The Role of HR & Other Departments in Customer Experience

Your customer experience strategy needs the active support of all departments.

Reading about how to improve the Customer Experience (CX) is a great deal like reading about CRM. Most of the discussion seems to be focused on technology, either CRM or Voice of the Customer, when the reality is, that’s only about 20% of the total strategy. I’m not discounting technology, but there’s more to Customer Experience than just rolling out Voice of the Customer software. Relationships need to be built with other departments so that they will do their part in helping your organization implement a successful CX strategy. Here are four factors that impact the CX. Your Human Resources Department plays a make or break roll in every one of them. Other departments such as Legal and Finance also have an influence.

1. Attitude—The attitude your customer facing staff demonstrates is vitally important. At the strategic level your organizational culture is going to be a huge factor in the attitude your employees display. Are you truly customer-focused or moving in that direction, or are you just paying it lip service. Attitude is also impacted by the individual’s personality and professionalism. Employee engagement also drives attitude. All of the above means your Human Resources Department needs to be on board with your customer experience strategy. When hiring, are they screening for the right competencies?

2. Knowledge—Your customer facing staff should also have expertise in product and industry knowledge. Again your HR department comes into play here as they must devise relevant training programs that bring new employees up to speed and keep more experienced employees up to date on industry changes. An effectively managed CRM strategy should be able to help you with your prospect and customer knowledge. The department responsible for CRM software and strategy also needs to be involved.

3. Skills—Your HR department’s trainers should be providing state of the art relevant sales and product training. Harder to train for is the ability of the individual to be an effective listener, to be able to put the customers’ needs before his own. Listening is a mission-critical skill. This is directly impacted by the degree to which your organization is customer-focused.

4. Support-- Just as an operating system like Linux or Windows isn't obvious as it operates behind the scenes, your employees need support from other departments which aren’t always obvious to the customer. This includes departments such as finance (for car dealers) customer support (for copy machine sellers) and legal (ensuring that polices do not conflict with the customer experience). Your organizational culture surfaces here as well since the more you empower your employees to create truly innovative customer experiences, the more liley you are to achieve true customer-focus.

If your customer experience strategy is just seen by others as the responsibility of one department, you could be in for a tough implementation. Gaining support and buy-in from other departments is mission-critical.

Regards,
Glenn

By: Glenn Ross

Water Crisis

Consider how what nightmare it would be if one morning you turned on your tap and nothing comes out except for a frizzing noise, yes the thought is daunting isn't it ? Do you there are around 900 million of people all around world going through what you even can't dare to think!

The global water crisis has touched over 900 million people more or less mostly belonging to developing countries like east Africa and Central India, currently even US has a dire threat of water supply these days. So if you were able to get safe drinking water easily consider yourself truly blessed and do not waste it at any cost.

As we are lucky to have this blessing of getting safe drinking water easily, we often overlook water crisis that has hit people living in the developing countries the hardest. The number of those without clean drinking water as last tallied was 884 million, which is almost 3times the population of United State, is apparently hard to grasp.

To add insult to injury like everything else (including our economic, food, health and climate crises) a poor person has to suffer the most. According to the recent study, by United Nations (UN), a poor person living in a slum is likely to pay five to 10 times more for water than wealthy people living in the same city.

Moreover, women disproportionately affected because they are the ones responsible for getting water each day in most developing countries. In a story for National Geographic, Tina Rosenberg writes about Aylito, a 25-year-old woman who has to walk an hour each way to a dirty stream to collect water for her family — three times a day. There are millions of such stories about women working hours of difficult labor under dangerous conditions to get water for there family.

W4KI.org is non profit organization and trying to help these women in need, by drilling deep wells and boreholes for easy access to clean drinking water so that they can live a happier and better life. Play your part in this kind deed and donate for Clean Drinking water :)



Bert - About the Author:

W4KI.org is working as a non profit organization from USA. It helps by drilling wells and boreholes for those people they don't have access of clean drinking water and save their lives from water causes diseases.

CRM Success by the Numbers – Part 6: Stretch Goals

To really achieve results and ROI with CRM, you have to put metrics in place to enhance and track success. It's a fact that what gets measured gets done. As an added benefit, achieving goals can give everyone involved a feeling of accomplishment so they appreciate that the project is progressing and the time and money hasn’t been wasted.

