Departed Client Analysis: Opening Formal Channels of Feedback to Improve Customer Retention

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Do you know the real reasons why your lost customers decided to stop working with your company? Do you understand the unmet needs of your most dissatisfied clients?

When you are part of a senior management team running a large business, it can be easy to become insulated from the day-to-day realities of how your company is handling its customer base. Often, internal customer satisfaction data and lost client information is filtered and distorted as it makes its way up the organizational chain of command, resulting in a less than complete picture of the actual customer experience.

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About the Author

Richard Schroder is president of Anova Consulting Group, a leading market research and consulting firm focused on Win Loss Analysis and Client Satisfaction Research. He is a sought-after speaker and a recognized thought leader in Win Loss Analysis. He is the author of a new book, From a Good Sales Call to a Great Sales Call (McGraw-Hill, 2011). To read Richard’s complete biography, click here.

Learn more about the Anova Consulting Group at www.TheAnovaGroup.com.

Creating Teams

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Performance within groups typically does not just happen. For a group to really perform well it needs practice. The group needs to understand the best way to organize itself for performance. This concept is commonly understood by sports teams and the military. They clearly see the need to give groups opportunities to practice. Boot Camp for the military and pre-season workouts for sports teams are the norm.

It is interesting to note in business that there is far less interest or appreciation of group development and the need for practice. Team practice, for the most part, is not factored into the business or corporate world. We form groups in business and march them into the corporate battle zone expecting them to perform and when they fail we are surprised.

This whole process was once again revealed to me as my business, CMI, went through the process of putting together a high performance work team. In 2008, we expanded our organization by one. A full 25 percent change growth in our employee numbers. This growth caused a change in our work mix and demands. In essence, we needed less administrative work and more research and marketing.

As we went through the expansion process, some basic truths about teams, groups, and performance helped me traverse this territory.

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About the Author

Since growing up in his family’s boating business to founding his company CMI, Bruce Hodes has dedicated himself to helping companies grow by developing executive leadership teams, business leaders and executives into powerful performers. Bruce’s adaptable Breakthrough Strategic Business Planning methodology has been specifically designed for small-to-mid-sized companies and is especially valuable for family company challenges. In February of 2012 Bruce published his first book Front Line Heroes: Battling the business Tsunami by developing high performance organizations (Volume 1). With a background in psychotherapy, Hodes also has an MBA from Northwestern University and a Masters in Clinical Social Work. More info: [email protected], 800-883-7995, www.cmiteamwork.com.

Alternative Selection Best Practice 5 – Establishing Priorities

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All organizations face resource constraints inhibiting the accomplishment of all proposed work. Some organizations resist prioritizing initiatives commonly resulting in the completion of lower value activities ahead of those with a higher return on investment. Such an approach diminishes the value returned to stakeholders and represents an abdication of management’s responsibilities.

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Leadership Inspirations – Complexity

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“There is most often no simple solution for a complex problem. True genius is finding the complex solution for the complex problem and being able to communicate it simply.”

Author Unknown

Recommended Resource – Judgment Calls

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Judgment Calls: Twelve Stories of Big Decisions and the Teams That Got Them Right

by Thomas H. Davenport and Brook Manville

About the Reference

Judgment Calls by Thomas H. Davenport and Brook Manville examines twelve mission critical decisions made by public and private organizations for the key aspects of the decision process employed and analytical approaches used. Through this exploration, Thomas and Brook discuss organizational factors influencing successful decision-making including:

  • Participative Problem-Solving Processes
  • Technology and Analytics
  • Power and Culture
  • Leaders Setting the Right Context

They assert that effective employment of these factors enhances organizational judgment and therefore its decision-making capability. The twelve detailed examples within their book serve as a roadmap for those seeking to further develop their organization’s decision-making ability.

Benefits of Using this Reference

StrategyDriven Contributors believe in the inherent value of reading books, such as Judgment Calls, that provide deep insights to the decision-making processes of respected organizations during critical situations. Thomas and Brook obviously had access to the senior leaders at each organization profiled; enabling them to garner the though processes and reasoning behind the decisions being made.

Valuable as it may be, we believe there are flaws in Thomas and Brook’s approach to ascertaining the key factors behind successful decisions. Most prevalent among these flaws is an apparent assumption that successful outcomes were the result of a sound decision-making approach and the correction of the organization’s past decision-making shortfalls; not the result, in part or whole, of good fortune or luck. (Note that Thomas and Brook did examine some failed decisions of examined organizations, however, we found those reviews to be incomplete when compared with StrategyDriven‘s analysis.) We would have liked to have seen additional testing whereby the processes leading to successful decisions were tested against decision-making shortcomings observed in other organizations. In our experience, organizations may experience a series of successful decision outcomes because circumstances that would otherwise challenge their area of vulnerability are not manifest. When such a circumstance does arise, the organization’s decision process fails to recognize or appropriately deal with it leading to an adverse outcome.

StrategyDriven Contributors have studied high-risk decisions – both the successes and the failures – made by organizations such as NASA and nuclear utilities around the world; identifying principles and practices to be embraced and those to be avoided. Indeed, one of our contributors co-authored the standards by which the U.S. nuclear industry processes its high-risk decisions. While we agree with the four organizational factors associated with successful decision-making as outlined in Judgment Calls, we believe there are many others demanding close attention in order to consistently achieve desired outcomes. Our insights to high-risk decision management can be found in StrategyDriven’s Decision-Making topic area.

While we believe the approach taken to draw the conclusions contained within Judgment Calls to be flaw, the book offers otherwise inaccessible insight into the decision-making processes of respected organizations making it a StrategyDriven recommended read.