"...keeping you great"
HEADLINES:
Team of Future Leaders -- "this one idea has already been worth a quarter million dollars the last five months," notes John Ratliff, CEO of Appletree Answering Service. John was chatting with Cameron Herold (franchising and PR guru) about how customer complaints and issues in his company are left up to his customer service managers and operations managers to handle -- he simply didn't trust his supervisor level (first level above his call center agents) to handle properly nor did they have access to his CRM system.
Customers Made to Wait -- continues Ratliff "problem is, we are 24/7 and the managers only work Monday -- Friday, therefore if a problem came up over the weekend, we made the customer wait until Monday. "At that point Cameron said, "then you're an a*s!" (direct and to the point!)
14 Year Problem Fixed -- so John immediately bought 38 additional Salesforce.com licenses, bringing their total to 102 (not cheap). He then flew his supervisors from 13 locations across the U.S. to his corporate office for training (again not cheap) so they could learn how to professionally handle customer issues and avoid losing the customer. Results -- Appletree has cut customer turnover from night and weekend complaints to the tune of $250k. They track complaint times, dates, and quit dates and had experienced a high skewed number of quits on Mondays from weekend complaints -- a problem that's existed in his business for fourteen years. "It is gone," exclaims Ratliff. "Our Monday quits are now in line with the rest of the week and overall service-related quits are down."
Babysitting Role -- concludes Ratliff "we always viewed our Supervisors in a more babysitting role -- by empowering them we are seeing dramatic results and we're developing a team of future leaders. It still amazes me how very, very simple some things are yet when you're on the inside looking out you just cannot see them."
India's Future Leaders -- speaking of empowering future leaders, I just returned from educating over 250 CEOs and executives of growth firms (and large firms) in India on the Rockefeller Habits. India's economy is expected to be one of the fastest growing in 2009 and their business leaders remain eager to learn. And roughly 50% of the audience represented repeat business -- CEOs and MDs bringing larger teams a second or third time to the workshop indicating that the habits are gaining traction and starting to have a significant impact on these Indian firms.
Ford's Weekly Huddle -- Jeff Snyder, President of CT-based Inspira Marketing Group, summarized this piece out of Fortune Magazine:
"I live for Thursday mornings at 8 a.m.," says Ford Motor CEO Alan Mulally in a Fortune article by Alex Taylor III (5/25/09). Thursdays at eight is when Alan meets with his direct reports from 12 functional areas in the Thunderbird conference room at the Ford headquarters. Alan and his team sit "around a circular dark-wood table" with Alan in the "pilot's seat." Blackberries aren't allowed and neither are side conversations.
"If somebody starts to talk or they don't respect each other, the meeting just stops," says Alan. "They know I've removed vice presidents because they couldn't stop talking because they thought they were so damn important." Instead the team presents reports coded as either "green for good, yellow for caution, red for problems." The first few times Alan held these meetings everybody coded their reports "green," but Alan fixed that in a hurry.
He said: "You guys, you know we lost a few billion dollars last year. Is there anything that's not going well?" Well, um, maybe. Within a week, says Alan, "the entire set of charts were all rainbows." Whether there are pots of gold waiting for Ford at the end of those rainbows remains to be seen, of course. But Alan sounds resolute: "I am here to save an American and global icon," he says. His secret is, there are no secrets. "This is a huge enterprise, and the magic is, everybody knows the plan," he says.
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