Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Good afternoon everybody. I am Valerie from people matters and we are back with another exciting session of our webcast in partnership with Wright selection on the topic Creating a great place to work- Lessons from building a service excellence culture. Creating the right work meets environment is key to a successful business. Sustaining the success means constantly uplifting and enabling your employees to succeed. This webcast this afternoon will give us some answers to the questions such as what is the role of the HR department, what are the collective responsibilities of each person in the company, and how can HR as a function engage multiple stakeholders to build a culture that attracts and retains the greatest talent. To share an expert’s perspective we have today with us Ron Kaufman, the New York Times bestselling author of Uplifting Service, the proven path to delighting your customers, colleagues and everyone else you meet. He’s also the co-founder of Up Your sService. For more than three decades Ron Kaufman has helped companies build a culture of uplifting service that delivers outstanding business results year after year. Ron is one of the world’s most sought after educators and consultants and business thought leaders and also has been a motivational keynote speaker on the topic of achieving superior service. He has also been featured in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA today. We’re excited to have him share his views  in today’s webcast and we have saved some time for you to ask your questions to him at the end of the webcast. For those who are tuning in live you can simply post your questions at any time during the session in the comment section on your right side of the screen and we will try to respond to as many questions as time allows. Can get back in touch with Ron if the time does not permit. Now we have an exciting topic to discuss on this webcast today. So without any further delay let me call upon brawn and ask him to just tell us about yourself a bit. Welcome to the webcast. 

Ron: Great to be with you Valerie, great to be with you fans of people matters. I know many of you are in India but some are coming in from elsewhere around the World. I’m in Singapore today which is my home base and I’m just so delighted to have this chance to be able to be with you and work with you. I prepared a few slides and answers to each of the questions Valerie will be asking me today. So let me just start by saying yes I am a professional keynote speaker, I travel around the world. This is what I do, helping to uplift the spirit and practice of service all over the world. And yes I wrote the New York Times best-selling book called Uplifting Service. I also created the company that Valerie mentioned called Up your Service and I’ll show you the URL at the end of this webinar where you can find a lot of great free resources that are there but you can probably figure it out it’s upyourservice.com. Now something that you would not know about me unless I tell you is that I also have a hobby that I share with my wife and that is that we are extremely avid scuba divers. Can  you see the picture there Valerie?  I’m the one on the bottom. This  is an example of where we were last week and we do this regularly throughout the year. It’s really one of the great joys and pleasures we have being on the planet. Something else to notice is that I’ve been out here in Asia Pacific now for 29 years, and I am now a citizen of the country of Singapore. This is now home base for me. I’ve visited India more than 100 times. What you may not realise is  that there was actually a time in life if you go back in my history when I had hair. I didn’t look like this. I looked like that guy in the middle because I was captain of the Brown University Ultimate Frisbee team. And if you’ve ever heard of that sport or seen that sport played called Ultimate Frisbee I’m probably the only person you’re ever gonna know who’s actually in the Ultimate Frisbee Hall of Fame and the reason I am is because I’m the guy who took the rules to countries in Europe and then China and the Soviet Union. And so the 50th anniversary of the sport was just celebrated and we had a little Hall of Fame recognition ceremony and you know the community worldwide decided I belonged in the Hall of Fame. Happy to be with you today. Let’s  get on with the webinar Valerie. Over to you. 

Valerie: Thank you so much Ron for that colorful introduction. It’s great to know more about you and to see you appreciate nature through scuba diving. So  getting back to the topic let me just dive right in and ask you the first question. When we talk about service excellence culture I was wondering if you could actually define it for us, and  highlight why it is important in an organization’s context.

Ron: Yes, excellent. You  know you’ve used three words. They’re  service, excellence, culture and all three of them have to be taken quite seriously in order to answer your question. So  let me bring up some slides again and we’ll take a look. If we ask the fundamental question of service, and you actually put that question out to a hundred different people in business, you’re going to hear so many different answers. You’re  going to hear ‘make people happy’ ‘do what people want’ ‘give them what they need’ ‘treat other people the way you would like to be treated’ ‘the customer is always right’ ‘the customer is king’. I mean we need actually a better and more effective definition just for the word service. Before we can even get to the idea of a service excellence culture. So what is service? Well, I think we can agree that service means taking action. You have to do something in order for somebody to say that you served someone else. So service is taking action for what purpose? Well, it’s to create an outcome. It’s an outcome that someone else will want or need or benefit from or prefer or hope for or desire or pay for something that someone else will value. So the definition of service that I wrote is this. Service is taking action to create value for someone else and the moment we present that whether it’s two people in the boardroom the CEO level suite the supervisors the managers of the frontline, they go “yeah.. yeah that makes sense”. I mean there’s all this stuff I do with the process and procedures. But the purpose of that is to create value for someone else. Now that someone else could be external, like a customer or a client. But it could also very well be internal. It could be a colleague in the same department, it could be somebody in a different department or a different division or on another shift. But at least now we have a definition of service. 

