Customer Happiness Starts with Your Employees

by: stacey - December 5th, 2011   Filed under: Customer Relations Add Comment

You may not think about this often, but reality is that your employees are the face of your company.  They provide customer service, they perform sales functions, maintenance, build products for customers, do implementations, provide documentation and assistance.  The quality of that interaction, their morale, and their work provides a key impression of your company just as much as your branding or your marketing.

This is where your attitude comes in.  You cannot control completely how your employees treat your customers- you can only influence it.  Your influence is tied to how you treat your employees.  You, as direct management, are a direct representation of the company’s attitudes.  If you do not show that you care about your employees, then your company does not care about your employees- and in turn, your employees see your company as an uncaring organization.  And that is exactly as they will portray, by intention or by accident, your organization to your customers.  Happy employees who value their company will take care of clients.  Unhappy employees won’t care about clients.  And nobody values a company that does not value them.  It’s that simple.

How does this translate to project management?  The same thing applies, actually.  Think of your project team as a company producing a product.  If you do not value your team members, there is no chance that they will value your project.  Team members that value your project will take care of it, go the extra mile for it, and evangelize it.  Attitudes are contagious.

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Some Thoughts on Hiring

by: stacey - December 2nd, 2011   Filed under: Management Add Comment

One of the courses I attended recently outlined some great tips on hiring that I thought I would share.  Here are five things you can do to get to know the person you’re interviewing better and make a better hiring decision:

1) Hire for attitude, train for skills

Any skill can be learned- that is, if you have the right attitude.  Look for people who are positive-minded, who want to learn.  Ask about their hobbies, how they learned their trade, and ask about major changes in their resume- what programming language did you use at job X?  at job Y?  What did you do to transition to the new language?  People who want to learn and enjoy learning will be glad to pick up new skills for you- in fact, you won’t even need to ask them to.  It’s who they are.

2) Listen to how they talk about their last job

Something obviously went wrong in their last job- they got fired, the pay was too low, there was no room to advance, they hated their boss.  Whatever the reason, people leave jobs because they’re unhappy and want to change things.  People are asked to leave jobs because someone else is unhappy with them.  What the interviewee tells you about the situation and more importantly their attitude about what went wrong will tell you tons about them.  Are they bitter?  Are they willing to talk about what went wrong?  Did they take anything positive away from it?  What did they learn from the situation?

Bad and/or difficult situations will arise for them at your company as well.  It’s just part of life.  How they deal with these things will matter to their growth at your company.

3) Know who and what you want

This one is actually all about you.  Prepare for the interviews by asking yourself exactly what kind of qualities you are looking for.  Ask yourself what skill sets you need.

For attitude, you must consider the type of job you are hiring for.  If you need someone to sweep floors, you frankly are not looking for someone who loves to learn new things.  That type of person will be bored soon, get distracted, not do a good job, and likely move on to something else soon.  You’re looking for someone who is happy with routine and does not care for change.  If you need someone to explore new technologies, you need someone visionary, driven to learn, and who seeks change.  It’s all about what fits the tasks you need the position to perform.

For skill sets, look for parallels to those skill sets just as much as the skill sets themselves.  If you need an object-oriented Perl developer (and I do), that skill set might be hard to find.  Experience in object-oriented programming, however, is not, and there are a number of similar and comparable languages that can transition well- PHP, Python, Java, etc.  Find someone with these skills and the right attitude about learning new things, and you’ll make a good hiring decision.

4) Ask the right questions

Once you have your list of qualities and skills you seek, sit down and make a list of questions.  What can you ask that will lead the person to reveal the qualities that you seek?  Ideally you want them to illustrate through what they say, not tell you.  Ask most people if they are intelligent and willing to learn, and they’ll tell you yes (obviously, since they want the job).  Ask instead about situations and stories that will reveal their relative desire, speed and interest in learning.

5) Take them out for spaghetti

I have to admit, of all of these items, I’ve never tried this one.  At interviews, people are usually on ‘interview behavior’.  They have carefully chosen to say and do all that they can to keep control of your image of them.  Perform a brief interview, then take them with you out to lunch or dinner to complete the interview.  Don’t tell them in advance that it’s coming.  Take them somewhere for speghetti or some other relatively messy, sometimes awkward to eat food.  Observe how they handle the unexpected situation.  Some folks will be very cautious and careful.  Some will dig in and ignore manners.  Some will watch you and follow your lead.  Some will simply accept the situation and deal confidently with it.  Depending on the position, one or both of those last two attitudes are generally who you are looking for.  On the job, unpredictable things will occur. You want someone who deals well and graciously with those situations.

These are just a few tools to add to your interviewing bag of tricks.  I would love to hear more- if you have any ideas, add them in the comments!

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The Customer is Always Right- Aren’t They?

by: stacey - December 1st, 2011   Filed under: Customer Relations Add Comment

Alexander Kjerulf has a great post over on his blog, “Chief Happiness Officer“.  The post is entitled Top 5 Reasons Why the Customer Is Always Right Is Wrong, and it outlines some reasons why you should consider how you handle your customers.

The fact is, some customers simply do not fit your company’s product, brand or culture.  Some customers have demands that will simply create a relationship that is not profitable for you and will drain resources away from your quality customers.  Sometimes, the customer will simply not understand what is the best solution for their own needs and insist you do a poor job.  There’s many reasons to think about your customer relationships carefully in regard to this credo.

So how does this apply to projects?  In client-facing projects, many aspects of it are fairly obvious.  The biggest place it applies in any project is the way you deal with your team members and your stakeholders.  When your stakeholders start questioning the judgement of your subject matter experts, this is always a sign of trouble- sometimes, the SME is wrong; sometimes the stakeholder is wrong, but either way, you have problems.  When in doubt, get a consensus of your SMEs or even get a third party involved to verify your direction.  Once you are sure of your SME, though, stick to your team’s opinion.  They’re called Subject Matter Experts for a reason.  Failing to support them will show a lack of confidence in them, which in turn may be interpreted as a vote of no-confidence in your team, and it will all spiral downhill from there.

Standing up to clients, customers and stakeholders can be tough, no question, but in the end, do the right thing for the people you lead and the company you represent.

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