Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival 21 nights. He won the bet!

It’s Sunday, March 17 9:47 AM otherwise known as St Patrick’s Day. The day where my proud people celebrate their national saint, their country and losing to the Italians, by dyeing our drinking water green, dancing maniacally while keeping our arms completely rigid and getting plastered.

So before I get dressed in green from head to toe, and enjoy my breakfast of sausage, egg and 2 pints of Guinness and then suffer from a three day migraine (definitely not a hangover) I wanted to talk to you about Sophistication Bias.

In his book “The Advantage” Patrick Lencioni highlights that many well educated managers and leaders believe that real improvement can only come from complex, sophisticated management theories. They tend to discount ideas if they appear too simple. This phenomenon is known as Sophistication Bias.

From my 10 years experience as a business speaker I’ve found that neither complex management theory nor the intelligence of the management board is the deciding factor in whether an idea works. Instead it comes down to courage, discipline and persistence.

This applies in business and personal life. We all look for the next fad diet or next breakthrough in exercise, but the reality is quite simple to get fitter or lose weight it’s simply a case of eat healthier and move more than you sit. It requires persistence and discipline. If anything the more complex an idea is, the harder it is to follow or achieve.

Look at performance management. Each year you have a bureaucratic system of record keeping and documentation to protect managers from lawsuits and unfair dismissal claims, rather than focusing on motivating and improving performance of employees. In fact, if we are honest, how many of us have a team of people that we hate doing annual performance management for because it takes up so many hours of our time requires so much documentation and doesn’t actually result in any fruitful results. As managers we often find the process mostly adversarial, fraught with nervous negotiation rather than clear communication.

What if we cut down the required paperwork to a page, but undertook regular performance management, provided employees with clarity about what was expected of them, delivered regular and specific feedback? This wouldn’t be a sophisticated solution, it just requires persistence and discipline.

Right I’m off to the pub to celebrate my favourite saint. Probably best if you call my assistant Alyson over the next few days as I can feel a migraine coming on…

Click here to watch Marc’s showreel. If you would like to find out more about Marc, visit www.marchoganlive.com or to book him for a speaking event please contact your favourite speaker bureau.

 

Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival for 21 nights. He won the bet!

Great customer service starts with good leadership this is my good boss manifesto.

1. I’d like to think that I’m a nice person to work for, but in reality I am probably occasionally a pain in the neck (feel free to choose another part of your anatomy). Help me be a better boss by being honest with me.
2. My most important asset is you, I need your enthusiasm, passion and knowledge I will always try to fairly reward these attributes.
3. Whilst occasionally I have a grand breakthrough idea, usually the day-to-day grind of running of a business can be very mundane. If you have an idea that will make our lives easier, share it with me.
4. Your ideas are crucial to our success, I will always encourage good ideas, however sometimes I have to make the difficult decision not to support all ideas (including my own).
5. My job is a tight ropewalk between being too assertive and not assertive enough.
6. To lead, one must be confident and believe they are right however I also understand that sometimes I may be wrong I will strive to teach all of us the same lesson.
7. I understand that nobody is perfect and we all make mistakes, I will try not to play the blame game, let us deal with mistakes as effectively and painlessly as possible, and then learn from them.
8. I promise to listen if you promise too.
9. Problems to be solved in private, successes celebrated in public.
10. In challenging times it always very easy to focus on the negative, I will always try and look for the positive in any situation.
11. You will always be sure where you stand with me, there is no hidden agenda.
12. Sometimes my role is to shield you from external pressures and pressures from above, please understand that I will always fight for the best outcome for my people.
13. In high-pressure situations I may be short with you, I apologise in advance, I will always aim to be polite and treat you how I would like to be treated.
14. We would not be here if it wasn’t for our customers, it is up to all of us to ensure that we do our very best to help our customers. I am never too busy to deal with the customer.

Click here to watch Marc’s showreel. If you would like to find out more about Marc, visit www.marchoganlive.com or to book him for a speaking event please contact your favourite speaker bureau.

 

Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival 21 nights. He won the bet!

To understand what your customers really think of you, here is a simple exercise.

First of all you need ask your customers to use a scale from 0 to 10 to rate how likely they would be to recommend you to a friend or colleague.

