Lean Service Design Presentation at ASQ

I have the pleasure of participating in the conference and will be giving a sixty-minute presentation on Lean Service Design. My presentation will be building offering a unique perspective on applying Lean to the Service Design Field. All participants of my presentation will receive a CD that contains:

• 130 Page PDF eBook
• PDF & Excel work forms
• Training Videos
• Bonus eBooks and Audio Tracks

My discussion will begin with a discussion on Service Dominant Logic and go through the use of Stakeholder and Customer Journey Maps and Buyer Personas. We will use these 3 outlines to develop several service prototypes narrowing it done to a single choice. The Lean Process of moving from EDCA to PDCA to SDCA will be discussed in conjunction with the before mentioned processes. The last part of the hour I will introduce CAP-Do and the use (sorry for the pun) of User Personas and Scenarios creating a process that I call Persona Mapping.   

This ASQ 2013 Service Conference provides how-to’s, step-by-step advice, and the latest in service delivery methods and networking opportunities. Speakers will engage you on topics to help organizations improve customer service, reduce costs, and build both customer loyalty and satisfaction. Join us in Las Vegas for two days of networking and discovery.

22nd Annual Service Quality Conference
October 7–8, 2013 • Las Vegas, NV
THEME: Seizing the Competitive Advantage with Service Quality

REGISTER: Program details are now listed on the site. To or get more information, visit asq.org/sqd or call 800-248-1946. If you are from outside of the United States of Canada, please call +1-414-272-8575.

A Simple but Effective Communication Model

The Process Communication Model (PCM) was developed by Dr. Taibi Kahler and Judy and Joe Pauley have been teaching and implementing this model for over twenty years. I enjoy the simplicity of PCM and the fact that it has been used over such a wide spectrum. Judy and Joe Pauley have written books demonstrating the use of it in:

• Teaching; Here's How to Reach Me: Matching Instruction to Personality Types in Your Classroom
• Healthcare: Establishing A Culture of Patient Safety: Improving Communication, Building Relationships, and Using Quality Tools
• Leadership: Communication: The Key to Effective Leadership

They have written more books by the way and their website for more information is Kahler Communication.

At the ASQ 2013 Service Conference, The Pauleys will be presenting Seizing the Competitive Advantage with Service Quality on Monday, October 7, 2013 at 2:30 – 3:30 p.m. Participants in this fun filled session will learn how to apply the concepts of Dr. Taibi Kahler’s Process Communication Model with their clients in building a positive relationship with each individual with whom they interact while providing quality service, thereby seizing the competitive advantage and building for the future. On Tuesday afternoon, I have the honor to be presenting at the same conference, Session T06: Lean Service Design

An excerpt from next week’s podcast:

Joe D.: You are one of the top rated presenters at ASQ. Can you tie all this back into quality? Can we rate conversations by the quality of them?

Judy: When we want people to hear what we have to say it certainly helps to speak to them in the way they prefer to be spoken to, and that’s the bottom line. Knowing what each personality type is knowing what the personality type of the person you’re communicating with is, and using their favorite “language.” If everybody speaks English, there are six different versions of English and six different ways of communicating the same thoughts and ideas. We talk about how we perceive the world through thoughts, opinions, feelings, reflection, reaction and action. Those are the basis of the six different personality types and we have all six in us, but some of them are more developed than others and those are the ones we respond to most readily.

Joe D: I’m a sales and marketing guy so when I look at it, I think this has some great value to a sales guy. What I just took from what you said is that I should be really trying to understand how that person communicates before I start trying to communicate. How they look at the world and how best to reach or communicate with them.

Joseph P.: That’s a great observation, you’re absolutely right that is what it’s all about. As a matter of fact, we have a sales course where people get to practice individualizing their approach based on the person that they are interacting with, and each of those six types that we mentioned buys for a different reason. We give the salespeople knowledge of what that motivation is going to be before they ever go in so that they can plan their approach, make the approach, you asked about PDSA, study the results and analyze them and then make any changes that they have to make to be successful. We do the same for managers, for leaders, and for everyone who has to talk to another person.

The Six Personality Types of the Process Communication Model identified by Dr. Kahler are; Reactor, Workaholic, Persister, Dreamer, Rebel,  and Promoter.   

Of the six traits, which one do you think is the most popular?
Answer is below the bios.

Judith Ann Pauley, PhD, is the CEO of Process Communications Inc., an international management communications training and development company.  She also is an Adjunct professor in the graduate education departments of 7 universities from New Hampshire to California, including the Education Leadership Program at George Mason University in Virginia and the Education Department at California State University San Marcos.

