It can take one sentence, one conversation or one seemingly innocent action to completely lose the trust of your employees or colleagues. Conversely, it will take multiple conversations, consistent actions and time (and more time), to build the trust of your employees and colleagues.

When it comes to building trust, there is no magic bullet, no special pill and no one week contest.

A talented coworker of mine recently wrote her Master’s Thesis on “Improving trust between executives and employees”. She shared that for subsequent years, employee engagement surveys have shown a downward trend in “trust in senior leadership”. In addition, there is a direct correlation to a company’s performance and financial success and the engagement of its employees, so organizations must take this issue very seriously. She also agreed, considering her extensive research, that building trust is not an easy affair.

How the heck do you build trust with your employees while working in environments with lots of change, surprises, acquisitions, budget cuts and more? This blog post will focus on 5 best practices that I learned (and most experts agree with) this year to build trust with your employees.

1) Must be deliberate

Like choosing to lose weight, or not smoking, the decision to build a climate of trust must be deliberate. It will not happen on its own.

The best place to start is by assessing the current state of trust and engagement on your team through surveys, skip levels, direct observation or other feedback gathering techniques. Through this process you can identify the key “detractors” and “contributors” of trust and know where to focus your attention. Once you have identified the areas of focus, create your plan of attack and then hold yourself and your teams’ accountable for plan execution.

2) The department leader sets the tone

When I interview candidates for jobs at my firm, I am often asked this question, “what is the culture at your company”. My standard, honest reply is that it varies and depends on the department leader. As I look cross-functionally, the environment and tone varies from sales, to marketing to support etc.

Trust building starts with the department leader and then should cascade through the levels and teams.

It is common that some of the trust issues are occurring within management ranks, not just with your employees on the front line.. for example, the managers may not fully trust the directors or the directors may not fully trust their VP. I believe that you need to fix the management trust issues, before you can address issues across the larger team.

3) Trust is about authenticity

Acting as if you are “in management” will get you no-where. Speak and act in a way that is genuine, authentic and is comfortable. Share stories from your past experiences. Laugh when you think things are funny. Swear occasionally- if that is something that makes you, you.

You can be a very effective leader, while also being true to you, your values and interests. In fact, if you find that you have to make significant changes to fit into your department or company culture, you may be in the wrong job.

This sounds a little bit Dr. Phil-ish, but most of the trust building papers and books talk about “being vulnerable”. If a leader discloses personal things (appropriate ones), then, in turn, employees and colleagues will feel more comfortable disclosing, and the mutual disclosure builds trust. I tested this in 2012, and it does work. I am not someone who is comfortable telling personal stories (I always wonder whether they are too boring), but I pushed myself to practice this year and it was a great learning experience.

4) Trust takes time and more time

At the beginning of 2012, our company purchased one of our largest competitors and my department, technical support, close to doubled in size. One thing I heard a lot about and observed in the early stages was that most of the acquired employees had loyalty and trust to/with their prior company, but as of day one with our company, the trust meter was at zero, or even negative numbers.

I learned that every action or decision after “day 1” could either work to build their trust or detract from their trust. The fact that our acquisition, like most acquisitions, resulted in some employee layoffs, added negative fuel to the fire.

I learned a lot from overseeing the integration activities, but from a trust building perspective, the most important takeaway was that trust is built over time, and not with words, but with consistent actions. You must say what you mean, with authenticity, and then deliver on your commitments time and time and time again. If you keep doing this, trust will come.

5) Communication is the best tool for building trust

It is very simple.. I want to know what happened in the past, what is going on today and what is going to go on in the future. I also want to know why it is happening, who made the decision and how it impacts me. When possible or appropriate, I want to either provide input into or make some of the decisions. (I also tend to be very nosey and want to know all of the same things about the rest of the departments across my company.)

Many other employees are like me and the best way to address our incessant curiosity is by direct communication. The communication does not have to be fancy, but it does need to be timely, relevant, complete and exclude “blah blah blah” language.

Like the act of building trust, communicating with our employees must be a deliberate act. Leaders set the tone and must demonstrate that it’s a priority. Thousands of books have been written on communication best practices, but when in doubt start with some of the basics: email, verbal and face to face.