But the worst thing you can do is to set unrealistic goals or metrics - what some people call “stretch goals.” In my experience, people who like to combine those two words are often the same ones who make unrealistic demands to get a challenging project accomplished in an impractical amount of time with insufficient resources.

Here are some of the “stretch goals” that are often set during CRM rollouts:

• We want 100% data quality
• We have to clean up ALL of lists right away
• Let's put EVERYONE through an hour of classroom training
• We should enter EVERY business development activity
• We are planning to roll out the system to the WHOLE FIRM ALL AT ONCE so we can get immediate results

And, my personal favorite: 

• We have to get ALL of the attorneys to use it – without making ANY additional work for them – and without irritating ANYONE.

Good luck with that one. 

Instead of achieving enhanced results, in most cases, setting these types of “stretch goals” actually ends up being counterproductive. I mean, who is willing to bend over backwards to try to accomplish goals that they don't believe are even achievable… 

Russia and WTO membership: challenges and opportunities for Russia and the EU

By Massimiliano Gobbato

The decision of Russia to engage in negotiations for the World Trade Organisation membership highlighted the fact that the country was undertaking several important steps towards its modernisation and line up with the development pace of the rest of the world. Even though not in the media's spotlight, Russia has eventually reached the stage which should allow Moscow to join the WTO after being an outsider for eighteen years. Despite remaining technical and political issues to sort out, nonetheless Russia was declared a full member at the WTO ministerial meeting which was scheduled from the15th to the 18th of December. The final juridical step was constituted by the Russian Parliament ratification of the agreements in order to formalise the membership. The ratification process would lead to put into force the norms embodied in the accession treaties presumably at the beginning of next year.

An act of detention?

This set of events has been prepared by several acts of detention which have changed the focus of Russia's foreign policy over the past years. Moscow's involvement both in the energy crisis with Ukraine and the war against Georgia, along with the tensions with the US on the missile shield project in Europe as well as several diplomatic crises with Poland have undergone an important qualitative shift which is culminating into the WTO membership. The more smoothed nature of Russian foreign policy with regards to its neighbors could be attributed to the achievements of a new internal and external strategy which have been sustained by EU and US efforts in order to involve Moscow on renewed political and economic streamlines. In addition, the losses that the country has suffered as a consequences of the financial crisis and the fact that a pro-Russian has become President of Ukraine in February 2010 have surely contributed to this evolution.

Apart from the international context, it is of utmost importance to evidence the debate on the foreseen consequences of the WTO membership which would offer Russia the opportunity to rebalance its economy as notably the country's shape relies excessively upon natural resources exports and prices. In fact, the membership promises increased market access for Russian exports under Moscow's agreement on a greater opening of Russia to foreign investors. The global public debate on Russia's advantages and disadvantages of joining the WTO seems to be oriented towards the opinion that Russia will benefit in the medium and long term from this new trade and economic pattern.

Persistent concerns

Some concerns have been raised both upon both the capacity of the Russian economy to offset the disadvantages of firms which would struggle to survive market pressures and, more generally, to what extent a win-win game could be forecasted from the new trade model. Worries have been also pointed out on Russia's capacity to develop rule of law improvements to create a better investing climate and to implement market-oriented reforms, especially on public procurement and property rights. Over the past 5 years, the Russian government has adopted several laws with the rationale of facilitating companies in obtaining registrations, licenses and certificates, as well as to reduce the number bureaucratic ties. According to different authoritative sources, although these reforms have achieved some results in improving business-oriented practices, hurdles have remained heavy and, coupled with persisting corruption, they are actually preventing enterprises establishment and growth both for foreign and Russians investors .

The challenges of WTO membership are nonetheless not limited to economic policy. They also put into question the political model which has shaped Russia in the last ten years. Under the present rule, Russia's 'social contract' has been based on the deal that Russian could have accepted de facto limited-right citizenship over the assurance of political stability, security and an elite-driven wealthiness redistribution. On the contrary, within the WTO deal, Moscow would have a more circumstantiated influence on economic dynamics and progressively fewer controls on the top-down convoy of the country's richness distribution. This model has notably been internally and externally controversial for its consequences on the quality of the democracy. Transitional economics theories and the example of the Central Eastern European transitions have showed the direct link between economic growth and the rule of law, as well as the quality of the institutions. As a result, the challenges ahead for Russia have a solid base within the concerns which this case embodies.

