Giving Effective Feedback – one of life’s skills

Posted on April 8, 2016February 16, 2017 by Janet Webb

1 – Why are you giving feedback? What do you want to happen as a result?

The art of giving effective feedback is a skill that we are not born with and many never develop. Yet giving good feedback is quite a simple tool that can have enormous benefits. Here are 5 pointers to help you on your way. One of the most effective questions that we can ask ourselves in any situation is “what is it that I am trying to achieve?” yet we often don’t think about this at all. When going into a meeting, phoning up a client or supplier or booking some time with a colleague, being clear about what we want to happen is essential if we are to make the most of it. This is also true for giving feedback, whether it is to an employee, your friend or your bank manager. Why are you giving this person the feedback? There are many good reasons for doing so – to change their unhelpful behaviour, help them to grow, encourage them to carry on – but you need to be clear about this before you start. If you can’t come up with a good reason, then maybe there isn’t one.

Just getting things off your chest is not a good reason for giving feedback and is potentially damaging.

2 – People always behave rationally. Always.

Their behaviour makes sense to them at that moment. Just because it doesn,t make sense to you doesn’t change this. You may never know for sure why a person has behaved the way they did. In fact, even if they explain it to you, you still wont necessarily get it. All we can ever know is what we actually see and hear.

So what is the answer? Objectivity – describing only what you can see or hear, not the stuff under the waterline (thoughts, feelings and beliefs) and keeping it factual. To do this well you have to take notice.

Your employee, Bob, is often late for work, which is unhelpful for a variety of reasons. You could tell him that he is slack. However, he may a) not understand what you mean, after all when he gets in he always works hard or b) feel angry that you have been so rude (which you have, by the way.)

You might try harder and say that he is often late. Bob may counter with “when am I? I was in early yesterday; you just didn’t see me until later.” This may or may not be true and if you have no facts to hand it is difficult to get back to the feedback. However, if you say “you were late three times last week and 4 times the week before” then you are on firm ground and Bob has to respond.

3 – Positive feedback is just as important.

If you tell people factually what it is that they have done well then they can reproduce it. Saying to a colleague “you’re great to work with” might be nice and encouraging but it is hard to do “great”. The chances are the person doesn’t know which bit of their working style you like. However, a statement such as “when thre is a problem that you have identified, I like the way that you think of solutions rather than just dumping it on me2 is much more powerful and will encourage them to carry on.

4 – Explain why it is an issue?

As well as making a statement about what has happened, explain why it matters and when appropriate tell them how you feel. If you explain to Bob that being late causes a problem with scheduling the jobs in the morning and that you feel frustrated having to spend the first half hour of each day trying to find him he is much more likely to do something about it. On the other hand, if it doesn’t actually matter then don’t say anything. If Bob wears red shoes that annoy you, but they don’t stop him doing his job, that is something you’ll just have to accept. As stated, getting it off your chest is not a good reason for giving feedback.

5 – What is it that you want?

The purpose of feedback is to give people the chance to improve. You do this by letting them know what you want them to stop and what you want them to do (or to carry on doing.) Be clear about it. Explain what behaviour you do want. What is it that you want from Bob? to be on time most days – at least 4 out of 5 to be in on time every day without fail to let you know when he gets in to make up the lost time somehow As for his annoying red shoes? Some things you just have to put up with.

Maximising Your First Contact With A New Client

Posted on April 8, 2016February 16, 2017 by Janet Webb

It is a well-worn clich‌é that you never get a second chance to make a first impression;

Well-worn but true.

All good clients were once new contacts so it makes sense to try and make that first impression as positive as possible. Here are a few thoughts on how to do just that.

1 – Plan your desired outcome.

What is it that you want to happen as a result of this first meeting? Be very clear about this as it is going to influence the decisions that you make about how you communicate, when, where and what you communicate and what other things need considering.

2 – Stand in their shoes.

Clients buy when they are confident that the product or service meets their needs. They will have explicit concerns such as “does this widget do the job?” but also implicit concerns such as “can I trust this person?” You can help your client feel confident by anticipating what needs they have. If you identify a need and can demonstrate how you satisfy it then you are not just building a relationship but you are making yourself valuable to them.

3 – Know their business.

Make it your business to have some understanding about their business – the culture, the pressures, what’s new, who their clients are. This will help you build rapport. Rapport comes when two people sense that they have a joint understanding about something.

4 – Have some humility.

Demonstrate that you are interested in them by asking questions and listening carefully to their answers. Don’t use the first meeting to brag about how clever you are – your client isn’t stupid. They’ll soon work out if you know your stuff or not. Sell yourself by making the client the focus. If you are speaking more than you are listening then you are getting the balance wrong.

5 – Manage your internal dialogue.

If you approach your client telling yourself how bad it is going to go, then that’s how it will go; you have rehearsed failure. Walk into the meeting with some positive thoughts in your mind and rehearse for success.

6 – Get the basics right.

However, none of the above matters if you use the wrong name, make an assumption about their business that is off the mark, give them shoddy marketing material, turn up late or be rude to the receptionist. It also wont help your cause if you bad mouth the competition, talk about politics, sex or religion, or make a promise that you can’t keep. And don’t expect anyone to be receptive at 4 o-clock on a Friday afternoon.

Customer Service vs. Customer Focus

Posted on April 8, 2016October 4, 2021 by Janet Webb

What’s the difference between customer service and customer focus? Answer? Excellence.

