Monthly Archives: March 2012

Managing Work Interruptions

I’ve been busy over the past several months. I accepted additional areas of responsibility in my role, and all of the new demands have forced me to become more disciplined in how I execute my priorities.

It’s been a long time since I’ve actually developed a comprehensive, written work plan to organize my own time; but, I have once again been carefully planning the work, and working the plan. Monthly milestones, weekly targets, and daily task lists have been keeping me focused on achieving the outcomes that I need to deliver. It has felt good to check things off that list, and to visibly see progress toward my goals.

Interruptions

I’ve learned that the more responsibility you accept, the more people need your time. Demand for a leader’s time often translates into unplanned interruptions to their work. Telephone calls, emails, meetings, and groups of people landing in your doorway all create barriers to executing on a detail-oriented work plan. It can become frustrating. As pressure to meet deadlines builds, the natural response is to want to close the office door and to block out the calendar. I need to focus on the work to get it done.

I had an employee come to my office last week. She was anxious and asked if she could have a few minutes. Despite the irritation that I felt over the interruption to my work on a very complex issue over which I had wrestled for months, I gave her my full attention. We spent about 10 minutes discussing a project that she was leading. Her problem was solved. My problem was not solved, and I struggled to regain my focus.

The Real Interruptions

And then it struck me, again. I had been behaving like the interruptions to my important leadership work were those unplanned demands on my time from other people. The real work of a leader is the time that we spend helping other people accomplish their work. The real interruption to my leadership work had been the busy, task-oriented, check-list mentality that I created to try to manage new demands.

Patient Care Interruptions

The trap into which I had fallen is not any different that what I sometimes hear from clinical professionals in healthcare. All of the regulatory paperwork, documentation, and computer work required of their roles prevents them from spending time with patients. This is very frustrating to healthcare workers who largely went into their profession to take care of people, not regulations.

Focus

Whether it’s learning how to accomplish the detail work required of leadership, or managing the compliance and documentation demands of clinical care, the fact remains that we need to get that work done. But, I am reminded about how important it is to maintain the right perspective. Leadership, like patient care, is about taking care of people. When our complaints and frustrations turn against those “pesky” employees or patients, then we have lost our perspective. The good news is that our employees and patients are willing to remind us of our purpose, if we are willing to listen.

How do you manage the demands on your time?

How do you maintain the focus on what’s most important in your leadership or patient care work?

Service Recovery in a Social Media World

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I do not typically take my bad customer service experiences to social media. In fact, I rarely complain at all about these experiences, except to my family. When I do have a bad experience, I privately decide whether it was bad enough that I will take my business elsewhere – on the business side of that equation, I know that these are the most difficult customers to keep.

Business fact: no matter how good your company is at customer service, your customers will occasionally have bad experiences, and you will receive complaints. That’s the way things go when you involve human beings, and their emotions. No organization is perfect.

My Angry Rant

Last Saturday, I broke my own social media rule. I was angry, and I fired off a tweet about a bad customer service experience that I had at the Hy-Vee store in Winona. The message I posted was demure compared to what I was feeling. Nevertheless, I sent my snarky comment out into cyberspace and curiously waited to see if the organization was monitoring social media. They were.

So What?

I followed up with Customer Service like I had promised. They responded promptly with an apology, which was followed immediately by another apology from the store’s manager.

At this point, I was impressed with a few things: (1) Hy-Vee was monitoring social media, and responded to my tweet; (2) they asked for more information and an opportunity to address my concerns; and, (3) they were prompt, professional, and seemed sincere. I was satisfied with their response to my less-than-constructive criticism. It was probably more than I deserved.

Business Reality

Stop for a minute and put on your HR/manager hat. How would you approach the resolution to a customer service complaint received via social media? As a HR guy, I understand that these situations can be delicate because they involve people, both customers and employees. What I expected was a follow up email or telephone call a couple of days later informing me that they had taken an appropriate training/coaching approach to resolving the situation.

HyVee WOW!

Instead, a couple of hours later I had a delivery of flowers to my work office – this was the first time I had ever received a delivery of flowers (kind of awkward, really). With the flowers came a sincere, in-person apology from an employee of HyVee, along with a hand-written not from the store’s manager. I was blown away.

The Business Case for Social Media

Sorry, but I need to take this great service recovery story a step further. Here is the context: I am far from being a social media influencer (yeah, that might surprise you). You can look – I have about 1,200 followers on Twitter, and many of them were probably too busy drinking green beer last Saturday to notice my tweet (you know who you are). My snarky tweet was not about to cause a PR problem for Hy-Vee. Nevertheless, they responded.

Now, some numbers: my family spends about $500 each month at our local grocery stores. Let’s assume that we (meaning my wife) decide to continue shopping for groceries at Hy-Vee for the next 10 years (including the full duration of my son’s teenage eating syndrome). The service recovery could easily mean $60,000 in future revenue.

Social Media & Service Recovery

While this reads like a great service recovery story, it is really a social media story. Remember, my typical response in these situations is to privately take my business to another store. My impulsive tweet provided an organization with an opportunity to address my frustration, which they did brilliantly. Had Hy-Vee not been engaged in social media, the opportunity and the business would have been gone. Perhaps the ROI of social media isn’t measuring what more you can get, but what you might keep. Relationships are always personal. Hy-Vee understands that.

None of this is intended to justify my juvenile social media complaint. Just because I generally choose not to take my frustrations to Twitter, many other consumers (including your customers) do so quite regularly.

By the way, my wife has banned me from doing any more grocery shopping. And, I wouldn’t recommend that other happily married men show up at home with a bouquet of flowers that were not intended for their wives.

What social media success stories do you have related to customer service?

Note: While I apparently will not be permitted to return to Hy-Vee, other members of my family will continue to shop there.