Furthermore, the opponents to the WTO membership and the political elites which are not inclined towards economic liberalism are convinced that, during the recent economic crisis, the coercion of foreign investors in favour of national champions, together with protectionist practices, have demonstrated their effectiveness. In addition, WTO accession talks have been considered a premature political move rather than technical means to improve Russia's welfare. Tariff reductions are in fact perceived as concessions to trade partners instead of tools to increase the quality of trade and enhance competitiveness, while the opening of the economy is considered dangerous to Russian producers, especially in the domains unprepared to open competition, such as agriculture. The debates in Russia seems thus to be clung to the classical dichotomy between liberalism and protectionism and its natural ties with the democratic rule.

Will trade and democracy enforcement go along?

The incontrovertible fact is that a great amount of trade should allow Russia to gain an immediate advantage in terms of capital inflows, especially from the EU. The WTO membership is expected to swiftly boost about 4 billion euros of trade-creation per year coming from the European economy. In addition, the new establishment is forecasted to be immediately mutually beneficial as, on the one hand, the WTO accession should also assure higher accessibility for one of the Russia's main trading partner, namely the European Union, and, on the other, it should facilitate the setting up of a functioning market economy while granting imports' cost reductions. Non contested figures have shown that last year the EU as a whole imported nearly 60 billion euros of goods from Russia, including oil and gas, and it has exported roughly 86 billion worth of manufactured products.

On the Russian side, it results quite clearly that, apart from trade creation inflows, the tariffs lowering could benefit Russian citizens and firms by assuring lower costs to the already present amount of trade. Furthermore, Russia should be able be secure its and import its oil and gas commodities more efficiently and benefiting from tariffs exclusion in all the sectors which have suffered the non-WTO members restrictions. Finally, as reported by the Commission website, ''Russia is the only major international economy which is not yet a member of WTO. Once Russia becomes a member, it will benefit from the rights and obligations set by the multilateral trading system of the WTO, including the possibility of recourse to the intergovernmental trade dispute settlement''.

Both Moscow and Brussels have thus a lot at stake also in consideration both that, in absolute terms, Russia is the third largest export market after the US and China and that the country's internal economic structure and foreign policy have undeniably tangible repercussions not only in the European economy, but also in Europe's neighbourhood stability and democracy enforcement. Russia after Putin re-election seems at a turning point whose outcomes are still unknow. At first glance, the opening of its economic instituions and the emerging of a visible political opposition seems parallel fenomena, nonetheless Russia still gives the impression of remaining monolitical.

The Enduring Leadership Legacy of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was one of those rare souls who will likely be as influential in death as he was in life, because he was a living legend who also left behind an enduring legacy. As Jobs' successor at Apple, Tim Cook, explained "Steve built a company and culture that is unlike any other in the world and we are going to stay true to that – it is in our DNA."

Raised on Cultural and Technological Innovation

That Steve Jobs DNA traces its hereditary roots to Santa Clara County, CA, an area now known as part of Silicon Valley – thanks in large part to Jobs' creative inventions. He spent his childhood there, coming of age at the geographical and social epicenter of the 1960s San Francisco antiestablishment revolution. He was inspired by that historical movement to reexamine the conventional world around him – and to ultimately redesign it with his signature blend of artistry, technology, and people-focused functionality.

Like his lifelong competitor Bill Gates, Jobs attended college for a while but soon dropped out to pursue other passions. He experimented, as did many others of his generation, with everything from spirituality and religion to psychedelia and counterculture. Jobs' favorite band was the Beatles, and following in the footsteps of the Fab Four he trekked to India to pursue his lifelong quest for philosophical answers and to try to satisfy an insatiable curiosity about life.

He was even inspired to name his company Apple, after the Beatles' Apple Corps, a decision that got him sued for brand copyright infringement by his musical heroes. But leaders know how to negotiate challenges and disagreements in ways that make everyone a winner. Jobs did that in legendary fashion, eventually settling the perennial dispute with Apple Corps by signing the music company to an exclusive digital distribution deal with Apple iTunes.

Leading from the Trenches

Jobs not only knew how to turn adversity into success, but also how to transform apparent failure into extraordinary achievement. When the first Apple retail store opened many people derided it as a failure waiting to happen, but within 10 years there were hundreds of wildly profitable Apple stores in prestigious locations.