Simply, you can not build trust without communication.

Related articles

• Communication Strategies to Gain the Trust of Your Employees
• What Your Employees Won’t Tell You (But Wish You Knew)
• Trust: A retrospective on its role in the Leader-Follower Equation

• How easy is it for customers to find your self service portal? Once they get there, how is easy is it for them to navigate and find the actions they are seeking?
• After they open up a customer service ticket, how well do we do keeping them informed of the progress, or do we rely on them to continually check in?
• When we improve our products, offer new versions or find common bugs, do customers have to seek out this information or wait until their product breaks…. or do we feed them this information proactively and not just via email?

Here is a recent example, of a situation where I had to invest significant effort to get some satisfaction…

In June 2012, I purchased some special hair care products on the Internet. I thought I had signed up for just the one month, introductory package, but apparently, in very small print, I had signed up for ongoing deliveries until I canceled.

When I got my first surprise delivery in early August, I called their customer service department and verbally canceled the subscription. I was told that I should have read the small print on the email, on the website etc, because I authorized this second delivery. I ultimately agreed to keep and pay for the second shipment, but clearly stated- cancel everything else.

About six weeks later I received another shipment. This one was bigger and the ticket price was $90! I called customer service again and waited on hold for 3 minutes. The person who answered could not help me and I was transferred to an account specialist. From there I waited on hold for 15 minutes (timed on my iPhone) and the person who answered said, “I can see that you called us last month, but there is no record of the cancellation. I can cancel the subscription now, but you will need to mail back the products to get a credit.” I asked them to pay for the return shipping, but they refused. I hung up the phone and my blood was boiling.

I contacted my credit card company and disputed the charge. I then went to the Better Business Bureau website and entered a formal customer service complaint against the company. About a week later, the hair care company contacted me and agreed to credit me for the products and pay for return shipping. (Why not let me keep the products for all the hassle?)

What an exhausting ordeal and the interesting part is, their hair products are awesome. I loved them and would want to keep using them, but since they have caused me so much time and effort, why bother.

The other interesting thing I discovered was that there were a bunch of other complaints against them on the Better Business Bureau website, about the exact same thing. This issue of not knowing you sign up for future shipments is very common, yet they have not changed their selling practices. Instead, they keep upsetting customers and requiring our effort to cancel.

• Are you making it super easy for your customers to do business with you?
• Are you learning from your mistakes, so they are not repeated with other customers?  Or, are you only reacting when you receive a customer sat survey with low ratings?
• Is customer effort low, yet customer satisfaction high?

Related articles

• Customer Service and Customer Satisfaction
• Customer Satisfaction in Banks

Every once in awhile we get the chance to witness a feat of incredible customer service that reminds us that the stars are aligned, people are nice and that the world is a wonderful, dreamy place. This just happened to me on a business trip to India.

Over a ten day period, I flew from the U.S. to Mumbai, then Pune and then Bangalore, India, to attend a customer conference and then to meet with our local customer service team members.  The trip was a huge success, with the exception of my laptop glitch.

Like most business travelers, I traveled with my laptop. And like most business travelers, one of the first things I did after I checked in to my hotels, was go to my room and plug in my laptop to charge it and check email.  That is exactly what I did when I arrived in Mumbai and then again in Pune. However, when I got to Bangalore and looked in my travel bag, the laptop slot was empty. I stared with disbelief, could feel my adrenalin pumping and then muttered a few choice curse words.

In a state of growing panic, I went down to the hotel’s front desk and asked for some help. Since I am used to U.S. hotel customer service, my expectations were fairly low. I expected to hear something like, “Sorry to hear that mam. Would you like the phone number of the Pune airport?” Instead, I got a completely different response.

The manager on duty clearly stated, “I will take care of this for you Ms. Reynolds. We will get your laptop back”. I offered to help and to call my company’s travel service and they said, “No need. Let us run with this and get back to you with updates”.

Over the next 24 hours, four different hotel employees worked on the laptop recovery. Occasionally, I was asked for information or signatures, but the hotel employees handled 99% of the work. Every time I walked by an employee in the hallway, they would offer updates on progress and reinforce that they would get me the device. I also received telephone updates mapping their progress.