So then what is service excellence? Well if service is taking action to create value for someone else service excellence is taking the next action that will create more value for the someone else that you serve. Service excellence is taking the next step that creates more value for somebody else and a service culture is an entire environment where people are hired and they’re communicated with and they’re compensated and they’re encouraged and they’re enabled and they’re reinforced and they’re educated to be able to provide high value. So what’s the relationship between these two things: service excellence and service culture? Well you could have an individual, who is a service superstar, a hero, who gives excellent service even if the culture of the company is not an excellent service culture. That’s possible, but it’s not sustainable. For that to be sustainable you have to actually build the culture. Sowhy bother doing it in the organization of the three or four hundred people that are now on the webinar? Well  you may have a bunch of different reasons and here are the ones that we see most ordinarily. Number one the competition is doing it. If you don’t step up and improve your service, that’s service excellence and build an environment that continually sustains and reinforces that the competition will get away from you. Number  two, your customers expect more. Your  customers expect you to do a better job tomorrow and a week later a month later in next year than you’re doing right now so you have to keep stepping up. Number  three, the people who work for you actually need to work in an environment where they’re fulfilled, where they’re satisfied, where they themselves are uplifted. Otherwise  they’re gonna leave you and go somewhere else. Number  four, you want to make more money. How are you going to differentiate when the competition has pretty much what you’ve got to? You can do it if the service experience is actually better. By  the way, that’s the Singapore Airlines story, because they fly the same aircraft Boeing and Airbus, and they find it as a fly in and out of the same airports. But  they can charge more. And  their airplanes are more full. Not only because they deliver excellence in service. But because everybody knows that will be consistent because they have an excellent service culture. and then finally you want your customers to be loyal. So the question you were asking me is what is a service that’s culture and why is it important in the context. And right there you can see not only what is a culture of service excellence, but also why it’s so important in the competitive world today Valerie. 

Valerie: That is very true Ron. I mean though in the organization’s context is really important to actually build that service excellence culture ,which brings me to the next question about how within an organization, there’s a growing emphasis on treating employees now as customers. What  can talent leaders or HR professionals learn from this research on customer service excellence and what are some of the pointers that they can take away? 

Ron: Okay. Let’s take a look at this together. I’m gonna pop back over to the slides again. This is where we left off. But now you’re actually asking me the question like what can HR professionals learn from research on customer service excellence and here’s one of the key things. I’ve selected a case study to be able to actually help you see what I’m talking about. One of the most important lessons that we’ve learned is that you cannot only improve customer service without also improving the quality of service that is experienced inside the company. And that means from department to department, from head office to branch, from one division to another, from human resources to all of the people who work in the organization, sometimes you even think and talk about them as your internal customers. We’ll come back to that later on.  But here’s an example of an organization where the external customers: IT organization Information Technologies has external customers like banks and airlines and hospitals and governments. Inside the company are the account managers, the business stakeholders. Well that’s clearly an external service relationship. And  we want to deliver excellence and service there. But now let’s go over to who’s supporting the business stakeholder. Oh well that’s everybody else inside the company that does these specialist areas, whether it’s in consumer, group enterprise group, digital etc and they are supported by domain experts. In all of these different technical areas where the company needs to have expertise within the group. Now they are also supported by external outsource providers so for example Amazon Web Services or additional capacity for call centers. So let’s look at this whole thing again. Where is service happening and where is service excellence important? Well certainly it’s going to be important between the external customer and the stakeholder but we also have internal service here. We have internal service here, we have internal to an external provider here, we have service going on between the different domains depending upon the complexity of the issue. And during resolution of an issue we may even need to have those domain experts working directly with the ship. Now let’s improve service. Let’s go for excellence. Where  do we need to focus? Here ? Of course, but it can’t just be over here. It’s going to have to be the entire organization. So one of the most important lessons that HR professionals can learn from research on customer service excellence, is the quality of service inside the organization amongst colleagues, between departments, between shifts, between divisions. That’s one of the most critical places if you’re an HR that you’re gonna have to focus your attention on. We’ll come back to later in terms of what sequence you should do that, like who comes first. Should you improve the internal service or should you focus on improving the external service? But right there I think I’ve put my finger on one of the most important lessons from customer service research, is that you’ve got to have a great team inside to deliver that on a consistent and improving basis.

