PODCAST - #HRHappyHour 204 - Customer Success and Advocacy

HR Happy Hour 204 - Customer Success and Advocacy

Recorded Tuesday March 3, 2015

Hosts: Trish McFarlane, Steve Boese

Guest: Howard Tarnoff

Listen to the show HERE

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, Trish and Steve were joined by Howard Tarnoff, Senior Vice President for Ceridian HCM, and the person responsible for launching and overseeing the Ceridian's award winning Customer Success Program "XOXO".

On the show, Howard shared some of the pretty unique approaches to Customer Success and Advocacy that Ceridian has put in place - creating ways for customers to connect and share information and best practices, highlighting success stories for both organizations and individuals, and engaging customer advocates at numerous points along the HR buying journey.

Everything has changed about how organizations and individuals conduct product and market research, how they find and engage with trusted advisors and colleagues, and how they expect the relationship between solution provider and customer to evolve. Innovative approaches like Ceridian's "XOXO" customer success program represent how modern, empowered, and mutually beneficial provider/customer relationships have adapted to meet these changes.

We also lamented (yes, again), about the terrible winter weather, Steve pitched his idea for a 'Snow Day' on May 22, we previewed some upcoming events on Steve and Trish's calendars, and dropped the first hint about an exciting HR Happy Hour announcement that is coming soon.

You can listen to the show here, or using the widget player below, (Email and RSS subscribers will need to click through, or go to the show direct link)

Check Out Business Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Steve Boese Trish McFarlane on BlogTalkRadio

 

As always, you can listen to the current and all the past shows from the archive on the show page here, on our HR Happy Hour website, and by subscribing to the show in podcast form on iTunes, or for Android devices using Stitcher Radio (or your favorite podcast app). Just search the iTunes store or your podcast app for 'HR Happy Hour' to add the show to your subscriptions.

This was a great show, and many thanks to Howard and everyone at Ceridian for being a part of the fun. 

Notes from the road #12 - On helping each other

On the road this morning on the way down to the Brandon Hall Group's Excellence 2015 Conference where I am pleased and honored to be a participant tomorrow in a panel discussion on HR, data, and analytics. Hopefully, I will also talk about basketball, craps, and Lucha Libre, (which are all relevant to the HR and analytics discussions, trust me on that).

Today's Notes from the Road dispatch involves one of the most simple, yet increasingly infuriating elements of modern business travel - the airplane boarding process. As most regular or even occasional travelers know, boarding planes these days is some kind of hellish mix of mosh pit, confusion, violations of personal space norms, and utter despair. Boarding planes today is a test of patience for sure. People crowd the gate area the second that they get a sniff that boarding is about to begin, the folks in first class (me too sometimes), jockey for space in the 'preferred' line, and once on the plane, lots of fighting for limited overhead storage space for bags ensues. The advent of checked bag fees has made the 'I don't care how large it is, I am not checking this bag' mentality even more prevalent.

So that was the context in which I boarded the 6:00AM flight today. Boarding just in front of me was an older lady, probably about 70 or so, who was clearly struggling with her bags as she made her way down the jetway and onto the plane. She had taken advantage of the call for pre-boarding to take a little extra time to board. About half way down the jetway it became clear to me that she was going to have some issues actually hoisting her bags up to the overhead. By the time I caught up with her, we were just inside the plane and I offered to assist her (since I am of course a consummate gentleman), in carrying her bags on to the plane and then up to the overhead bin. And so I did, and once making sure she was situated and seated, I headed back up the aisle (to my seat in Row 1, thanks Delta), and sat down.

Later, once the flight had commenced, and the flight attendant in First Class came round to take drink orders she stopped to thank me for helping the aforementioned older lady with her bags. I thought it kind of odd that the flight attendant even noticed, and just stammered 'Thank you'. It was not really that big of a deal. The older lady clearly needed some help. I am (thankfully), still able to lift relatively heavy objects off of the ground, so I helped her. This is not that big a deal.

But the fact that the flight attendant made a point to mention it to me once we took off, at least 30 minutes later, kind of struck me as a little unusual. Like it must have been unusual to her, like maybe she doesn't see people helping each other all that often.

Which, if true, is kind of sad. 

It is hard out there. Especially for older folks, or people who don't travel all that often, or for people that are just a little nervous about the entire experience of airports and planes and TSA and everything else.

It is pretty hard out there sometimes. And it is pretty easy to help out. And to be kind.

Happy Wednesday.