When I thanked these employees, the standard response was, “No problem Ms. Reynolds. We are just doing are job”.

First, they uncovered that the laptop was indeed in Pune and not stolen by another traveler. Then they determined which airport and airline employees they needed to talk with. And ultimately, they negotiated a deal where the laptop was sent on a cargo plan from Pune to Bangalore and handed to one of the hotel drivers.

I first discovered that the laptop was missing Saturday afternoon. At 6AM Monday morning, it was handed to me in perfect condition, just in time for my business meetings.  The entire recovery service was free, with the exception of a $40 USD courier charge.

Wow… an incredible customer service experience! Makes you wonder what we can do to make our customers feel so special…..

Small Print

Some of you may be wondering, how the heck did Marci leave her laptop at the Pune security desk? Here’s the story..

• The security process in India is not the same as in other airports. In the U.S., the security guards advise you to watch your personal items through the entire process of screening. In the Pune airport, female travelers are separated from their belongings and asked to wait in a line for a manual pat down in a closed off, screened booth. I lost sight of my belongings  (a small suitcase, my pocketbook with money, prescriptions and credit cards, and my laptop) for close to ten minutes.  While waiting, it was possible for any other travelers to claim my items and walk away.
• The line through security was so long that the plane had already begun boarding, so I was also worrying about possibly missing my plane.
• When the pat down was over and I was allowed to leave the booth, my main concern was grabbing my pocketbook. I found that first and then my carry on, but forget about the laptop. End of story.  A very non-Marci move, that will never happen again.

Here’s what I mean….

I worked in sales organizations for many years and when employees were not meeting their sales quota the most common reasons given were that their sales quota was too high or that their sales territory was “bad”, as compared to other sales territories. Very rarely did I hear, “I need to raise my game. Make more calls, improve my sales pitch etc”.

Now that I work in a technical support environment, I hear a different set of “not in my backyard” statements. For example, “We missed our service level target because product quality is bad or we had to wait a long time for the customer to get back to us.” “Our customer satisfaction results missed target because the customer did not rate Tech Support, they rated their experience with the company overall. We can’t control that”.

There are definitely occasions when these statements are true. Sometimes product quality does suck. Sometimes other departments drop the ball and do not follow through. And, sometimes customers take a long time getting back to us. BUT, I would wager that in 80% or more of the cases, the reason for the performance results miss is partially or completely in our control and in our own backyard. We may not be able to fix the issue(s) completely, but we should be able to minimize them.

Let’s use the Customer Satisfaction Survey example….. In my recent experience, one of the most common reasons that customers give lower survey scores is because we, (the department) could have done a better job keeping them informed during the problem solving process. They do not site the product quality or what other departments did/did not do- they just want to have visibility into what is going on. This is completely in our control.

What about the situations where we contact the customer for more information and they take a long time getting back to us? Is it possible that we could have checked back in with the customer more frequently to see if they had any questions or needed more info? Is it possible, that we could have set better expectations from the beginning, i.e. Ms. Customer, can you please get back to my by Tuesday at the latest, so we can resolve your problem quickly?”. It is true that we can not control what customers do, but we CAN influence what they do.

For every situation that starts with a focus in someone else’s backyard… after further discussion and understanding, there are always opportunities in our own.

Here is a home-made comic that illustrates this point. Enjoy! (Click on the image to view a larger version.)

If you are leading a technical, production support department, only focusing on problems, post “go live” is reactive and does not paint the entire customer experience picture. Instead, you should gain visibility into all product issues and all tickets, including those found during testing or found during projects. You should understand the volume and causes, and then identify trends across ticket sources. This allows you to move into proactive mode and influence product release decisions that will have the biggest bang for the buck.

The most common buckets of cases/tickets are:

• Project cases/tickets: Those tickets opened during the lifecycle of a project, prior to a customer’s Go Live date. These problems may be unique to that individual customer, or problems that affect all customers using that version of the product. In most companies, the professional services department owns and manages these tickets against an individual project, but may not be looking at these tickets holistically across projects.
• Internal cases/tickets: Those tickets opened by internal, company employees, usually in software development or engineering, as they find defects in the core product code through the course of testing or fixing other defects. These are product specific, not customer specific.  Ideally, software development and product management should oversee these tickets and prioritize which defects will be fixed (or not fixed) in which future release, and notify internal and external customers.
• Production support cases/tickets: Those tickets opened by customers who are using the product in a production environment. The technical support or customer support department usually owns and manages these cases.