Joseph F. Pauley is the President and COO of Kahler Communications (Washington, D.C.) and is an Adjunct professor at the same universities as Judith Ann.   Mr. Pauley served in a variety of   leadership positions in the navy during the Korean War.  After his naval service, he had a very successful 34-year leadership career with the U.S. government.  Twenty-one of those years he and his wife lived in Asia where he became an authority on managing, communicating with, and motivating people from other cultures.

The answer is the Reactor.

Lean Service Design Program

Lean Service Design changes the way you think about business. No longer can companies focus their efforts on process improvements. Instead, they must engage the customer in use of their product/service rather than analyzing tasks for improvement. We no longer build and hope that there is a demand. We must create demand through the services that we offer and Lean Service Design is the enabler of this process. It changes our mindset of thinking about design at the end of the supply chain to make it look good and add a few appealing features. Instead, it moves design and the user themselves to co-create or co-produce the desired experience to the beginning of the supply chain.

The umbrella of Lean offers Service Design a method of entry into a well-established market. Lean has been very successful in Services and Design through traditional practices. However, we must move away from these traditions and institute a wider scope of Design to Services. This download contains a 130-page PDF book, workbook with forms, PDFs and training videos.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 – Lean (SDCA)
• Chapter 2 – Service (PDCA)
• Chapter 3 – Design (EDCA)
• Chapter 4 – Trilogy

In addition, for a limited time, I have included 2 popular eBooks from the Marketing with Lean Series:

1. Lean Engagement Team (More Info): The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible.
2. CAP-Do (More Info): What makes CAP-Do so attractive is that it assumes we do not have the answers. It allows us to create a systematic way to address the problems (pain) or opportunities (gain) from the use of our products and services.

But wait, you can get a CD with this same content free if you attend my presentation at the 22nd Annual Service Quality Conference, October 7–8, 2013 in Las Vegas, NV. The theme of the conference is 
Seizing the Competitive Advantage with Service Quality. REGISTER: Program details are now listed on the site. To or get more information, visit asq.org/sqd or call 800-248-1946. If you are from outside of the United States of Canada, please call +1-414-272-8575. Look forward seeing you in Las Vegas! Or, purchase the Lean Service Design Program!

Purchase the 130 page PDF for download, Lean Service Design  at a special price for the next 4 four days.

Mindfulness for Sales?

I have this on and off relationship with Meditation, NLP and Yoga through the years. An extension of this is the practice of visualization. Many of us will consider this for sports and have at one time practiced the technique of visualizing our next golf shot from behind the ball. Of course, we can argue the success of this technique for ourselves, but most professionals do practice the technique.

If it works for sports, why would it not work for sales? Would it be a crazy practice to sit in the car and just visualize the outcome of the sales call? Would it help rehearsing the problems that may be encountered or the people you might see during the call? There is an easier and more beneficial practice that could occur. It is the act of mindfulness or unloading. If we just take a break to rid ourselves of everything going on around us and participate in the presence – would that make us more effective?

When is the last time you did absolutely nothing for 10 whole minutes? Not texting, talking or even thinking? Mindfulness expert Andy Puddicombe describes the transformative power of doing just that: Refreshing your mind for 10 minutes a day, simply by being mindful and experiencing the present moment. (No need for incense or sitting in strange positions.)

Jose Silva is the person that may be best known for bringing meditation to the western culture or at least North America. He also is one of the few that has taken this type of material and applied to the sales arena. His book, Sales Power the Silva Mind Method for Sales Professionals, provides an outline for the process. It is somewhat dated material but I do enjoy the Silva Intuition System. This program has been updated by his daughter Laura Silva and provides an excellent introduction to meditation. If you try it, let me know your results.

The Power to Predict

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die was called by Tom Peters, “the most readable big data book I’ve come across, By far, great vignettes and stories.“  Author, ERIC SIEGEL, PhD, is the founder of Predictive Analytics World and Executive Editor of the Predictive Analytics Times. Eric makes the how and why of predictive analytics understandable and captivating.

From Eric’s website:

Predictive analytics taps this rich vein of experience, mining it to offer something completely different from standard business reporting and sales forecasting: actionable predictions for each customer. If you predict it, you own it.

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Lean Sales and Marketing: Learn about using CAP-Do

Predictive Analytics book description: This rich, entertaining primer by former Columbia University professor and Predictive Analytics World founder Eric Siegel reveals the power and perils of predictive analytics, showing how predicting human behavior combats financial risk, fortifies healthcare, conquers spam, toughens crime-fighting, and boosts sales.

