TOASA > Timely, Objective, Accurate, Specific, Actionable

Feedback - First ingredient in my secret sauce

I am often asked what my secret sauce is that has helped my ongoing success.  Providing Feedback is one of the key elements of my success.  I use TOASA to help me remember the key elements each time I plan to give Feedback, which is almost always.

TOASA = Results

Why do some teams perform at high levels with a positive culture, and loyalty to their leader? The largest reason - Feedback! 

These are the five key elements to giving great feedback!

Timely          Feedback given while still memorable

Objective     Be fair, unbiased, unprejudiced 

Accurate      Avoid minimizing or exaggerating, be correct 

Specific        Be detailed, Precise; Avoid generalities

Actionable  Provide suggestions, solutions, options

I remember them with the acronym TOASA > Timely, Objective, Accurate, Specific, & Actionable.

These five elements are especially critical when giving corrective (negative) feedback; however, I believe that it is important when providing reinforcing (positive) feedback as well.

If you cannot provide the five elements, ask yourself if the feedback really needs to be given at all. 

If an employee is late; don’t talk to them two weeks later. Talk to them within a day, and be Objective, Accurate, Specific and Actionable. For example, “John, I noticed you were 12 minutes late this morning for your 10 am shift. It is important that everyone start at their scheduled time, and you need to make sure you adjust so that you are ready to start each shift on time.” AVOID, “John, you have been late at least three times that i know of in the past week. Jane, Bob, and Mary are always ready to start on time. Why can’t you?” Stick to TOASA > Timely, Objective, Accurate, Specific, & Actionable.

Of coarse, there are the other keys to feedback that we have learned before:

- Praise Publicly, Criticize Privately

- Balance corrective feedback with positive when possible

We all start out wanting to perform well, and public praise keeps us motivated to perform at our highest levels. When people are criticized in from of others, they become hesitant and afraid to act at all. Ultimately, they become discouraged and leave.

Balanced feedback is easy when practiced, and especially important with new employees. “Jane, I appreciate your enthusiasm in putting up the chairs and mopping the floor, but we don’t start closing for another hour. Let me show you our checklist with timelines for closing activities. There are tasks we can start now in order to have more time later to do the floors.”

When these elements are followed your team will consistently know where they stand. There are no surprises at review time and the morale of your team will be positive and loyal. Great feedback builds trust, empowerment of employees, and ongoing improvement/development of your team.

Planning for Service Excellence

"Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it."

Peter Drucker, Best Selling Author

Include Service in Your Business Plan

What organizations come to mind as leaders in customer service - Southwest Airlines, Federal Express, Disney and Nordstrom? Now, companies come to mind when you think of mediocre service providers? We encounter poor service every day as customers: the restaurant chains, retail stores, and the telecommunications companies that perpetually annoy us with long waits, uninformed personnel and self-serving policies (insert any cellular provider or cable tv provider here). What the first group of companies has in common is that they planned for service excellence from the beginning. Good service is not something they tried to introduce after they were up and running; it is part of their DNA, an essential component of their business model.

These service leaders offer a valuable lesson for entrepreneurs. Business plans typically include details about how to attract customers, but little information about how to sustain and build relationships after acquisition. They often include platitudes like, "We are a customer-centric organization," and "We create value for all of our stakeholders," but seldom present a clear strategy that shows how customers will be retained, nurtured and made progressively more profitable over time.

There are significant financial benefits to articulating and following a strategy of service excellence: lower customer and employee turnover, fewer complaints and returns, greater average purchase, positive word-of-mouth endorsements. But good service costs money, and it is easy to invest in service standards and programs that do not provide a measurable return. The key is to create a clear strategy that links service investments with profit-based outcomes, and to make sure the service strategy aligns with all components of the business plan.

Smaller companies with no formal service strategy frequently appear "customer-centric" - because there aren't many customers, and because the internal service providers tend to be owners or others who are heavily invested in the organization's success. In time, the responsibility for customer relationships will devolve to employees who are less invested and less empowered to take risks, solve problems and spend money on solutions. A formal service strategy acts as a Plan to keep the company true to its vision.

