The No Tool Zone

I am not much for surveys these days, but I ran across the 2012 Global Customer Service Barometer prepared for American Express by Echo.  The best way to find out how you are performing is to actually know before the customer hangs up.  Because, once the call is over the opportunity has passed to provide service – one reason I am not a fan of customer satisfaction surveys (another is that surveys rarely ask questions “that matter” to customers).

Some things that stood out for me in the survey:

• Customers are not seeing much change in customer service.
• Businesses are more likely to miss your expectations than exceed them.
• Customers will pay more for customer service.
• Consumers expect excellent customer service and don’t expect to pay more for it.
• Consumers are likely to tell 8 or more people about their excellent service.
• Consumers are likely to tell 11 or more people about their poor experience.
• Consumers prefer to speak to real person either by phone or face-to-face.

As anyone can see from the survey, consumers want good service.  Just so few deliver it.  Why is this?

Many organizations view customer service as a zero-sum game, where the belief is that good service costs more.  This is not true, great customer service costs less.

This also means if customers want to talk to a real person, it will be less expensive than that expensive IVR and voice system you just bought to save money.  I have often found these technologies entrap the customer and workers – increasing costs.

There are some numbers more nebulous than others.  For instance, knowing how many customers say good and bad things is a very difficult number to know for your service.  However, failure demand (a failure to do something or do something right for a customer – Seddon) is something to sink your teeth into.  When customers place demands on your customer service people that are failures it is very expensive.  Worse, is the amount of failure demand hitting contact centers or other service workers.  It is typically between 25 and 75%.  That is the bad news, the good news is that in most service organizations it can be designed out.

A better service design also requires better management thinking about how to manage the work.  Activity measures like AHT and service levels are the wrong measures.  They play to the zero-sum game, failure demand measurement is a whole different game.  To deliver better service, we have to reduce failure demand that reduces costs too.

There are other measures that are important too.  These may be end-to-end measures derived from “what matters” to customers.  These require others outside the customer service arena to support making a design that meets the demands of customers.

No matter what the survey says, it can not replace getting knowledge about that what and why of current performance of your organization.  Learning about customer purpose, types of demand (value/failure) and the flow of the work will help you understand about the assumptions associated with design and management of work.

Come hear me speak at the CAST conference in San Jose, California!  Re-Thinking Management . . . Re-Thinking . . . IT!

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the Vanguard Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Interesting article in the WSJ today called, GM Chief Labors to Get Rebuilt Carmaker into Gear which outlines some of GMs difficulties.  There is a little bit of everything:

• Functional separation of work leading to in-fighting
• Outsourcing
• Performance rewards that cause internal competition
• The bureaucracy created by those in support functions
• Economies of scale thinking

All of the above perpetuate the problems of GM.  Economy of scale thinking has long been replaced by economies of flow.  Remember the US had all the scale after WWII and lost manufacturing to a country with little or no natural resources or scale – Japan.  The scale thinking has to go, before the country does.

However, I see more of the “frozen middle” than anything.  Support functions and middle management that stagnate whole organizations.  They are people that cannot say “yes” and add costs and bureaucracy to organizations.  Like a boat anchor to ships these folks eat resources and ruin whole financial budgets.  The need to get these folks jobs that create value or enable those that create is a daunting task.  Most people in non-value adding roles see themselves as adding value and often so do the executives that put them there.

So, the frozen middle remains frozen.  Incapable of creating value and there unintentionally to thwart innovation and invent hoops for those that can create value to jump through like policies, entrapping technology, standardization, rules, etc.  The problem with the frozen middle is irony.  It is ironic that it freezes progress, but as the dysfunction grows so does the middle expand its activities.  Organizations intending to reduce costs, increase them as they add more folks to the middle ranks.

GM is not unique in this problem.  All organizations have a frozen middle, they are there to make things run smoothly.  However, counter-intuitively they make things much worse.

Come hear me speak at the CAST conference in San Jose, California!  Re-Thinking Management . . . Re-Thinking . . . IT!

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the Vanguard Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Almost 62 years ago (July 13th, 1950), W. Edwards Deming met with 45 Japanese leaders that represented about 80% of the capital of Japan.

