Managing Knowledge Through Culture and Technology

Following on from my previous point that surfacing and sharing knowledge could be a crucial factor in survival right now, the underlying enabler in leveraging this knowledge is culture. If your organisation doesn't already have a knowledge sharing and evolution culture, then all the information you store is only of limited use.

The typical view amongst many culture change consultants is that culture is about people and therefore all change strategies must focus entirely on human structures. A business issue. Behaviours, communications and processes; not technology. The vertical split in function and skills dividing business and technology in most commercial and consulting environments, compounds this division and embeds it into our ways of thinking.

The reason I make this point is that we live in a time where technology and human behaviour are so closely inter-twined, even for those who consider themselves technophobes, that ignoring one or the other just increases the difficulties in changing culture.

Technology by its nature is an enabler, facilitating our ability to do virtually everything, all the way from computing and working to socialising and entertainment. A great example of technology driving culture is the way social utilities like Facebook have single-handedly raised the web literacy of a whole generation.

If leveraged sensibly then, technology can greatly facilitate and speed up culture change around knowledge management by providing a directional platform that removes the barriers to sharing and evolving knowledge, driving new behaviours and ways of thinking that over time become embedded into organisational norms i.e. culture.

The key here is to think of change as a journey, rather than a big bang - if you want it to be painless anyway! People need time to learn and adapt so my suggestion is to approach the development of knowledge sharing in terms of maturity, where technology supported by a change programme evolves the immature information capture state towards more complex social interaction around knowledge and innovation at the end of the journey.

The following is a Knowledge Management Maturity Model I've sketched out to illustrate what I mean:

Customer Experience Pt 2 - Identifying and Managing Culture

Post series written by Andrew McMillan (Principal Consultant at Charteris specialising in customer experience). Before joining Charteris, Andrew had a 28 year career with John Lewis and spent the last eight years of that career being responsible for the quality of service and selling across the UK department stores.


Last time I attempted to put into some context the importance of business culture in the overall operating model and consequent customer experience. In this piece I hope to give some thoughts as to how it can be identified and managed to positive effect.

So what is culture?

In the simplest of terms it’s ‘the way we do things around here’. There have been many academic studies on the subject but, in my view, intellectualising the subject is unlikely to help a business shape its culture from an operational perspective. What most of the studies agree on is that a culture is created from an amalgam of the businesses’ activities both past and current which will include: stories of previous events, organisational structure, how power is disseminated or not within the organisation, symbols such as management parking spaces, dining rooms etc, leadership style and many more depending which study you happen to read.

In essence though, it does amount to ‘the way we do things around here’ but how do you shape that in practical terms and what is a good or not so good culture?

Shaping Culture

Well, that all depends on what you are trying to achieve in the organisation which is where it gets so complicated. However, considering what sort of culture you want to create in the organisation is an essential starting point and one many organisations ignore. Perhaps it would help to give a couple of, admittedly extreme, examples to illustrate the point: I don’t want a junior surgeon to be creative or empowered if they are operating on me, nor do I want a troop of soldiers to feel empowered to question orders in a battle situation. BUT, and this is the challenging bit, I do want a senior medical practitioner to be imaginative and creative as that is how advances in learning are made and likewise I would want our senior military figures to be creative in their strategy and tactics as that is often how battles are won. So the culture you create very much depends on what you have to achieve in the organisation and, in the examples I have given, this may even change for different parts of the organisation.

Fortunately many organisations aren’t responsible for the nation’s defence or advances in medical science so it can be a little more straightforward!

An Illustration

Let’s go back to the small business I talked about in the last piece. The owner is initially the only employee and is likely to have a clear idea of how the business is to interact with its customers and have a passion for the success of the business. This may be as simple as being efficient and polite, but it may include thinking creatively to offer a very personalised service, or wanting to be known for being informal and especially welcoming or some other point of differentiation the owner has identified. The culture won’t be explicitly articulated because it doesn’t need to be – it’s in the owner’s head!

As the business finds the culture is successful and appealing to its customers it will grow and the owner will recruit more people. The people recruited are likely to share the owner’s own views and attitudes just in the same way as we subconsciously choose friends with whom we have common views and attitudes. The new recruits are also likely to have an affinity for the business and a passion for it to succeed or they wouldn’t have been recruited in the first place. So, we now have a business of 10 employees all of whom know the owner and work closely with them on a day to day basis, being kept abreast of new developments and thinking as the business grows. If the recruitment has been done with care, these ten people will share some common views, attitudes and approaches to the organisation that will bind them together as a cohesive unit with a real sense of common purpose and a desire for the business to succeed. Nothing will have explicitly been done to shape the culture, but implicitly the workforce will have come together as a group of like-minded individuals.

