

The Scenario

This real life story was relayed to me last week ….

A Customer Service Director was passed an angry customer letter of complaint from his CEO to handle – the letter was addressed to the CEO himself.

In the letter, the customer recounted her infuriating experience with their contact center – in a nutshell, the customer explained she had called in with a complaint, and at the very onset of the call asked to speak directly to a manager, as she believed a manager needed to be involved to solve the problem.

The frontline advisor insisted on helping the customer himself – and after a lengthy debate, he finally put the customer on hold, approached one of the managers on duty – the manager refused to take the call and talk to the customer.

The advisor went back to the customer and attempted to ‘explain’ the situation – this infuriated the customer even further.  She then asked to speak to a higher level manager.   After attempting to persuade the customer to let him help her, a second time, he relented and approached a different manager.

The second manager also refused to take the call leaving the advisor no alternative but to go back to the customer with that news.  Hence, the reason for the angry letter.

Comment
1.  No wonder the customer wrote the letter … what a valuable peek inside the organisation the customer gave the CEO … what an opportunity for leadership and leadership development!

2.  What kind of predicament did the situation pose for the advisor?

3.  With all the focus on employee engagement these days – what must this employee be feeling and thinking?

4.  Think about how much time this whole situation consumed!

5.  Not one, but two managers refused to talk to the customer.  What does that tell you, even without knowing all the facts?

6.  This story raises serious concerns in my mind about the ‘customer’ ethos and service capability within the organisation.  Were the two managers indifferent to the situation or have they never been developed and trained to be masters in talking with customers – listening and taking action to handle upset and complaining people?  Did these managers think they had the authority to resolve the problem?  Is this a matter of management authority?  capability?  confidence?

7.  I really hope whatever caused this manager-behaviour is being addressed constructively and not punitively.  This situation has the potential to be a great turning point for this organisation if handled properly..

Some Questions for You
This scenario raises some questions you may want – or need – to discuss in your organisation:

- what role does your CEO play in responding to escalating complaints?  Is it good enough?  Does it send the right messages to customers and staff?

- are your frontline people expected to dissuade customers from talking to managers – if so – how are they trained to do that – have you heard them?

- how is your frontline trained to involve a manager when asked to do so by a customer?

- do all of your frontline people really feel supported by their managers in difficult customer situations?

- does every manager in your organisation ‘pin their colours to the mast’ and stand by their team – even in the most difficult circumstances?

- what additional help do your managers need to handle escalated complaints and unhappy customers?

My Final Comment
To me … it all boils down to what I know is essential – an ownership and responsibility mind-set must permeate an entire organisation – top to bottom!

Mary’s column is published in Customer Strategy magazine.  To read the rest of the magazine, please click here.

How frustrated are you by your phone calls not being returned?

What is your philosophy and approach to returning business phone calls?  What percentage of them do you actually return? Do you have a policy of always returning your calls personally? Do you filter some calls or messages and make a conscious decision not to return some of them? Are you so busy that you really are just not able to do your job and return all the calls you get in a timely manner? What does it say about you and your company if you do not return calls?

How about the people on your team?  What is their behaviour and reputation for returning phone calls?

I pose these questions because I have finally decided I must write about this issue. It is such a topic of conversation in my business and also in my customers’ businesses.  It seems to have become worse in the last year during the downturn. When I started to look into this further, I realised it is a hot topic. You just have to search on the internet or talk to colleagues, listen to your sales team or service team, to know that the practice of not returning calls is common and upsetting to many of us. It is also having a detrimental effect on business.

From my research, there seems to be a growing opinion, especially relating to sales, that it is not an issue to not return a call – that it is incumbent on the caller to call back and to catch the potential customer at a time convenient to them.  So my question is, does this matter?

My view would be, yes it does – for a number of reasons:

Courtesy and good manners – there are many ways to acknowledge a call – if you truly are too busy, then keep a log and quickly email to acknowledge the call, or if you are in a position to ask a colleague or PA to return the call as a courtesy, then do.