Dr. Deming had found his audience.

Largely ignored in his home country (USA) after WWII because the world to buy products.  The industrialized mindset was born in the US.  The methods Deming and Shewhart had taught during the war effort to make better quality military products were forgotten.

One engineer that had worked at Western Electric during the war was back 8 years later and the control charts they had used were now missing.  The basics to manufacturing better products were now gone.  Dr. Deming sought refuge in the US Census Bureau as US management used mass production to fulfill world demand.

As a statistician, Dr. Deming arrived in Japan in 1946 and 1948 to help with the census.  He was asked to talk about Quality Control to a group of engineers where he said it would be pointless unless the highest executives attended as well.  His sponsor, Ichiro Ichikawa did just that and because of Ichikawa’s importance in post-WWII got the attendance Deming desired in July 1950.

Dr. Deming who had grown accustomed to being ignored . . . found his audience.  He promised the Japanese that in 5 years that the Americans would be screaming for protection from Japanese products – they did it in four (in Deming’s words).

Within months, Japanese companies reported 30% + improvement in productivity by focusing on quality.  While the Japanese embraced the basics, his countrymen moved further and further from them.

Decades later, the Toyota Production System (TPS) became all the rage in the US.  The work of Taiichi Ohno was “discovered” by the Americans.  There would have been no TPS without the groundwork done by Dr. Deming in Japan.  The funny thing is that Americans are all running to Lean, when they should first be understanding the basics that Dr. Deming learned while working with the Japanese.  Ohno is indeed a product of American thinking and not vice versa.

US management has largely destroyed manufacturing in this country.  Outsourcing to other countries with cheaper labor is a natural extension of the industrialized, mass production mindset.  The problem is often pegged as a labor problem when America’s thinking about the design and management of work is the source.

The economic crisis in the US offers opportunities to rethink our approach and come to the realization we are wasting our natural resources with an inability to manufacture or service in a suitable fashion.  The economic tsunami that has befallen us is a product of playing games with finances rather than improving on the basics.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the Vanguard Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

W. Edwards Deming (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Still the most talked about and controversial of W. Edwards Deming thinking is what I reference as the 95/5 rule – that 95% of the performance of an organization is down to the system and not the individual.  It isn’t a rule and, as I have stated in previous posts, it is not empirical.  Dr. Joseph Juran though the number was 85/15 and based on Dr. Deming’s experience the number was thought to be 95/5.

So, does this mean that the individual is not important?  NO!

The design and thinking about the management of work is so poor in service organizations that the individual is rendered completely irrelevant.  The individual worker gets entrapping technology forced upon them.  The work is functionally separated where the worker can never finish a piece of work and the result is no accountability.  Improving the system restores the individual.

Dr. Deming’s central theme is restoration of the individual.  Fear, competition, manipulation and performance appraisals that result in ratings organizations have undermined the individual.

W. Edwards Deming believed some really simple things for workers:

• Joy in Work
• Cooperation
• Intrinsic Motivation
• Systems Thinking
• Self-Esteem
• Never-ending Learning

He implored us to adopt new thinking for a new economic age.  When do we get to see this happen?

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the Vanguard Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Executives are much like a wealthy family that annually sells acreage . . . Until the plantation is gone, it’s all pleasure and no pain.  In the end, however, the family will have traded the life of an owner for the life of a tenant farmer.  – Warren Buffet, The Selling of America, Fortune Magazine 1988

If anything the past few decades have taught us is that companies the world wide have become slaves to investment companies.  Hitting the numbers promised to Wall Street has become the defacto purpose of whole publicly-traded organizations.  The dysfunction to hit these numbers is evident in moves to reduce staff or make other short-term cuts that will ultimately lead to a long-term increase in costs.

It is without doubt an unenviable position.

I have always felt cutting staff in any form is not an optimal solution.  I have always felt the best route that shows leadership is to first cut out executive bonuses should go first and then across the board executive compensation cuts.  The next thing to do across the board cuts in compensation.  However, if cuts have to be made then the front-line staff (or those that create value) should be kept and all other positions should be cut.  Front-line staff are the only ones that can create value for customers.

