A year of work in progress – day 7

Day 7 – 10 January 2014

About a quarter of our business is traded, that is with customers outside of the Council.  Gaining and losing customers is a natural part of the business cycle.  As long as we gain more than we lose then we will be OK.  I don’t like to lose any business but we have, or at least we are under threat of losing a school in Hartlepool and so first thing today was a visit to see the Head.

Fortunately the Tyne Tunnel behaved this morning and so the uneventful trip gave me the time to think about the conversation ahead.  The A19 wasn’t great though.  It was never going to be an easy visit but I was really keen to hear what she had to say.  In the end everything that we believed that the meeting was going to be about was wrong and it turned out to be very worthwhile.  We have some lessons to swallow, we’ve lost some business but retained much more. Your best customers are those that tell you, the others just walk away.

Back to County Hall for lunch with my Wingman (but that’s for another blog), followed by a meeting with a big supplier about Big Data, yet another topic that is going to exercise us this year.  I’m convinced that there are patterns within all of the sets of data we have that we cannot see.  There are many woods and all we see are trees.  Bringing our data together will help us to develop new ways of providing services and no doubt I’ll come back to this.

My last meeting of the day was really a resolution.  The next layer of management down from me (sorry if I’m being too hierarchical), the so-called Tier 4s are important in delivering the services to our customers.  I realised late last year how few of them I knew across the authority and so committed to getting to meet each and every one of them this year.  I’ll need to do eight a month to make it and so here’s a start.   The first was with Mary in Customer Services and included a walk around the contact centre

This week I managed to spend 2 hours in my office at County Hall when not in meetings.  This is a good thing!

Learning points for today:  Whatever anyone tells you there is no substitute for face to face contact; All customers need to be taken seriously;  I’ve still got a lot to do.

Today’s enjoyment rating 8/10 – taking it on the chin.