Good customer service includes being polite and friendly, going the extra mile, fulfilling your promises, making sure that your systems are easy for the customer to use and that information is accessible and relevant. But really excellent customer service includes something more; Customer Focus.

Customer Service Question 1

Who are your customers? The first thing to remember is that you are not delivering a service or product to a customer. (Or a client, patient, service user or passenger etc.) You are delivering a service to Jon or Susan or Mrs Miggins or Shareef or Doctor Braun or Great Aunt Winnie. They never cease being these things, even when they are on the phone to you, looking through your catalogue or walking into your shop. Their priorities, experience, likes and dislikes will always be there. If you don’t allow for this, then you are immediately letting them down. Letting down the controllers of your income is not a good business strategy. So think carefully about who they really are and design your business processes accordingly. That includes giving permission to your staff to see customers as people. Real people, with unique likes, needs and wants.

Customer Service Question 2

What do they also want? Hopefully we can easily deliver what customers want. If we are smart we deliver what they also want. To do this we need to analyse what is ticking their boxes and what is wrinkling their noses. Face to face businesses have the advantage here but only if they use that advantage. Businesses need to exercise some sensitivity – what NLP practitioners call sensory acuity; using your senses to pick up subtle clues from the other person about how they are feeling. You then need to test out and act on your findings. Your policy should be to treat each customer individually. For on-line businesses this is proving more difficult. Being told what other customers also bought can be irritating, though occasionally quite amusing.

Customer Service Question 3

What do they need? This is where real customer focus comes in and makes the difference. Customer focus is stepping into the shoes of your customer and asking the questions that they need to ask. “Do you care about my situation? Can I trust what you are saying? Will this product work with other products that I use? Is this going to be too expensive for me? What else do I need to make this work?” Suppose a lady comes into your shop wanting a new handbag to take to a swanky party this evening. She may have a thoroughly pleasant time with the sales assistant selecting just the right one and leave your shop delighted with her purchase. If, however, when she gets home there isn’t room in her new bag for her purse and she ends up using her old faithful, not only will she not like the bag anymore she will also not like your shop. You on the other hand will never know that you missed the chance to sell a purse or that you’ve just lost a good customer for ever.

Only by answering question 3 will you be giving excellent customer service.

To Comma Or Not To Comma: that is the question.

Posted on April 8, 2016February 16, 2017 by Janet Webb

Communication with customers has never been easier. But is it better?

In The Good Old Days

Before the 1970s senior managers and directors had secretaries to handle their written communication. These employees had undergone training at secretarial school, had done their apprenticeships in the dreaded typing pool and had earned positions of trust, through experience and skill. Letters would be dictated, typed to a high standard, presented for approval and signing, and then posted. Quality was high but it came with a cost and could be very slow.

Hoorah For Technology!

The 70’s brought in word processing and things became slightly quicker and cheaper. The 80’s saw the development of spell checking software which began to undermine the professional secretarial role, and then we arrived in the 90’s! This is where things really started to change because suddenly managers had PCs on their desks and they could write their own letters. Brilliant! The secretaries left, along with their learning, and directors started to manage their own post. It wasn’t just letters either. In the past if you wanted a sign for your business you would have hired a signwriter who, like the secretaries of old, had been trained and apprenticed. Now the cheaper, faster option is to plug your wording into an on-line form and a couple of days later your lovely, shiny sign arrives.

Is This Good News?

It certainly has been sold as such but a quick browse through the World Wide Web shows you that businesses can be exceptionally careless with their reputation and unfortunately grammatical nasties abound. The invention of the internet, laptops, tablets and smart phones hasn’t helped this decline either. Communicating with the world is the remit of employees who haven’t had a grammar lesson since they were about 12 and certainly have never had training in good communications. In addition communication with the customer has been transformed with the introduction of social media. Now directors are tweeting and updating to all and sundry whilst stuck in traffic queues, sitting on the loo or enduring boring meetings. This constant feed is not necessarily better but there certainly is a lot of it. Nevermind the quality, feel the width. Meanwhile your laser printed sign has been hung, complete with the spelling mistake or grammatical error that you didn’t notice when you filled in the form and you don’t notice now. Not until someone (your viewing public) points it out to you. Too late.

Should We Care?

It is astonishing how the drive for speed and cost cutting has trampled over quality. In addition, the pursuit of new customers through social media has blinded some companies to the need for good old-fashioned quality control. I received an e-mail a few months ago inviting me to spend my money on a training course that was going to pay me great dividends. However the e-mail was full of careless grammar and spelling mistakes that made reading really hard work. One of the typos was so bad that it changed the meaning of a sentence to something entirely different. Why should I pay money to an organisation that cares so little about itself and its products? Should we care about good grammar? Yes, if it is going to affect our business and what our customers think about us. And there lies the heart of the problem.

Rules Are There For A Reason

The rules of English are there to help us be clear in our communication. They are not there just to keep English teachers in work and give grammar bullies something to get steamed up about. I am not advocating a linguistic prescription that tries to standardise everything, leading us into an Orwellian world. I am advocating the careful use of the rules if they help understanding and make life easier for the reader. Ignoring good grammar is like not caring what you wear. Possibly it shows you to be free-spirited and unshackled by convention. On the other hand, it might leave you feeling chilly and looking pretty ridiculous. Your customers are not going to take you seriously if you turn up in just your pants.