Self-Care on the Job

We spend the majority of our waking hours consumed with work. We are there five out of seven days. On those five days – we get up and spend our mornings preparing for and getting to work. We stay at work at least eight hours. Then we spend time commuting home from work, trying to leave work at work and then preparing for our next day at work. We spend more time with co-workers than we do with families. So finding out how to care for ourselves at work is critical.

On the Commute: Listen to your favorite CD or radio shows on the way to and from work. Maybe just enjoy the silence before you get home to a loud house full of kids! You might even want to use that time for a little prayer and meditation (of course, you don’t want to close your eyes while driving!).

During Lunch: Of course, you should have something health. But I say you should also have something yummy that you look forward to eating. Make the most of your lunch by eating it away from your desk and with co-workers you enjoy. When I worked in DC, I found a nice little park to steal away to and eat my lunch. It was great to have a peaceful and beautiful outside experience in the middle of my day. I also have had a favorite restaurant close by I can go to and enjoy.

During Breaks: I am a big proponent of getting away from the desk, or the cube whenever possible. I get a big boost when I take a short walk during my breaks. You can also use breaks to talk and reconnect with work friends.

During my Coach University training, one of my instructors gave me a great way to remember to take care of yourself. Use the ESC key on your keyboard as a reminder to engage in Extreme Self-Care!

Work-Life Balance? Maybe ...

Lately, I’ve had to work a ridiculous number of hours at my day job to complete a major project. It’s really got me thinking about this concept called work-life balance. Since the past six weeks have been decidedly unbalanced, I think this is a great time to cover this concept and the three things I have realized.

1.      Being out of balance sometimes is part of being in balance. In other words, balance isn't perfection. It isn’t a perfectly divided pie. It’s part of life and life is messy and never symmetrical. For six weeks, my work took precedence and that was fine for me because there was an end date. At other times, my family and my health have taken precedence. That’s fine too as long as I’m dealing with a temporary situation and not a permanent life change.

2.      As soon as possible, reestablish old routines. I routinely get up at 5:00 AM, go upstairs and work out. I follow that up with prayer and meditation and then head back downstairs to get ready for work. I love this routine. It keeps me focused, sane and on track. However, being at work by 6:00 AM made this impossible. However, as soon as possible, I got back to it. My body and mind thank me for it.

3.      Do what you can, nothing more, maybe a bit less. While I was burning the morning and midnight oils, my blogging took a back seat. I spend weekends on the sofa instead of running a long list of errands and tasks. I realized that I could only do so much, so I accepted that. I was too tired and frazzled to do everything I had been doing. Working out in the evening would have been nice, but frankly, I didn't have the energy. Instead, I tried to focus on not eating too much junk. That much I could do.

The moral of the story is life happens. Part of being balanced is being flexible and realizing that what balance looks like will change from day-to-day. And that is okay. There will be times when one area takes a lion’s share of your time. Do what you can with the rest. But start by being gracious and realistic enough to recognize your limits and your limitations.

Respect and Loyalty

Last week, I shared with you an awesome customer service experience I had with 360 Computer Maid. As I wrote that post, I realized I had another post that would illustrate the good and the not-so-great about customer service.

I’ve been in my house for just about five years. It is my first house. As a renter, one thing I never had to worry about was landscaping. When I purchased my home taking care of a lawn was a completely new experience. Luckily, I had an acquaintance who had just started a lawn care company. I went with them. For the first two years, I had no complaints. Then a drought decimated everyone’s yard in in my neighborhood.

After the drought, my lawn had large gaping bald spots. They aerated and seeded but no luck. I took a lot of the blame because I wasn’t good at watering … especially when I was told the best time to water is in the morning. I already get up at 5:00 to work out. I’m at work by 7:30. My mornings are packed.

I did some research and found out that Bermuda grass would be better than the fescue that we’d been trying to grow. When I said I wanted to switch to that grass, I was told we’d have to seed in the spring and not the summer.

So this spring we seeded and I watered. I watered daily. My water bill doubled! Still no luck. I googled and found out that Bermuda shouldn’t be seeded until the ground temperature was 65 degrees. We were still going down into the 40’s at night. But I gave them the benefit of the doubt. They are the experts; I’m just someone that has a Google app on my smart phone.

I did email and ask about the seeding. The reply I received was shocking. In fact, I didn’t want to jump to conclusions so I forwarded the response to a few friends. They came to the same conclusion. Basically, I was told that I hadn’t actually watered my grass at all and that my claim of watering was not truthful. I was lying.

At this same time, my neighbors grass was beautiful, and they had been exactly where I was, with an ugly lawn, a few months before. I got the number to their lawn care company. Our discussion was eye-opening.

First of all, he looked at my grass and was stunned that it had not been aerated and the seed was just thrown on top of the soil. Of course, it wasn’t growing and the amount of watering I was doing wasn’t going to make it better.

