2008 Issue 3
Improving Productivity Starts
With Improving Management
Talking To The Unhappy
Customer
Brainstorming Your Way To
Innovation
Protect Yourself From Invoice
Scams
 
Improving Productivity Starts With Improving
Management
Business owners know that workers who aren’t
using their time and resources effectively are
costing the company money. Declining
productivity means falling profits and sliding
competitive position. That makes the findings
from this year’s Proudfoot Productivity
Report a cause of concern to employers.
The 2007 report covered businesses in the U.S.,
Australia and Europe. It reports a disturbing
average of 18% of working time wasted among the
surveyed businesses. The U.S. came in as most
efficient with "only" 14.1% of working hours
wasted while Australia topped the charts at
19.4% wasted.
Analysis of contributory causes revealed that
more than three-quarters of inefficient working
in 2006 could be attributed to just three
causes:
- Inadequate workforce supervision (31% of all wasted time)
- Poor management planning and control of work (30%)
- Poor communication (18%)
The remainder of wasted time recorded was the
result of IT problems, low morale and a skills
absence or mismatch.
When managers were asked to select from a range
of actions they considered could increase
workplace productivity the top 2 they chose were
investment in workforce skills and investment in
management skills. But this may be putting the
cart before the horse.
The interesting thing is that all three major
contributors to time waste are directly
referable to internal management practices.
Wasted time may be up, but as the report
recognizes, the root cause for that is
inadequate management supervision, disjointed
planning of production processes and inadequate
communication of the information employees need
to work at their most productive level.
Managers can’t dodge their share of
responsibility for the amount of time wasted
each year by under-producing employees. When it
comes to improving productivity the first area
to attend to should be reforming poor management
practices and getting managers up to speed in
some basic skills.
Workforce Supervision
How to supervise a group of people effectively
is a basic HR skill for anybody in a position of
leadership or management. Managers should have
at least some training in critical HR areas such
as employment law, selecting people with the
right workforce skills, setting compensation
packages, training and developing employees and
carrying out performance reviews. These HR
skills underpin your ability to get the best out
of your employees and improve organizational
performance.
Management Planning
The ability to work to a business plan that sets
out the broad goals to be achieved in a given
period of time, organize all the inputs required
to achieve the goals, coordinate the activities
and monitor progress towards them are all
essential managerial skills necessary to achieve
business growth, yet the ability of many
managers in these areas is problematic.
Inefficient practices are rarely improved by
simply automating them. Introducing technology
before optimizing the process it is intended to
improve merely results in automated
inefficiency. But how many managers take the
time to analyze just how efficiently their key
processes, such as supply chain operations, are
working? How many take the effort to develop
procedure manuals to ensure employees do things
in a consistent and approved manner?
Communication
Managers often have issues with formulating and
delivering clear verbal instruction. This can be
addressed to a large degree by having the right
support resources in place: a clear
organizational structure; well defined job
descriptions to avoid confusion about
responsibilities; policies and procedures
manuals to provide a definitive answer on the
approved method of doing things; and investing
time in inducting and training new employees.
Implementing measures like these will reap huge
long term productivity benefits.
Employees do usually try to achieve what they
think the job requires of them. To get them
achieving the right things you need to be very
clear in the instruction you provide, whether
that be at the level of explaining how to
perform a process or what goals the business is
trying to achieve and their role in contributing
to their attainment.
Poor productivity can be the result of just
plain time wasting by employees but more likely
it’s the result of poor planning, inefficient
practices and an inability to clearly
communicate what needs doing. Whether through
coaching, talking to a business advisor or
putting themselves through one of the many SME
management short courses available, a manager
has a responsibility to make themselves the best
they can be before laying problems of poor
productivity at the feet of their employees.
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Talking To The Unhappy Customer
Let’s face it - the customer is not always
right. What is always right is to treat them as
if they were, because a customer will likely
tell numerous people about their bad treatment
at your business whereas they rarely pass on the
good treatment experiences they have. After all,
as customers they expect a good experience. No
matter how much customer care training you
conduct, some customers will end up dissatisfied
with something. They may become so irate that
they decide to confront you face-to-face to take
the opportunity of venting their frustrations -
at times rather abusively.