Do Personas, Stakeholder, Journey Maps work?

Successful companies are now viewing their marketing as a method for getting the message in from the marketplace versus pounding the message out. It is this inbound marketing stuff we have been talking about the last few years. The new methodologies of User Experience, Service Design, Design Thinking and the Lean Startup^TM are all about using this found wisdom and all expound to be “Customer Centric” and concentrate on the “Customer Experience”. It is that Outside – In thinking.

The three tools that have become prevalent are Customer Personas, Customer Stakeholder and Customer Journey Maps. They are tools that we use to understand and improve the Customer Experience. There is seldom a workshop that does not utilize these three tools, and they have been widely adopted in the community. I use them myself and find them quite fun to talk about and to do.

I wonder after a workshop, how many participants actually go back to their organizations and create personas, stakeholder and journey Maps. I am familiar with a few that have, especially the customer personas. However, if you are like most, you go back to your everyday job and work. It was an exercise and only an exercise. If you do make the attempt, you do it in an isolated group with participants that already have a decent idea on what is needed. There is little disruptive change that occurs. We may bring a few “outsiders” in, but those people seldom understand the bigger picture of the organization (said in jest).

The truth is if you try to use these tools you find them cumbersome. There is not the external knowledge of the customer present, and so assumptions are made. If sales is included, they seldom are, the salespeople are disengaged and looking at their smartphones and stepping out to make urgent calls. The innovative organization would like to have both salespeople and customers included but without mastery of the tools find it difficult.

Lately, I have been challenging organizations to turn back and think internally. Think inside-out versus outside-in. At the end of a workshop or webinar, I no longer ask participants to take this knowledge back and design customer facing services or involve sales and marketing. I ask them to do it for their vendors. I ask them to take one of their own particular services or outsourced products that they use internally and create Customer Personas, Customer Stakeholder and Customer Journey Maps. I encourage the Lean Champion to head the project if and only if he can stop it from making it the typical Lean or Six Sigma Project. We are empathizing with the users and discovering how decisions are made within our own company. Our goal is one of discovery and definition. Seek to understand not fix.

We first need to address the users of the service/product and create the Customer Persona Map. Then view the stakeholders and who is influenced by the use of this product and who influences them. Mapping the Customer journey in our organization can also be enlightening. If you want to have a little fun, have your supplier create his own three maps and see how they compare. Now, bring who you would designate as your outbound map makers and show them the results. How valid will one be with your customer? Would it be worth your time? Or, would yours look like the one created by your supplier?

Where Strategy and Customer Service Meet, Part 2 of 2

John Goodman, Vice Chairman of Customer Care Measurement and Consulting (CCMC), has published scores of articles including “Using Service to Grow the Top Line” in the AMA Journal, 8 articles in Quality Progress as well as BrandWeek, the American Banker and Marketing News. Business Week credits John’s research for creation of the GE Answer Center, the original customer satisfaction contact center, as well as instigation of service initiatives at American Express, Coors and Toyota. The American Management Association published his book, Strategic Customer Service, in May, 2009.

John was my guest in the podcast, Where Strategy and Customer Service Meet, Part 1 of 2

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download this episode

or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

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John will be presenting at the ASQ 2013 Service Conference. He holds a pre-conference on Sunday, October 6^th WKSP01: Using the Voice of Multiple Customers (VoC) to Drive Quality: Be Easy to Do Business and Monday’s  Session M04: Beyond the Buzzwords: Using Data to Enhance Loyalty and Service ROI. On Tuesday afternoon, I have the honor to be presenting at the same conference, Session T06: Lean Service Design.

Marketing Campaign Project Map

For quite a few years, I have used this outline to organize marketing campaigns, create web pages or so-called squeeze pages and many other marketing efforts. I first ran across this outline in the book, The Marketing Playbook: Five Battle-Tested Plays for Capturing and Keeping the Lead in Any Market by Jahn Zagula and Richard Tong. I have adapted it through the years to meet my needs, but essentially it has remained the same. The book explains the process in greater detail. However, the outline in itself offers a good description.

We are all enamored, with are tools, to include the latest canvases and maps. We always seek to find this deeper understanding or epiphany from creating a buyer persona, customer journey or stakeholder maps. These tools, though quite useful, are all strategic type tools. For me, I like to go in the weeds and work on more tactical projects. This is an outline after completing allows me to write copy, create buttons and add pictures very easily. It is what I call a tactical outline. I do want to mention that seldom have I used the Marketing Campaign Project Map without modifying it in someway depending on the client and their needs.