Jobs also knew how it felt to suffer the private disappointment and public humiliation of being tossed out of his own company in the mid 1980s. Rather than retreat in bitterness or compete out of spite, however, he accepted an invitation to return and revive Apple from the verge of ruin and bankruptcy. With outstanding determination he quickly repositioned the floundering company as the most admired, respected, and valuable technology leader in the world.

Jobs also appreciated the value of leading by coaching and encouraging, and he gave supportive credit to his teams for Apple's amazing revival. To ensure that such dynamic interpersonal mentorship from the trenches could continue within the ranks of an ever-expanding organization, he wisely opened the groundbreaking Apple University.

"This is not a one-man show," he pointed out to BusinessWeek Magazine. "What's reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there's a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they're not losers. What they didn't have was a good set of coaches, a good plan."

Launching the "I" Generation

Jobs exemplified leadership creativity, and he himself said that the quality that distinguishes leaders from followers is innovation. "Apple is about people who think outside the box," he told Time Magazine, "people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done."

The products that Apple has launched have revolutionized not only the workplace but also our homes, the way we interact socially, and the way we view our relationship with technology.

"A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them," Jobs said in a BusinessWeek interview. But Apple customers always recognized and resonated with those fantastic tools when Jobs unveiled them. That's because he and his enterprise made sophisticated science user-friendly, and they made necessary technology sleek, elegant, fun, and sexy.

Not one to rest on his laurels, Job continued to take calculated risks beyond his comfort zone, right up until the end. "I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good," he told NBC in 2006, "then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next."

An Undying Leadership Legacy

Jobs lived life on his own terms, and by doing so he left a magnificent sustainable legacy. "Your time is limited so don't waste it living someone else's life," he famously said.

In his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005, Jobs advised new graduates, "Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on."

Meanwhile Jobs explained that all external expectations and fears of embarrassment or failure fall away in the face of death. What is left is what is truly important, he realized, which is why he stressed that there is no reason not to follow your heart.

"Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me," he told the Wall Street Journal. "Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful, that's what matters to me."

The announcement of Steve Jobs' passing on the Apple website expressed our sentiments succinctly and eloquently. "Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius," it said, "and the world has lost an amazing human being."



Sarah Hathorn - About the Author:

Sarah Hathorn, AICI CIP, CPBS is an internationally distinguished executive coach, corporate consultant, professional speaker, and the founding CEO of her own company, Illustra Consulting. A career acceleration and leadership presence expert, Hathorn created the innovative Predictable Promotion System, a 10-step proprietary process she uses to coach managers aspiring to be directors, directors seeking vice presidential promotions, and VP's eager to ascend to the C-suite. Hathorn served as a senior level executive for a Fortune 100 company for 25 years, and she has more than 30 years of experience mentoring high potentials for rapid career advancement and extraordinary success.

Get your FREE CD – "5 Steps to a Fast, Predictable Promotion" at http://www.illustraconsulting.com/subscribe

Website & Blog: www.illustraconsulting.com

Phone 800-267-3245 Email: info@illustraconsulting.com

Copyright © 2006 – 2012, Sarah Hathorn, AICI CIP, CPBS

Become a Champion of Change

By Andrew Horton

The most well-known distinction between a manager and a leader is found in the fact that managers are great at maintaining direction or managing processes, whilst leaders are able to influence people and move an organisation in a new direction. Managers are thus able to steer the ship, whilst leaders are able to plot the course. These constantly changing times we now live in, have made managers redundant, any business, which wants to thrive and even survive, in the new age of constant and rapid change, must be filled with leaders, at every level in the organisation.

Managers were able to manage systems and maintain the direction of businesses in the past. All business today need to be flexible and be able to rapidly change direction, so that they can work within the changing environment they face every day. Any business, which wants to still be around five years from now, needs a competent leader at the helm. In times of change, like we are facing right now, people always seek out more and better leaders. The leaders, who will thrive in this new environment and who will be the most sought after, understand the fact that any change, needed in their organisation, must start with them first. Mahatma Gandhi said it so well when he said "We must be the change that we envision." and Tolstoy said, "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."

If you are a leader, who wants to successfully lead your organisation in these turbulent times, which I believe is the new norm, you must accept that all change starts and ends with you. If you want anything around you to change, you must change. When you are the example of the change you want and need in your organisation, people will support you as the leader and introduce the change needed. No leader can change anyone else. The only person who can change himself or herself is himself or herself. I know this sounds really simplistic and obvious, but too many leaders think that they can change the people in their organisation. As a leader you are responsible to lead the people who follow you and positively influence them. You can never be responsible for them and the way they think, feel and just are.