From HR Executive - On being a better HR Tech consumer

Some readers might know that in addition to being the Program Co-Chair of the HR Technology Conference that additionally I write a monthly column for Human Resource Executive (magazine and online), titled Inside HR Tech. The latest Inside HR Tech piece 'Being a Better Consumer' posted earlier this week, and I wanted to share a little bit of the piece here (since I liked the piece and I think it relevant to many of the blog readers here).

From Human Resource Executive - 'Being a Better Consumer'

Recently I had the opportunity to talk with executives and product leaders from a small group of HR technology start-up solution providers. The conversations were primarily focused on these start-ups’ product offerings, their positions in the market and their various approaches to development, software user experience and deployment. It was really interesting stuff for a HR tech columnist for sure!

But some of the most interesting and engaging elements of the conversations with these providers was hearing from them about their challenges dealing with prospects and customers in the sales, contract negotiation, implementation and post-live support processes.

They shared some of the specific obstacles they've come across when educating, trying to sell to, and lastly, finalizing contract agreements with HR leaders and organizations. I thought it would make sense to share what they shared and offer some tips for HR leaders to be better customers.

Though the start-ups, themselves, are small, many of their customers are quite large, even global organizations.

And while some of what they had to say was certainly flavored by their relative small size and inexperience, I know for sure from having worked for very large HR-tech providers (and customers), that many of these buying process issues are common no matter what the HR-tech vendor’s and the customer’s current size may be. Big company or small, these kinds of challenges arise all the time. So here, without further delay and presented in no specific order, are my tips for being a better HR-tech customer:

Define and share your decision process/timeline.

Once the initial contact is made between your HR organization and the HR-technology provider, you -- as a customer -- can significantly assist the overall process by sharing with the tech vendor the motivations behind your inquiry, the specific business needs or problems you are hoping to address, and -- most importantly -- details about your internal decision making process and desired timelines for the technology decision to be made will

Many of the start-up vendors shared their frustration with long and winding product education/demonstration cycles with customers that seemed to have no end in sight.

Even if that “end” is a decision not to purchase, the vendors are often better off getting that information sooner in order to shift their time and resources to other prospects.

And if your decision process, (for whatever reason), is long, that is fine too, just be up front with the vendor early on so they can align their resources and expectations.

Explain your purchase approval and payment process.

As a customer.....

(catch the rest of the piece at Human Resource Executive online 

I invite blog readers interested in these longer form HR tech pieces to subscribe to get every Inside HR Tech column in convenient email form. I would also invite suggestions and ideas for future Inside HR Tech columns.

Have a great weekend!

Notes from the road #11 - We're not going anywhere edition

Submitting this dispatch to the Notes from the Road series from another Delta Sky Club at a ridiculously early hour. 

Short story - Weather/air traffic control/mandated pilot rest period (or some combination of, we never really got a full and/or definitive story), caused cancellation of a bucketful of late night flights heading out of NYC last evening, including the one your humble correspondent had boarded and had been patiently waiting on for about 3 hours before No Joy was called. Nothing like a planeful of angry passengers who, at about 1:00 AM, get informed that they are not, in fact, going to make it home at all after such a long delay, and had better scramble to make alternate arrangements or prepare to sleep in the airport.

Good times.

Me being the smart and savvy frequent traveler that I am, managed to book the best available alternative flights home, (and I do mean flights, I will enjoy flying about 300 miles past where I actually live, in order to get on another flight to come back). I then pulled some Elite Status traveler magic (or so I thought) to get a room at the closest hotel to the airport, figuring I could get about 4 hours of decent sleep before coming back in the morning. Only when I arrived at said hotel did I find that no, there were no rooms at all available, and the reservation the nice man on the Elite phone line made for me was actually for TONIGHT and not last night (which had already turned into today, as it was about 1:45 AM when this was all happening).

So now who was the savvy traveler?

Not me. Now I was looking at only about 3.5 hours or so I had to kill before heading back to the airport, sitting in a deserted hotel lobby that had no room for me, (except on the couch in the lobby where I hunkered in to ride it out), and praying that I didn't wake up and freak out from not knowing where the heck I was.

Sure, things happen in business travel, these kind of bad nights are almost unavoidable from time to time. But there were a few customer service/training and employee empowerment kinds of things I noticed that if handled better, could have at least taken some of the sting out of the problems.

1. I'll will try to find out is better than I don't know, which is better than the wrong answer

I had to try and figure out, since I was switching to a different NYC departure airport, if I needed to get my checked bags back from the original plane. I think I asked 4 different airline personnel questions about how to make that happen. I basically received three 'I don't knows' and one essentially incorrect answer. Only when I pursued the line of actions that proved to be incorrect did I find out what was really happening. No one offered to actually try and help, (except for the guy who simply gave me the wrong information).