Efficiency – if you have no interest in the caller’s services or are unable to assist them, it is much better to call back and say that, so they don’t call you again. It is highly inefficient for all businesses to continually have to chase people by phone, and for the business receiving the calls to have to listen to the calls over and over again.

Brand – your business brand will be negatively affected if you or your employees habitually do not return phone calls. Outside your business, it will affect your reputation. Inside your business, as a leader, you wish to set high standards and not returning calls will damage your reputation with your people.

So, if you are lamenting the fact that people do not return your calls, how about you take a moment to reflect on your own track record?  Put in place processes to enable you to quickly and courteously return calls or email people to update them. Then at least they are not left hanging without an answer and can get on with their jobs, whatever the information you give them.

I was amused by one article I read on this topic published in BrooWaha, where the writer (Ed Attanasio) said, “I wish I could have done a more thorough study of this subject, but most of the people I called to interview never got back to me. (Everyone interviewed for this piece asked to remain anonymous. They don’t want anyone calling them!).”

Food for thought!

Virgin Holidays Train Staff to Deliver Exceptional Experiences

Virgin Holidays has seen an increased satisfaction among customers, key partners and other important trade and consumer-facing clients since a company-wide bespoke values 2-day course.  Refreshing the company values, all 3 based on ensuring the customer is at the heart of every area of the business, has seen tangible results in customer satisfaction, internal and external relationships.

Amanda Wills, Managing Director of Virgin Holidays, says: “I have always believed passionately in the basic truth that staff in a customer-facing business who live and breathe a common purpose can drive sustained success whatever the commercial backdrop.  As the travel industry enters its toughest trading conditions yet, we have been consistent in increasing investment in staff training and engagement.  There was never consideration of scaling back or compromising in our focus on our principle success drive – our people.  Consequently, we are in rude health against market benchmarks, and share a common purpose and belief in our values.”

Virgin Holidays offers holidays to the Caribbean, USA, Far and Middle East and the Indian Ocean.  Its self-declared vision is to provide “the best holidays in the whole wide world.”  Managers felt that while there were pockets of brilliant service, there was also an opportunity to build more consistency and focus, and cement ownership of the customer journey among all staff.

Through training, the company wanted to build further on a good CSQ rating among customers, and protect its healthy level of repeat customers.  Mary Gober International designed the “Living Our Values” 2-day course to meet the company’s needs, developing the optimum mindset for giving enthusiastic and genuine customer service, while also improving communication skills that trainees could use to find positive solutions.  Above all, the training aimed to remind delegates what exceptional service looks and feels like, and how to deliver that consistently.  It made the link between the company’s vision and values and how staff work with each other and with customers.

Over the course of six weeks, trainers working in groups of three or more held interactive round table seminars for 50 to 100 people at a time.  A total of 580 people took part.  Success was measured through customer surveys, call monitoring, statistical information gathering and staff survey results.  Following the training, customer satisfaction has reached record levels.  Furthermore, 97% of staff say they understand the Company’s values.

Terri Bailey, General Manager of People and Performance at Virgin Holidays, explains: “The seminars have resulted in a real shift in behaviour, particularly in the psychology of how we approach customer service.  Our staff now really understands the importance of responding positively to customers, every time, explaining what we can do for someone, whether an internal or external customer.  This provided a boost to our ongoing investment as a company in innovative skills and culture training to always ensure the customer journey, in whatever format, is the priority.”

Travel company Virgin Holidays employs 701 people and has made the Skills Pledge.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown is amongst those to congratulate The Riverside Group, with a personal letter from his office.

The Government wants public services for all that are efficient, effective, excellent, equitable and empowering – with the citizen always and everywhere at the heart of public service provision.  With this in mind Customer Service Excellence was developed to offer public services a practical tool for driving customer-focused change within their organisation.

The foundation of this tool is the Customer Service Excellence standard which tests in great depth those areas that research has indicated are a priority for customers, with particular focus on delivery, timeliness, information, professionalism and staff attitude.  There is also emphasis placed on developing customer insight, understanding the user’s experience and robust measurement of service satisfaction.

The Customer Service Excellence standard aims to make a tangible difference to public service users by encouraging provider organisations to focus on their individual needs and preferences.