Marketing Campaign Project Map from Business901

Progressing to SD-Logic Thinking

Joseph Michelli, author of Leading the Starbucks Way: 5 Principles for Connecting with Your Customers, Your Products and Your People is tomorrow’s podcast guest and like all his books he bases them around five principles. This is Michelli’s second book on Starbucks, the first one was The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary Into Extraordinary. In the first book, the five principles were…

1. Make It your Own
2. Everything Matters
3. Surprise and Delight
4. Embrace Resistance
5. Leave your Mark

In one of my highest rated blog post, Is Zappos the Next Toyota?, I discussed the The Zappos Experience: 5 Principles to Inspire, Engage, and WOW. The Zappos principles were…

1. Serve a Perfect Fit—create bedrock company values
2. Make it Effortlessly Swift—deliver a customer experience with ease
3. Step into the Personal—connect with customers authentically
4. S T R E T C H—grow people and products
5. Play to Win—play hard, work harder

The first Starbucks book was written about 10-years ago and the Zappos book two years ago. As you can see, the progression of the principles from a focus on operations to customer experience. In his new book, Leading the Starbucks Way, I asked the author about the new set of five principles.

Joe: In all your books, you frame them in a certain way which I really like. You base them on certain principles that companies can identify with. Could you start out by giving a brief introduction to the principles that you used in Leading the Starbucks Way?

Joseph Michelli: I'll be glad to. I think for me I have to kind of get it in bite size pieces. There is so much information when you're dealing with a company the size of Starbucks. If I can kind of comeback and pull the cameras back a little we can get on that, some of the principles that we talked about in this book are really kind of around focusing on product and making sure you can savor and elevate your product. They have to do with really extend employees so that the love and I know it can be a tricky we can talk about, but the love that you extend is a leader to your employees is something then that moves into the life of the customers.

We are talking about mobilizing the connection in this book. The world has changed, and the notion that people are just going to walk into your store front or on to your page on online business is just not there. You going to have to go out and find where their lives are and mobilized your connection to make sure that you step into that space with them. There really is a principle in the book that really kind of looks at the importance of not just focusing on transaction or the customer relationship of the day, but really extending yourself out in the life of the customers by challenging your legacy, making sure that you have a lasting legacy statement that goes out into the customer’s space.

In the world which we live today there is a need to have a global of a connection with your customers as possible will also maintaining nuance for cultural relevance. So the business principles in the book are specifically dedicated to that and by name….

1. Savor and Elevate
2. Love to be Loved
3. Reach for Common Ground
4. Mobilize the connection
5. Cherish and Challenge your Legacy

The new perspective of these five principles is similar to many of the forward thinking companies today. We have progressed from operational to customer experience to Service Dominant Thinking (SD_Logic). This is where value is co-created. Delivering great experiences requires participation. We must engage our customers so that they are part of that experience and so much so that they may even take responsibility on delivering part of it. It is not a theater anymore. It not actors delivering to the audience, rather the audience and actors have joined together. For example, think about reality shows. Think about customizing your smartphones. It is the personalization of your experience that elevates it, and you savor the moment.

Framing Big Data, part 1 of 2

If you have two sets of researchers who are telling you contradictory things, and they have their own data sets to support it; how do you tell which one is believable and which one is junk. In Numbersense, what I try to do is to give people, as you say, a framework to start thinking about how you would interpret all these things out there.

…says Kaiser Fung, author of a new book, Numbersense a previous book, Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on Everything You Do and the popular blog, Junk Charts. Kaiser Fung is a professional statistician with over a decade of experience applying statistical methods to marketing and advertising businesses. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, in addition to degrees from Princeton and Cambridge Universities. He is Vice President of Business Intelligence and Analytics at Vimeo, a high-quality video hosting platform for creative people. He previously worked at Sirius XM Radio, American Express, [X+1], Exodus Communications, and Sonus Networks. He is also an adjunct professor at New York University teaching practical statistics.

This is the first of two podcasts with Kaiser. The second one will post next week.

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or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

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What is your Organizational Persona? Map it!

Do we focus on the customer too much? Most of us would disagree and say no that we should focus on the customer more. However, recently we have seen a tremendous amount of books written on organizational clarity. One of the reasons is that without understanding our purpose as an organization or as an employee of organization we limit our effectiveness. Dating myself, you go back to the 80’s where a tremendous amount of work was done on corporate vision and mission statements.