Many of the defunct dot-coms failed because they neglected to think through a retention plan after spending millions on attracting customers. Other companies suffer from chronic customer churn and low profitability because they have not aligned customer expectations with a service strategy.

A service strategy begins with an understanding of the typical customer's lifecycle with the company. It identifies the points at which the customer and company interact, when and how often those interactions are likely to occur, and how they can best be used to advance the customer relationship.

In the book "The Loyalty Effect", author Frederick Reichheld makes the case that the longer customers remain with a company, the more profitable they become. The loyalty effect works because long-term customers have more opportunities to learn about the company (and vice versa), allowing the relationship to become increasingly efficient and productive. But the benefits of loyalty do not occur simply because customers have more experiences with the company over time. To move up the loyalty/profit curve they need to have the types of experiences that will add to their knowledge and influence their behavior. Understanding the customer lifecycle allows the company to plan the right types of Customer Experiences at the right time.

Implementing a Customer Experience Program funnels down from the service strategy defined in your Business Plan. By identifying when and how interactions occur, as well as what they should accomplish (both for the customer and the company), one can work backwards to design a service-focused Customer Experience Program. The service strategy helps define appropriate standards and policies, and also suggests how standards and policies can be supported through hiring practices, training content, research and measurement, business tools, etc.

Many companies make a substantial investment in customer surveys, call monitoring, mystery shopping and other service-related research that generates reams of data reports -- which sit, unread, on the desks of overworked managers. If they had a well defined Service Strategy that is incorporated into the business model, they can make much better decisions from the beginning about what data they should collect and how they should use it. For example, by mapping out the points at which service failures are most likely to occur, the company can create feedback channels that will identify at-risk customers, and service recovery mechanisms to prevent turnover. The service strategy will also suggest what data should be captured to ensure that standards are executed properly and that employees and managers are rewarded for the right outcomes.

Choices of business tools and systems also follow from the service strategy. By defining what an ideal customer relationship should look like, a clear service strategy fills that void, allowing the company to invest in tools and systems that support a well-defined vision.

All of these details do not necessarily go into the business plan - they may go into the marketing plan behind the business plan, or as a formal Service Strategy. What must go into the business plan is a declaration of the role that service will play in the overall offering of the company, and a description of how the service strategy will align with other components of the organization. A picture of what the relationship between the company and customer should look like as it advances through the customer lifecycle must also be in the plan. 

Armed with this information, new companies can make service work for them from the outset, and build on it over the long term.

Business Start Up Checklist

Business Start Up Checklist

Creating your new business is easy, but creating a successful new business takes planning and follow-through. 

The checklist below is meant to remind you of important tasks you may perform set your business up for success.

You may not need to complete all of these steps. You will want to verify which steps are required by law, and which are critical to success in your industry

Since laws vary by state and by type of business, be sure to check with local authorities to determine if there are any additional legal steps you need to take.

• Choose a business, preferably based  on your skills and interests.

• Research the business idea
- What will you sell?
- Is it legal?
- Who will buy it and how often?
- Are you willing to do what it takes to sell the product?
- What will it cost to produce, advertise, sell & deliver?
- With what laws will you have to comply?
- Can you make a profit?
- How long will it take to make a profit?

• Write a business plan and marketing plan

• Choose a business name

• Verify right to use the name

• See if the business name is available as a domain name 

• Register the business name and get a business certificate

• Register your domain name even if you aren't ready to use it yet

• Choose a location for the business or make space in the house for it

• Check zoning laws

• File partnership or corporate papers

• Get any required business licenses or permits

• Reserve your corporate name if you will be incorporating

• Register or reserve state or federal trademark

• Register copyrights

• Apply for patent if you will be marketing an invention

• Order any required notices (advertisements you have to place) of your intent to do business in the community

• Have business phone or extra residential phone lines installed

• Check into business insurance needs

• Find out about health insurance if you will not have coverage under a spouse