Paul Hallam, Director, Six Degrees Executive

Welcome to the July issue of Six Degrees Connected - our quarterly e-newsletter, which forms part of our highly successful Thought Leadership Program.

In this issue, Tim Rose, Director of Consumer Research at Nielsen Australia looks at the benefits of neuromarketing, while Bill Lang, CEO of Bill Lang International shares his five simple steps for building a world-class team, and Christoph Goldenstern, Partner and Global Vice President of Service Excellence at Kepner-Tregoe offers a strategic approach to achieving service excellence.

As we move into the new financial year many businesses are saying farewell to the gloom and doom of the global financial crisis and adopting a much more optimistic outlook for the latter half of 2010 and beyond.

Many of our clients, particularly in the FMCG, consumer goods and manufacturing sectors, say they are feeling confident that the economy will grow stronger in the forthcoming financial year. With this resurgence of optimism, many say they are likely to increase staff salaries and take on new employees in the new financial year - a stark contrast to this time last year.

It seems their confidence is well justified. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD's) latest Economic Outlook (released in May), after a growth rate of 1.4% in 2009, the Australian economy is set to grow at 3.2% in 2010, increasing to 3.6% in 2011.

The OECD report also expects the unemployment rate to fall below 5% by the end of 2011, while inflation will be moderate.

One of the biggest challenges for businesses as they gain momentum this year will be the continuing short supply of skilled professionals. This situation seems to be getting more challenging as the year progresses and businesses are having to come up with new and innovative approaches to employment, retention and professional development in order to attract and retain quality staff.

Our Thought Leadership Breakfasts continue to be popular networking forums. In May, Damian Borchok, CEO of Interbrand led a Thought Leadership Breakfast in Melbourne on differentiating your brand in an increasingly commoditised market and in July the Portland Group led a discussion on structuring for success in Melbourne.

We were also excited to be a finalist for the prestigious Panasonic Australia Medium Business Award at the 2010 Telstra Business Awards. This is a great achievement and continues on from our success in 2009 when we were named the ‘Best Executive Recruitment Company' at the Seek SARA Awards and ‘Recruitment Firm of the Year' at the FEMA Awards.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our dedicated team for their continued enthusiasm and professionalism, and our valued clients and candidates for their ongoing support, without which such achievements would not be possible.

We hope you find this issue of Six Degrees Connected enlightening and inspiring. If you have any story ideas or would like to contribute an article yourself, please contact: lorries@sixdegreesexecutive.com.au

Tim Rose, Director - Consumer Research, Nielsen Australia

Nielsen has recently joined forces with NeuroFocus - the world's leading neuromarketing company. Tim Rose, director for Nielsen Australia's Consumer Research Group explains what this means for Australian companies...

Nielsen Australia has recently joined up with the world's leading neuromarketing company - NeuroFocus - to bring the most advanced neuromarketing technologies and methodologies to Australia.

The use of neuroscience in shopper and customer experience research has been the biggest development in this field in the past few years, and we are looking forward to showing Australian companies how it can help improve their branding and investment in marketing and advertising.

So how does it work?

NeuroFocus leverages neuroscience knowledge and expertise to add value to advertising, marketing, product development and packaging strategies.

The neuromarketing technology allows users to view an audience member's brainwaves in real time and shows how the metrics of attention, emotion, and memory are measured for a TV advertisement.

This is an extraordinary opportunity to incorporate ground-breaking science into your product offerings to better understand the elements of successful consumer engagement.

Globally this new technology is helping companies in the FMCG, liquor, retailing, banking, automotive and telecommunications industries to produce better, more targeted marketing campaigns.

Companies that have adopted the new technologies have reported that they are understanding and marketing to their customers in ways and in depths that have never before been possible.

For more information on NeuroFocus, please contact your Nielsen representative or visit www.neurofocus.com  

Tim Rose is director for Nielsen Australia's Consumer Research Group. The Nielsen Company is a global information and media company with leading market positions in marketing and consumer information, television and other media measurement, online intelligence, mobile measurement, trade shows and business publications (Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, Adweek). The privately held company is active in more than 100 countries, with headquarters in New York, USA. Please send any comments or questions you have in relation to this article to: tim.rose@nielsen.com

 

Bill Lang, CEO, Bill Lang International

Many corporate performance improvement activities focus on developing leadership skills. But is it possible to get a team to not only manage themselves, but also continually strive to improve their own performance to a world-class level? In his book Scores on the BoardTM - the 5-Part System for Building Skills, Teams and Businesses, author Bill Lang provides a set of practical, repeatable steps that cover most skill development and performance improvement activities. Here they are in a nutshell...

1. Vision
High-performing teams have a common vision - a compelling picture of the future they can work towards. It should be short and emotionally meaningful to the team. An effective vision is aspirational; it represents a perfect scenario or ‘team utopia' which provides the team with a clear sense of purpose. All team members should be involved in creating the vision so they each have an emotional investment in striving to reach it.

Using the vision as a basis for all other activities ensures the team remains focused on what is most important.

2. Goals
Smaller, more attainable goals help the team stay on track to achieving their overall vision. Goals give clarity about what the team will focus on in the short term, and provide a sense of achievement along the way. Goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.