Valarie: Very well put Ron. I mean just the way that you divided it into internal customer customer service and external customer and how to combine those, may I ask you that based on your interactions with the business community, what is the one thing that you see employers get wrong about a service culture?

Ron:  Just briefly I mean that goes back to this issue again of you what they get wrong as they say and so they say “let’s go train the people who work with the customer” “let’s go provide more customer service training to the frontline” and they forget or they ignore or they don’t realize how critically important the internal service is. If you don’t improve the quality of service that your customer-facing employees are receiving from HR, from IT, from finance, from manufacturing, from facilities, from everybody else inside the organization. If you don’t give those people better service but you ask them to give the customer better service that’s a recipe for high levels of frustration. Now that’s not always understood by people who are in leadership positions. And so Harvard Business Review found out about our approach. And they said you know what this is so revolutionary, we want to actually do an article about your approach. And I want to share with you a little bit about it. This is a copy of a white paper called engineering a service culture transformation and everybody who is on the webinar can get a free copy of this in PDF format just by going to https://ronkaufman.com/harvard-business-review-white-paper/. 

The  very first lesson inside here Rule#1 is what they call it. It is ‘don’t start with your customer facing employees instead involve everyone with a special focus on your internal service providers’. Lesson  number one, that’s the one we just touched on. But  there’s more. I’ll give you another example of something that is so important that employers often get wrong. it’s called Rule#2. Don’t start by training people on specific service skills, scripts and procedures. Instead educate them first to a better understanding of what service excellence really means. And that goes back to the beginning of our webinar when we were talking about service excellence is taking the next step to create more value for someone else. When they get that first then you can give them the scripts and the procedures and the tools as an enabling technology. But  if you start out by just saying “okay here’s the script, here’s the procedure and here are the standards”. And they don’t understand that it’s all about stepping up to create more value, then you miss the boat. That’s rule number two. Let  me get Rule#3. Don’t  pilot the change instead go big and go fast to build momentum for the new culture. If you’re serious about really building a strong culture of excellence in service then you can’t just pilot it over there in that small group or let’s give it a try over here in this department you’re gonna have to tackle this thing full-on. And  that means of course that Human Resources needs to get buy-in from all around the organization. I understand that we’ll talk about that in a moment. That’s  not always the easiest thing to do but that’s what you’re gonna have to take on if you want a cultural transformation. Some organizations are not after a transformation. What they want is just incremental improvement and that’s okay. Then  you don’t have to do this everybody do it all at once. But  if you’re in a situation where you realize my company needs to really make a complete transformation, then you gotta go big and go fast and get everybody involved. Rule#4, don’t focus on traditional KPI’s during a transformation. In  other words don’t hammer your people and say “show me more sales”or “get the number of customer complaints down” or instead, you want to focus on the leading indicator. And the leading indicator is how many new ideas are your people coming up with? How  many of those ideas are they working together and say that’s a good idea? Let’s try it, let’s put it into action? And  then how many of those ideas that you try are actually producing positive results? If you focus and you measure how many new ideas, are we getting enough new ideas, are we bringing our people together to generate enough new ideas?. Then you’ll have a large pool of ideas from which you can choose the best ones to try. Then  you can see which of those actually work. So  the lagging indicator is the traditional KPIs, sales customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score competitive position. But  those come later after everything that you’ve done. What  you need to do at HR is recognize the importance of creating the environment where people are coming up with the ideas and trying new things. That’s what it is you actually need to measure. 

Valarie: Very well put Ron. With these four pointers that you HR professionals need to keep in mind when you start building this culture in the organization you touched upon this next question a bit. But when you talk about getting everybody’s buy-in into it, getting all the stakeholders on board and driving this cultural change is quite a difficult exercise and as you said the talent leaders need to take this ownership upon themselves. So how would you suggest that these HR professionals address this challenge?

Ron: Before I go into the answer this I want to make a clear distinction. Achieving excellence in service can be done with a small team, it can be done in a specific situation, it can be done in response to certain complaints you may be getting or you know a critical area that has to be improved. But building a culture of service is a much larger undertaking. So you can go after and solve certain service problems you have and we have the technology for that that’s teaching people about service and giving them some tools. But if you want to create a sustainable culture of excellence and service and have that become your organization’s competitive advantage, so that you attract the best people, you develop the best people, you keep and you retain the best people, then you need to take on a larger project. Let  me show you a picture of the kind of thing that I mean. Way  back in history, if we go back to the Greek era, when this was built. If  you realize what was around this if you went five kilometers in any direction from this building, what you would find is chickens and goats and fishing boats and farms. You didn’t find anything like this. So  why in the world would they decide we need to build this magnificent structure? And  I mean that structure took a lot of time and a lot of people and a lot of resources and a lot of money. And by the way it didn’t look like that. It looked like THAT. It was inspirational, it was uplifting and profound. And  you know what when people went inside they were themselves challenged and uplifted to become more than they had ever been before. That’s  why the entire environment was created and that’s what HR needs to take responsibility for creating in the organization if you want to have that sustainable advantage of excellence and service culture. So  let’s use that same look and feel.

