ORM Defined

As the shift to the word Organizational implies, ORM is an approach to guiding the entire entity to success.  Some slight, but significant, modifications derive a basic definition of ORM as: A management system that makes optimum use of all available resources – equipment, procedures and people – to achieve organizational goals and enhance the efficiency and value of operations.

Like CRM, ORM focuses on the cognitive and interpersonal skills rather than technical skills and knowledge.  It encompasses a wide range of human behaviors and attitudes that include culture & values, strategy & goals, communication, team-work, decision making, problem solving and service. Importantly, ORM starts with leadership.  If effective ORM practices are in place, effective CRM is sure to follow.

Culture and Values

What are the organizational culture and the underlying values that define your company?  Not necessarily what hangs on the wall in the lobby, or what you personally believe, but what the company really stands for in the view of employees and customers.  In other words, what do you ‘broadcast’ as important to your company?  The answer may or may not be explicitly stated, but it is implicit in the behaviors of the leadership and demonstrated by what gets recognized and rewarded throughout the company.

Strategy and Goals

With culture and values in place, you are in a position to develop your central strategy.  A clear strategy is essential to defining what the organization is all about.  Why are we in business?  What do we offer our customer that is unique?  What are our strengths and weaknesses?  What are we capable of?  How do we define success?  These are some of the questions that must be part of the strategy discussion.  The strategy need not be complex; in fact, the simpler the better.  It should be compelling and, most importantly, familiar to and clearly understood by everyone in the organization.

A solid central strategy must be well executed and monitored if it is to succeed.  This requires the establishment of organizationalgoals. At their best, visionary goals provide the path to achieving the overarching strategy.  Properly developed they can guide and even motivate people to realize the strategic vision.  To do this, goals must strike a balance between a number of things – aggressive and realistic, long term and short term, individual and team based.  Most importantly, the goals must be shared.  This can only be accomplished by including all levels of the organization in the goal setting process.   foundation for teamwork.

Teamwork and Communication

People must work together if organizational goals are to be met, but leaders know that this is much easier said than done.  Trueteam work is achieved when the result produced by the group is greater than the sum of what is accomplished by the individual contributors working in isolation.  This only happens when goals, roles and responsibilities are well understood.  And it requires empowerment in an environment of trust, respect and shared information–communication.

Problem Solving and Decisions

Much of daily business activity is devoted to problem solving at all levels.  That includes providing solutions for a customer’s problem or need, or solving internal issues that stand between you and your goals. Arriving at the right solution, quickly, requires a shared framework for defining, measuring, analyzing, implementing and controlling the process.  It need not be complex, but for larger organizations, databases and systems support are often needed tools.

Service

Customer service is a cornerstone for competiveness and a primary differentiator in any given market.  Most everyone seems to know this, but few ever truly use it their maximum advantage.  That’s because the challenges of providing excellent customer service are formidable.  One major challenge is that various people and organizations define service differently.  Another, perhaps greater challenge is that many businesses think they know what customer service is and that they are doing a good job of delivering it.  They are often surprised to discover that they do not, and are not, because it is much more complex than they realized.

In fact, customer service is a culture.  A culture takes time to build, and the right tools are needed.  A service culture does not occur after a one-day seminar. A service culture requires an individual and an organizational commitment to concepts, and a process that must be sustained over time. Serving others effectively is an ongoing effort; it is not a destination, but a journey.

Conclusion

The concepts of ORM are similar to, and an extension of, CRM.  They focus on cognitive and interpersonal skills, rather than simply technical knowledge.  And, they are applied much more comprehensively to overall organizational issues rather than to safety only.  ServiceElements uses ORM to assist leadership in understanding the issues, solving problems and making good decisions.  Most significantly, the tenets of ORM enable the creation of positive working relationships based upon service, core values, common goals and shared information.  The outcome is consistent high performance and sustainable results.

“Are You A Good Customer?”