It’s hard to take a tongue lashing patiently
when the customer is obviously in the wrong. But
by and large that is the approach you should
train yourself, and your team, to take with
complaining customers. Here are six practical
tips to keep in mind when talking through a
complaint with a customer - if you want to keep
them as one.
1: Establish Exactly What The Customer Is Upset About
Listen carefully - actively - to the customer’s
complaint before trying to resolve it. Never let
the customer go without getting enough
information to make a sound decision about how
to resolve the problem - calling them for more
details will annoy them even further. Allow the
customer to explain the situation, then, if
necessary go back to ask further questions,
clarify issues, or politely disagree. This phase
also allows them to let off steam and 9 times
out of 10, just doing that has a calming effect.
2: Accept Ownership Of The Problem
Avoid getting involved in a point–by–point
debate over the rights and wrongs of the
situation. Nothing is more guaranteed to enrage
a customer who already feels badly treated. Use
‘I’ language - "I will do whatever I can to
help you.", "You are an important
customer and I would like the opportunity to
resolve this situation and make you happy."
‘I’ language shows the customer that you are
taking responsibility to resolve the situation.
3: Take Complaints Professionally And Not Personally
Do not take a customer’s anger personally.
Remain objective and remember that they are
upset with the situation, not necessarily with
you. A professional demonstrates that they value
complaints as a way of assessing where things
have gone wrong in customer service and as an
opportunity to win back customer loyalty.
4: Maintain Open Body Language And A Helpful Attitude
Your body language will express more than your
words will as to what your real feelings are. It
needs to be just as reassuring to customers as
what you are telling them - that you are
concerned, you want to hear their grievance, and
that when you have all the information, you'll
try to rectify the situation.
5: Apologize Even If The Matter Is Not Your Fault
Marketing research done by major companies tells
us why it is important to take the attitude that
"the customer is always right". A customer who
has a bad experience generally tells 10 other
people about it. Simply saying, "I'm sorry.
What can I do to make you happy?” can stop
the complainer in their tracks and prevent the
spread of bad PR.
6: Be Able To Say“No” To The Customer (In A Tactful Way)
On occasion a complaint may be clearly
inaccurate and it will not be possible to give
the customer the sort of satisfaction they are
seeking. If you cannot give the customer what
they want, explain exactly why. Saying “No”
requires tact and diplomacy.
Ultimately, customers will assess your response
to their complaint, and judge you accordingly,
using three criteria: how they were treated (the
politeness, empathy, effort, and honesty of the
personnel who dealt with them); the process they
were put through (how responsive your people
were to their grievance, as well as how fast and
simple the overall process was - the longer
customers have to wait to get answers, the more
dissatisfied they are); and the complaint
outcome (has it left them feeling satisfied with
the way you handled things). Curiously, a well
handled complaint can be a powerful driver of
customer loyalty.
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Brainstorming Your Way To Innovation
Marketing wisdom has it that to develop products
with good sales potential you need to first
appreciate your customer’s needs and then build
a product that answers those needs. Customer
needs analysis is the process of unearthing
information about just what it is customers
would really value in a product. The activities
most commonly associated with this process are
running customer surveys or focus groups and
undertaking market research.
One group that sometimes gets left out of the
loop is the company’s employees yet these
people, particularly those facing customers,
aggregate a huge amount of knowledge about what
customers think of a product and about how
customers actually use them. A brainstorming
session with employees can be a very profitable
source of ideas for product innovations that
will answer to real needs customers have
discussed with them.
Trouble is, traditional brainstorming sessions
based on throwing up any and all suggestions for
consideration often create more hot air than
good ideas. In the real world of business not
all ideas are good ideas. One reason is that
many blue sky ideas are simply not feasible
given the practical constraints imposed by the
business’ capabilities. A brainstorming session
that ends up with several hundred ideas on the
table may be considered successful in terms of
quantity but there’s no guarantee of any
quality. Searching through this grab bag of
ideas, how can you determine which of them
really do address an unmet customer need?
A lot more useful ideas are likely to come up if
the thinking is focused in some way so as to
keep it within the zone of what customers need.