 

Well  the foundation is teaching people how to improve their service. That’s in specific situations, for specific customers,or specific internal service, and you can do that with key principles and tools. That will give you the foundation. But you also need a roof that’s going to protect everybody inside and we all know that when you have a roof on a house you don’t need many leaks to mess up the house on the inside. So the leadership team itself needs to understand their role. They need to play their function in supporting and giving direction and protection of the service culture. We’ll talk more about them in the middle in a minute. But then there’s also something here in the middle which you can see are like blocks. And I refer to these as service culture building blocks. So the answer to your question is you cannot just say “what’s the problem let’s fix it”. You have to actually say how do I build a culture that is embracing, encouraging, reinforcing, rewarding and reminding communicating, educating and uplifting all of our employees every day? And the answer to that is you have to take responsibility for building a larger phenomenon than just “Let’s go fix that service problem”

Valerie: So the presentation you talked about, kind of building the foundation and then building the roof as well so that there’s a whole family where we can actually instill this culture. And you touched upon this about creating a sustainable culture so launching these transformative initiatives is one step close to bringing about a major change in an organization. However, sustaining these changes is the key and it’s a more difficult task. What are your tips for sustaining this culture of service excellence from top to bottom, bottom to up, across the organization and over time? Duration matters as well. 

Ron: And I really like the word you use “the whole family”. Because  if you think about a family, most families have some kind of a culture. They’re either a very loving and warm supportive family or they’re a very competing family or it’s a family that argues a lot about it, whatever it may be. But there’s a culture that sustains over time and how does that happen? Well  let’s go back and use some slides again. Let’s go back to where we left off and take a look at some of these various components. 

We already talked about the foundation that’s to giving people the tools and the techniques and our company we have a train-the-trainer approach. So we can actually teach people how to apply service principles in small workshops to solve service problems and do it over and over again. And that’s the foundation of continuous service improvement but what about that roof? Let’s take a look at those leaders. If we go here to the leadership team, there are certain behaviors that need to be understood and practiced by people who are in a leadership position. 

Same as in a family. If mom and dad and Grandma and Grandpa are all in sync with each other about the kind of behaviors that the family should demonstrate, the younger ones are going to learn that from them. If they’re all doing crazy different things or they say one thing but they do something else then you know you have a problem in the family. 

So here are what we call the seven rules of uplifting service leadership. And today’s webinar is not just about service leadership. So we’re not going to go into all of these separately. Perhaps we can do that another time. But you can see here that there are certain behaviors, certain expectations, of people who are in a leadership position. That they should perform a certain way to give guidance, to give direction, to give role modeling to the organization itself. Now let’s go to those building blocks. Because you’re asking you know how we actually do this over time and make it sustainable and it’s difficult. Now you’ve got to actually put in place everything else that surrounds your people every day. So think about a family again. There’s birthday parties and what else happens? One brother or sister needs help and the other contributes and what else happens? You might help one of your siblings or one of your cousins or your nieces or nephews with their homework. And what else happens and what else happens and what else happens for example? We have a daughter who’s 23 and she has a boyfriend and her boyfriend actually comes from an Indian and Pakistani background and we recently spent time together with him. Well if you look at the third building block it’s not like we recruited him, she recruited him. But in getting to know him and getting to know his family, that’s all part of an orientation process. Now we’re not going to ever say that he’s a member of our staff, but he’s definitely going to become a member if they stay together of our family. And so the way we welcome him during the orientation stage which is now it makes a huge difference for setting the culture. And so does everything else that you see. Now once again we’re not doing a webinar on what these are called. Perhaps I can do another webinar on that sometime. But building a house like this does not happen overnight. This is not something that you snap your fingers. You need one more really critical element, and that’s called a service excellence implementation roadmap. In other words you’ve got to focus on where do we need to improve, build up our internal capability and teach people what they don’t know about principles of service because the school system is not teaching it? Then you can actually apply and measure things like how many new ideas, how many new actions, how many customer compliments, how many improvements and then BANG! You go to work on building that long-term sustainable service culture.  