So far, so good but what happens when the business gets really successful and grows to 100 employees?

Managing Culture

At 100 employees, the latest recruit often won’t have a close relationship with the owner and is less likely to have been personally recruited by them. They may well be working to pay a mortgage, support a family, buy a new car or whatever else, but it is unlikely they will automatically share the passion the owner has for the business. And that’s with just 100 people! When you get to 1000, 10,000 or 100,000 the recruitment and its leadership can be so far removed from the original aims of the business that the people making the recruitment decisions may not be clear about the owner’s original overall aims, let alone the views and attitudes the people they are recruiting should have to achieve them.

So, at what point does the culture move from something implicit to require explicit shaping and leadership? I don’t believe there is a definitive answer for that question, but it is likely to be the stage at which the business has got to a size at which the latest recruit does not have day to day contact with the owner. At that point the owner needs to stop, think carefully and clearly about the views and attitudes that have made the business successful to date and how to ensure they are replicated with every new employee and frequently reinforced for the existing employees. Sounds simple and perhaps obvious, but it rarely seems to actually happen which can be very damaging as it’s so much harder to change a large organisation’s culture when it has become firmly established than it is to shape it as the organisation builds.

So, I hope I have provoked some thoughts about the culture of a business and how it can be identified and shaped to be a great attribute or, as is often the case, how it can be very damaging to the future well-being and growth of an organisation. Next time we will look at how you define or actively start to change an existing organisation’s culture.

Customer Experience Pt 1 - Introduction

Post series written by Andrew McMillan (Principal Consultant at Charteris specialising in customer experience). Before joining Charteris Andrew had a 28 year career with John Lewis and spent the last eight years of that career being responsible for the quality of service and selling across the UK department stores.

This series of blogs is about what it takes for any organisation to deliver a consistent and distinctly identifiable quality of service through its employees. I would welcome, and will respond to, any comments or thoughts of your own that you may wish to add as we go.

Delivering Customer Satisfaction

I want to start by putting the customer experience factor (or whatever you might choose to call it) into some context with other business activity.

In simplistic terms the customer experience and consequential satisfaction or otherwise of a customer delivered by any organisation can be divided into 3 key areas:

1. The competiveness/desirability/relevance of the product or services the organisation is providing.
   
2. The effectiveness of the systems or processes to deliver that product or service to a customer, in other words – how easy are you to do business with?
   
3. The way the staff in the organisation interact with its customers, ideally leaving them feeling they have been treated as an individual rather than being part of a process and, when appropriate, genuinely cared for.
   

If you were starting your own business tomorrow it would probably be because you felt you had an idea for a product, proposition or service that nobody else, or nobody else in your area, offered. Possibly this might be offering better quality or price than any existing potential competitors too. Consequently that has to be the starting point for all organisations as it must be the reason for their very existence. If the product or services you are offering don’t represent an attractive proposition for your target customers the organisation is destined for failure.

What’s next?

Well there is no point in having a great product or service if your customers find it easier to do business with your competitors. The systems and processes are very important as in a time pressed world nobody appreciates confusion, complication or errors. The knowledge and advice you are able to impart about your product or service are also very important as you will be perceived as an expert in what you do and customers will want to trust your advice.

Finally, you are really going to look after your customers and care about them individually as you will want the business to grow. Consequently you will want your customers to come back and bring their friends because they have enjoyed dealing with you.

So, all pretty obvious stuff, and even more obvious if you are still thinking of a small business where the owner is the person the customers interact with. Of course you are going to be easy to do business with and you are going to care about your customers and leave them feeling good about the transaction because you have a vested interest in making the business succeed.

What happens when the organisation grows to 100 employees? Well, the product or service will remain the same or perhaps diversify a little and the owner is still likely to be driving the development. The systems and processes may have become more complex as the organisation has grown but, to a large extent, the logistical challenges of the growth will have ensured the processes have developed in tandem.

So what about the people and customer experience they deliver?

Intentionally or accidentally, the organisation will have developed its own culture and that will have a significant effect on how its customers are treated as the owner will no longer be dealing with each customer personally. That will affect how those customers perceive the business when they interact with it. However, because the culture of a business is less tangible than its products, services or processes it is often the case that there is less overt awareness of how the evolving internal culture can affect customer service. This can often be to the detriment of the business as a whole, which is why I believe we have such a reputation for poor service in the UK.