The representative agreed that the best time to water is in the morning. However, he told me I could get an inexpensive timer for my hose. My original lawn care people never mentioned this to me. Basically, they felt I should just get up and water the lawn.

Finally, we talked price. The new company’s rate was half of what I had been paying. Needless to say, armed with all of this information,  I switched lawn care companies.

So what did I learn?

As a customer, …

• Loyalty is important to me. However, being loyal to a company that isn’t meeting my needs is just ridiculous.
• More important than loyalty is respect. Accusing me of lying was the height of disrespect. That, even more than the sorry state of my grass, was what made me pick up the phone and call another company.
• Price is king. However, price alone didn’t fuel my decision. It was going to a company that made me feel like they had the knowledge and ability to meet my needs. Telling me about the seed and echoing what I had read for myself on Google made sense to me. And the nugget about a timer for the hose was invaluable. Compared to the information I’d been getting before, it was critical in the decision I made.

For the Company/CSR…

• Make it easy for the customer to be loyal by offering a strong product and wonderful service. Had they grown my grass and treated me better, I would have continued to pay a premium for their service. Price alone would not have driven me to a competitor.
• The customer and client should be on the same team. The customer wants a good product or service and the company wants them to have a good experience. Informing me of what I could do to make my lawn better would have helped both of us. Why did it take 4½ years for me to even hear about the timer solution (remember this is my first house and my first lawn).
• There are customers out there who would lie, but a customer with no history of lying, misrepresentation or other negative behaviors should not be assumed to be a liar, or anything else. 
• Your price should be competitive but if your price is going to be higher than average be able to justify that cost
• Don’t assume that your customer isn’t going anywhere. The way my lawn was seeded was simply not acceptable, nor was the strong implication of lying.

A-M-A-Z-I-N-G Experience: 360 Computer Maid

A few weeks ago, I decided to take the time to do some overdue maintenance on my PC. One of the applications I chose to run was my registry cleaner, 360 Computer Maid. It’s the best registry cleaner I have come across. I decided it would be great if I could schedule automatic registry cleanings. I found that I couldn’t. When I went to the web site to try and find a solution, I realized that I was using an out-dated version of the software. They were on version 4. 0. I had version 1.2.2.2!

I knew that once I had purchased the software I shouldn’t have ever had to repurchase it. However, when I bought it, it was $9.99. It was now $24.00. I contacted support expecting them to tell me I’d have to pay again. However, they responded promptly, even though I contacted them on a Saturday, and honored their promise. The representative sent me a link to download and an updated product key. I was pleased.

Well, I was pleased until I installed the software. It wouldn’t work. I was crestfallen. I loved this software and even the outdated version I was using gave me great results. I really wanted this to work.

Over the next few days, we went back and forth. They gave me suggestions and steps to follow. I responded with screen shots and details of what happened when I tried what they had suggested. After my last email, I hadn’t heard from then for over 24 hours. I thought they had given up on me in frustration.

Finally, they got back to me. They uncovered the problem. I tried this final upload and it worked perfectly! In fact, I had helped them uncover a bug they hadn’t known was there. They immediately uploaded this new version and contacted previous customers to let them know about it.

This was an incredible experience. Email customer service is usually the worst. I hadn’t expected the prompt replies. But each time, they got back to me. It would have been easy for them to ‘lose’ my email and stop responding at all, especially when the solution wasn’t easy to come up with.

Each email was friendly and professional. At no point did they pass the buck and say it wasn’t their problem. They stuck with me until the problem was resolved. I loved 360 Computer Maid before. I really love them now.

Great product + Outstanding Customer Service = Customer for Life.

Be Our Guest!

Thomas Peterson is quoted as saying ““The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.”

Think about how we treat our guest. We make sure the house is clean. We stock the bathroom with amenities and make sure we have good food on hand. We plan activities for them. And we do all of that before they arrive. When we finally get that knock on the door, we welcome them with open arms and a smile. If they have a request we didn’t anticipate, we do what we can to accommodate it. We do these things even when we aren’t crazy about the person visiting!

So what does this look like one the job. Well, the anticipation phase would require us anticipating the questions and requests that come in most often and preparing ourselves to answer them. This could mean everything from having the right software open and/or directions for how to complete a task to rehearsing what you’ll say when the system is down or running poorly. It may even involve finding other ways to complete a task.

We also want to be prepared to answer that ringing phone with the same enthusiasm we would answer the door for a guest. Okay, we are humans not robots so maybe we aren’t quite THAT enthusiastic. However, we always want to be professional and courteous. And for goodness sake, we never want to answer the phone as if we are dreading that visit!

The second half of his statement involves treating employees like people. People are people and not machines. This means, from a management perspective, expecting bad days … they happen. People get sick, the have emergencies and sometimes they just get up on the wrong side of the bed. This doesn’t excuse poor treatment of customers, but in these cases a little bit of understanding can go a long way.

