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Courageous conversations Performance management for the 21st Century Learn more

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Charles Dickens famously wrote: Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. His point was this: it’s not the absolute level of income that makes you happy or miserable; it’s the gap between what you have, and what you feel you need.

Customer service is the same: it’s not the absolute level of customer service that makes your customers love you or hate you: it’s the gap between what your customers expect, and what you provide.

My broadband has been rather slow lately, so this morning at9amI called my internet service provider BT, to ask them to sort it out. Frankly, I was expecting a long and tedious phone call, lots of transfers from one department to another and not much progress today with my problem. To my amazement, the first person I spoke to did some speed tests there and then, told me he couldn’t sort it, and arranged a time for an engineer to visit me later on today. Result (so far!): a very happy customer.

By contrast, a few days ago I tried to book some tickets on the East Coast train website. After a frustrating 20 minutes trying to get the website to work, I phoned the (premium rate) helpline. After quite a lot of fafffing around, I was told that the website temporarily didn’t work for the type of transaction I was trying to make. Also, they didn’t know how long it would take to fix. My expectation of a train ticket website is that you can use it to buy tickets. Result: misery and anger.

But here’s the problem: customer expectations are rising all the time. A few years ago I didn’t expect to be able to buy train tickets online at all. Now I do. In fact, thanks to ticketless air travel, I really expect to be able to download them onto my iPhone, rather than collecting paper tickets from the station, but East Coast doesn’t allow me to do that; perhaps I’ll find another provider who does…

What do your customers expect? What do you need to do to meet those expectations – even if they seem unreasonable to you?

And here’s that Dickens quote in full:

 

Six challenges for 21st Century Leaders

May 3, 2012

Why is leadership in the 21st Century different to leadership in the 20th Century? Because the challenges are different. Here are six key challenges all business leaders face in the early years of the 21st Century 1. Unreasonable customer expectations. Almost certainly, your company provides a better level of customer service than it did five [...]

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Trust

April 17, 2012

There are the four things you need to do if you want people to trust you 1. Be honest. People won’t trust you unless they think you are telling the truth. This can be tricky: how do you handle information that has been given to you in confidence? How do you give a person honest [...]

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Small things

April 5, 2012

Great leaders understand that little things matter as much as the big things. Most people don’t need or expect an earth shattering triumph every day: a succession of small things is often enough. I’ve been doing quite a lot of work with virtual teams lately – teams whose members are based in different places and [...]

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The key to influence

March 20, 2012

How many people died as a result of the tragedy of 9/11? The usual answer is about 3,000, in and around the twin towers and in the wreck of United 93. Having seen these events replayed on TV, many regular American travellers decided to go by car, instead of taking their usual flights. In reality [...]

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Looking for a black swan

March 8, 2012

Until black swans were discovered in Australia in the 18th Century, Europeans were convinced that all swans were white. Author Nassim Taleb has taken the term black swan to describe an event which is rare, unpredictable, and high impact. The terrorist attacks on the 11th September 2001, the rise of the internet and the 2008/9 meltdown of [...]

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Charisma or presence?

February 28, 2012

One day a good fairy appears and says to you: ‘I know how hard you have been working. Because you are such a committed and hard working person I’ve decided to give you a special gift – the power of charisma. When I wave my magic wand you will instantly become an incredibly charismatic person [...]

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Are great leaders born or made?

February 27, 2012

Here’s how most businesses try and develop leaders. They draw up a list of desirable leadership behaviours (which are sometimes called competencies). They assess their people against this list, to identify strengths and weaknesses. Then they send their people on some kind of training or development programme to remedy the weaknesses. If your organisation uses [...]

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The hassle factor

February 16, 2012

On a recent work trip I stayed at a five star hotel in Luxembourg. Like many posh hotels, it gave me a lot of things I didn’t want – a bloke in a uniform to open the door of my taxi when I arrived, someone sneaking into my room while I was down at dinner [...]

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