Important:

If you analyze and trend all three case types; project, internal and production cases, you will identify that a portion of case types are exactly the same.

For example, in project Cool Customer defect 12 was found and then fixed only in that customer’s project, not across products. The project manager notified Engineering and an internal case was opened for the same defect and is now sitting in the internal case backlog waiting to be prioritized for a future release. In the mean time, six customers using that product called Tech Support and opened up tickets for the same product defect.

Why should you care?

Leverage: Having your arms around this data gives you a lot more leverage to influence product management or engineering decisions related to product fixes or product enhancements. Instead of making a business case that includes 100 production support cases, you can make a business case that includes 300 cases: 100 production, 100 internal and 100 project.

Customer Loyalty: This gives you visibility into the entire customer experience. If you see that Cool Customer experienced a significant number of product defects during project, they may need more TLC post Go Live. Your support team may need to spend extra time building the customer’s trust in the company or the product to help instill customer loyalty.

Project Handover Management: Keeping tabs on open project cases weeks or months before a project handover, will allow you to head off any unforeseen issues at the time of Go Live. Check out a recent blog post, “Don’t be the victim of a customer project handover gone wrong“.

Last… you may be thinking, why should I have to do this trending across case or ticket types? It is not my job.

Caring about the customer experience across all touch points, building customer loyalty and helping your company contain costs, is everybody’s job.  Just do it…  An who doesn’t want to be a Rock Star?

Related articles

• Customer Experience Management Best Practices (themorningsocial.wordpress.com)
• 10 Reasons Why Incident Prevention Trumps Incident Management (theoperationsblog.com)
• Why Experience is Key to Customer Loyalty (conversationagent.com)
• 3 Ways to Guarantee Customer Service Failure (customerthink.com)

• When important things need to get done, you and/or your team state with confidence, “I own that. We will review what needs to get done and provide an update next week. We will achieve the end of month target.”
• When things don’t go as planned, you and/or your team state, “My bad. This should have been done by X date, but I missed that mark. I apologize and would like to discuss an alternative date. I assure you that we’ll meet the adjusted time line.”
• When a direct report misses a date for a task that is due to your boss, as the leader, you take ownership, “Unfortunately X project is not ready yet. I should have done a better job planning with the team to make this date. I assure you that we will provide the deliverable by Friday.”
• When team members do not like a decision that “management” made, you respond with, “I actually made that decision. I had to make some difficult calls, but I weighed all options, got input from the leadership team and decided that this was the best course of action”.

When I am in discussions with accountable people, it is a breath of fresh air. The conversation focuses on the job at hand and driving results. The focus is NOT on egos, passing the buck or making excuses. I hear phrases such as, “I will”, “I can”, “I did”, “I missed that, but assure you I will get back on track”.

Alternatively, lack of accountability is one of the LEAST attractive personality or leadership traits. Consistently acting this way will kill your credibility, reputation and effectiveness, as well as that of your teams’. We should ban words and phrases  like “maybe”, “probably” and “not sure who owns this”.

What are you doing to drive an accountability culture in your organization?

Related articles

• Credibility: It Still Matters (leadershipchallenge.typepad.com)
• How Do You Establish Accountability? (managebetternow.com)

When we consider options to improve the customer experience, discussions often lead to complex process improvements or expensive tool enhancements, but there is something we can all do that is relatively easy and almost free – keep our customers well informed during the problem solving progress.

There are three major components to the act of keeping a customer well informed:

1. Acknowledge that work has begun on their problem
2. Share the problem solving activities
3. Set and follow through on time frame expectations

Based on feedback I have received in customer satisfaction surveys and directly from clients, keeping customers informed during the problem solving progress, is often more important that the total time of resolution.  In other words, frequent and relevant communication can trump speed- when done effectively.