Also when it comes to improving production remember the horse. There is a carrot as well as a stick. Constantly cracking the whip and making all sorts of demands will only go so far. Use the carrot sometimes. This doesn’t always mean a monetary reward. It could mean stopping by and asking someone how things are going or sending an email to let people know how well someone is doing or of a particularly great customer service experience they created.

For co-workers, it means that you don’t have to love or even like all of your co-workers but that you treat them with the respect you would like to be treated with. Keep gossip about co-workers to a minimum as well as complaints. Likewise, give the kind of help to your teammates that you’d like to receive.

Retail Chains with the Best Customer Service

This article is a reprint of from Barbara Farfan of About.com. Click here for the entire article.

What make a good customer experience? According to the Temkin Group research and consulting firm, it's a combination of three aspects of a customer's interaction with a company - functional, accessible, and emotional. The annual Best Customer Experience ranking list is based on these three aspects of the customer experience. In 2013 customer rating and rankings reveal that in 2013 they viewed their experiences with retail grocery store chains Publix, Trader Joe's, Aldi, and fast food restaurant Chick-fil-A to be better than their experiences with Amazon.com. This is significant since Amazon.com and its leader Jeff Bezos are well known for an almost fanaticalcustomer satisfaction commitment. 

When consumers are asked just three questions about their latest interaction with a company, it can be determined how they rate their experience with that company for functional (completely failed to completely successful), accessibility (very difficult to very easy), and emotional impact (upset to delighted). Individual opinions are averaged and a customer experience ranking is obtained based on the average customer scores. 

Even though the 2013 Temkin Customer Experience rankings included ratings of companies from 19 different industries, it is clear that the masters of customer experience in U.S. business is the retail industry (which includes restaurants, automobiles dealers, and companies with significant retail operations). Of the top 20 companies that consumers rated as having the best customer experience, 19 of them are retail companies. Banks, insurance companies, financial services, wireless providers, TV services, computer manufacturers, and car rental companies crowd the bottom end of the customer experience rankings. As in 2012, of the companies that are strictly retailing companies, RadioShack received the lowest customer experience ratings from retail customers. 

What follows is a list of the retail companies that were rated by consumers for customer experience in the 2013 ranking report. The list is arranged according to the customer experience ranking each company received, when compared to all companies rated. The number in the left column is the ranking number, out of a total of 246 companies. (The companies sharing ranking numbers received the same average ratings from the customers surveyed.) 

Which retail chains provide the best experience to their customers? The ones that can best answer that question are the customers themselves, which they do each year in a customer experience survey conducted by Temkin Group research and consulting firm. Customers have rated and ranked Aldi, Amazon, Publix, San’s and HEB as multi-year customer experience bests and Dell, AT&T, Ford, and RadioShack as multi-year customer experience worsts. 

By comparing customer experience rankings from 2011, 2012, and 2013, it’s possible to see the trends of individual retailers as viewed by the customers they serve. What follows is a multi-year customer experience comparison of all retail chains that were included in the annual Temkin research from 2011 to 2013. The numbers to the right of the dates are the ranking numbers that each retail company was given based on the ratings of emotion, function and accessibility provided by their customers compared to all other retail companies, as well as companies from other industries. 

1       Publix 
2      Trader Joe's 
3      Aldi 
3      Chick-fil-A 
5      Amazon.com 
5      Sam's Club 
7      H.E.B. 
7      Dunkin' Donuts 
5      Save-a-Lot 
7      Sonic Drive-In 

Internal Customers Need Love Too!

I used to have a boss and whenever she walked over to my desk, I’d cringe. Her desk-side visits meant one thing, I’d done something wrong. Her philosophy was when you got it right, you were just doing what you were supposed to do. She felt commendations and praise were too ‘touchy-feely’. Those efforts didn’t require desk-side visitation.

The morale of our team suffered because we never heard anything good from our manager and the overwhelming majority of the work we did was good. A little acknowledgement would have gone a long way.

Too many times, we fail to give credit where credit is due or even show a little appreciation to those closest around us. It doesn’t feel important. In my old boss’s view, criticism was a better motivator than praise. She was wrong. But she isn’t alone in her preference for criticism. People who receive excellent customer service tell, on average, three other people. If they receive poor service, however, they recount that experience to at least 11 people.

Think about how good you feel when you get an honest compliment or when someone values your hard work. Now, take that feeling and pay it forward.

Here are some ways to acknowledge and appreciate those around you.

• Don’t keep quiet! Let people know about a job well done.
• Remember birthdays. It’s a little thing but it shows that you cared enough to remember.
• Smile.
• Celebrate successes. Good grades, a promotion at work, losing a few pounds, all of these things take a lot of effort. Acknowledge the hard work.
• Compliment honestly.

Acknowledgement and appreciation help us focus on the positive and the good that is always going on around us!