Valerie:  That roadmap and kind of you know breaking down your long term goals and breaking it down into sizable chunks that you can now see your own company culture getting built up and sustaining in the long run. And I definitely like the real-life examples that you drew in, in order to explain this building of the house concept. Diving right into the next question. How can you get these senior leaders to play such an active role driving this initiative? As you mentioned you know orientation is a very important founding block in building this culture. Similarly  how do you think the senior leadership can pay a more hands-on role in these initiatives? 

Ron: Yeah it’s a great question because often you know when there’s a customer service or an external service problem people go to HR and say you know “get them the training that they need” go fix, it like it’s an HR issue or somebody struggles at an operational level to come up with a new policy or a new procedure or new piece of technology. But what you’re asking is we got to get the leadership team, that roof of the house to understand this, what it’s gonna take and get on board to support it. Now over the many years that we’ve been doing this I’ve been teaching this for three decades.

What we discovered about 15 years ago was what is most convincing for senior leaders, is when they can see that other organizations have succeeded in doing this. When they can see that other companies, whether it’s in their industry or in other industries, have figured out how do I implement a roadmap, how do I build an environment with building blocks, how do I get my leadership colleagues and I too role model certain behaviors, how do we build that foundation of people who understand and can apply service principles to actually continuously improve service quality? You show them that other companies do it. And then they start to Go, “What? If they can do it we can do it” or they start asking “Well, wait a minute. How  did they do it?” Because when you answer that question then they’re thinking in their own mind. Well ours may not be like that but we’re sort of like that or we can do it a different way. So what we’ve learned to do now with senior leadership teams and we do this in what’s called a One-day Service Leadership Workshop. We say to an organization, get your leaders in the room and let us come and show them how other companies have done this. In fact next week I’m doing this in Mumbai for a very large bank and then I’ll be the very next day teaching more in a more public environment.

Let me show you what I’m talking about here. I’m sure everyone on this call is familiar with a company called NIIT. I mean it’s an Indian legend. But here’s an example of where they took one of our principles, which we call the six levels of service from criminal to basic to expected to desire to surprising to unbelievable and notice what they’ve done. They’ve translated it into language that makes sense in their particular industry, for their team of several thousand people. When the bank looks at this they may not use the same language but they realize that we could come up with our own language or the hospital or the retail organization or the hotel or whomever.  I see an example, we could do it our way. Here’s another one. This is a telecommunications company in the Philippines that has taken a lot of our principles. And then they’ve made them colorful and interactive and they’ve made it enjoyable and now your culture may not be so fun and friendly. You may say Oh, if I did that with my people they wouldn’t take us seriously because we manufacture truck engines. “Okay, I got it. But you see that this culture did it their way. Now you could do it your way. You see, for example, here’s an automotive company in Australia. They took that same principle that I shared with you and they actually put it on the stairs. So they use the physical environment as a way of ongoingly communicating and reinforcing for their team members so that it becomes a common service language. Oh that’s interesting.

Here’s another one. This is an Australian insurance company that created a six-week festival, where each week was focused on one of those six levels of service. And remember that’s just one of the service principles called the six levels of service. But look at this. You’ve got a company where one of our clients said we’re gonna devote six entire weeks to focusing on those six words and what they mean, oh my gosh, by the end of those six weeks every single person in the organization absolutely remembered and knew what those were about.  

Let’s take a look at something like Singapore Airlines where their vision is service even other airline’s talk about. Oh my God the emotional impact on the staff is they feel proud, they want to go show the world who we are, they want to demonstrate that this little country can make a great big impact in a global industry. How’d they do that? With one two three four five six words. Okay leadership team, what are your six words or four or seven? And they go, “Well, we have a mission statement that nobody remembers or we have a corporate vision on the wall that’s not very inspiring”. Seeing  this kind of example can be uplifting and inspiring for them. 

