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The Power of Feedback

Posted on July 11, 2011 by David Kay

Photo credit: iStockphoto.com

Last time in this space, we discussed the power of appreciation. Let’s explore another primal human need—the need to answer the question, “how am I doing?”

It starts early. Watch a small child doing something new: she will be looking anxiously at a parent to see if the action brings praise or censure. As we mature, we start looking inside ourselves more than to authority figures to answer the question. Sometimes, our conscience or our “gut” provides us all we need to know. But other times, we need data.

Sports and games are all about providing feedback. Our golf scores, our lap times, how much Monopoly money we have, a perfect 10, all provide us unambiguous data to assess our performance. Whether we choose to benchmark against ourselves (as I do as a lousy golfer) or against others (as I do at the racetrack), we get satisfaction from knowing where we stand. And we use that data to motivate ourselves to improve.

Note that I’m not just talking about winning, and the sense of achievement this brings. Win, place, or show, we want to know the score—literally. Who would ever play a video game where you couldn’t see the points?

A recent excellent Wired cover story on using feedback to modify behavior got me thinking about this, and how much more we could do with feedback in our KM initiatives. One example it cited: radar-equipped speed limit signs—the kind that tell you how fast you’re driving—reduce speeds in school zones, even more than cops writing tickets.

The author, Thomas Goetz, suggests that there are four requirements to make feedback effective at changing behavior. Let’s see how we can apply them in the support center:

Evidence: quantifying the behavior. For KCS, these are the activity measures—each support staffer should be constantly reminded of his or her participation rate, create rate, edit rate, case closure rate, article quality index, escalation rate, or metrics on other behaviors we care about.
Relevance: providing context. For activities, these would be historical trends and team averages. (As readers of this blog surely know, we would never put goals on activities.)
Consequences: the larger goal or purpose. Show outcomes like net promoter score, renewal rates, or self-service success, because these outcomes are the reason we’re performing the activities. Also, include knowledge performance as part of employees’ performance reviews. This ties individual action and accountability to the organization’s mission.
Action: closing the loop. This is where the support staffer decides to be more diligent about capturing, reusing, and improving knowledge—not because he needs to achieve a quota, but because he wants to narrow the gap between himself and high performers on the team, or he wants to be part of the team’s success.

This is all pretty basic stuff, but how often do we even get through step one? Is your team constantly reminded of their knowledge performance?

Make sure everyone on your team knows the answer to the question, “how am I doing?” And most of them will return the favor by making the response, “Better than ever before, thanks.”

Posted in Culture, KCS, Measures | 2 Comments

The Power of Appreciation

Posted on June 22, 2011 by David Kay

Really, it seems too good to be true. If you heard about this in an email, you’d mark it as spam immediately. “You’ll feel better, make the people around you feel better, improve relationships at work and at home, and make people more likely to listen to you.” Sure…do you have a Nigerian millionaire’s estate to split with me, too?

The funny thing is, though, it’s real. Appreciation, given sincerely and consistently, does all that and more.

Before I say more about this, let me be clear about what I’m not talking about:

Flattery. We can all tell when someone’s blowing sunshine up our skirts. It makes us feel manipulated, and besides, no one trusts a flatterer.
The compliment sandwich. Have you ever known people who only say something nice when they have something negative to say? “Great work closing your cases this week…oh, by the way, if you don’t start attaching cover sheets to your TPS reports, you’re going to be in big trouble. Nice tie!” This isn’t very subtle, and appreciation from a compliment sandwich-maker leaves us wondering when the other shoe is going to drop.
A grateful attitude. Don’t get me wrong; this is a great thing to cultivate. But when I’m talking about appreciation, I’m talking about a specific set of behaviors, not a mindset or attitude.

Appreciation is the act of telling those around you the attributes or behaviors they have that you like. For a coworker, this might be the fact that you can absolutely count on them to do what they say, or how their work makes your job easier, or how their positive approach just makes the office a nicer place.

Most of us notice these things, and we may even mention them to others. But how often do well tell the person we appreciate? Especially if we don’t do it frequently, it may feel awkward, or even somehow unprofessional. But practice makes it comfortable, and it’s perfectly professional when applied to workplace topics.