One way to create this sort of focus is to work
to a set of preplanned questions that work off
your employee’s knowledge of actual customer
needs (or behavior) rather than to ask for
off-the-top-of-the-head thoughts. A set of good
questions will restrain thinking to sensible
product modifications, or even new versions of a
product, that could represent valuable
innovations.
There’s no such thing as THE list of right
questions to ask and you’ll want to develop your
own related to your individual business, its
capabilities and its area of operations.
However, some generic examples will give you an
idea of how this approach works and provide a
start for your next brainstorming session.
-
What modifications have customers asked us
about? Customers will often discuss the features
of a product that would be just right for them.
If it would be just right for a group of
customers, then it could be worth developing.
-
Are some customers using our product in a way or
for a purpose we never expected or intended them
to? For example, iPods are being used as flight
data recorders in light aircraft.
-
Do any customers invest significantly in
modifying your product to get it to do just what
they want it to? The most zealous windsurfers
who get new boards first and modify them, the
most advanced builders experimenting with new
materials like stressed-skin panels often
suggest or even create useful innovations that
manufacturers subsequently adopt.
-
What minor modifications do customers regularly
make to the product? Do left-handers have to
modify it to suit their handedness?
-
Is there one modification that would open this
product up to a new customer segment such as
providing instructions in another language or in
braille or developing a ‘green’ version? The
2008 release of Microsoft Office Accounting will
be bilingual with the Spanish version targeted
to Hispanic-owned businesses, the fastest
growing segment of small business in the U.S.
-
Do customers report a consistent difficulty with
using a product? Employees are often well
situated to hear about, or even anticipate,
customer problems with a product.
Using known unmet needs to guide brainstorming
removes the unrestrained speculation that leads
to impractical suggestions to meet unproven
customer needs. Rather, it allows for creative
suggestions on how to devise valued solutions
that meet real needs. This approach can be a
powerful way of coming up with new ideas ranging
from minor product modifications to an entirely
new product.
To Top
Protect Yourself From Invoice Scams
Paying on phony invoices is an occupational risk
for small businesses. They are regularly the
target of scammers hoping to take advantage of
sloppy bookkeeping, inattention on the part of
employees and poor communications between the
people in the firm ordering goods, those
receiving them and those approving payment. All
too often they are paid unwittingly along with a
number of other routine bills.
Scammers have fake invoice production for such
things as stationery or cleaning services, down
to a fine art. Their invoice will include names
(perhaps established by a prior phone call to
the business for some innocuous seeming
information), figures, and other details that
add up to an authentic looking invoice. And they
have a range of scams other than fake invoices -
solicitations for the purchase of goods or
services carefully designed to look like
invoices for items already received; payment for
listing in a directory of some sort you never
agreed to; asserting that there is a government
requirement for the services offered when no
such requirement exists, and phony advertising
to renew an ad allegedly placed "last year" ...
to cite just a few.
The best protection against invoice scammers is
knowledge and vigilance. Your company's
accounting department, or the individuals
responsible for paying accounts, should be made
aware of the different types of scams and how
they work and you need to have a set of internal
controls in place that will pick up fake
invoices before payment is made. These include:
-
Not placing orders over the telephone unless
there is no doubt that the firm you are dealing
with is reputable
-
Always ask for a phone order to be followed up
with the offer in writing
-
Check your records to confirm claims of previous
business dealings
-
Channel all invoices through one department
-
Read your mail carefully. Warn employees to be
on the alert for any unusual invoices.
-
Use pre-numbered purchase orders for every order
placed
-
Check all invoices against purchase orders and
against goods or services received
-
Verify all invoices with the person who gave
written or verbal authorization for purchase
-
Limit the number of people who can pay invoices
to just one or two
-
Never give out or clarify any information about
your business unless you know what the
information will be used for
In many cases the amount of the invoice is just
small enough to slip by the check writer's
attention. Invoice scammers build up
considerable experience in calculating the most
effective amount to place on the invoice.
Thousands of mass-mailed invoices, each for a
small sum, may prove more lucrative for the con
artist than several large invoices. It is
believed that invoice scammers succeed in
collecting a significant percentage of all the
bills they mail. While it’s impossible to put an
exact figure on it, business bureaus speculate
that scam invoices cost the SME sector millions
each year.
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