Here’s a couple more. I’m sure many people will recognize this gentleman by his name Rajendra Pawar. He was the founder of NIIT, he’s on the left hand side. On the right hand side is the CEO of NIIT technologies, and this is when we actually invented their engaging service vision which is simply four ideas. New ideas, More value. Rajendra Pawar is also the founder of NASSCOM which I’m sure is an Indian legend. And you can just see that it’s that kind of leadership involvement. So then you can ask the leadership team on your company, Hey, are we that involved? Are we that committed? I’ll just show you a couple more examples. This is a company in the United States whose vision is our world is serving yours. Oh my god! Our whole world, the purpose of our being, our world is about serving your world. Guess what industry they’re in Valerie. I’ll tell you. They are the world’s largest manufacturer of cheese. If a cheese manufacturer can have a vision like this, don’t give me an excuse why your company doesn’t have a great one. A  few more to wrap this up. Here’s a hospitality firm where they say We make each moment matter. Oh isn’t that where you want to go on vacation?  Here’s that telecommunications company again, that says we got to connect it. Delighted customers Satisfied shareholders Engaged employees. We’re going to call this our circle of happiness so that we can communicate it to and teach it to everybody in our organization. One more. This is an operating theatre hospital sterilization equipment company. Get that. And they’re dead. You need to provide one-of-a-kind service. Why, because a small clinic may need something completely different than an emergency room who may need something completely different than a large operating theater or who may need something completely different. And there you go. Those are just some examples of other companies when you show your leadership team those other company examples and lots and lots of them and you show them how those demonstrate that the architecture of building the house is really happening around the world. Then a leadership team says “Hey you know what, we can do that too. Let’s  get to work, who’s gonna be involved, what’s our roadmap, what goes first, what goes second what’s my job”

Valerie: When you turn over the question – Oh they did that and kind of get past that and think about the steps that your competitors or maybe your peers have taken or as HR professionals maybe other departments, you can learn from others, other teams how they have developed their team culture, and then translated it back into your own our role as a talent leader.  You did share some examples of companies that have done this right. What are some of the most compelling other examples or case studies that you would like to share before we go on to our audience questions? 

Ron: Yes, yes and you know the question makes me smile because you can only imagine. After  30 years of doing this with 2,000 workshop leaders that we have certified in companies around the world who in turn have taught these materials and these principles and tools to hundreds of thousands of people I’m on a hundred airplane flights every year. So the number of different companies, different industries, different situations, different groups, different leaders. I mean when you say, have you got some examples, if you go to our website upyourservice.com and you put a slash and then the word blog BLOG, Oh my gosh! We have hundreds of articles describing things that we’ve done in different situations. 

But you can also find at our website something pretty special and that is that we’ve got a recorded webinar called global best practices in building service culture which is available for anybody to be able to go in and see. Just go to www.upyourservice.com and search around you’re definitely going to find it. And that entire hour is just example after example after example not very very short like I just you a moment ago. But we’ll say for example here’s the company, here’s the situation they were facing, this is the result they wanted to achieve, let us show you how they did it. Okay now let’s show you another one and another one and another one. There’s also another webinar that’s in the same location called How to lead a customer service culture transformation. And this would be very helpful for anyone who’s in an HR position because you don’t have to be the CEO to lead the transformation. You can lead it just within your own team, you could lead it within your own department, you could lead it in a certain situation, and certainly as HR, you can lead it from a creating better employee experience standpoint. And then one more you’ll find something there called the six disruptors of customer experience. And that’s an important one, because of what’s going on in the world in terms of technology, in terms of omni-channel service, in terms of greater digital expectations, in terms of globalization, in terms of different generations having different expectations, and the labor force having very different expectations. We kind of put all of these in context and show how to tackle that. The website again for that for anybody who’s interested is simply www.upyourservice.com.  Back over to you Valerie.

Valerie: You shared so many examples already and you mentioned these all other webinars and tools that talent leaders can take up on their own time. So now we have some time to address some of the audience questions and ask a couple to you Ron. Bansari is asking about the metrics that you can now use to measure the success of the service culture

Ron: Oh okay, very good. Thank you Bansari. I touched on this but I’m gonna give it a little more explanation and you can find in a very dedicated presentation about this just by going to google and type in Ron Kaufman -Show me the money. Because that’s kind of what he’s asking right. Let’s be honest. If we’re talking business like hey “Show me the ROI”, that’s probably what the financial people are gonna ask or you know what  I’m gonna see the results. You got to answer that- Ron Kaufman Show me the money. Let me explain. 

