Effectiveness…The Good ‘E’ Word

I spent 20+ years in the field. I started as a service technician repairing communications equipment in the public safety space. As I am prone to say, “I spent 20 years twisting screws, managing teams that twisted screws and running a QA department that set policy on which screws to twist and how hard to twist them.”  Needless to say, I was in the trenches in a customer facing role and my customers were in the public safety space. For these folks their communications gear was their lifeline and it had to work.

As part of this experience I developed a knack for a near 100% first time fix rate. The fact that I usually stole parts from my own equipment to get the customer back up and operating usually frustrated my dispatcher to no end but the customer was working and that was all that mattered. The upside was not listening to my dispatcher whine for a few hours so it was a win-win situation as far as I was concerned.

During those days in the field I developed excellent troubleshooting skills, the ability to think on my feet, self reliance and an encouraging way of interacting with customers under incredibly stressful situations. There is nothing worse than being woken by the phone ringing at 3 am to a police Watch Commander screaming at you because he can’t contact his officers in the field. Trust me on thist one. They have no sense of humor at that point and ‘fix it yesterday’ is a term they use freely.

My goal in the field, whether it was for me or for the teams I managed, was always the same; how can I be more effective at what I do? There’s no easy answer but the best evidence is out there with your field staff. I will warn you though asking this question will garner the wrath of your mobile workers in a nanosecond if the question is not asked correctly. Pitchforks and torches come to mind.

You never ask a mobile worker how they can be more efficient.

What they will hear is “how much more blood can I squeeze out of this turnip”. Efficient translates to more work. Like the old trick of how many college kids can you cram into a Volkswagen, it may be efficient but it may also be worthless.

Efficiency is more about schedule manipulation than empowering your people to be more successful. Don’t get me wrong, you have to be efficient to make money and stay in business but simply focusing on getting more done in a shorter period of time may make your situation worse. Here’s an example.

An outbound call center that provided up-sell information to existing customers had an “efficiency expert” come and evaluate their processes. Using “industry standard measurements” this expert determined that if the rep could not convince the customer to move to the next step within five minutes they should hang up and move on to the next prospect. On the surface this seems like it might be reasonable. They implemented the change immediately without question (or asking their reps what they thought). After all, we paid this expert a lot of money to take advantage of his experience and help us with best practices.

The result was a disaster.

First call closure rates dropped to single digits, outbound call volume doubled and sales plummeted. In a panic the managers expanded operating hours and took out their stop watches to make sure the reps were following the new directive to the second. No matter what they did things only got worse. Eventually somebody asked why. The answer was very simple but somehow it was overlooked.

In their enthusiastic effort to match industry best practices they neglected to determine how long it took to actually position the new offer with the customer. Some minor analysis revealed that even the most savvy customer talking with the best rep required more than seven minutes of explanation to be able to understand the complex offering well enough to move to the next phase (buy or not). Unfortunately the reps were given only five minutes to cut and run and the few that were taking longer (and being more successful) were being disciplined for not adhering to company policy.

I know what you’re thinking, why didn’t anybody look at this BEFORE they paid some idiot (or expert) to tell them something else? Because critical analysis of what we do is usually left to some unbiased outsider when we have a wealth of information and real experts right at our fingertips.

Asking the reps how they could have been more effective would have been the first place to start.

The reps reported that (prior to the enlightened experts changes) much of the resistance they ran into was related to the complexity of pricing and trying to determine the customer’s actual cost based on the discount formula they had been provided. In many cases the rep used their personal relationship with the customer to get them to buy. This shows how a trusted advisor relationship can help even when the support systems don’t make their jobs easy. Unfortunately the initial focus was on efficiency, not effectiveness so this nugget of wisdom was missed. A simpler pricing structure would have made them more effective and might have lead to more sales.

It’s the same with your mobile workers. Before we embark on some massive efficiency exercise we would do well to ask the field team what they think would make them more effective. Do they need more, less or different inventory in their trucks? Do they need different tools or equipment? Are we saddling them with documentation requirements that provide no added value? Can we streamline the process of data collection? Can any of this be pushed back to the office and cleaned up with a less expensive resource?

I’m not saying there’s no opportunity to be more efficient but with effectiveness comes efficiency, happy employees and happy customers. Can the same be said with just efficiency? You be the judge.

Tags: Brian Philbin, Business Process, Effectiveness, Mobile Futures Today