In a recent interview, Handling Impossible Projects, I asked author Michael Dobson, “When we think of a crisis like that, how much project planning goes into a crisis, such as Tylenol. Were they just winging it in that instance?”

Michael: Well, the part of the background of the Tylenol situation was that a lot of the executives of Johnson and Johnson had just gone through training or some workshop about corporate ethics. Their vision and mission statements and all these good management practices and they really only had one question to ask themselves. Did we mean all this stuff that we were saying? Once they said “Yes, we did mean it,” then they had a basis to go on.

This demonstrates how this understanding will guide is organizational decision making. Simon Sinek message of starting with Why, (Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action)) embodies this message. Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” He then draws another circle with “How” and another with “What”. It is powerful message and one of best Ted videos of all time. Not to downplay the effectiveness of the message but it is a very clever packaging of the old mission and value statements created in the 1980s.

How do we convert to a powerful Why statement?

Whether you call it Why or Vision, there is not anything else that maybe more instrumental to your success. Do you believe your organization has a heart? Does that mission pulsate throughout the entire organization? It’s not an iterative process. It is not anything that is cloudy or mysterious to your organization. It is Why you get up in the morning and go to work. With Vision, With Why, a unifying theme of purpose exists. All of your objectives, all the measures, all the targets, etc. become aligned.

I believe the simplest method of crafting our Why is through the use of an Organizational Persona Map. We use build personas to understand and empathize with customers but do we have one to understand our own organization? Can we easily identify what is the personality of our organization? As Sinek says, we know what we do and how we do it but do we know why? A humble attempt at creating an Organizational Persona Map:

Organizational Persona from Business901

Without vision, without why, you seldom provide a unifying theme of purpose. All of your objectives, all the measures, all the targets, etc. become disjointed. In a Business901 Podcast, Ari Weinzweig, CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, MI said, “Vision comes from the heart”. That should dictate how we act and the personality of our organization. Does it? How would your customer complete this?

Related Information:
The Kipling Growth Strategy Map
The Lean Business Practices of a Deli

Framing Big Data, part 2 of 2

Let us say you have Google or even Facebook – you have a billion users. It is almost impossible for Google and Facebook to understand whom their customers are. Intuition or even just like talking to some customers is going to give you an extremely biased view. You are going to basically base your entire description of one billion people based on interactions with what a hundred people? Having the data and the numbers are really important. Like we said previously, completely trusting the numbers and the analysis is also very foolish. You need human intelligence to interpret these numbers. It is really an interplay of the numbers and your interpretation because ultimately, even though the numbers will never give us cause of information – they can never really tell you with certainty that A causes B, it would tell you that A is related to B. It is human interaction that is needed that kind of tie these things all together into a credible story. Forget the notion that you will find one story that is correct, and everything else is wrong. All we are trying to look for is a story that is our best story, given our constraints of what we can and what we cannot.

…says Kaiser Fung, author of a new book, Numbersense a previous book, Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on Everything You Do and the popular blog, Junk Charts.

Kaiser Fung is a professional statistician with over a decade of experience applying statistical methods to marketing and advertising businesses. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, in addition to degrees from Princeton and Cambridge Universities. He is Vice President of Business Intelligence and Analytics at Vimeo, a high-quality video hosting platform for creative people. He previously worked at Sirius XM Radio, American Express, [X+1], Exodus Communications, and Sonus Networks. He is also an adjunct professor at New York University teaching practical statistics.

This is the second of two podcasts with Kaiser. The first one posted last week, Framing Big Data, part 1 of 2.

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Cap-Do Audio Excerpt of Book

When we use our typical sales and marketing approach, we form an idea of the way things should be, forming maps or journeys that we want our customer to adhere to. As they get further along, we have so much invested that our manipulations get stronger. When they push back, we push back. When we apply what Stephen Covey said, “Seek first to understand,” we only do that for qualification purposes. Successful companies are destined to create the future of the outcomes with their customers. It is not incremental change or problem solving. It is not a prediction, it is what we think will happen.

We can only bring this about through challenging ourselves to first let go of our pre-determined thoughts and build structures based on possible scenarios. It requires experimentation, prototyping and the practice of learning by doing. This is not an easy process and one that requires a well structure outline. CAP-Do offers such an outline and will create a process of understanding and collaboration to help determine the future with our customers. In the Check and Act Stages leads to discovery of what we must attempt, experiment within the Plan and Do stages.

Enjoy the brief introduction of the book

 

 

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CAP-Do is included in the Marketing with Lean Book Series at no additional cost.