Delivering Benefit

Technical leadership capabilities

Brian Sutton, Robina Chatham

• Publisher: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781780173986
• eBook ISBN: 9781780173849
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

The development of technical leadership capabilities is often overlooked as a training requirement in organisations but these are key to business success.In this book, management experts Brian Sutton and Robina Chatham describe six management techniques to help you develop your leadership capabilities and deliver benefit to your customers, team and organisation. With real life examples, tips and mini exercises, you'll also boost your soft skills as you improve your professional value.

1 UNDERSTANDING YOUR CUSTOMERS: HOW TO TRULY DELIGHT THEM

The focus of this chapter is learning to look at the business through the eyes of your customers or clients. Often as you grapple with the challenges of your daily tasks and activities it is easy to lose sight of how those tasks contribute to the fulfilment of a customer or client need. Without customers a business cannot survive; therefore it is important to really understand how everything you do contributes to delivering a benefit that will be appreciated by a customer or client.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

Now you have stepped up to team leadership you will inevitably become more externally focused; your interactions with other business functions will increase and you should also start to interact externally with the customers or clients of your business. As an IT team leader, your prime reason for being is to help your business serve its customers or clients better or more effectively.

Any business will only survive if it is able to encourage existing customers to repeat purchase while at the same time finding new clients. Loyalty is the magic ingredient that drives repeat business and crucially encourages existing customers or clients to actively promote your goods or services and hence act as an unpaid sales force to help grow your business. If you are reading this and thinking that this doesn’t apply to you as you provide an internal service to your peers in the rest of the business, remember unless you are seen as value for money and easy to do business with, you are always in danger of being outsourced.

All customers are important whether they are internal or external to the business and at some point a chain of internal customers or ‘business partners’ will have an interface with the outside world of real paying customers. In the early 1980s, Jan Carlzon became CEO of the problem-ridden Scandinavian Airlines. Over a period of 10 years he transformed the company by focusing on what he called ‘Moments of Truth’ – every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to form or change their impression of your business and your commitment to fulfilling their needs.

Your aim is to interact with your customers in a way that builds loyalty so that you become their supplier of choice (even if they don’t have a choice).

In order to become the supplier of choice you will need to:

• Relentlessly focus on the customers’ needs rather than your own.
• Understand that your customers also have customers. How is what you are doing going to help them with their own ‘moments of truth’?
• Make sure that you are easy to do business with (ETDBW).¹

In order to really excel you need to look along the value chain of the business, past your immediate business partner and try to understand how what you are providing will influence and enable your customers’ customer to have a better experience.

THE IMPACT OF THE ISSUE

It is far more difficult to please customers of a service offering than those of a product offering. We expect services to work and when they do we don’t give them a second thought; however, when they go wrong we are very quick to complain. Therefore, when delivering a service offering you will have to work twice as hard to delight your customers in comparison to someone with a product offering.

Many IT people are excited by the technology itself whereas their customers tend to be interested in what the technology can do for them. Salespeople used to focus on product features to distinguish the credentials of their offering, but now it is increasingly realised that customers are less interested in the features of a product than the solution that the product will allow them to achieve. As Harvard Professor Theodore Levitt reputedly used to tell his students, ‘people don’t want to buy a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole’. The typical IT professional is driven more by intellectual curiosity than a desire to serve. They get frustrated by business partners who don’t know what they want, who can’t make up their mind and change priorities, causing plans to be redrawn. They have a desire to pin requirements down to the nth degree as soon as possible, so they can get on to the real and interesting work: the intellectual challenge of getting the technology to do what they want it to do and pushing the boundaries of what is technically possible.

Consider a motor car for example; a feature of that car may be that it has a large engine; the advantage of that large engine is that it allows you to drive quickly, but this only translates into a benefit if you want to go quickly. Road safety, fuel economy or space for luggage and kids, for example, may be far more important to you than speed. The trick is to think in terms of benefit as opposed to features, i.e. the ‘job to be done’.

In the world of IT, people are very good at thinking in terms of features, as these are tangible; however, the result is often technology for the sake of technology. Consider Microsoft’s Office product for example – what percentage of its features do you use on a daily basis? For most people, it is probably less than 10 per cent. Only a small minority of people will be excited by the technology and its possibilities. The key is to maintain a clear focus on the purpose of the interaction with the customer: what is the customer trying to achieve and how can you make that as easy and as beneficial as possible?