Here are some specific examples:

1. Acknowledge that work has begun:

• My name is Marci, one of the Widget A Product Specialists, and I have just begun to work on your ticket
• Mr. customer, I received and am working on your ticket about Error Message 123

2. Share the problem solving activities:

• I will review the problem logs you sent and attempt to identify the cause of the error
• I will consult with one of our senior engineers, who has worked on many similar problems
• I will review the technical release notes and see if this change is related to the recent product version change
• This issue looks very familiar. I will check our knowledge base articles for a solution

3. Set and follow through on time frame expectations

• I have dealt with similar problems before and I expect this will take about 4 hours to resolve
• I will post updates on my progress in our ticketing system and these will be visible in the self-support online portal
• I will send you an email in two hours and let you know where I stand in the problem resolution process

I love this process because anyone can do it, from your brand new employees, to your executives to your very experienced support engineers. In addition, every type of customer will find this valuable: individuals, small businesses or large corporations.

Although the process is relatively simple and somewhat intuitive, I have found that it does not always happen. We often get wrapped up in the technical side of problem solving and forget about the human element. We spend more time talking about SLA achievement than the processes that lead up to the problem resolution.

It’s also important to remember that technology can enable the communication process. If you have an eSupport option and can publish public comments, the act of communicating can become part of the problem solving process, not in addition to. Most CRM systems also have notification options, and you can set up  a process by which customers will receive email updates at certain intervals after the case has been opened- and when the case has been resolved. We can address the human side, leveraging our existing technology.

Let’s work together so that we don’t leave opportunity on the table and provide our customers with the best experiences in our collective industries.

Related articles

• How to Maintain Traditional Customer Service in the Social Media Age(mashable.com)

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• SLA is not just for customers – count everything(sillyfeatures.com)

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When running a complex business operation, there will always be problems to solve and coworkers that you disagree with, but if you take action on every problem and confront every disagreement, you will actually lessen not increase progress. Strategically, picking your battles will increase your leadership effectiveness.

How do you know which battles to fight? Ask yourself this set of questions…

• Does the issue in question tie to one of your department or company priorities?
• Even though you disagree with the idea or approach, can you live with it? Will it still address the problem, but in a different way?
• Working with others is about give and take. Has this person outwardly supported one of your ideas in the past?
• Does the person you disagree with have more expertise about the problem than you do? Is your ego getting in the way?
• Should you even be involved with this issue or do you need to let go and allow the right people solve it, i.e. delegate and empower?

If you are still not sure, wait at least another day and/or run the scenario by a trusted coworker or boss and get their input. It can difficult if/when you are too close to an issue.

If you do decide to pick a battle, you must approach it very strategically. You must think through and be able to articulate the business impact of the possible wrong decision and the benefits of your approach. You must bring data, stories, pictures etc.. whatever will help illustrate your point of view.

Don’t pick your battle until you are prepared. If you need more time, try this phrase one of my recent bosses uses effectively  “I need some time to process your ideas (or point of view). Can we meet again at XX time?” By using the word “process”, you are not stating disagreement yet- so the person does not get defensive and you lay the groundwork for a positive follow-up meeting.

Strategically choosing your battles will improve your leadership effectiveness – you will get more of the right work done, build stronger relationships and continually  develop team members.  It is so true… there are often bigger fish to fry!

However, the technique that stood out the most to me was this: “To make a compelling case for change, don’t just point at the numbers and demand better ones. Your abstract message won’t stick. Instead, make key managers experience your organization’s problems.”

Here is one example from Bratton’s playbook. At that time, New Yorker’s viewed the subways as one of the most dangerous places in their city, but the NY Transit’s senior staff ignored this feedback and believed that the subway riders were over-reacting. To change their mind-set, Bratton required all New York transit officers, including himself, to commute to work by subway. Once they observed and experienced the gangs, the criminals and the overcrowded conditions, they grasped the need for change and took responsibility for making it happen.

These type of “aha” experiences do not all have to happen on a subway. You can experience the same things on a few conference calls.  Here is an example…

I had received feedback from a key leader in my organization that he and his team members were being asked to do things that were beyond their scope of work and that were very stressful. As a result, morale was suffering and some of their primary duties were being neglected.