In the 1980s and 1990s, businesses across the country were taught the now-common-mantra that “The customer is king.” This mindset established a couple of principles that everyone in business was to follow:

• Any product or service’s design, production, distribution, marketing, and advertising should have the customer as the central focus for all decision-making

• The customer is boss

• The customer is always right

The evidence is clear: employees and service providers who really believe that the customer is king do a better job at delivering service and establishing greater customer loyalty. At the same time, experience has also shown that the customer is not always right—especially in complex, high tech, high frequency, high touch industries. Stu Leonard’s, the veritable grocer whose headquarters is in Connecticut, asks the question: “Is the customer always right? No, but our job is to make them feel right!”

All of this means that good service creates good customers; good customers create stability, revenue growth and job security. But is the reverse true? Do good customers receive good service precisely because they are good customers? Put yourself not in the service provider’s shoes for the moment, but in the customer’s shoes. This perspective is important because in the aviation industry, we all have suppliers and vendors on whom we rely to do our jobs or serve our customers. We pay these suppliers and vendors good money to deliver on promises so that we can run our businesses. Perhaps you work in an FBO, and your suppliers are caterers or fuel suppliers. If you work in a flight department, you probably buy fuel and flight planning services from another organization? As a pilot, technician or flight attendant, you surely buy simulation training.

When you buy all of these services, are you getting what you want, what you need, and what you expect? Does your service provider constantly surprise you by going above and beyond what you expect? If this is happening to you, the truth is that it is probably, at least in part, because you are a good customer.

Could the opposite be true if you are not receiving good service? Could it be that you are not a good customer? Are you polite? Are you cordial? Are you respectful? Do you ask people or do you order people? Being a good customer has a lot more to do with how we treat people than just being a good payer or paying the bills on time or paying the asking price.

What does it take to be a good customer?

Take a moment now to think about your best customers and write down some words or phrases that describe them.

Here is a common list people come up with in this exercise:

• They communicate their expectations very clearly

• When things change, they tell us—they give us a heads up whenever possible

• Honest, polite

• Friendly

• Patient

• They do not make assumptions

Interestingly enough, all of these qualities are the same ones that describe good customer service delivery. While good customer service delivery is a product of many factors, it is reasonable to suggest that customers who exhibit the qualities above will likely receive excellent service in return. Such customers realize that communication is a two-way street. And though they might expect to be treated like kings, it is likely that they are “good” kings.

In customer service, there is a saying that what you give is what you get. This applies to you as a service provider, but perhaps just as importantly, it applies to you as a customer. If you communicate well and treat your service providers respectfully, it is very likely that you somehow find that you are the recipient of good service or sometimes even exceptional service. It is also very likely that you find yourself feeling that the money you spend on your suppliers and vendors is well worth the value they provide back to you. This is no coincidence.

So, are you a good customer?

Engaged employees want their organizations to succeed when they feel connected emotionally, socially and even spiritually to its mission, vision and purpose (Fleming & Asplund, 2007).

However, experts indicate engagement is very low among workers today.  Given this fact, it stands to reason why so many companies struggle to meet customer expectations, financial goals and employee satisfaction.
So how and where do organizations begin to engage or re-engage their employees?  Below are a few suggestions:

Establish and communicate clear company goals frequently, repetitively and through various communications modes.

• Find each individual’s talent, and help him or her to use that talent and strengths every day.

• Provide opportunities for career development and learning.

• Demonstrate appreciation for each employee’s contribution to the organization frequently, and as often as you can.

• Encourage friendships among employees.  Although this may seem odd, research has shown that employees who have friends at work are more likely to be fully engaged.

• Praise innovation.

“Interviewing for Service Competency”

August 2010 Newsletter

by Christine Hill

The most common tool used across business to select people for a task or job is the face-to-face interview. The “interview” can be used to hire new people or recruit existing employees to work on a team to solve a problem or implement a solution.  Whatever your purpose, one thing is constant–the perceptions we develop of others is predominately shaped by our face-to-face interactions with them. Thus, the interview questions we ask of others become very important, and those questions could determine how effectively we match someone to a task or job.

