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Love All, Serve All July 23, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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I recently recounted a great customer service experience with the Wall Street Journal.  Hard on the heels of this unexpected event, I had another great experience this past weekend at the Hard Rock Theme Park in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  Could this be a trend?  Let’s hope so!

Unlike my single interaction with the Journal, my family’s entire day at the Hard Rock was exceptional.  As we arrived at the parking lot entrance to pay our $10 parking fee, the attendant took the time to explain the re-entry rules, welcomed us to the park, and exhorted us to “Rock On!” as we pulled away.  We laughed and drove on, our mood and attitude reinforced for a fun day.

Inside the park, every employee took time to ask us how we were doing.  Did we need help finding something?  Were we enjoying our day?  Did we know that a particular show was starting in a few moments?  From r

ide attendants to cashiers to janitorial staff, every single employee seemed to be taking a personal interest in our experience.  Although we were a bit surprised at first, we began to appreciate what a difference this attention made throughout the day.  It was wonderful!

I lived in Florida for fifteen years.  I’ve been to every variation of a theme park you can imagine, more times that I can count.  The service and approach by the Hard Rock staff was better than any other park I’ve attended, including the Disney properties.

Being a brand new park, the Hard Rock lacks the breadth of more established parks but makes up for its smaller scope with a wide range of different things to do.  Hands down, it has the best background music of any park you’ll attend.  The small touches and puns are everywhere, rewarding the discriminating rock and roll fan with something to smile about no matter where you look.  My favorite part: the same music plays everywhere at t

he same time, but in the reggae area, a synchronized version of the song is played on the steel drums.  I never thought I’d hear Livin’ On A Prayer on the steel drums, but thanks to the Hard Rock I can check that off my bucket list.

If you get the chance, take the time to visit the Hard Rock Theme Park.  Enjoy the music, have fun on the rides, and marvel at the customer service.  Then come home and see if you can get your staff to generate and sustain the same level of customer focus with your customers. Love all, serve all!

Customer Service! July 3, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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I had a startling customer service experience this week that is worth sharing.

I am a long-time reader of the Wall Street Journal.  I think the Journal is the last great newspaper in America, with an editorial viewpoint that resonates with my own political leanings.  It comes as no surprise to me that a paper run by conservatives is successful and profitable, in contrast to a certain other high-profile New York paper that positions itself slightly to the left of Karl Marx.

I have been distressed recently to see an uptick in spelling and grammar errors in the Journal.  Loyal readers know my feelings on such things, and I was not happy to see the Journal slipping to a level of quality normally associated with USA Today and its ilk.  I reached the end of my rope when earlier this week a Journal article referred to the owner of a Toyota dealership as “Mr. Yaris,” replacing the real name with the name of a Toyota model.

Knowing that they await my feedback on a regular basis, I dashed off an email to the editors.  You can imagine the consternation in the Journal offices when word got out that I had written; I can only presume they brought the whole operation to a grinding halt while my thoughts were shared across the organization.

Well, something like that must have happened, because in less than two hours, I received a personal response from the author of the article, apologizing for the error, thanking me for my concern, and assuring me that the Journal worked very hard to keep such things from happening.

Wow!  A real response to a (mildly) disgruntled customer!  Imagine an organization that reads their email so quickly, routes it to the responsible party, and ensures that a response occurs so quickly!  I was impressed, and wrote back to say just that.  Later, I found that they even listed the error in the next day’s corrections.

Does your organization handle customer feedback that well?  Are your people taking personal responsibility for their errors with their customers in such a professional manner?  If not, why not?

Cars, Computers, and Trust April 23, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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I dread getting any sort of work done on my car. Although I am fascinated by automotive technology, I am utterly incapable of working on cars or diagnosing their problems. I’ve always worked with guys who knew cars inside and out; they would tear down engines, replace crucial parts, and rebuild things with careless abandon.  I envy their skills and confidence.  My limited experience with cars usually resulted in expensive trips to a real mechanic to correct my errors.

