Customer Satisfaction Measurement - The Leadership Factor

What makes the difference?

Regular readers (both of you) will know that I'm a big fan of the climber Dave MacLeod. I want to share with you a passage from his superb new book about training for climbers:

"The truth about famous climbers

They aren't really much better than you are, yet their grades, results, level, rewards somehow end up being absolutely miles higher than you have managed.

...It comes down to this:

4% effort does not get you 4% less results.

Often, 4% less effort gets 90% less results.

The return on making that little extra effort is vastly out of proportion with the extra work required. Multiply this across all disparate aspects of climbing performance, and 4% extra in each one delivers a windfall of results that lifts you over huge barriers of performance.

In practice?

A top climber will try the boulder problem 26 times to your 25, and do it on the last go.

A top climber will rest 20 seconds less per attempt...

A top climber will hang on five seconds longer than you before shouting 'take'..."

I think we could use that passage, with some suitable substitutions, as a pretty solid guide to business performance too:

The truth about world-class companies

They aren't really much better than you are, yet their costs, results, brand, rewards somehow end up being absolutely miles higher than you have managed.

...It comes down to this:

4% effort does not get you 4% less results.

Often, 4% less effort gets 90% less results.

The return on making that little extra effort is vastly out of proportion with the extra work required. Multiply this across all disparate aspects of business performance, and 4% extra in each one delivers a windfall of results that lifts you over huge barriers of performance.

In practice?

A top business will keep working on customer satisfaction, even when they're better than most.

A top business knows nothing is “uncontrollable”.

A top business will accept the risk that comes from trusting its staff.

I suppose it's similar to Seth Godin's theory in the Dip - winners know when to quit, but more importantly when not to.

The Decisive Moment

“X is like Y, because...” is a useful way to generate fresh thinking about pretty much any topic (and quite a good qualitative research technique to boot).

“Presentations are like films, because they are about telling a compelling story through a primarily visual medium” is so well established that it is now a cliche. Cliff Atkinson even suggests using a three act structure for your presentations (actually not as silly an idea as it first sounds, albeit over-prescriptive).

The lean forward moment

I've just finished a great book on film-making and editing called “The lean forward moment”, which has lots of useful advice about telling stories.

In a nutshell Hollyn argues that stories are about change, and that change (of any kind) can be used to signal important turning points to the audience. This might mean a change of acting style, a physical movement, a new camera shot, different lighting, music starting (or stopping) and so on. It doesn't matter what changes, as long as the moment has a chance to register.

As Hollyn points out, this is precisely the technique used by many public speakers when they use pauses to allow key points to land. They might also use visuals, props, changes in the pitch or rhythm of their voice, and so on. Change grabs attention.

Moments of truth

I, like Cartier-Bresson, believe that most things in life have decisive moments—lean forward moments—which are particularly powerful. When talking about the customer experience we call these “moments of truth”. Can we apply Hollyn's techniques to get the most out of moments of truth with customers?

If we take each customer interaction as a film scene, Hollyn suggests that we approach the scene with three questions:

1. Whose scene is this? Many organisations act as if it's their scene, but it should be the customer's.
2. How does that character change from the beginning of the scene to its end? Clearly we'd like them to be delighted by the way we've surpassed their expectations, not disappointed.
3. Where, exactly, does that change occur in the scene? Ah, now that's an interesting question. What are the moments of truth? Once we realise that this scene belongs to the customer we can start to look at the turning points inside their minds as they go through the change identified at question 2. We can start to control how the scene's going to end by understanding that the outcome is not based on a gradual progression, but pivots around a small number of key moments.

The Back of The Napkin

Quick review of Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin, which I've just finished. It is an excellent guide to visual thinking in business, and a passionate call to arms to get back to the brass tacks of marker on whiteboard or biro on napkin.

It is certainly a must-read book but, for reasons I can't quite articulate, I found it strangely disappointing. Perhaps I expected it to revolutionise the way I see the world, and was sad to find it merely good.

Don't let me put you off though, it is a very useful book. I particularly liked Roam's comprehensive "visual thinking codex", which you can download from the website (though it probably won't make much sense on its own). This offers a complete palette of visual solutions, categorised by problem and offering a selection of versions for different audiences.

Omit needless words

One of the books I like to keep next to my desk is Strunk & White's classic "The Elements of Style". It really is as good as everyone says it is, and well worth returning to whenever you suspect that your writing style is getting muddy.

My most pernicious lapse is probably "the fact that", which Strunk includes in a list of unnecessary words and their conciser alternatives, such as:

used for fuel purposes........	used for fuel
he is a man who.................	he
in a hasty manner...............	hastily
this is a subject that...........	this subject
Her story is a strange one....	Her story is strange.

The little book is absolutely crammed with similar pieces of terse wisdom. Business writers are renowned for their unwillingness to get to the point, and their use of ridiculous, pompous, buzzwords. White's description is telling:

People in business say that toner cartridges are in short supply, that they have updated the next shipment of these cartridges, and that they will finalize their recommendations at the next meeting of the board. They are speaking a language familiar and dear to them. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; exectives walk among toner cartridges, caparisoned like knights.... A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express a precise meaning.

I'm on board with that.