Customers who give you a 9 or 10 (well done, by the way) are what we call, “promoters”.  They’re the ones who would generally recommend you to a friend or colleague.

People who score you 6 or less are known as “detractors”.  They are likely to make negative rumblings about your brand. A score of 7 and 8 would come from the “passives” they don’t have strong positive or negative feelings about you (a bit like how I feel about Sweden).

Once you’ve asked the question, you can use this information to calculate your company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS).  Simply take the percentage of your customers who scored you 9 or 10 and subtract the percentage of customers who scored you 6 or below.

Lego, Apple, American Express and HSBC are amongst 48% of large companies (with more than $500 million in revenues) who use NPS to improve customer satisfaction, retention and growth.

I like NPS as a tool. The reason it’s popular is it allows you to measure customer satisfaction and to benchmark against other companies.  By asking other probing questions you can get to the bottom of underlying reasons and make the necessary changes.

The thing is I bet there are a lot of companies out there who don’t actually know why their customers are their customers.  Sure they can give an educated guess, but they don’t actually know why.

The only way you’ll ever find out why a customer uses your product is to ask why, and then more importantly use that information to drive your company, your employees and your communication.

Click here to watch Marc’s showreel. If you would like to find out more about Marc, visit www.marchoganlive.com or to book him for a speaking event please contact your favourite speaker bureau.

 

Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival 21 nights. He won the bet!

In the last blog we talked about how much poor customer service is costing the UK’s economy. This time I’m going to be a bit more specific about how to respond to complaints and improve customer service.

There are seven incredibly annoying phrases that you could use when a customer has a problem:

1) Our policy is…
2) The rules are…
3) We can’t do that because…
4) That department does not take incoming calls. (Seriously a telephone company used this on me!)
5) That department does not have direct email address.
6) We are very busy at the moment.

Or the all-time classic:

7) Our system is down.

If a customer is complaining they want their problem to be heard, taken seriously and ultimately resolved. When I have a problem there are a few phrases I would much rather hear:

1) Sorry…
2) Clearly based on what you have said we could do a lot better.
3) Let me make this right.
4) Is there anything I can do right now that would make it up to you?
5) Thank you for your feedback I will make sure that the relevant people know and we will fix the problem.

Imagine that your partner has returned home to find that you had left the tap running all day and flooded the house. Which of the above phrases (obviously tweaked for that situation) would you choose to use?

Of course, no matter what answer you use you’ll still be in deep water (ho ho!) but I’m pretty sure the second set of sentences might be a little more useful…

One final thought. I know it’s hard sometimes but please try not to get angry with your customers – it doesn’t help anybody.

Last week in the middle of an argument with my wife I found myself shouting rather too loudly “WOMAN! You have unleashed my wrath” I probably don’t need to tell you that I lost said argument…

Click here to watch Marc’s showreel. If you would like to find out more about Marc, visit www.marchoganlive.com or to book him for a speaking event please contact your favourite speaker bureau.

 

Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival 21 nights. He won the bet!

Some recent research from the Professor of Common Sense at the University of Bleedin’ Obvious has found that bad customer service costs your company money.

What you might not know is that industry analysts Datamonitor calculate that bad customer service actually costs the UK economy £15.3 Billion a year.

What’s more frightening is that a survey carried out by Avaya found that while 80% of companies think they have good service, only 8% of their customers agree.

Furthermore a 2012 YouGov Poll of 2,084 UK adults showed that 59% of consumers will pay a premium for products or services where they believe they are likely to receive good service.

And if all those figures don’t blow your mind the YouGov survey also found that 82% of consumers would share a bad customer service experience compared to 55% who would share a good experience.

So how do you create good customer service? Well over the next few blogs I’ll be discussing just that!*

*Hint:

You don’t need a fancy automated telephone answering system that tells me I’m the 59th person in the queue!

You don’t need a call centre on the other side of the world, where all the telephone operators are forced to change their name to more Western ones;

And you don’t even need to record my call for quality purposes, to see how many swear words can fit into a 10 minute conversation.

Click here to watch Marc’s showreel. If you would like to find out more about Marc, visit www.marchoganlive.com or to book him for a speaking event please contact your favourite speaker bureau.