2. Generalists are more valuable than specialists most of the time

I think the primary reason why it was so hard to find out what the process should be for recovering my bags lies in the fact that every person I encountered had one primary role and if that role did not directly involve the baggage handling procedures, they were simply not able to offer any advice. I may have well been asking them to break down the quadratic equation or recite some sonnets. Customers can't be asked to maneuver their own way around your org structure and hierarchy when they need assistance. Having even one or two people that could reliably address a wider range of customer issues would have made everyone's lives easier last night.

3. Different parts of the organization need to communicate more effectively

The hotel debacle last night was pretty simple when you analyzed the cause - the agent on the phone did not back date my reservation by a day, and since it was already past midnight local time, the reservation was made for the wrong day. A bad error on his part, but sort of understandable at least. But the bigger issue was when I arrived at the hotel and the counter agent told me about the reservation problem, he added that 'This happens all the time when flights get cancelled late at night. Phone reservations keeps sending people here with a reservation for the following night'. Sure enough, two more folks after me turned up in the ensuing hour or so in the same situation. So obviously the moral here - if this happens all of the time, why can't someone at the hotel near the airport talk to someone at phone reservations to build in some kind of process to safeguard against it happening in the future? Ticking off your best customers because two parts of your organization don't know how to communicate is simply not acceptable.

Ok, that is it - rant off for the day. Going to try and get on another plane. Hopefully this one will go a little farther than the end of the tarmac and back.

Happy traveling.

The Secret Menu

If you are a fan of Chipolte, In-N-Out, or Starbucks, (that pretty much has to cover everyone I think) you might be aware of each of these chains so-called 'Secret Menus' - alternative items or more accurately variations of existing menu items while not typically on the menu, are sometimes ordered and served for some of the stores biggest fans.

These 'secret' menus are only secret to varying degrees - at In-N-Out the 'secret' menu is actually posted on their website and at Starbucks, well in most of the lines I have been in some knucklehead in front of me orders something to ridiculous and pretentious sounding (Triple-soy-venti-no whip-caramel-with ranch dressing on the side') that almost every order may as well be 'secret'.  Of these three chains, only Chipolte seems to be much more coy and sketchy about the existence of a secret menu - so much so that recently a writer from Fast Company went to pretty great lenghts to try and uncover the truth, which you can read about here in a piece titled 'The Secret Behind Chipolte's Secret, 1,500 Calorie Super-Burrito'.

Aside for the most avid Chiplote die-hard fans, whether or not there truly exists such off-menu concoctions like 'Quesaritos' really isn't that important, but what might be important is how the knowledge of these non-standard menu items are communicated and spread among and througout the restaurant employees.  Check this exceprt from the Fast Company piece:

While (a Chiplote spokesperson) maintains that the restaurant has no formalized secret menu, he admits that two off-menu items we see have become extremely popular, even in Chipotle’s own offices: nachos and quesadillas.  What’s particularly odd, however, is that the line’s machinery isn’t really customized to make either. Without a flat-top grill, quesadillas are typically made in the low-temperature tortilla press (and there are generally only one to three presses per Chipotle, which can lead to backups during busy hours). Without a broiler, nacho cheese can’t really be melted, but employees can get close by ordering the toppings so the cheese sits directly on top of hot beans.

Despite their popularity, neither nachos nor quesadillas are inside any Chipotle operations manual. Instead, employees teach one another the popular off-menu requests through a sort of “oral history.”

That last part, the bit about the Chipolte secret menu existing but not really existing, at least in the official training manuals or operations procedures for employees, and having that faux existence reliant on employees actually talking to each other, and interacting, and passing down that bit of institutional knowledge and culture is what makes this story interesting to HR and Talent folks I think.

Mostly organizations worry about this kind of undocumented institutional knowledge. They get panicky when they think about this kind of knowledge - usually gained from years of experience and often guarded carefully by long-term employees, walking out the door before it can be adequately documented and captured so it can be passed down.

The Chipolte approach to the 'Secret Menu' is the exact opposite of that typical reaction. It exists, but it doesn't exist. The newest worker on the burrito line can't find a reference to it in his or her training manuals. Maybe even some veterans don't know about it either. 

But instead of rushing to formalize the menu, to create procedures and processes around its preparation, and rules about how workers should discuss it with customers, the company seems to be leaving much of it to informal processes, and more importantly, to ones that seem to serve as a kind of bond between the company, its employees, and its biggest fans.

It truly is a tiny bit of mystery that just might have more value than if it was truly written down, captured, and categorized in some knowledge management system.

That's it for me - heading out for a burrito - have a fantastic weekend!