3. Feedback
External feedback enables the team to objectively assess its performance, and identify ways to improve. Get feedback from internal and external stakeholders, and from team members, in a regular and systematic fashion. Always ask for specific suggestions on how performance can be improved.

4. Gap analysis
Periodically, the team should compare where they are (determined by feedback) to where they want to be (goals). Then identify the causes of any gaps, differentiating between causes within the team's control to fix, and those outside their control. Only focus on the things you can control - these will form the basis of your actions.

5. Action
The team can now develop and agree to an action plan to bridge the gap between the team's goals and their current performance. Action plans should be simple and pragmatic. Display tasks, responsibilities and due dates prominently so all team members are aware of their obligations.

Following these five simple steps has helped thousands of team members the world over achieve significant improvements. The system works across industries and functions, and avoids the expense and lost productivity of team-wide training. Importantly, it provides an ongoing framework for continually developing and reinforcing behaviours that drive performance to a world-class level.

It all starts with an effective team vision. To access Bill Lang's free Vision Creation Kit, visit www.scoresontheboard.com/thebook and click on ‘Free resources'.

Bill Lang is a team-building and business improvement expert and author. He travels the globe helping executives, business owners and individuals to rapidly build skills and implement systems to maximise performance in any area.

Bill's new book, Scores on the Board^TM - The 5 Part System for Building Skills, Teams and Businesses, combines the latest Harvard research and learning methods with cutting-edge neuroscience breakthroughs - the result is a simple system that anyone can use to get the most out of themselves and others. Purchase the book online at: www.scoresontheboard.com/the-book

Please send any comments or questions you have in relation to this article to: bill.lang@billlang.org

Christoph Goldenstern, Partner, Global Vice President of Service Excellence, Kepner-Tregoe

In his article Closing the 21st century service capability gap, Christoph Goldenstern, Partner, Global Vice President of Service Excellence, Kepner-Tregoe highlights some of the challenges service businesses face and outlines a more strategic approach to delivering high quality customer service. Here is an edited extract from his article...

With the ongoing commoditisation of products driven through globalisation and the omnipresence of the Internet, the pressure is more than ever on the service business to come to the rescue. Not only to provide additional sources for revenue growth and defending sliding product margins, but as a way to provide a level of differentiation from other technology providers by establishing an intimate relationship with the customer that goes over and above the product functionality.

Not surprisingly, recent research conducted by Xerox showed that their overall customer satisfaction was more impacted by the customer service experience than by the performance of the product.

Furthermore, customer service needs to be able to support the rapid evolution of converging technologies. The steadily increasing complexity of technology leaves service organisations with a widening gap between the capability of the technology they are supporting and service engineers' understanding of it, which can no longer be bridged purely through product training - the speed of technological innovation is simply too high.

On the customer expectation side, things don't look much better. With the global access to suppliers and vastly similar technologies to choose from, more than ever, we are dealing with a "buyer's market". In this environment customer expectations of customer service are only going up, putting additional pressure on service businesses to deliver not only a high quality, but consistent customer service experience... every time... and everywhere.

Another contributing factor to the widening service capability gap is a general lack of direction and priority setting in service businesses on how to close the gap in critical areas of the business. This often stems from a lack of strategic clarity around the service portfolio that is being provided and the missing segmentation of different customer types and their needs.

It is impossible for an organisation to prioritise its time and investments without clearly articulating what its focus is around customers and services and defining how it will differentiate itself from its competition.

The three major sources of service gaps: process, people, performance system.

Critical customer service is ultimately delivered through people as part of a process. Problems are solved by people and relationships are created by people, not software. However, software can play a critical role as an enabler to make this process as efficient as possible by helping to capture, store and retrieve the information in the way you want your service engineers to think, engage with customers and create knowledge.

If the design of the software is not modeled after the service work flow - which it is supposed to enable - service engineers will soon find creative ways to minimise their need to use the system or circumvent it completely in order to reduce, what they would consider, bureaucratic, non-value-added work.

We suggest that service organisations need to focus on two basic performance outputs:

• providing a high-quality customer experience
• providing a consistent customer experience.

Both of the above are primarily behavior driven and therefore require a renewed focus on "the human service interface", which is largely driven by service processes, the skills of service engineers and their performance system.

Where to from here?

Reducing the service capability gap will require a new type of thinking, away from blindly investing in tools and measurement systems towards understanding what truly drives a repeatable, high-quality customer service experience and efficiency in how services are being delivered.

If we can get it right, the price to be won will be worth the effort: customers that not only are loyal to our business, but that act as willing apostles for our products and services. It is then that customer service will become a genuine competitive advantage and a driver of future revenue and profits.

To view the article in full visit:
http://www.kepner-tregoe.com/NewsArtPub/InTheMedia.cfm

Christoph Goldenstern leads a global team of consultants who serve clients in a range of high tech industries. Kepner-Tregoe provides consulting and training services to organisations throughout the world. They help clients implement their strategies by embedding problem-solving, decision-making, and project execution methods through individual and team skill development and issue resolution process improvement.

Please send any comments or questions you have in relation to this article to: dbyrum@kepner-tregoe.com