There are certain outcomes that business leaders want and need. Increase in top-line revenue, increase in bottom-line profit, increase in shareholder value, increase in market share, increase in share of market, in turn share of wallet. You know you want to increase, okay. That’s the ultimate objective for business. But it happens you only know if you’ve made it after all the service that you provided. So that’s why we call it a lagging indicator. What would come before that? How would you know that you’re gonna get the money you’re gonna get the ultimate objectives? Well,  let’s look at your scores. If  your satisfaction score is going up, if your loyalty index is going up, if your employee engagement score and satisfaction is going up, if your Net Promoter Score is going up, if your wallet allocation score is going up if all these indicators are going up these survey and score results you’re gonna get the money. But wait a minute. You  don’t do those surveys every day do you? And  you don’t look at the reports that generate every day. So  what would be a leading indicator that would let you know you’re going to get the survey results which is a leading indicator that would let you know you’re going to get the money? Well  that would be positive compliments and positive feedback from your customers and from colleagues to each other. So  what does that mean? Thumbs up, pat on the back, attaboy, positive social media, lots of good reviews, good comments coming from the people that your organization serves. Because  if you’re getting enough compliments coming in, you’re gonna get the higher scores when you run the survey and you’re gonna get the money. So  now we’ve got the money, the survey, the compliments. Let’s  go one more step. How  do you get a compliment? What  does it take for a customer or a colleague one to another to say “That  was great, I really appreciate that”? Well,  you have to do something that’s not just expected. If all your people do is follow the operating procedure, do what’s in the manual, do what they’ve always done that’s not going to generate a compliment, you  need somebody who can look at a situation think about it another way have an AHA insight, come up with an idea, and then take action on the idea. And  then if it’s a good idea and it’s a good action it will lead to a compliment. So  then what’s the driver of this whole thing? It’s  not the money at the end that’s the end result. The  driver is as I said before, “Are you creating a culture where people are generating enough good new ideas? Are  they looking at things from a fresh perspective, working with each other, talking with each other, brainstorming with each other, coming up with a list of ideas? Now, not every idea is a good idea Valerie, we know that. So  you’ve got to generate enough ideas, so that the team can look at them and go “okay let’s look okay these 50”, “this 50% they suck let’s get rid of those” “what about this” “other better or that one” it’s a good idea but it would be hard to implement”. Then you boil it down now you got maybe three ideas that are worth trying. Put  them into action. Did  they work? How will you know? Did  you get a compliment? Are  you getting enough comments? How  would you know?  So  back all the way to the question of “What do I measure?” You should be tracking the number of new ideas generated by every single department in the organization and do that on a weekly or monthly basis. And  you know what, you don’t track it at all right now do you? You  have no goal, you have no target, you have no metric, you have no measure, and yet when that starts growing on a month-to-month basis then the culture, the dedication to continuous improvement of service experience, service excellence, service quality the culture is getting stronger. How  do you know? You’re  getting more new ideas. 

Valerie: So it all boils down to generating new ideas and that’s where all the measurement and the metrics start. I think it was a very holistic answer to Bansari’s question. I think I do have time for the rest of the questions. So  the next one is how to drive the service excellence culture internally within the organization. I think you touched a little bit upon that when we talked about external and internal. 

Ron: Fabulous question. Oh well you’re contributing wonderfully, Thank you. Okay, let’s go back to something that I mentioned earlier about internal customer.  I hate that phrase, I hate it, and here’s why. The moment one department thinks of themselves as the internal customer of another department, it can lead them to take sort of an entitled position like I’m the customer. It’s your job to serve me. But inside of every organization, the truth is that there are things that both sides could do that would result in a better service experience. I will give you an example. One of the classic areas of internal complaint is between sales and finance. Sales is always complaining that finance doesn’t pay them whatever on time, or finance makes it hard, so finance doesn’t pay my petty cash or finance doesn’t do my bonus or finance doesn’t do my overtime or find out whatever it may be.  But finance is always complaining about sales because they submit the paperwork and it’s incomplete or they didn’t put all the signatures that were needed or they didn’t buy the original documentation. So then you got these two parties kind of pointing the finger at each other. And  I got to ask you, Are these customer service providers or these partners? Because if they would say to each other look, we’re inside the company we’re service partners. Therefore sales would actually have to ask this out of the question, What could we do differently that would create more value for our colleagues in finance? What new procedure, what steps, what hygiene check, what actions can we take that would make it easier for our friends in finance? And boy, the friends in finance could give you some ideas or some suggestions, but you guys got to come up with that.  When you do that or create more value for them. Oh, guess what, that’s gonna make it so much easier for them to create more value for you. Now most of the people on this call are from human resources positions so you must understand what I’m saying. There’s so many things that people can’t complain about the HR department. But you know so well that you need them not to think about themselves as I’m the customer of HR you have to serve me. We’re partners. We’re partner at each other and the easier you make it for us to serve you by taking actions that create value for HR, then we can put our attention, not on chasing you, not on complaining about you, not on fixing things that you should have fixed for yourself, not for informing you a third time about something that you could have read about or paid attention the first time we brought it to you. But we can instead then focus on more value-added things like helping you think about your career, working with you and your boss so that you actually get more challenging assignments, hoping to think about where you could be assigned elsewhere within the company to get more cross-functional experience. Those things I just mentioned would create a lot of value for the employees. But if the employees are not behaving as good partners then all the HR time’s going to be sucked up because they think of themselves as internal customers. 