So, I hope I have put business culture into some degree of context within the overall operating model. Next time we shall look at culture and how you can positively shape it in a large organisation.

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Contact - andrew.mcmillan@charteris.com

Customer Advocacy through Compelling Customer Experience

What percentage of value-add activity are you achieving in your customer facing operations?
If less than 80%, then it is time for action

How many of your front-line staff can answer the question “how have I added value to customer experience today?”If less than 90%, then there is too much wasted effort and higher than necessary costs

Do your customer facing people and systems consistently help & drive enhanced customer experience?
If you are not very sure then there is a compelling case for a “voice of the customer” review of your systems and processes

Are your customer-facing staff systems and product experts or customer problem solvers?
If just experts then they – and therefore your organisation – will benefit from being problem solvers

How do you spot and remove barriers to rich customer experience and people motivation? Find out about “voice of the customer” at www.charteris.com/what_we_do/customer_centricity/

Making banking customers' experience compelling whilst cutting costs

"Your call is important to our bank; we’ll be with you as soon as possible....in the meantime here is some mind numbing music"

Ten years ago or so banks like many other major businesses recognised the opportunity to cut costs by directing more customers away from higher cost, face-to-face channels to call centres. They wanted to maximise the use of centralised customer contact centres to deliver a more efficient, consistent and auditable service. However, in the pursuit of cost reduction these organisations lost sight of the most important factor: the customer experience.

No business can afford to provide excellent customer service at any cost. But equally, no business can afford to ignore the importance of customer satisfaction.

Call centre cost reduction strategies like off-shoring or technology outsourcing have failed because they focus almost exclusively on improving the bottom line. They have not properly considered the implications for enterprise processes and management approaches and, more importantly, have not focused on the customer. So, anticipated financial and operational benefits have not been fully realised and customers remain largely dissatisfied i.e. a vicious circle.

Customer dissatisfaction has led to many institutions reversing their earlier decisions to offshore call centre operations. In their adverts many banks now make a point of having UK based call centres.

But cost savings and service improvements do not have to be mutually exclusive. If the customer experience is placed at the heart of a business transformation programme, opportunities can arise to improve both customer service levels and cut waste.

The Art of Possible:
There are three layers of corporate process that fundamentally drive performance excellence in a contact centre. They are contact centre strategy, operational planning and tactical execution. The strategic thinking, business analysis, detailed planning and communication that occur at each of these layers must be highly integrated from both the bottom up and the top down.

Only then will banks be able to determine where they are going – and have confidence in the belief that they are really going to be able to get there.

Saving costs and improving customer experience need not be mutually exclusive.

At Charteris we have customer centric contact centre expertise with experience gained in some of the country’s largest and most successful contact centres.

hoss.atri@charteris.com

Multi Channel Retailing - Putting the Customer First - Part 7 - Creating Agility......The end goal

Putting it altogether; the IT, the business organisation and a service oriented architecture, will provide a retailer with:

• an IT architecture that allows change, rather then dictating what changes can be made.
• a business that is geared to meet the needs of the channels and ultimately its customers
• a multi-channel platform that will last, adapt and perform

In summary, multi-channel retailers require agility and in delivering these key assets, a retailer can acquire the lasting agility that will differentiate them in the marketplace. Agility can be measured in many ways but there are some simple measures to consider in assessing just how agile a retailer really is. For instance, how long would it take to do the following:

• introduce a new range or products across one or more channels?
• open a new channel (such as a concession or mobile commerce platform)?
• react to a competitors promotion?
• introduce regional pricing and promotions?
• introduce differential pricing across channels?
• start marketing internationally

If the answer to any of these is “longer than my competitors”, then there is room for improvement. Taking the customer centric approach will shortcut many of the hurdles in assessing what needs to be done and partnering with Charteris is a firm step towards creating agility.

The Charteris Approach
At Charteris we define Customer Centricity as “the alignment of organisational structure, processes and technology to deliver products and services to internal and external customers in the most agile way.” Applying this to multi-channel retailing is what we do best and have wide experience in making this not just a theoretical exercise, but making it real.

Mobile Banking and Payments Innovations

The Demise of Cheques?

When did you last write a cheque? The average person in the UK now receives less than seven cheques per year. In 1990, 11 million cheques were issued per day, in 2008 the daily volume is approximately 4million cheques and APACS estimates that in eight years time there will be only 2.5 million cheques per day.

Non-paper based payments like direct debits, direct credits and cards have reduced the need for cheques. Insurance claims are now settled via direct bank transfers or pre-paid cards for the smaller amounts. You can now draw larger amounts over the counter at your bank branch using your chip and pin card as your proof of ID. So, why are there still 4 million or so cheques issued a day?

