Dave Cain: Welcome to unsuitable on Rea Radio, the award-winning financial services and business advisory podcast that challenges your old-school business practices and the traditional business-suit culture. Our guests are industry professionals and experts who will challenge you to think beyond a suit and tie, while offering you meaningful, modern solutions to help enhance your company’s growth.
I’m your host, Dave Cain. On the matter of customer services, businesses can no longer afford to be anything but attentive, accommodating, and polite. After all, in today’s climate, one wrong move from someone on your front lines may be all it takes to get your company to go viral, and just so we’re clear, there actually is such a thing as bad publicity. W all that’s at stake, what are you doing to improve the quality of your own customer service practices? When was the last time you actually sat down and examined your processes to determine if they are still relevant, or whether they even make sense?
That’s where our guest comes in for today’s program. Chris Liebtag, president of Rea Consulting Group, is here to tell us a few simple adjustments that can yield incredible results with regard to existing customer service processes. As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, a Lean Gold Practitioner, and a certified project management professional, Chris has helped businesses nationwide achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness. Today, just in time for Customer Service Week, Chris is going to explain how many of the concepts that he teaches every day can be used to improve your customer service initiatives.
Welcome to unsuitable, Chris.
Chris: Thank you, Dave. Glad to be back.
Dave: Quite a list of accomplishments. There’s Black Belt, Gold Practitioner. Wow, you’ve been hard at work.
Chris: Been busy, yes, but all good things. It helps you bring pretty neat perspective to business.
Dave: Certainly, I want to kind of reemphasize some of the things we talked about in the opening, that you’re providing these type of services nationwide to CPA firms and manufacturing companies. There’s professional service firms. You’re practicing all day long.
Chris: Yeah. Some of these concepts that we’ll no doubt get into a little bit more detail with are applicable to almost every walk of life business. It’s not one industry, it’s not one profession, but companies throughout the country and throughout a diverse number of industries can take advantage of them.
Dave: I noticed, too, in your bio that I took a look at before you came in the room is that when you’re not traveling around the country, you’re attending recitals and rehearsals.
Chris: I am. Yeah, I have a little girl who’s fond of microphones in her own right. She does some singing with some traveling choirs, if you will, and the dance circuit, et cetera. Yeah, it’s a busy world.
Dave: She get that singing voice from you or your …?
Chris: No. Actually, my wife is the singer. She’s-
Dave: The singer. You’re the dancer.
Chris: Clearly, yeah.
Dave: Can you do the moonwalk?
Chris: I’ll be tap dancing for the next-
Dave: Tap dancing.
Chris: … 20 minutes.
Dave: Okay. I don’t know we do tap dancing on Unsuitable. Moonwalk, yes. Tap dance, no.
Chris: Fortunately, it’s a podcast-
Dave: Or a salsa.
Chris: … so if we all … be watching.
Dave: Yes. Let’s talk about customer service. Obviously, this is in celebration of Customer Service Week, and I think the idea behind that is just bring attention to the folks on the frontline that do help out with customer service and client activities and I think a shout-out to their duties. Let’s kind of start there, customer service. As you go out and you talk with your clients, where do you start? Do you take an assessment of what their customer service policies are, or you just blindly call them and try to figure it out on your own?
Chris: Well, it’s a very interesting place to start. If we’re talking about efficiency and we’re talking about improving the ways we’re delivering services, it all comes back to your clients. It starts and ends with customers and clients, so starting there, surveying customers, finding out what they need is vitally important. If we’re going to make any changes internally, they have to benefit the client in one way, shape, or form or certainly not detract from the client or customer experience.
That is every bit the place we need to start, and that does involve sometimes going out directly to our clients, customers, and surveying them or interacting with them in some regard, interviews, et cetera. There’s a variety of techniques to understand what it is that’s really driving their motivations and driving the overall customer experience. Once we understand those factors … and there’s a few commonalities we can even talk about today … you use those to help drive the improvements of your process. Ultimately, any improvement initiative needs to result in a benefit, a benefit to the company, a benefit to the workforce, and a benefit to the client, customer. If you can do that, then obviously you’re going to see the positive impact financially and, to your earlier comments when you kicked this podcast off, virally even as our customers are using social media.
Dave: I think in today’s environment, you make a mistake in business and sometimes it’s going to be tough to recover from that because of it may go viral, the social media. It’s hard to recover.
Chris: It is, so response becomes incredibly important. We see that time and time again, how it’s not so much the first mistake, although the first mistake can be very damaging. It’s how you respond to that mistake and what that message sends to your customers. That’s what then takes over that viral social media sphere. it’s one thing to have a bad experience. We all do from time to time, but it’s how that company responds, and that speak to, again, your internal processes. Do you have the capacity to respond in the right way, or do you at least have your procedures set up in such a way so that you can respond meaningfully and respond appropriately to that particular bad incident or negative interaction?
Dave: Now that leads into the next question. There’s a comment I’ve heard you say over a cup of coffee once or twice, but today’s customer service paradigm equals immediacy. I think you just hit on that. It’s how you react.
Chris: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about that a little bit. There are a few common drivers of the customer experience, and that’s been tried and true for a generation, so it’s not that they’re changing. You can bring your product or service to market quickly, you can do it affordably, and the quality needs to be there. Fortunately, by and large in today’s environment, quality is pretty high in terms of a deliverable, a commodity, deliverable or a service, and we have different organizations that rate quality accordingly. Many companies are finding it more difficult to compete there on the quality level, though so many do.
The other aspect of customer experience that I mentioned is affordability and price. Yes, you can compete on those things, but competition in the marketplace has driven a lot of fees and prices down, and they’re on a level playing field in a lot of industries. It’s been that third aspect, though, that you mentioned, immediacy, speed to market, speed to delivery of service where we see so much of the competition focused on. This is in a variety of different industries and professions, but if we just take a look at what’s happening in the service market or at the retail market. It’s a prime example.
The retail model is being transformed by the day, as you’ve had these … your box store enterprises where we would go out and we’d travel into these stores and purchase something to the model being remade. Not overnight, for sure, but it’s certainly accelerated to where we’re getting everything home-delivered and the customer is prizing that next-day delivery or even same day-delivery, in fact. If I eat at my favorite restaurant, I don’t have to go out anymore. They’ll subcontract through a delivery service and deliver what I need, when I want it, and price so much isn’t the option then. It’s more about immediacy. It’s more about can you deliver quickly, and the quicker you can deliver, the happier I’ll be as a customer. That is a self-perpetuating machine, so a lot of companies are focused on, how can we bring that service or product to market fast? They’ve honed on that being the primary driver of the customer experience.
Dave: By the way, that noise you hear, that’s the drone dropping the pizza by the broadcast. You didn’t know you were getting that.
Chris: Well, you joke and I laugh, but that’s going to be a reality in just who knows how long’s time, but not long, for sure.
Dave: Well, you mentioned, and I want to follow up with a question. How would convenience for the customer fit into the customer experience?
Chris: Well, every bit. The interesting thing is efficiency is really driving this customer experience. Think about this logistically. In order to deliver next day or same day or via drone within an hour, you have to work your processes backwards to the point to where you can be that operationally efficient to produce on that sort of customer demand. It’s almost unfathomable, and it certainly would have been 5, 10 years ago, suggest that we can reconstruct or reorder our internal processes to produce at that rate of speed.
That is what the customer is, in some cases, demanding, but really what they want and how they’re defining their experiences. You’re seeing so many companies that look internally and say, “Okay, listen. We have to come to market today. We have to deliver today or tomorrow,” and use that goal to work their operations backwards, to say, “What changes do we need to make internally to be able to produce to that level or that speed of demand?”
Dave: You sound like a consultant.
Chris: Occasionally…
Dave: You sound like you’re in charge of the Rea Consulting Group.
Chris: Well, that’s been the fun part. That’s why we’re able to talk to companies of all stripes, because they’re all wrestling with this very same issue, how do I do what I’ve done for years and yet, how do I do it in such a way that it’s going to speak to the customers that are purchasing from me today and purchasing from me tomorrow?
Dave: You talked about efficient processes allow businesses to add value. If we step back from that comment, personally, I think about processes where we’re making something, we’re making furniture, we’re making a widget. I don’t know that I thought so much about a process to handle customer service. I think there’s a change in some of the business thinking and the strategy, and obviously, you’re seeing that as you travel around the country discussing and talking on this matter.
Chris: I do. There’s a couple examples of that. You look in terms of your … when you call in. Obviously, there’s a classic example of when a customer picks up the phone and dials into a company and then they’re put on hold for a minute or two minutes and it feels like a half an hour at the rate that we’re going in this society. That type of interaction is critical to the customer experience. How long do we keep them waiting when they reach out to us, to interact with us? When they go onto our websites and they click, and they click and they want a response and they don’t see it? Unfortunately, we’re now being conditioned to expect almost an immediate type of response.
Something you had said earlier, I want to get back to if we don’t have the time right now to talk about it, is those frontline individuals in our companies. They are providing the customer service. That’s that customer’s first interaction point. So much of what we’re doing is focusing on how can we reduce the friction of that interaction so when the customer contacts us it’s every bit the experience they want, and then that moves them to the next experience, and to the next experience. What can we do on that front end to make sure that their response rate is not only quick but the most appropriate, the most favorable to the ultimate goal that client’s trying to reach in contacting us in the first place?
Dave: Again, as you are consulting with your clients, do you start with the frontline? Is that maybe where you start to look to see what the systems are for customer service?
Chris: Well, it’s interesting. Many business owners will come at this notion of efficiency a different way. Obviously, if I’ve been running my business for a number of years, I know my business pretty well, I know my processes pretty well, and I can determine, well, I’m losing money in a couple of vital areas. If I was more efficient, then I’d be more operationally profitable. Most businesses won’t necessarily start with the customer experience, but they’ll start internally, or at least initially that’s what their viewpoint of an efficiency initiative will be, how can we do better internally for business profitability? That’s an every bit logical and rational place to start.
However, what we need to understand is, obviously again, customers are driving all of the success of the business, and any change that we do also has to impact them as well. They might not be the very first place we start, but they have to be part of the equation. They absolutely have to help us drive that efficient type of procedure or approach through the system.
One of the certifications you had rattled off there that I have is this Lean certification, and Lean is every bit focused on efficiency and effectiveness in terms of client experience. All changes are meant to drive value to the client from a Lean perspective, to use that discipline. Whether you want to look internally at a system for the manufacture … You’re manufacturing furniture is the example that you gave.
Obviously, there is an end client or a client that has initially ordered that particular piece of furniture, and so much of what you do internally might not involve that client, but everything you do internally to become more efficient, to become more effective, is going to positively impact that client, or what’s more, give you the capacity of time, that precious resource, then you to determine to spend more time adding value to that product or service or creating additional service or enhancing the client experience another way.
Dave: What you’re talking about, this sounds like a concept in training that only fits with large companies, large industries like airlines or the cable companies. Is that who you’re working with, who you’re talking with? Are you talking to the $2 million firm or company, the $5 million company, the smaller stores and companies?
Chris: Well, obviously, economies of scale. Large companies have a lot of opportunity to make improvements.
Dave: Some of them fail miserably.
Chris: They do. Fortunately, when we’re talking about the customer experience and when we’re talking about servicing customers, that’s companies of all sizes, all shapes, all industries and professions. If you are serving a client or a customer in one way, shape, or form, then you can benefit from some of these strategies. Obviously, the zeros might not add up quite the same way that they would for a multibillion-dollar company, but all the same, as a small enterprise, one of the only advantages you have is your nimbleness, your quickness, your responsiveness to your market. An efficiency initiative or these strategies would every bit have applicability to even the startup, for that matter.
Dave: Get started on the right foot.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely.
Dave: I want to go back to you talked earlier about capacity and capacity of time allows for innovation and responsiveness. I didn’t give that much thought at first when I heard that, but that’s a large part of customer service and customer service training.
Chris: Well, this is one of these missing links, I believe. There’s been so much focus on innovation, and that’s been quite a buzzword in a number of different circles the last couple of years. I’ll be talking to business owners and we’ll be discussing innovation, and then you’re struggling with how we transform what we’re doing today into what we need to be doing tomorrow and really, truly wrestling with that. Oftentimes, it’s because the business requires so much time and attention that there’s so very little time for anything else.
Now if you can become more efficient, obviously the byproduct is this capacity of time, and you can spend that time then stepping back and working on your business and innovating. It involves the customer to the extent … especially the frontline employees. So many of our business owners feels that they’re shouldering the whole burden of the business on their own, and to some extent, they are, but to whatever extent you can involve your employees, especially those that are on the front line, interacting with your clients and your customers, those are the ones that can give you the ideas to inspire innovation an d to really trigger how we’re going to serve the marketplace differently for years to come.
Dave: Listening to you talk, this sounds like a form of business strategy that business owners need to think about, because this is training of employees, this is ongoing training. Not once a year, Friday afternoon, but it’s an ongoing approach and you have to put dollars in the budget, because this type of training is ongoing, and it’s not inexpensive.
Chris: Well, now, you’re correct, but also I we’re talking about growing the business and creating a legacy business of any sort, it’s going to take that time, that commitment of time and capital, to be sure. You want to train your front line in an appropriate manner so that the client does have the type of experience that you’re trying to deliver for them, so I think it’s money very well spent. Not to say that every business has that, but you do have to commit dollars to training on a certain level, and it might as well be to delivering greater value to the client experience.
Dave: We can’t leave this topic without talking about corporate culture, because I got to believe this whole concept and idea is a cornerstone of a company’s culture.
Chris: It is. Again, it speaks to, well, who you’re trying to benefit here. If you’re working on your internal processes, if you’re embracing some sort of an efficiency initiative, it’s not for efficiency’s sake. Efficiency is not an end to itself. It is an end to means, and so, are we trying to improve the bottom line of the business? Absolutely. Are we going to conduct this exercise internally to make a better workplace experience? Absolutely you should and can. Then, again, the driver of it all is the customer experience. When you’re going to make improvements internally to your processes, you’re going to try to benefit all three, the begins, the workforce, the customer. If that’s your starting point, I think you’re in pretty good shape.
Dave: What a great topic for Customer Service Week, and throughout this week, I think we all need, all the listeners here need to reach out and celebrate the importance of clients and the team that delivers the service. A lot of celebration needs to happen and recognition.
Chris: I couldn’t agree more. At the beginning, at the end, it’s all about the customer, so we might as well start celebrating that.
Dave: Let me ask you a very difficult question. How would I get started on this great concept? I’m sitting here and think, wow, where do I start? Who do I call? What do I do? What’s my starting point?
Chris: Well, a little bit of research never hurts, right? You can look up, do some searches on efficiency initiatives and try to get your feet wet there. Also, in our consulting group, we’re always at lour clients’ beck and call, just for conversational purposes to help guide our business owners through the motions of where should we focus our time and attention? What makes the most sense for us in our business and in our industry? That’s typically the best place to start the conversation and then see where it goes. There’s a lot you can do internally, because most of our business owners know their business better than anyone else does. They’ll know some of the trouble spots and where to focus. It’s just up to us to help point the direction.
Dave: Good point. Our guest today has been Chris Liebtag, the president of Rea Consulting Group, and Chris sometimes is located in Dublin, Ohio, when he’s not traveling around the country. I just want to kind of recap from my own notes some of the key points that we discussed today.
Our customer service paradigm equals immediacy. Efficient processes allow businesses to add value. The last one, capacity of time allows for innovation and responsiveness. We covered a lot of territory in a short period of time.
Chris: Yeah, so do it for a good price. Do it right the first time, but by all means, do it quickly, and the quicker the better. Delivery to market is a big deal in today’s world.
Dave: Good point. Thanks again for joining us on unsuitable today, Chris. Listeners, don’t forget to check out the Rea & Associates channel on YouTube to watch full episodes of this podcast and other great videos from Rea. You can also check out website at www.reacpa.com/podcast for additional articles and insight. As always, don’t forget to subscribe to unsuitable on iTunes.
Until next time, I’m Dave Cain encouraging you to loosen up your tie and think outside the box.