I understood that change would need to happen, but did not realize the urgency until I personally experienced the pain by attending a series of meetings with the leader. First hand, I heard the demands, felt the pressure and met all of the key players. I also put myself out there to respond to some of the demands.  After these experiences, “I got it” and took personal responsibility for driving faster change.

This experience reminded me that I can not just rely on reports, presentations and conversations to understand what changes need to happen. I must put myself out there and experience first hand what my teams experience every day.

Related articles

• The Danger Of Conference Room Decision Making (The Operations Blog)
• Video: Bill Bratton weighs in on new crime stats (cbsnews.com)
• How Beer & Change Management Go Together (The Operations Blog)

If you work in a big ticket software, technical support organization then you and your team members have likely been the victim of a customer project handover gone wrong.  This is not as serious as other crimes, but addressing a red, project handover is of critical importance.

A “project handover” is the point in time that a customer installing a large ticket software product moves from their “project phase” to their “production support phase”. In the project phase, the professional services organization manages the customer engagement and activities focus on planning, testing and implementation.  In theory, when the customer moves to the “production support phase”, the project phase is completed, software defects addressed, the customer has gone “live” and the software is working as designed.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Often times the customer is moved to production support too soon, resulting in frustration, long work hours, both employee and customer dissatisfaction and, at times, financial penalties.

How can you fight the crimes that occur during a troubled software implementation engagement? Lieutenant Reynolds recommends that you….

1) Define the laws of the handover

Start by clearly defining the project handover process itself. Partner with your sales and professional services organization to map out and agree on the sequence of events leading up to and immediately following the project go-live, that will ensure that the handover is successful.

2) Assign a division to the process and traffic cop to each project

There should be one handover process owner, and in my opinion, it should be the professional services organization, and more specifically a Project Manager should own the successful completion and handover of an individual project. When there are multiple owners to the steps in a project, no-one takes accountability for the overall project handover’s success.

3) Involve the entire squad at the start of the shift

Involve technical support and engineering at the beginning of the project. The more that the support teams knows about the customer and their project, the more successful they will be in supporting the live customer. Bringing them in at the very beginning allows the support team to provide advice or input, and plan far ahead for success, e.g. appropriate staffing.

4) Build project handover activities in the scope of the project hours  (could not think of a clever police analogy)

When the professional support team calculates the full project hours and resources required, the tasks and time for project handover must be included. If not, many of the success steps will be skipped and the handover will have problems, as the project team is rushed on to new, billable work.

Taking a step back, the hours required for project handover tasks are not material compared to the hours required for all of the other project steps. But, the small investment will have major returns! The customer will be much happier with the outcome of their project. Customer satisfaction, will lead to customer loyalty, which will lead to more billable engagements and new business referrals.

Taking short cuts in this area can have major, negative ramifications, while investing in them can have a measurable, ROI.

5) Like a good District Attorney, negotiate the details of when the customer is ready to hand over

Before the customer nears go live, the project team and the support team should meet and discuss the criteria for allowing a project handover to occur. There should be some standard criteria for all customers, for example, no open Severity 1 (outages) tickets, no open Severity 2 (critical) tickets and less than 10 Severity 3 (ongoing support) tickets.  This criteria will vary depending on your product and business needs.

Since all software has product defects, and some are more important than others, it is not realistic to assume every issue has been addressed before the project changes hands.

6) Like a good lawyer, negotiate the details of who will handle any open tickets

Agreeing on the number of open issues is one step, but it is equally as important to determine who will do the work to close out the open issues. It may be helpful to walk through each open ticket and agree on a go forward business owner, e.g. the project team will close out certain types of tickets, while production support will take over a different type. This work assignment will vary depending on your product , policies and business roles.

7) Submit your paperwork on time.. and don’t leave anything out, or the Sarge will be mad

A successful project handover requires that the customer is ready AND the internal staff members are ready. More specifically, your handover activities must include tactics for information transfer from the project team to the production support team and include details about the customer’s environment, software customizations and anything else that you consider pertinent. This information transfer may happen at the time of handover in the form of training and documentation. You should also consider processes that will support ongoing questions, months after the customer is in production.

If your company can ensure consistent, successful customer project handovers, than your company will reap many benefits including increases in customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, new business and employee engagement. Why not start the crime fighting process right now?