There are as many ways to express our appreciation as there are reasons to appreciate others. A quick face-to-face comment works, as can an email, or a post-it. If you’re inclined, home-baked cookies or veggies from the garden are nice, but really, this is a case where the communication is what counts.

Appreciation works best when it’s

Specific—tell them exactly what you liked
Timely—as they say, “if you see something, say something.” Now.
Personal—say why they and their actions matter to you.

If people know you appreciate them and what they do, they’ll be happier to do more of it for you. They’ll know you value them, which means if you do need to have a difficult conversation, it’s based on mutual trust. And it really does feel good to see someone smile when you let them know what you appreciate.

Appreciation is an extremely powerful behavior to cultivate. Let’s all remind ourselves to do more of it.

(On that note, let me say how much Jennifer and I appreciate the fact that you’re actually reading this. It’s fun putting our experiences and observations in writing, but knowing that more and more people are reading it makes it really satisfying. Thank you!)

(HT to Beth Haggett, who developed the KCS Coaching workshop that got me thinking about appreciation in the first place.)

Posted in Coaching, Culture, KM | 3 Comments

Keep An Eye On Your Customers’ Success

Posted on June 8, 2011 by David Kay

Generally speaking, in Support we measure our operations: time to resolve and backlog, for example. But in Marketing, they measure customer behavior, like click-through rates and conversion rates. In this case, I think Marketing has it right. And from what I’m seeing, more Support leaders think so, too.

The days of passively waiting for customers to open a case are over. Dissatisfied B2B customers may just grumble to a colleague at an industry event, and consumers will share a derisive tweet…if you’re lucky. In many cases the switching costs to a competitor are so low that they’ll just leave. And the fact that you could have resolved their issue, if only they’d asked you, will do you exactly no good at all.

I often say that Support is in the customer success business—so that’s what we should measure, as best we can. We have to watch our customers to see if they’re being successful, or at least if they’re acting as other successful customers do. And we need to be proactive about helping them if they’re not.

I’m seeing great examples of this. For consumers, Intuit’s support measures itself based on how frequently customers are able to successfully complete their tax returns. And Yahoo! looks for customers who are sharing their concerns in social media forums—in some cases, they’ll jump in and help. Yahoo! also measures user behavior to identify which features make customers more active and loyal; the Help team focuses attention on making it easier for customers to adopt these features.

For businesses, configuration health checks are becoming commonplace, as Support measures, in effect, how prepared for success their customers are. And Salesforce.com has implemented what they describe as an Early Warning System—really, a customer success dashboard—that shows how fully customers are taking advantage of the capability they’ve licensed. This lets Customer Success Managers (isn’t that a great title?) guide lagging customers to more deeply engage and get more value from Salesforce—and, in turn, they hope to reduce defections.

These programs all have a few things in common:

They measure the customer, not support operations
They’re focused on success and value, not simple uptime
They’re more impactful and practical in SaaS—yet another reason support executives should want to advocate for the cloud whenever possible

In Support, we love measuring things. Let’s make sure we measure the things that matter to our customers.

(HT to Patsy Nations, Brad Smith, Neil Deluca, and Mehmet Goker.)

Posted in Measures | 4 Comments

Keeping Two Sets of Books

Posted on May 23, 2011 by David Kay

Photo credit: iStockphoto.com

I learned a great best practice for organizational change this week at the Consortium for Service Innovation’s executive summit in beautiful Chatham, Cape Cod: Keep two sets of books! No, not in the bad way—not like Enron—but to enable change.

Several industry leaders are keeping two sets of books to track performance on their current organizational obligations, while setting the stage for a new way of thinking about their work.

For example, let’s say you’re in charge of a self-service initiative. Readers of this blog know that self-service is a customer engagement strategy, not a customer deflection strategy…but do you want to have that conversation every week with the CFO?

A better way is to keep books both in the organization’s currency of the day (deflected contacts, avoided operational expense) and in your aspirational currency (loyalty, feature use, and repurchase, for example).