MAKING SENSE OF IT ALL

Everyone understands that over the last 20 years the internet and then Web 2.0² has transformed the way that all organisations do business and changed attitudes forever by blurring the lines between what a business does for their customers and what the customers can do for themselves when interacting with that business.

We would like to draw your attention to three aspects that might, in the first instance, appear to be unrelated to understanding your customer, but we hope that you will see how they have created a new operating environment and are fundamental to building loyalty and trust in all customer interactions.

First, starting in the late 1990s, the internet brought about what Don Tapscott and Art Caston predicted in their landmark book Paradigm Shift (1993), namely disintermediation, aka the removal of intermediaries. In the 1990s the only way to book an airline ticket was through a travel agent; the way you taxed your car was to visit the Post Office with reams of documentary evidence. In this first wave of disintermediation, the intermediaries, who had traditionally acted as a buffer between the consumer and the business provider largely providing an administrative service, found that their reason for being had disappeared overnight. Now it is common for both internal and external customers to be able to conduct all their standard business interactions using self-service methods. This has transformed both customer interactions and expectations; people now expect to do these things 24/7 when it suits them. This self-service interaction is often the first ‘moment of truth’ in a customer’s experience and it needs to be seamless and simple.

Some companies have mastered the art of customer focus and as a result have become exceedingly successful, for example eBay with instant purchases, Uber with instant driver hire or Apple with booking customer appointments with Apple advisors. Other companies, however, still have work to do and often cause anguish and annoyance by taking their customers through many levels of a telephone menu without an appropriate option to choose from, or have websites with incomprehensible options, links that fail to work and security levels so complicated that a genuine customer struggles to complete their interaction.

Second, the appearance of social media and related applications allows us to instantly share images, ideas, news and opinions with large groups of people, many of whom you may not actually know, from anywhere at any time of the day. Each of the recipients of the messages can then discuss or share them with even more people. This ability has transformed the world of customer feedback. It used to be said that the British didn’t like to complain; perhaps more accurately we should have said the British are reluctant to create a scene by complaining. Now that social media has removed the need for embarrassing physical confrontation we find that the British and every other nation under the sun are only too ready to share their major and minor sources of dissatisfaction with anyone and everyone. This, aligned to the psychological fact that people are far more likely to moan about perceived bad products or service than to praise good or even excellent ones, makes it more difficult than ever to build and maintain customer loyalty.

Some years ago, before the advent of social media, I visited a client organisation and as I entered one senior manager’s office I noticed an A3 poster on the wall. It was quite professionally printed and had a large picture of a pencil, underneath which were the words ‘IT support’. I later discovered that this same poster had pride of place on the walls of many of the organisation’s senior leaders. As an outsider, I could see the funny side of this silent protest but if I had been the IT director I would have been looking for a new job. In a world dominated by instant communication, dissatisfaction of this level can destroy customer loyalty and make it pretty much impossible to create any semblance of a good working relationship.

Third, many traditional customer service interactions such as fault reporting and diagnostics are going DIY. Huge cost savings can be achieved by removing face-to-face and telephone interaction. In the article ‘Kick Ass Customer Service’, Dixon et al. (2017) suggest that it is possible to reduce the cost of an interaction from around £12 to just a few pence. Nowadays, many organisations routinely encourage their customers to fix their own problems by providing helpful web guides and, of course, YouTube videos.

New electric vehicles automatically download software updates and monitor their own performance, scheduling routine maintenance as needed without any intervention from the owner.

This level of do-it-yourself service is demonstrated in a proof of concept video produced by SAP,³ that shows a woman discovering a broken switch on her washing machine. She uses an app on her smartphone to identify the product by QR code and then photographs the switch. An order is automatically placed for the replacement part, which is printed locally on a 3D printer; and she gets a text message to advise her the time the new part will be delivered to her door.

The result of this is that customers only interact directly with an organisation when they have exhausted all other channels; human-to-human interaction ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• BCS, THE CHARTERED INSTITUTE FOR IT
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• About the authors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. UNDERSTANDING YOUR CUSTOMERS: HOW TO TRULY DELIGHT THEM
• 2. SEEING THE BIG PICTURE AND THINKING STRATEGICALLY
• 3. SEEING NEW OPPORTUNITIES AND RECOGNISING THE UNEXPECTED BEFORE IT HAPPENS
• 4. BUILDING A SPIRIT OF INNOVATION
• 5. BEING SEEN AS SOMEONE WHO HELPS CHANGE TO HAPPEN
• 6. HELPING YOUR TEAM TO COPE WITH THE RIGOURS OF CHANGE
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover