Start by picturing the scene:  an open-plan customer service call centre with a separate manager’s office at the side.  On the outside of the door that leads to the manager’s office is a notice that says “Quiet please, meeting may be in progress”. 

Nothing odd about that you may think? On the contrary, David thought there was something very odd indeed about the fact that the customer service team was being asked to be quiet when their job was all about talking to customers on the phone and working together as a team to solve customer problems!  So, whilst the manager was out for a while, he took the notice down (in his playful yet purposeful way) and replaced it with a new notice that was on the office side of the door.  This one said “Quiet please, customer service is in progress”.

What notices have you spotted around your office that could be much more effective if only they were written from a different angle?  Go on.. dare you to change them!

Lance describes a recent holiday with his young son and the learnings it brought him…

Walking through the narrow Greek streets of Lindos with my young son, I pointed out the door to an apartment I had once stayed in. We carried on our walk to St. Pauls Bay, then after about an hour headed back.

For fun, I asked my son if he could find the door I had shown him earlier. Knowing that, ‘seen one Greek door, you have seen them all’, I said there was a prize of a new John Deere toy if he got it right.

As we walked along to the sound of him saying “not that one, not that one, not that one” to the tens of similar doors we passed, I was happy in the knowledge that my money was safe in my pocket. Then, as we passed the door in question, I was astonished to hear him say “It was that one.”

Stunned, I asked “How on earth did you know it was that one?”

He replied, “That one has a lion on it.”

I had never noticed the door knocker was in the shape of a lion. For me, re-confirmation of the power of pictures, oh, and to never under estimate a child again!

We hope you bought him that new John Deere toy Lance!

John Stainthorpe, a delegate who completed the Super Coaching programme, emailed Craig to share a story of how he has used coaching style questions and skills to get…well have a read!

After our course on Thursday I dropped into a ‘well known supermarket’ to buy a pizza and found that on arriving at the till there were only 3 out of 13 tills manned. I asked an assistant if they could open any more but was told “No, we are too busy!”

The conversation then proceded as follows:

John (J) – If I was at ‘one of your well known competitors’ they would open more tills for the customer.

Supermarket employee (SE) – I suggest you b*#!*?y well go to them then.

J – Can I speak to the Manager ….?

SE – No, he is too busy. You will have to come back tomorrow.

J – Why are you closing this till when there are 10 customers behind me waiting?

SE – The woman at the till is finishing her shift so we are closing the till.

J – Why are other staff checking flowers and shelves but not one of them are coming to help out on the tills?

SE – They are not trained on the tills.

I paid for my Pizza and left as a  very disgruntled customer, BUT on Friday I returned –

J – Can I speak to the Store Manger please?

Manager arrives and I explained the situation, plus ….

J – As a customer how would you describe this service?

Store Manager (SM) – Not very good, indeed appalling.

J – And how would you feel as a customer?

SM – Very annoyed and upset.

J – Tell me more …..

SM – Well, I would not feel as if I wanted to come back to shop here.

J – Ok, as a manager, what can you do to make the customer experience better …?

SM – Well I would like you to accept my sincere apologies and a £25 voucher ….

He then walked me to the wine counter and also provided a £25 bottle of Chablis

SORTED ……

Thanks for the story John, it’s great to see coaching techniques in action in different situations. Remember, the right type of question to help someone think about a situation will give them the chance to find their own answers, and on this occasion delight John as a customer!

So what about Treetops I hear you asking……..

Well, as with all new ideas, we had our initial plan, then conducted market research, adjusted the plan, more market research, tweaked the plan, etc…. you get the picture?

Anyway, while many of you were off for Christmas and New Year we were……………erm, off too!

However, our aim of getting Treetops to you early this year is still on track and the new design takes into account the three sets of market research conducted in 2009.

The stuff we will put there is going to be so useful we know you’ll be delighted and you’ll want to…………. well, shout from the treetops.

And now for David’s next prediction…

Let’s be 100% clear.  No one at Rambutan is an economist or market analyst so my prediction is purely based on feeling… not science or numbers, but as last year’s predictions kind of panned out I thought I would give it another bash.