This is an easier conversation: we start off by showing our stakeholders and funders how we’re doing the things they care about, then we earn the right to have a conversation about why they should care about the things we care about, too.

Also, emerging measures are usually imprecise and somewhat subjective, as Dean Spitzer tells us. In contrast, measures in our “first” set of books tend to be better vetted, and more familiar to the organization. These more conventional measures give us breathing room to gain experience with our new measures without subjecting them to the third degree.

Without aspirational measures, we can’t refocus the organization on new and innovative sources of value. Without our conventional measures, we’ll spend all our time arguing and justifying.

As soon as your new measures take hold, you get to institutionalize them in the first set of books—and you have the great opportunity of creating even more innovating measures, keeping the change moving forward.

So, keep two sets of books. (Just please, don’t call it that when you’re presenting to the CFO.)

A special tip of the hat to the support executives who shared their “double entry” stories and successes, especially Medi Goker of Oracle; Marco Bill-Peter of Red Hat; Steve Young and Janet Ramey of Cisco. The good ideas in this post are theirs; misrepresentations of their points of view are mine alone.

Posted in Measures, self-service | 2 Comments

Sustainable Knowledge

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Jennifer Crippen

Sustainability isn’t just a trend. Creating and fostering sustainable environments at work and at home are “what’s happening,” for very good reasons. Resources are becoming more and more limited, which requires us to do more with what we have.

By thinking of knowledge sustainability, you are enabling the organization to practice knowledge management continuously, with minimal long-term investment. Sustainable knowledge is ever-evolving, being improved, shared, and reused. Sustainable knowledge provides opportunities for continuous learning.

Photo credit: The Pub Father Via Flickr. Creative Commons Attribution license.

To help ensure knowledge sustainability in your organization, remember:

• KCS is not a project! It isn’t done once you have implemented the program and trained everyone. It is a program that requires ongoing commitment and resources.

• You can’t practice KCS successfully unless you implement all eight of the practices! If you are making the time and doing the work required for each of the eight practices, you are on the path to success and sustainability.

• Start by focusing on the internal benefits of a KCS culture: building efficiency and making analysts’ lives easier first. Once the organization and participants learn what’s in it for them, customer self-service is a wonderful secondary result.

The most challenging portion of KCS isn’t implementing the practices themselves, but the maintenance and continuous commitment to the purpose – to do more with what we have available. KCS creates sustainable knowledge.

ps – Details about our upcoming Events: July KCS Workshop in Raleigh/Durham, NC and May’s Third Tuesday, all about ROI and the business case. Hope to see you there! See what the KCS Book Club is up to or become a member: http://groupspaces.com/KCSBookClub/

Posted in KCS, KM, Resources | 1 Comment

You are not a scalable model

Posted on April 26, 2011 by David Kay

We mean this in the nicest way, but you don’t scale.

You’ve put yourself in that process step with the best of intentions.

You’re going to write the Content Standard by yourself because everyone else is so busy, and it really has to get done quickly.

You’re going to review knowledge before publication because you want to make sure customers have a really good experience.
You’re going to encourage people to flag content so you can improve it when you get a chance.

Fortunately, but inconveniently, this knowledge management initiative is about to be come bigger and more powerful than you planned. Trickles of customer-facing knowledge will become torrents. Occasional suggestions will morph into a buzzsaw of continuous improvement. A small core team will turn into everybody.

At that point, you won’t be helping. You’ll just be in the way.

The only way to scale is to engage everybody. Everyone should define processes and measures; everybody should review content with every use; everybody should update and improve content.

It’s tempting to do it all yourself, because aligning the entire organization with your mission is much harder. That is, engaging others is harder until doing it all yourself becomes impossible, at which point the train wreck has happened and it’s too late to engage everyone.

Communicate unreasonably, create the community, and erase your name from every individual step of the process.

ps – as readers of this blog, you’re already in the Inside Crew. So if you’re going to be at Technology Services World (TSW) next week in Santa Clara, or if you’re in the area and just want to stop by, here’s an invitation to join us with our partners Stone Cobra, The Vergis Group, and Kepner-Tregoe at an Inside Crew event near the convention center. Please join us! dbk

Posted in KCS, KM, Lynchpins | 4 Comments

KCS, Compliance, and Risk Management

Posted on April 13, 2011 by David Kay

Image licensed from iStockPhoto

(HT @Brett for the great question!)