If an organization is mature enough in using the Vanguard Method, these are good strategies to deploy.  Because to me, maturity has to be the depth that the thinking has permeated the organization (i.e., executives “get it”).  Sometimes we are lucky enough to start in this position with organizations, other times we are not.  Redesigning organizations can be construed as simple in comparison to changing thinking of executives.

No matter what when the numbers or the company is at risk, organizations either have to or feel compelled to act.  The response predictably increases long-term and total costs.  We have surrendered our companies to investment firms that drive for greater results, which in and of itself sounds OK until we get the type of actions that results in what Warren Buffett described and damage the organization.

There is a better way.

Dr. Perry Gluckman (Deming’s Profound Changes – DeLavigne) had a view on this:

“The Message is simple!

1. Every system is broken.
2. Being competitive in the market means improving the system faster than the competition.
3. We are all part of the problem, and we are all part of the solution.”

Wall Street has driven us apart by class and by thinking.  The bottom-line now prevails over what is right for the system in too many cases.  Time to rethink our position.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the Vanguard Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

There is assorted information regarding Dr. Deming’s Funnel Experiment.  This Experiment was conducted during Dr. Deming’s famous 4-day seminar – I attended my first Deming seminar back in the 1980′s at the invitation of Allison Transmission as a supplier.  As with many folks, this had a profound impact on my thinking about management.

During Dr. Deming’s 4-day seminar we broke out into groups supported by consultants (most statisticians) to facilitate our learning regarding the concepts taught us.  The purpose of this exercise was to teach us what happens when management tampers with systems without knowledge.  Tampering is a really good word as it represents what most managers do when they manage from assumption and data that carries no context.

The funnel experiment itself has been a source of confusion as to how it is conducted, this is not as important as what needs to be learned from tampering with systems without knowledge.  I will describe how each of the four Rules of the Funnel Experiment and examples of associated tampering with that Rule.

Most important, is that the Funnel Experiment describes variation.  Tampering is to treat a common cause of variation as a special cause and vice versa.  Without a fundamental understanding of variation, you stand to make mistakes or “tamper.”  If you are not familiar with the concepts of variation, I wrote a post titled, Service Metrics:  What You Need to Understand.

Let’s start with the four (4) Rules of the Funnel Experiment:

1. Make no Adjustment to the Funnel – Just keep it centered on the target.
2. Adjust the Funnel from Its Last Position – Start with the Funnel on the target.  If the marble falls 3 inches North of the target the next drop will be 3 inches South.  The second drop starts from 3 inches South as the new target and if the next drop lands 5 inches East of this (new) target then the next drop is conducted 5 inches West of the (3-inches South) target.
3. Bring Back to Original Target Before Adjustment – Start out at a static target.  If the drop is 5 inches North of the target, then the next drop (new target) will be 5 inches south – this is the same as Rule 2.  If the next drop lands another 2 inches south then you are now a total of 7 inches South from the original “static” target.  Now the next drop will be conducted 7 inches North of the “static” target.
4. Set the Funnel at Each Drop Over the Spot Where It Last Came to Rest – Pretty simple.  Just start with your target and then where the marble drops becomes the new target.

Rule 1 is always the best option.  This does not mean that targets are good for business, but having a customer purpose (aim in Deming terms) is important.  There will always be variation (different spots the marbles come to rest) in the system.  Manipulating the system is where the tampering begins.

Rules 2, 3 and 4 are all methods that result in increased variation or tampering.  I have pulled examples of tampering from W. Edwards Deming’s Out of the Crisis and The New Economics, Kenneth T. Delavigne’s Profound Changes and William Latzko’s Four Days with Dr. Deming as well as my own experiences.

Rule 2 (results in 41% more variation):

• Legislation, Federal and State, tampering with our economy – We have witnessed far too much of this!
• Adjustments by the Federal Reserve Board – Ron Paul has a point!
• Overreaction to a complaint by a customer – Two actions you should take one is to see if the problem is systemic or not (repeated) and two – take an administrative action to fix the customer.
• Reaction of stock market to news.
• Changing company policy based on latest attitude survey.
• Continual changes in tax laws and health benefits, each change to correct a previous mistake.
• Price wars that end in competing companies having no investment capital to innovate and improve.
• Over ordering supplies in one month and under ordering supplies the next month.
• Adjusting a rifle’s sight after each shot.
• Taking immediate action on defects, errors or violations.

