Is It Fair to Have Perfection as the Standard?

I truly understand your difficult position. My suggestion would be to agree on your metrics of success with your client and with your employees. The metrics should try to be forward-looking, not backward-looking (such as a customer satisfaction survey). You cannot manage the past; you must manage the future. What metrics would predict happy clients? What strategies do you have for improving those metrics? Involve your client in those discussions. Customer satisfaction surveys should be used only to doublecheck your own internal predictive metrics, not as the source of improvement strategies or punishment.

If you look in my book (Pain Killer Marketing) at a chapter entitled "The Big Equation of Business," you will see that the predictive internal metrics not only deal with the eventual customer, but also with your own employees. How is their success measured? Can you have a contract with them on how their performance will be evaluated? The Big Equation of Business concept was taught to me by Dr. Bradley Gale (Customer Value Inc.) and Ray Kordupleski (former VP at AT&T).

Most customer satisfaction surveys deal only with a sample of the actual activity. When I worked at PG&E, we might have surveyed 5 to 8 phone calls an individual phone rep answered IN A YEAR! Is it fair to judge them based upon maybe 15 minutes of their yearly performance? I don't think so!

This is an example of what Dr. Edwards Deming called "The Red Bead Experiment," where employee rewards and punishments seemed to be handed out in a somewhat random fashion, based upon the vageries of the process (who happened to get assigned to which difficult customer). You don't want to treat your employees this way, as it creates low morale and disrespect for management.

Talk to your customer about metrics of success that are predictive of satisfying customer needs. Try to convince them that anectdotal survey information is counterproductive, unless they only have a few BIG customers, in which case those customers can be treated as markets of one (special treatment).

I hope that this helps!

Chris Stiehl, co-author of Pain Killer Marketing (WBusiness Books, April, 2008)

Thank you for these responses.

1) Yes, the software is the client's.

2) The perfection standard does permeate the client, although it is proposed and enforced by a particular person. I think it unlikely that this person will be replaced.

I am trying to manage my people to be their best, and satisfy the client, without allowing the client's negativism to adversely affect my people and the job that they do.

I understand that the client is the client and is entitled to push for the performance that it wants. I'm just trying to figure out how to best manage from my position in the middle.

I will check out the suggested references, and I appreciate your responses.

Lee

Lee, you have my sympathy, yours is an extremely tough role but you are not alone. Where companies have outsourced they sometimes believe that they have outsourced their problems and insourced their highs. Some of this is about the sales process which is often unrealistic and disconnected from the service being offered.

We work with some of the UK's biggest outsourcers, particularly to the public sector, which tends to be our health service and government offices. The ones who have been really successful are also the ones who started off in the same position as you guys. When we took apart the complaints, what we found was a misalignment of purpose. What the client wanted had changed from when the contract was sold, yet the company was still delivering on the original proposition.

The client had changed because the Govt had changed their targets to their staff, yet they had not shared this change with their supplier. This meant that no one was happy. The client felt beaten up all the time, and used lots of senior exec time trying to placate the client, and the client worried about their job as they were not hitting their targets.

It took six weeks to find out the problem and implement a solution. The contracts are now profitable again, and the client peaceful. Also the client now knows which questions to ask when things get difficult in the future. For you you could try asking your client:

1. What measures are you being asked to use to show that you are successful in your role?
2. By this time next year, what would you like your bosses to be saying about how you have motivated and managed the team working on this contract?
3. What is the biggest issue you would like us to fix right now?

To ask the first ones will require an element of relationship to be in place.

I hope this helps, and feel free to mail me if you want any further thoughts.

All the best,

Alison

www.thehaloworks.com

Lee, After reading the latest comments and your nice "thank you" note, I've two things to add:

1. The expression, "the customer is always right" was coined by Abacrobie & Fitch when they were the premier sporting goods store in the US. But, as may catchy advertising phrases are taken to mean what they did not mean at the time, they used it, as you have stated in your TY note, that the customer may not always be right but their desire to ask it is always correct. Going back to my earlier post, that they have the desire/need/want to ask for perfection is correct. Now the question becomes twofold. What criteria are they using to define perfection and, second, is perfection ever obtainable by both the supplier and the customer?

If there was a criteria for perfection, why would there be needs for updates of computer hardware and software and why would anyone develop new hardware or software if perfection had already been attained?

This brings me to:

2. (and this comes from my involvement in the Olympic movement) Is to look at how Olympism looks at perfection and how that affects what we do. There was, in the eyes of Pierre Coubertin who gave birth to the modern Games, no level that could be considered "the best." It was that, Olypism was the striving to do better that was important. Even when someone does it better does not mean that someone else will not come along and do it better. This, of course, can be applied to business as well as sport.

Now the question to ask is if their or your use of "perfection" really should be stated as "wants/needs it to be better" and then why does it need to be better?

Could the problem be that they had expectations but did not convey them or that they were told something that someone took to say your program was "perfect" for the task needed . . . or, that in order to get the OK to buy your system, that person(s) made statements/promises to others in the firm that you did not promise?

Was it that whomever(s) you worked with were charged with coming up with answers to a problem and when they found your program, whether or not your program would solve it, buying your program was a way to meet the demands being made on them? Somewhere within their business, there are accusations being made by someone who has demanded more than you can deliver or has told that your program would do more.

I could come up several more scearios that might have caused the problem you are not facing.

No matter what, it is you who is the scapegoat and not those that made false statements about what your program would do.

These are all nice as to why. The thing to come up with is what does one do. It seems to me to find out, and very likely you've already done this, it so ask them:

* what they want that is not being met by your program,

* were these not met early on and that, by your software solving their immediate problems, new ones showed up that were not evident previously because they hidden behind/underneath what they were doing

* in your program solving their problem, they had other problems that they had just lived with and they now believe that wouldn't it have been nice if these soluttions would have been included in your program . . . and now, rather than buying a new program for these problems, they'd like them worked ito your program, thinking this would be less expensive than buying a different program?

If they won't give you the answers to these three points, suggest that they find a firm that will come up with a program to solve the problems your program does not solve. Or, if you wish, tell them you'll develop a new program, not to replace what they bought, to do what your software cannot do. I.e. put the ball back on their side of the net.

Alan

Alan J. Zell, Ambassador of Selling, Attitudes for Selling offer consulting, workshops, speaking on all business topics that affect sales. He can be reached at azell@aol.com For more information, please visit his website, www.sellingselling.com Mr. Zell is the recipient of the the Murray Award for Marketing Excellence, He is a member of PNW Sales & Marketing Group, Institute of Management Consultants, and Linkedin.com

I've been evaluating it since 10/20/07 and this is second time I've had problems connecting to relay server. I opened the program at 0845 EST and the problem is still ongoing at 1545 EST. The error icon is there, but I occassionally see some upload/download rates flash in the boxes next to it.

Interestingly even with the error, I was able to add some contacts from the public directory provider. Plus when someone in my office opened the program, I saw her come online immediately and I got the discussion update she added to a project. However there is no connectivity with people outside the office and when I ping relay.collaber.com it times out.

Guess I don't understand when the relay server comes into play.

When the relay connection works, the program is awesome - just what I need. I hope they get the relay working consistently. The program is almost there. It could be a strong contender in the marketplace if they develop a good business model for it.