The main culprits include person to person and person to small business payments. This is because as yet there is no infrastructure in place in the UK to provide an electronic payments system for these payment types.

Now with the new UK Faster Payment Service - you can get the latest updates here – ramping up, the industry has taken the first step towards the eventual elimination of cheques. All that is required next is for your banks to enable you to download from their mobile banking site a mobile payment application that becomes a function of your mobile banking service.
OK, there is more to the technology jigsaw puzzle than my “all you need” but it is not rocket science either. A main component will be a bank and mobile operator agnostic database that securely stores you m- credentials and keeps these up to date. There are also a few governance, security, privacy and exception management considerations to iron out.

But m-payments will be a compelling win-win proposition for payers, for beneficiaries and great for the banks’ relationship with their customers. It has the potential for the banks to innovate new customer centric experiences for all of their customers.

Who needs cheques now? Imagine.... you can pay “Joe the plumber” for fixing your pipes by pressing a few buttons on your mobile and by the time he finishes saying thank you he gets confirmation of settlement from his bank on his mobile..same mobile also tells him that he should now transfer some money to his personal account to avoid going into the red.

The British a nation of shopkeepers? More like a nation of bankers.

Multi Channel Retailing - Putting the Customer First - Part 6 - The Customer Centric Approach

In gearing any part of an organisation to deliver a service, whether it be technology, system, process or people related, an understanding of the customer is vital. For example, a retailer who also provides white label channels has not only the end consumer to consider, but also the partner organisations to whom they provide white label solutions. Similarly, merchandisers, graphic designers and cataloguers servicing more than one channel can consider each channel as a customer. When an organisation starts to think along theses lines, about who their customer really is, then the implementation of a service led philosophy becomes an easier task. Underpinning this approach is taking a considered view of the customer in order to understand their motivations, behaviour, likes and dislikes.

Taking a customer centric approach enables each area to focus on delivering exactly what the customer wants. Critically analysing processes, systems and related functional areas and determining their effectiveness in delivering customer service is at the heart of the customer centric approach. Breaking down each element and step of a process and stripping out those that do not add value to the customer can create efficiencies and benefits across the organisation. In doing this, the multi-channel retailer can create a framework of services that is ultimately geared towards the customer rather than the requirements or functions of a particular channel or technology.

Can banks cut more costs without risking customer service ?

Cost reduction through improving operational efficiency has been a consistent goal of financial services organisations. Techniques such as Lean have been adopted with significant success in many organisations.

However, recent research indicates that the pure application of such techniques, which were originally designed for the manufacturing sector, can be detrimental to customer experience when applied to service organisations.

In essence, process optimisation motivated primarily by a desire for cost reduction can lead to decisions which are detrimental to customer service.

Meanwhile , the behaviour of the financial services consumer continues to evolve; more sophisticated, more demanding and more likely to complain or transfer their business if their expectations are not met. Simultaneously, financial services organisations are recognising the true lifetime value of customer retention; looking to cross-sell and up-sell to their existing customer base.

In this context, what financial services organisations need is the confidence that their business critical process change programmes will enhance customer experience not acting to its detriment.

The key to drive business change successfully is direct and continuous engagement of the customer within the change process. Customers are the ultimate arbiters of the success of change initiatives – their “voice” can not only be a compelling reason for change but, properly engaged, an extremely effective shaper of that change.

Chaos reigns in the world of spreadsheets

Thanks to its relative ease of use, flexibility and low unit cost Excel has matured to become the most pervasive business tool for risk modelling, financial analysis and reporting applications. But Excel’s perceived ease of use and flexibility have become both its strengths and its weakness.

In many instances though Excel models operate outside normal governance and control mechanism, giving rise to increased risk of failures in such critical areas as valuations, assessments, premiums, trading and financial reporting.

At the other end of the scale, many enterprise risk and financial modelling services are hard coded into line of business or specialist applications. The process for defining and changing these services is complex, time consuming and expensive. Typically it impacts a range of systems and requires lengthy interactions between subject matter experts (e.g. risk analysts, financial analysts, researchers and statisticians) and IT development teams.

Often this results in:

• Poor time to market for new deals,
• higher than necessary development costs
• Less than optimum productivity

In my view the effective solution is effective spreadsheet management requires a risk framework encompassing

• spreadsheet lifecycle and content management and version control
• quality assurance, security and access control
• regulatory and corporate compliant business processes
• access to information required for reporting

..... will continue