I’m often approached by organizations that are attracted to the idea of KCS, but are concerned about how it will work in their environment because of the perceived risk. We find this most often with organizations whose products and services are subject to regulation (especially in healthcare or financial services) or have health and safety risks.

How can KCS work with regulation and risk management? There are really four approaches that can be brought to bear.

1. Rely on the process. With both regulatory and risk management issues, the process is nearly as important as the outcomes. In other words, your risk management lawyers and your regulators both want to see that you’re following a process that is prudent, clear, industry-standard, and to which compliance is assured.

At first glance, KCS seems a little unstructured and chaotic. But, on closer inspection, it’s actually a very clearly defined, well-documented process with artifacts like the Article Quality Checklist, the Content Standard, certification, and other tangible ways of assuring quality and compliance. I find when presented in this light, both risk management people and regulators love the process. (ISO 900x auditors, too.)

2. Document the requirements. If there are specific issues that are required to assure compliance or health and safety, write them down. If there are gray areas, write them down and tell everyone whom they should ask for clarification if they come across one of these areas.

These safety and compliance requirements should be baked into the Content Standard, the Article Quality Index, the Coaching process, and the competency requirements for Certification. For business-critical issues, establish accountability such that violating regulatory, security, or safety requirements can have immediate and serious implications (e.g., you will lose your license; you may lose your job.)

Sometimes people who are concerned about these issues will insist that they can’t define what is and isn’t OK to say. Like Justice Potter, they protest that they’ll just “know it when they see it.”

Push back hard on this. ”I’ll know it when I see it” doesn’t help the organization learn, and “trust me, I’m an expert” doesn’t sound like a very rigorous or safe process. Even if they can’t describe everything that would be a problem, they can at least document the topics that have risk areas for safety and compliance, and what those risk areas are.

3. Leverage boilerplate and disclaimers. It’s good practice to have standard, approved wording for a warning and disclaimer on particular topics. The most famous example of this is the warning in Microsoft articles about the dangers of editing the Registry…and you’ll see that every time the topic comes up in a KB article. So, any time physical access to (for example) a hazardous electrical system comes up, contributors should know to paste in (or link to) the right verbiage that warns against sticking fingers and screwdrivers into voltage sources.

4. Review smart. Reviews are, of course, most organizations’ first answers to these questions, and reviews can have a place in a KCS implementation. The core idea is to keep reviews as lightweight as possible, while still accomplishing the business objective. So, you might implement one of the following:

Sanity check all to-be-published articles for compliance, health, and safety issues. Of course, as we said in step 2 above, these issues should be documented, and if a review turns up an issue that is NOT documented, it’s time to raise an exception and update the documentation.
Smarter yet is to sanity-check published articles that meet certain criteria—say, that include mention of hazardous components or areas. This is the equivalent of HP Nonstop’s practice to review all articles that require a system restart.
Or, you can allow an opt-in review so people concerned about risk or compliance can scan new or updated articles for topics of interest or concern. Reviewed or not, articles will be published in a short period of time.

The things all these approaches have in common is that (a) they’re focused, so they don’t take long at all unless an interesting question arises, and (b) they’re continually improving, as new issues are documented in the content standard and communicated through coaches and other channels.

ps – I would be remiss in not mentioning three upcoming events: Our April KCS Workshop in Menlo Park, CA; our pre-conference KCS workshop at TSW in Santa Clara; and May’s Third Tuesday, all about ROI and the business case. Hope to see you there!

Posted in KCS, KM | Leave a comment

Unreasonable Overcommunication

Posted on March 23, 2011 by David Kay

Photo: colindunn via flickr.com. Creative commons, some rights reserved.

Several times over the past six months, I’ve been sitting with KCS program managers who are discouraged and frustrated… really frustrated. They feel like they’ve been doing everything they can reasonably do to communicate, and people still aren’t getting it. Managers act surprised when they see project plans that were emailed to them weeks ago, and key stakeholders complain that they don’t know what’s going on, even though they were briefed three times in the last six months.