Today, in a world where customer service has taken on increased importance, it is critical to examine whether traditional interviewing techniques can assess anything about a candidate’s customer service competency.  Executives must be able to mobilize an entire organization and build a customer service culture.  A customer service representative must know how to handle difficult and demanding customers.  And technicians and pilots must know how to deliver good service internally and externally.

Allen Huffcutt has researched extensively the interview questions and methods that hiring managers and committees use.  Huffcutt has found that most interview questions are in fact ineffective and not at all predictive of subsequent employee performance.  Here are common interview questions, across many different types of jobs that people apply and interview for:

1. Why should we hire you?
2. What do you consider your greatest strength?
3. What do you consider your greatest weakness?
4. What do you see yourself doing in five years?
5. What do you know about our company?
6. Why did you leave your last job?

Look at the list again.  Can you guess which of these questions Huffcutt found to be ineffective?  Many of the questions require the candidate to extol his own virtues, and charming people certainly know how to do that.  Prepared candidates can certainly talk a good game about why you should hire them, and what their strengths are.  In fact, these people even make weaknesses seem like strengths—example: I sometimes forget how much time has passed because I am so focused on my work, that is my weakness!

Other questions require the candidate to speculate about the future (what will you be doing in five years) or construct some one-sided explanation of what happened in the past (why did you leave your last job).  All of the questions are what Huffcutt calls first date questions and require some sort of “performance” by the candidate except the fifth question “What do you know about our company?”  That question let’s you know whether the person took the time to find out about your organization. It also matters how much they do know.  That shows initiative and interest, which are keys to successful service delivery.

In fact, there are other questions that are even better then question five.  The more you can ask people to provide specific examples and experiences, the better the question and the more insight you will gain into that person’s capability to execute on service delivery.  For an executive level position, the question may go something like this: “Tell us about a time you were involved in a specific initiative that resulted in measurable improvement in customer service in your department—and tell us the role you played in that initiative?”  For a customer service representative, a great question is: “Can you give me an example of when you actually dealt with an irate or a difficult or demanding customer or passenger?  How did that turn out?  What did you learn from that and how did you use it in your subsequent interactions with customers? OR Have you ever had to say “no” to a customer? How did you do it? How about saying “no” to someone on your team?”

Questions that ask people to provide specific, personal examples are powerful because they demonstrate results or lessons learned.  Some experts have also said that if a candidate can quickly recall examples, then that is a good sign. That means that the experience is fresh or made a lasting imprint.  It also decreases the chance that the candidate is making up a story.

The most important asset in any business is its people.  That is true whether your make bread, build airplanes or fly them.  It is people who make the difference in terms of how customers experience and perceive the service and its value.  So select your teammates, your employees, or your managers wisely.  Make sure they can tell you how they have built a great service culture or contributed to one. This will enable you to find the right fit. To find someone who is going to help enhance your organization.



For the last several years, employee engagement has been a critically important business topic. The results are worrisome, however: the results from numerous studies have discovered that only 30% of today’s employees are fully engaged at work. (Gallup, 2008) (BlessingWhite, 2008) (Towers Perrin, 2007 – 2008).  As the workplace becomes more blended across generations, different perceptions and expectations present challenges to employee engagement.   Absolute solutions to improve engagement remain under investigation, but many researchers agree on a few things:

• The nature of the job, or a portion of it, has to be mentally challenging and innovative to the employee—the good news is that there is a person who finds challenge and innovation in every job you can think of!
• Employees must understand the big picture: How does their work relate and contribute to the company’s performance and results? How does their work contribute to the goals the company seeks to achieve?
• Future opportunities for growth and career development and learning must exist.
• Direct relationship with one’s manager is critical.  Trust is a key element.
• Engaged employees out perform employees who are not engaged.
• Employee engagement levels have a direct relationship on Customer Satisfaction.
• Managers who coach effectively enhance employee engagement.