As I write this, my car is having new tires installed.  I don’t mind this, since I understand the value of tires in helping me get from here to there.  What I do mind is the inevitable visit from the mechanic during the process:

We gave your car a courtesy check while we had it up on the lift.  Honestly, we don’t know how you even drove here this morning!  Your brakes are completely shot.  The suspension is worn out.  It looks like the electrical system is about to burst into flames, and we think you’re actually missing a piston.  We’re afraid to even drive your car out of the garage bay.  You want to get all that fixed while you’re here?  If not, the law requires that you sign this waiver so we can let you leave the lot.

Argghhh!  I have no idea if any of this is true, or expected, or even possible.  The car has been running fine.  Does disaster loom around the corner?  Will I be left helpless on the side of the road?  I am totally at their mercy, with absolutely no information to help.

Such poetic justice!  This is exactly how our users feel, every day.  For anyone not in the secret computing geek club, computers are mysterious, magical, confusing devices.  When they work, they get the job done, but when they break, the average user is completely clueless.

Our explanations are equally arcane and absolutely inscrutable.  Here are the actual fixes I made to my wife’s laptop last night to (hopefully) correct a Vista network printing problem:

The Linksys router firmware is out of date and needs to be upgraded from version 1.00.9 to 1.02.5.  According to some web postings, I need to disable the IPv6 dual stack support on both network adapters. Finally, according to some other postings, the Dell BIOS settings are incorrect: we need to disable the flash cache support and switch the SATA controller from AHCI to ATA mode.    All this might fix the problem, but it might also require a complete reformat and reinstall of Vista, resulting in a loss of all your data and settings.  You want to get all that work done?

And we wonder why people have a love/hate relationship with computers?

Things are no different in the corporate world.  The rest of the company has no idea what we really do with all those blinking lights and wires in the data center.  They don’t know what it really does, or really costs, or if they really need it at all.  They place their faith, their wallets, and increasingly, the fate of their company in our hands and hope for the best.

Everyone in IT is responsible for earning and keeping the trust of our users.  We have to police ourselves, making sure that we give good advice and provide accurate service.  We cannot spend money foolishly or buy technology because it is cool.  By scrupulously managing ourselves, we’ll give our users good solutions that meet their needs, further the business, and don’t break the bank.  If we fail in this, we’ll lose their trust and lose the privilege of serving them.  As CIOs, we must instill this attitude in every person at every level in our organization.  Our success, and our company’s success, rides on it.

Who Is Being Served? January 23, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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A recent issue of CIO magazine included a piece by Kumud Kalia that encourages CIOs to redefine the meaning of “customer” to be their company’s actual external customers. I couldn’t disagree more.

Your customer is the individual or entity to whom you are providing service. Nothing more, nothing less. For years, we’ve been working hard to get (traditionally insular) IT organizations to recognize their customers, build those relationships, and provide good service. In this model, the customers are those employees that use IT services to design things, build things, sell things, and service things, meeting the needs of external customers.

Kalia contends that this is wrong, and that IT should instead focus directly on those external customers. By skipping past all those other employees that really do focus on the external customers, IT is somehow supposed to be a direct contributor the the company’s success. I’d argue that if you could really succeed with this model, you don’t need all those other people in the middle, and that IT should run the whole show.

(I notice that Kalia wears two hats: he is both CIO and EVP of Operations for Direct Energy. With all due respect, I believe he may be blurring the line between two very different jobs.)

In reality, “those other people in the middle” bring huge value to the company. They spend their time really focusing on and understanding the external customer needs. The figure out what the external customer wants, and they translate that into internal business requirements to meet those needs. IT, in turn, provides tools, processes, and systems that meet those internal business requirements as cheaply and effectively as possible.

I’m not saying that IT should never interact with real external customers. In some cases, that can be truly enlightening in our quest to provide the very best tools and systems to our real internal customers. But I would never have IT participate in an external customer relationship without appropriate oversight from the real owner of the relationship, such as sales, marketing, or support.

In short, IT builds tools. Other use those tools to get their jobs done. The better we build and support our tools, the better those other people perform. We make the hammers; others drive the nails. Together we make houses.