Honestly, sometimes I feel the same way. I lead workshops and I’m often excited by how enthusiastic and well-informed a participant is after a few days working on KCS…and then I see them in a meeting four months later talking about the importance of review queues and I think to myself, “what did I do wrong?”

The program manager and I didn’t do anything wrong. But we didn’t do enough, either. It’s not enough to communicate—we have to overcommunicate. Otherwise, the message just won’t get through.

Let me quickly add, this isn’t because people are dumb, or lazy, or not paying attention. Essentially everyone I’ve ever worked with on a KCS initiative is a good person with good intentions. It’s just that there’s so much to do. There’s so much to remember, and so many PowerPoints in our emails. Our minds slide into familiar, well-trodden paths—of course knowledge publication requires a technical review! And the point of communication, which is to change beliefs and behavior, just doesn’t happen.

So, what to do? How do we avoid all this frustration? Let me suggest that unreasonable overcommunication is the only rational strategy.

Expect to have to say things again and again. Understand that communication is an ongoing process, not an event. If you expect it, it won’t be so discouraging.
Share your experiences with other colleagues doing KCS or other major change management initiatives. We’re all living the challenge of communication, and it’s great to share best practices—or even just commiserate. The Consortium for Service Innovation and Technology Services World are great venues for group therapy.
Use your communication plan. If you have messaging activities scheduled every week, it’s just part of the job.
Check your calendar. Do you have lots of 1:1 and small group meetings with stakeholders? If so, good for you. If not, it’s time to send some invitations.
Don’t assume anyone really gets what you’re saying, deep in their gut, until you hear them say it to someone else with passion and precision.

Here’s the test I use. If I sit down with someone and they threaten to rip the slide deck out of my hand and present it to me unless I leave them alone, then I’ll know I’ve done my bit for unreasonable overcommunication.

Until then…are you available sometime Thursday for a quick meeting about KCS?

Posted in KCS | 3 Comments

The Gamification Of KCS

Posted on March 8, 2011 by David Kay

In ev’ry job that must be done there is an element of fun
You find the fun and snap! the job’s a game

And ev’ry task you undertake becomes a piece of cake
A lark! A spree! It’s very clear to see…

A Spoonful of Sugar, Richard Sherman and Robert Sherman

Games are becoming more and more part of “real life.” Not just because more of us are playing more games (although we are: 183 million Americans are “active gamers,” according to Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken). And it’s not because we’re spending more time playing games (although we are: McGonigal notes that people spend 30 million hours playing one game, World of Warcraft, every day.) It’s because the techniques of gameplay are being consciously employed to engage people outside of games.

As any teacher knows, asking students to listen passively is a terrible way to communicate information. Most of us learn by doing and collaborating: as KCS practitioners say, “knowledge is a byproduct of interaction and experience.” What better forum for “interaction and experience” than a game?

It’s no accident that the parts of the KCS Workshop that make the biggest impression are the games. (We call them “exercises,” but they’re really games. Don’t tell your boss.) Product managers have used innovation games for years: I remember a placid group of IT professionals who were so engaged by a game we hosted that they nearly came to blows over which feature to place their last quarter on.

Closer to home, game design is being applied to encourage people to participate in support forums. (How many “kudos” or “solveds” have you gotten recently? Are you about to level up to “Trusted Advisor” or “MVP?”) Games are infiltrating our social networks: have you sent your friend a cow recently? (FarmVille has over 100 million players.) Car dashboards are encouraging fuel economy with game-inspired feedback: can you grow a tree by the time you’ve finished your drive? (Some of these examples came from Jesse Schell’s fabulous presentation at DICE 2010, where he carries these ideas to fascinating extremes. It’s well worth the 28 minutes to watch.)

The hard part of knowledge management, and KCS in particular, is engaging busy people to do their daily work differently. Let’s gamify KCS!

