Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

As I have noted elsewhere, our customers mostly like us, and what we do – the results we received from the survey we recently conducted were largely what we expected, in this sense.

When I find a bit more “spare” time, I’ll summarise some of the feedback here.

It’s a nice thing, but one we can’t take for granted.

From my perspective, we’ve already disappointed some of them on too many occasions.  I really want major improvement in the months ahead.

If we are really going to make “Customers First” our prime reason for being, we need to have an explicit measure of the extent to which we really do live by this motto.  When we have this measure, we will drive the company by this measure.

The development of this measure will be one of the core responsibilities that our new GM for Finding, Attracting and Delighting Customers will need to adopt, when we have recruited them.

Hence it was with interest that I stumbled upon this presentation titled “Ideas for Building Better Software Businesses” from Dharmesh Shah (of HubSpot) at the Business of Software conference in 2009:

Note that Dharmesh (as an additional service to his customers and fans) has prepared this page from his “OnStartups” blog to list some of the key points in the video.

I like this approach of “going the extra step” to make the message more understandable.

The following notes are specifically about his suggestions for the Customer Happiness Index (CHI):

Note that there is plenty of other good stuff in this video (you have to get to minute 47 before he mentions CHI), which I might have a chance to talk about at some other time.

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Technically speaking, our recruitment process has not even begun yet.

However, back in January I did mention that we hoped to have our GM M&S in place before the end of the year.

As a result of the interest generated when we kicked off the process of recruiting Derrick as our GM for DDD WCW, a number of people contacted me about this second position.  Some of these have kept in touch with me to keep tabs on our progress with a view to being considered when the process begins.

In case there are other interested people out there, here are some details of our status.

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For those who have been frequent readers of this blog, you will understand that I have a number books on the go at any one time.

This makes for eclectic reading, and generally slower progress than would otherwise be the case.

1)  Binary Review

… however I pretty much flew through this one, given it was aligned with our primary core value of “Customers First”, and the other ones as well.

The Book	What we thought
“I love you more than my Dog” by Jeanne Bliss	Just where we are headed

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I’ve just posted a book review of “I Love you More than my Dog!”

The following five-step action plan for saying sorry to customers was provided by the author (p144) and is worth remembering, so I’ve posted it separately here for east of reference:

STEP 1 = “Delivering a swift response.”

STEP 2 = “Showing humility and empathy for what the customer is experiencing.”

STEP 3 = “Accepting accountability”

STEP 4 = “Providing an honest explanation of what happened and a commitment to improve”

STEP 5 = “Extending the olive branch – to right the situation and mend the relationship”

I know we have a long way to go until we can say that we follow these steps unfailingly in all circumstances…