Last year on January 7th at the IOD I spoke on the subject of ‘belief led recession’ and the fact that Rambutan had opted out of joining the recession in favour of growing the business.  We are a collaborative bunch so I of course asked the team if they felt they would be missing out by not ‘doing’ the recession (as all their friends were) and I promised them that we might do the next one or the one after that if they really wanted to.  This belief in what a great year Rambutan would have has come true.  We have had record sales and have doubled the size of the team, yet I know when I was explaining my thinking to the delegates at the IOD there may have been the odd one (OK..I will be honest…by a show of hands 100% of the audience said that it would be a very tough year and that I was King Canute with a tide of unemployment, crashing house prices, high streets full of empty units, FTSE index record lows and general gloom about to wash over me).  We had a counter argument to the vote of ‘no confidence’ but we realised that arguing against the tide would be fruitless (not great when you are named after one!) so we spent the rest of the year quietly nodding with empathy whilst many people licked their wounds in our presence.   

My argument was that the recession was not based on the usual factors of supply, demand, money supply and so on but on a collective global belief that was triggered by some significant occurrences (Leman Bros, Northern Rock etc.).  These occurrences had for the first time (due to the proliferation of media) been able to spread a virus of doom at a speed so fast that the antidote of reality hadn’t been able to catch up.

This time last year recession was on everyone’s lips and in every newspaper, everyday.  If you cast your mind back people were predicting 5m unemployed in the UK, house prices dropping by 40%, fuel prices rocketing (sorry!) and the whole mess taking ten years to recover.  The FTSE was predicted to drop below the previous (2003) level of 3,280  just before the turn of the year.  So why were we at Rambutan so optimistic and how does this relate to this the prediction for 2010?

Well, first of all the stock markets had correctly predicted 23 of the last 3 recessions and this time around many of those doing the buying and selling had been personally affected by the significant events…I felt that this was likely to make the market reflect an even more gloomy picture than reality. Secondly, by the time we turned the year fuel prices were dropping, inflation was very low, interest rates were at record levels and the disappearances from the high streets were more likely to be national chains who had run out of cash.  Sadly unemployment was creeping up but not at the levels predicted and retail sales were holding up.

What was also obvious is that house prices were not plummeting but instead houses just weren’t selling…not great news for the industry but it meant that when they started to sell (as they have been for the last few months) they would do so from a much higher price than predicted.  You also have to bear in mind that we live on an island with a longer term prediction of a massive under supply of housing.

To put my money where my mouth was, and against my financial advisers pleas, I diverted more of my funds and pension money into stocks and shares as I predicted that the FTSE would be back over 4,500 by the Autumn….on December 23rd (when I wrote my New Year prediction) it was standing at 5,300.

As for 2010…well I believe that the average UK household has more disposal income than previously considered.  Most people have not lost their jobs and many mortgaged home owners have had monthly payments at a fraction of what they were two years ago.  Many of us have benefited from lower interest rates, cheaper fuel prices, the banks have started lending again and the money supply has been inflated by huge borrowing from tax payers.  In short the reality is that we are ready for a boom but the belief is that we are about to go bust which means that the supply of goods and services will lag behind spending capacity in 2010….been a few years since my O’levels but I can remember what too much money chasing too few goods equates to…yep…sadly this year’s prediction is for rising inflation.  Another contributing factor is the return to the 17.5% VAT rate as of 1st January 2010.

As indicated this is only a feeling, and I hope that I am wrong, but just in case the ‘tea leaves’ again prove to be somewhere close to the reality that unfolds I would urge you all to ensure you factor in 4-6% inflation (and a subsequent rise in interest rates to try to counter it) into your SWOT analysis for 2010!

PS despite many requests I do not do predictions for football scores, snow forecasts or lottery numbers!

Well, thanks for that David!  We’ll of course be factoring these predictions into our business planning and we look forward to next year’s predictions to see if David has indeed turned into Mystic Meg!

We here at Rambutan would like to give a massive round of applause to Heidi Mottram who, whilst we were all off refreshing ourselves over the Christmas holidays, was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s New Years Honours list! 

Heidi is Managing Director at Northern Rail (who you’ll know from our case studies we’ve done some fantastic work with recently), so we’re absolutely chuffed to bits for her…