A year of work in progress – day 5

Day 5 –8 January 2014

Today was a management meeting today.  The Project leaders met in the morning, that is the wider management team and the Senior Management Team met in the afternoon.  I was asked to give an opening talk to set the scene for the year ahead.  This is an abrdiged version, a bit longer than I would normally blog but still sets the tone:

Happy New Year.  2014 is going to be great, or is it?  Time will tell.  It’s certainly going to be interesting with many challenges, twists and turns, ups and downs.  We’ll plan lots then life will get in the way and we’ll end up doing lots that is unplanned.  The truth is that it is up to us whether or not we have a good year.  As Henry Ford said ‘Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t–you’re right.”  But truth is a vague concept.  There is no such thing, just perception and probability.  If we perceive things to be good, we’ll probably be right.

I was at a conference on Channel Shift on 5 December.  It was in Manchester on the day that the trains went all to hell because of the high winds.  I went down with Alan Patrickson and Mary Readman who run customer services and part of the reason for going was to get to know them a little better.

Channel shift is about encouraging your customers to move to different forms of interaction with your organisation.  It was a good conference, perhaps not worth the five hour train ride to get there but you always pick up something interesting from these events.  Lunch was nice too. Thai green curry.

The reason that I am telling you this though is because speaker after speaker talked about channel shift as a means of saving money.  Cost reduction, cost reduction, cost reduction; that is the message that I heard loudly and clearly.

And we are going to get a lot of this again this year.  MTFP, cost reduction, efficiencies, savings.  You name it.  The settlement for the next three years is not great.  In line with expectations.  Same again I’m afraid to say.

But, coming back to the conference, surely the key driver to move customers to another channel would be to provide them with a higher quality, more consistent and more enjoyable experience with your service.  If you get that right then costs should fall.  Higher quality services are ultimately cheaper than lower quality ones.  Initial costs may be higher but less rework, less returns, less complaints, it all adds up or rather it all takes away.  Interactions that are easier to use will ultimately be used more than those that are difficult.  Look at Apple products – they are easy to use.

Channel shift should be more than just about saving money.  Yes, it’s important but we should start with the customer.  Channel shift should be about making the customer experience better.  The best online services focus all of their energies on getting this interaction right. 

So unashamedly my focus this year again will be on getting the culture of this organisation right to meet the customers’ needs based around a strong technical platform.  Our focus needs to be on understanding why our customers need to contact us and working to manage this demand.  Better products, more reliable products, easier to understand processes, things that just work.  We need to make it easier for the customers to find the information that they need to know.  Indeed we need to make it easier for our own people to find the information that they need to know. 

Just before Christmas the SMT had the pleasure of working on the Service Desk.  We did it on the pretence of letting the team go out for Christmas lunch.  I think it was appreciated, the unions certainly liked it but in reality it was a good opportunity for us to find out what life is really like.  Let me tell you it was hard.  Hard because none of us were any good at it yes, but also hard because there was information that we couldn’t record, the application wasn’t easy to use, categories were set up all over the place and there were things that we should have been able to fix which we couldn’t.  The whole process didn’t flow as it should.

Flow is one of those things we should be obsessed with.

Resource will be tighter if anything this year than it was last, so we need to focus on value add rather than low value repetitive work.  We need to understand why people contact us, when they are going to need us and work hard to stop people needing us for fix.  We need to focus on helping our customers to help themselves, make it a more pleasurable experience to use the portal or other online channels. 

We need to keep our telephone and face to face contact for the times when it is really needed and appreciated – change and inform.  We need to squeeze value out of our relationships.

That’s what our channel shift should be about.  Quality service, quality service, quality service, that’s what I want to hear and I’m certain that the costs will fall out of this.  After all quality is remembered long after the thrill of cheap purchase is forgotten.

A lot of times I am asked ‘Why don’t we play the game?’  Why don’t we play the system to get what we want?  But that’s not the kind of organisation I want us to be.  At Nelson Mandela’s funeral, David Cameron was asked what his lasting memory of the former president of South Africa would be and he said that his lasting memory was that ‘There is never a wrong time to do the right thing.’  

I work in the public sector to do the right thing.  It is not just a job to be done, it should be something more.  At times it is as if the purpose of the Council is to still be here next year.  A lot of people are bunkering down, trying to protect their corner and arguing about budgets but this is just adding to the cost.  I may be naïve or an optimist but I chose to work in the public sector to do just that, to serve the public and all this background noise is a distraction from that.

I know these are difficult time and people don’t want to raise their heads in case they get into trouble, we’re worried about our futures and whether or not we can plan ahead but it is only through change that we will succeed.  We need to be different tomorrow from what we are today and the day after we need to be different again because demand will change, customer needs will change and legislation will change.  The only constant thing will be change.  And we need people to appear above the parapet, try new things, get involved and push themselves further.  There are no guarantees but I’m certain that there is always work for those who are good.

This year is going to be exciting and challenging, not easy so we need to focus our attentions on what I am calling productive time – not productivity.  Productive time is when our customers do what they set out to do, teach, sweep, care, account, communicate – whatever.  Unproductive time is when they don’t.   We need to focus on making our technology work, to be available from wherever it is needed, to make it more usable, to make our clients more capable, to use technology to streamline processes and to make it easier for our customers to solve their own issues.

I’ve said it many times that I am proud to work here.  I think we can demonstrate that we’ve come a long way in the last four years and I’m raring to get stuck into the coming year.  I’ve set myself ten challenges:

So that is what I wanted to say.  Thanks for listening (and for reading if you are still here).

Learning points for today:  Setting the tone, sets the tone;  We do good things and don’t always tell; communications is key to good customer relations and; Telling stories is the best way to get your message to stick.

Today’s enjoyment rating 10/10 – nothing’s going to stop us this year!