Tired of boring tests at the end of a training module? Let’s play a quiz show instead! DB Kay is working with an innovative client to build just such a game—what else do we have for our wonderful workshop participants, Carol?
Do you get KCS certified? (Yawn). Or do you really level up? Can we provide more granular recognition, and badges along the way, to keep people moving forward in the process? (It’s a big day when you get the 200 citations badge, or the 1000 customer five-star ratings badge, or the “sharpshooter” award for a quarter with a perfect Article Quality Index.) The creative folks at Cisco IronPort give contributors of quality content a special KCS owl. To make it more fun, recipients have started dressing their owls to give them their own personalities…for example, here’s a KCS Warrior Owl. Owl bobblehead? Cheap. Enthusiastic participants? Priceless!
We read that KCS is a Team Sport. Can we take that a little more literally, and create teams for cooperative KM play?

I know, we all worry about people “gaming” the system (there’s that word again.) And the caveats about over-rewarding activity still apply. But in our experience, it’s apathy that kills, not enthusiasm.

Game on.

ps – four quick announcements, while I have your attention.

I’ll be headlining a webinar on the ROI of KM next Tuesday.
Also next Tuesday, if you’re in the Bay Area, we have a great Third Tuesday with Cordelia Naumann of Cisco IronPort. She promises to bring an owl.
If you’re coming to TSW in Santa Clara, I’ll be doing a professional development workshop on KCS during the first day. Hit me up if you want a discounted registration to TSW.
In April, DB Kay will be doing a three day KCS Foundations Workshop, also in the Bay Area. Operators are standing by.

Posted in KCS, KM | 4 Comments

Worst customer service email ever?

Posted on February 25, 2011 by David Kay

Readers -

I think a side benefit of writing a service and support blog is having a platform to hold really poor service up for ridicule…right? We’ll get right back to serious topics next week, but in the meantime, let me share the worst customer service email I’ve ever gotten. (At some personal risk, as you’ll see below.)

Quick background: I had a poor experience at EZ Rent-a-Car at LAX this week. I received a survey link, which I dutifully filled out. The survey also had an email address for customer service; I contacted them. (Remember: a complaint is a gift, right?) Here’s the only response I’ve received, which I’m reproducing here verbatim, except for removing the survey links. My comments are in italics.

Dear DAVID KAY,

This is the best part of the email–they got my name right, although it was in all caps. It’s all downhill from here.

Thank you again for choosing E-Z Rent-A-Car, The Best Value in Car Rental, for your car rental needs.

In fact, I think this is the first time they’ve thanked me, so they’re not really thanking me again. And if they looked at my survey, they may find that describing themselves as the “Best Value in Car Rental” may be inappropriate from my perspective.

br />We sincerely appreciate that you have taken the time previously to complete our online survey. If you wish, you may complete the survey again by clicking on the link below.

Nothing says “a focus on quality” quite like random bits of HTML tags in an email. And why do they want me to take the survey again? Is this their way of telling me they deleted my first response? Am I supposed to take it until I provide answers they like? Or does someone have a response rate goal they’re not meeting, and duplicate surveys will help their numbers?

CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE SURVEY

All caps again. Stop yelling.

If the above link does not work, copy and paste the following line into your browser’s address bar:

http://www.e-zrentacar.com/survey.asp?survey_id=(uniqueIDDeleted)

Sincerely,

Customer Care Department

E-Z Rent-A-Car

The information in this email is confidential and may be legally privileged. It is intended solely for the addressee. Access to this email by anyone else is unauthorized. If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution or any action taken or omitted to be taken in reliance on it, is prohibited and may be unlawful.

OK. You send me a form letter telling me I can (re)take a survey, and now you’re threatening me with legal action if I tell people about it? Um, as I am in this blog? I can’t wait for the cease and desist…I’ll be sure to post that, too. Remember, I didn’t ask for this email, so don’t start telling me what I can and can’t do with it.

The contents of this email do not necessarily represent the views or policies of E-Z Rent-A-Car or employees.

They close with my favorite line. It’s an official customer service email, including legal threat, that doesn’t reflect their views or policies, either as individuals or as a company.

I am completely bumfuzzled as to what these people were thinking. Am I right: is this the worst customer service email ever, or do you have an even worse one? Please share in the comments.

Back to KM next week,

David

Posted in Rants | 8 Comments