No one can ever change anyone else, unless they want to change and they choose to make the change themselves. As a leader you are responsible for teaching the people in your team good leadership, for sharing things that can add value to their lives, guiding, growing and evolving them, but the people in your teams are the only ones, who can take responsibility to change themselves.

As a leader the best way to encourage the people around you to embrace change, is to stop hoping things will change and to lead the necessary change, by changing yourself first. Once the leader has embraced the necessary change, he or she must encourage people to see the importance of change and to lead them to start the necessary change within themselves. You must encourage and show all the people in your teams that change is an inside job. Change is a door that opens from within.

When you as the leader can influence the people within your teams to start making the personal changes necessary, to support the changes in your environment and they understand that the change must start with them, you will have discovered a fantastic tool for managing and thriving in these new changing times. Change is the new normal and just the way things are today. When everyone in your team becomes a part of the solution in your organisation and they are willing to make the personal changes needed, to thrive in these rapidly evolving and changing times. You have discovered the winning formula to play a winning game and you and your organisation get to become a champion of change.

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Powerful, Successful, Ambitious Women

For more than 30 years I've coached and mentored women who are top-caliber Fortune 500 executives and high-level entrepreneurs. Meanwhile during that whole time I was either a Fortune 100 senior executive or the founding CEO of my own successful consulting firm. Many things have changed for women in the workplace over the years, but as the saying goes "the more things change, the more they stay the same." What I'm referring to here is the sad fact that, even in this advanced era of the 21st century, negative stereotypes about women in executive positions stubbornly persist.

The one that most often comes to mind is that if you are a woman and you are powerful within the business community then it must mean that you are also self-centered and egocentric.

So let me set the record straight. The most successful women leaders I know are actually just the opposite, because they derive their power from an ability to make the women and men around them more successful and powerful. Women who are the strongest executives, in other words, didn't get there by being concentrated primarily on themselves and their own needs. They achieved leadership stardom because they focus instead on how to develop and empower their employees and teams while giving those colleagues increased autonomy and responsibility.

Great female leaders don't hoard power and influence. They delegate it and they also coach and mentor others who do not yet have it but have the desire to accelerate their careers and accomplish their dreams.

Iconic female executives don't compete with their team members; they champion them and their accomplishments. They praise team members and employees to upper management to help them get the recognition and promotions they deserve. They mentor, guide, and develop others every step of the way, being completely unselfish about sharing their own expertise, experience, and honest narrative of how they got to where they are in life. They don't present themselves as the center of attention, in other words, but they shine the limelight on those around them. The best of them also show their vulnerable, personal, so-called "softer side" to let those around them know that they are human and imperfect.

Powerful women become powerful, and retain their power, by helping to empower others – not by being egomaniacs focused on their own self-aggrandizement and power-grabbing strategies.

To state it simply, powerful women put other people first.

Next time you hear this kind of stereotyping or feel that it is being directed toward you, don't let it get under your skin and into your head where it can turn into anger, resentment, or negative mental chatter. Keep doing what you're doing, helping others improve their performance, productivity, value, and work/life balance.

Those people – the ones whose lives and careers you enhance by your tireless and selfless work – recognize who you really are, and they respect and celebrate you for it day-in and day-out. They are the ones who will make sure that your leadership legacy in this world vanquishes these silly and baseless stereotypes about women in positions of power.


Sarah Hathorn - About the Author:

Sarah Hathorn, AICI CIP, CPBS is an internationally distinguished executive coach, corporate consultant, professional speaker, and the founding CEO of her own company, Illustra Consulting. A career acceleration and leadership presence expert, Hathorn created the innovative Predictable Promotion System, a 10-step proprietary process she uses to coach managers aspiring to be directors, directors seeking vice presidential promotions, and VP's eager to ascend to the C-suite. Hathorn served as a senior level executive for a Fortune 100 company for 25 years, and she has more than 30 years of experience mentoring high potentials for rapid career advancement and extraordinary success.

Get your FREE CD – "5 Steps to a Fast, Predictable Promotion" at http://www.illustraconsulting.com/subscribe

Website & Blog: www.illustraconsulting.com

Phone 800-267-3245 Email: info@illustraconsulting.com

Copyright © 2006 – 2012, Sarah Hathorn, AICI CIP, CPBS