Tough times require resiliency, especially in a cut-throat business like insurance. Your company’s branding, name and reputation, products won’t do it. It’s all about your people.

With pressure from the economic downturn, a large Singapore based insurance company needed their financial planners to deliver every time.  However, the financial planners were not getting the right support they needed from their direct management. Read how Egyii’s Andrew Sidwell helped turn the situation around. Coaching for sales performance

Andrew Sidwell, Team Egyii, Singapore

Today I saw a press release advertising an online course in Customer Experience Management, emphasising its ability to show learners how to measure a set of key aspects of the customer experience.

To me the very concept of customer experience management conjours up images of organisations somehow trying to control the experience the customer has with them. It reminds me of CRM software and operational processes and metrics applied to every aspect of the idea.

Of course, it’s great if an organisation can improve the way its customers experience the process of buying and using their product or service,  but this is a very different thing from a group of executives trying to manage such a thing.

What it comes down to is the way people behave, both in carrying out tasks in the background that support the customer experience and in interacting with customers. Yes, it’ important to have efficient systems and processes. But too often executives focus on these because they are quantifiable and easy to manage, to the exclusion of creating positive change in their people.

This is the hard part. Much easier to install a new Customer Experience Management system. From my 20 years experience of helping people at work learn and change, it seems that three conditions are necessary for this to work:

We must become acutely aware of the need for change

We must look honestly at our existing behavioural patterns and the results they are producing, and feel inspired to give our customers a great experience. This inspiration can come from different sources depending on the nature of the business and its leaders.

We must know how to change

We must be given tools that enable us to change both our thinking and our behaviour in our own special way. Scripted recipes for all to follow will never work. When our individual map of the world is in line with the idea of giving a great experience to our customers, then the behaviour will follow with relative ease.

We must be given the chance to change

Expecting habitual thoughts and behaviours to change overnight is unrealistic. This takes time. We need to be given a plan where we make simple, small changes over a specified time period as we install our new patterns. This means we need reminding and supporting.

So my plea to organisations our there talking about managing their customer experience – help your people first. Help them to be the very best they can be and then let them loose. And stop measuring them!

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

Bill O’Brien, the late CEO of Hanover Insurance, once told C. Otto Scharmer, author of Theory U – Leading from the Future as It Emerges that when facilitating corporate change, the success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.

This idea, that to create change in the new world of business, leaders need to look inside themelves first and connect with their own instincts, deep understandings and self-awareness, is the key to creating the kind of change that businesses need to succeed in the future.

It’s no good using the past to inform the present and future. What went well before, what the consensus of opinion is, and what is comfortable for the majority will only return businesses to the old world where external measurements and influences based on past experiences were used to decide on the future direction of the business.

According to C. Otto Scharmer, leaders need to engage in internal work before even considering change interventions. There are three kinds of internal work that need to be engaged in:

Suspending habitual patterns and seeing the situation with a fresh pair of eyes

Redirecting your attention from the exterior to your interior mental processes and really listening to yourself

Letting go of old identities and intentions

It is only when this internal work has been completed that leaders will be open to new visions and intentions, to redirecting attention to exterior action, and to creating new action, structures and practices to lead the business forward.

Every leader, whether a CEO or a learning and development designer, can benefit from turning inwards and connecting with their own source of wisdom before automatically adopting ideas and structures that are acceptable to the majority. These ideas will usually only present you with what is already acceptable and comfortable, and therefore what fits with the existing status quo.

Thus, the new learning and development will be first and foremost about internal awareness, insight and personal change. And coming out of this process will be new ideas, decisions and actions that will propel your business into a successful future.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

How much of new learning from a training programme actually gets applied in a value-enhancing way back on the job? It’s probably somewhere between 5% and 20%. That means out of a hundred learners, only a few are actually delivering performance improvement that leads directly to business results.

The solution? Most organisations would go on a search for a ‘new’ training programme that promises to solve their immediate problems. This training will then be seen as the ‘silver bullet’ that produces the long-awaited results. Hopes are raised amid an atmosphere of expectation and excitement. And more often than not, the training proceeds according to plan, the learners finish the programme highly motivated and determined to apply their new skills, and – nothing happens. Back at their jobs they react to the same interpersonal and environmental triggers that set off their familiar patterns of behaviour, and within a few days have lost their motivation and forgotten much of what they had learnt. The trouble is, they don’t return to the same situation they were in before they went for the training. Rather, they feel deflated and exhausted, and they work with a feeling of promises broken. The impact on morale can be devastating.

Often, the reasons why the learning was not applied on the job do not lie with the training programme. Much good training has met with similar results. It is a waste of time to blame the training programme and then go on to sign up an alternative training provider in the hope that this time it will be different.

Instead, a holistic approach needs to be taken. Training on its own will never result in performance improvement. What is needed is a whole-organisation approach to performance improvement and training support. Training effectiveness is influenced by many organisational, cultural and systemic issues.

For example, research indicates that new skills will only be applied back on the job if the employee receives proactive support for the change from his line manager. In many cases, learners return to work full of enthusiasm to try out their new skills only to receive at best a lack of interest and at worst an injunction to do things the way they’ve always been done. I have received feedback many times from participants on business writing skills courses that it is all very well learning new ways to communicate, but when they produce such writing in the office their boss changes it back to the ‘old’ style of writing. What a waste!

But merely acknowledging that the learner has some new skills and passively observing him trying them out is insufficient. The line manager needs to have a method for systematically following-up with the employee, monitoring the results he produces, giving regular feedback and support, and providing the Learning and Organisational Development Department with sound evaluations of performance resulting from the training.

This is but one of a variety of actions that can and should be taken before and after the training event so that training moves from being a one-off event to a performance improvement process. It requires the inclusion of all the stakeholders, from learning executives to line managers, senior managers and employees who all need to be aligned behind an agreed set of objectives and actions to be taken.

Training done the right way is one of the most powerful methods for creating positive business results, so let’s bring it out of the closet and let it show us what it can really do.

James Irvine and the Egyii team, Singapore