Valerie: Yeah I think that answered Bansari’s question completely. I’m going to take the time to get to two more questions. Mindy, in their organization, has tried a few initiatives to motivate their staff members. However, Mindy says that nothing has changed. The environment is toxic and how would, as an HR leader Mindy is tackling that issue trying to get the stakeholders on board. So what are your suggestions to them? 

Ron: Yeah I’m gonna pop up one of our slides again. Mindy thank you for the question and I just want to point out something here. You  can see the slide? When you did something to quote “motivate” then probably came up with something in this building block right here called service recognition and rewards. You  came up with some kind of a pat on the back, maybe it was a bonus, maybe it was a little contest, that we have a winner, blah blah blah and maybe you even use this building block over here where you put their picture in the newsletter or you you know you put them up on the bulletin board or the intranet as the employee of the month something like that, but  many. You  don’t get a house from two bricks right? You actually have got to take responsibility for the whole environment. And  so if the environment is toxic and I just want to acknowledge you for being candid about that if that’s the way things are inside right now and we got to step back and look at what is so and recognize that some practices inside the company right now are actually counterproductive from the standpoint of building a sustainable culture of continuous improvement of service and excellence, that  we got to go look at and use this model, this house as kind of a diagnostic tool. How do we do this? How do we do that ? How are we doing that ? How are we doing this? And  what you’ll recognize is there are some areas where you could make a small change that could make a significant improvement. There  are some areas that may need a big change but you’re not going to tackle right away because it’s going to take too much time. But  you could at least say to the employees “Look guys we realize we have an issue here.  We’re  going to commit ourselves to 12 months to improve this culture. There  are some things we see that we can fix right away we’re going to get on it. That  would be your quick wins, that’s the low-hanging fruit. And then there are other things we realize are very important and we’re going to commit ourselves to work on those in Q2 or Q3 or Q4. 

And then you get started because even if you only do things that are quick wins and they see that well you did something you did make that change that you promised to do and they exceed that. That’s  part of the larger plan, it’s part of the bigger picture of actually committing to change the culture. Then  they can get on board and believe you. Then you can ask them to contribute in some way. then you can actually get everybody on board together in building a house like that that does require everybody’s participation not just a chart.

Valerie: That actually kind of makes complete sense when you let the people know what your long-term goal is now these initiatives.  So I hope that helps you many with that answer which takes us to the final question from Sanyo was asking related to his organization. It says we are in the process of building a culture across our newly formed organization. So what is the first thing that we should focus on as HR reps in a new organization? 

Ron: Got it. Well it’s a different question but it can be helpfuIIy answered if you will, by again going back to those building blocks that I showed you. The first building block is called a common service language. So  again just to reference something else that was already presented in the webinar, one of our principles is what we call the six levels of sir. Criminal Basic Expected Desired Surprising and Unbelievable. And  it looks like stairs, but the idea is not just that it is stairs and you step up you have to also accept that the stairs are always going down like an escalator. Because  what was unbelievable yesterday today may just be a nice surprise, tomorrow it’s what I desire, a week later it’s expected, two weeks after that that’s just basic, and then one day if you don’t do it you’re a criminal. So the idea of  continuously stepping up through these six levels, applies to sales, it applies to marketing, it applies to manufacturing, or design of new products, it applies to customer service, it applies internally to HR and to finance ends up. You get my point. Otherwise  you’re going to market with their language, you’re gonna have sales with their language, you’re gonna have HR with their language ,you’re going to production with their language and they don’t have a common service language. That comes first. Our  principles provide a common language of service that you and HR can help build throughout the organization by showing them that this language applies to everybody. And  then the second building block is also linguistic. Because  human beings are the animals who create a reality with language. We’re  the only species that can invent the future, make promises, make requests, make offers, make declarations that invent the future. It  all happens in language. So  get a great what we refer to as an engaging service vision. Something  that inspires your people that they’re proud of, they want to be part of that. And  get those two pieces in place right and then you can work on building everything else to make it happen. 

Valerie: That is I think an excellent way to close out our Q&A session going back to starting off with the right language that translates directly to the employees in your organization. I think that’s a really great takeaway Ron. So with that I would like to wrap up this Webcast and I would like to thank our partner for today, Right Selection and of course Ron. Thank you for the insightful and engaging pointers that you brought to the discussion and your presentation style. It was wonderful having you on people matters webinar.  Meanwhile  I would urge all of our audience members to share your feedback in the survey link provided in the chat session because your input definitely matters to us and we will always be back with a new webcast. We have many more exciting sessions in store for you so stay tuned. With that I am Valerie with people matters concluding today’s webcast thank you and have a great day. 

Ron: Valerie, you did a great job, thank you.