Rule 3:

• Escalation of bets in a “hot” poker hand.
• Short-term “contracyclical” manipulation of credit, money supply and public works expenditures by the government trying to cancel out the “business cycle” but actual causing it to occur.
• Escalation of barriers to trade between nations.
• Sending children to bed early tonight because they stayed up late last night.
• Trying to exceed customer expectations this month to make up for bad service last month.
• Pulling in orders from next month to compensate for cancellations this month.
• Nuclear proliferation.
• Illicit drug crackdowns.  Enforcement improves, price goes up which stimulates importation of drugs.

Rule 4 (Off to the Milky Way):

• Marking the next board to cut by using the board previously cut.
• Making copies of copies where the original is constantly replaced by a copy.
• One employee being trained by an incumbent employee.
• Taking a sample from the last batch (as with paint) to be used as measurement standard for the next batch.
• Languages.
• History, unwritten passed down from generation to generation.
• Get together and share ideas.
• Executives meeting to discuss what to do in this new economic age.
• Adjustment of time to a meeting based on the last actual starting time.
• Playing “telephone.”

As stated, Rule 1 is the best choice and Rule 4 is the worst choice, but Rule 2 & 3 are sub-optimal compared to Rule 1.  Tampering is evident in every system and many organizations can not recognize when they are tampering.  This is when outside help is needed to understand when things are being made worse by the actions taken.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the Vanguard Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

The following incident (with ACS) from a reader highlights the good problems with front and back office design and putting agents on the phone that can not help customers in any way.  I love the IVR, which of course only adds to the frustration of the call.  The amount of failure demand driven in from such interactions far outweighs the short-term benefits perceived by “dumbing down” the agent.

“I have a great one for you.

Just called ACS/Mellon (my HSA) because by recurring payments to dentist have not been working.  I’m going to try to recreate my experience for your reading pleasure.

I initiated the call at 8:20pm and went through the regular 3 minutes of options before I could get to an option to speak to someone.  Once I got through, of course all representatives were busy, and I was told my wait time would be greater than 5 minutes.  During my 20 minute wait on hold, I was told 33 times by an automated female voice and 8 times by a male voice that “my call was important” and to “stay on the line and someone would be with me shortly.”  In one instance, the female voice even interrupted the male voice.  I finally got through to a representative who of course asked me for the same information I had already keyed into the phone.  I was finally ready to address my issue.

The issue:  I had set up $160.00 monthly recurring payments to my dentist for my daughter’s braces.  I set this up last year, and everything worked fine for October, November, and December of 2011.  I assumed everything was going according to plan, so when I checked my account sometime in March of 2012, I was surprised to see that no payments had been made to the dentist in 2012 and the recurring payment was gone.  Thinking it was probably a new year thing, I went ahead and paid the dentist the two missing payments with my flex spending debit card, and set up a new recurring payment beginning with the April payment.  I could then see payments queued for 3/30, 5/1, and 6/1, so I thought all was well.  The week of April 9th, I went back in to check the account and saw that all three payments (including the 3/30 payment) were still in a pending status.  Having exhausted what I could find on the website, I made the call.

The representative proceeded to tell me that she saw a pending payment from 3/30 to the dentist, that had not been issued.  Duh!  Wasn’t that why I was calling?  She asked me to hold while she “checked the database.”  She came back to me with the suggestion that I delete the transaction and re-enter it to see if it would go through.  When I said I didn’t think that was the solution, and that I wanted to find out the problem (whether it be on my end or theirs), she said she could open a research request for her back office to look at it.  It would take 3-5 days for a reply, and I could call back and get the results the the inquiry.  When I questioned why I was calling them instead of them calling me when I didn’t even know when they would have an answer, she proceeded to repeat that it would be 3-5 days.  She did say that she would make a note on the request for them to call when they had resolution (I’m not holding my breath.  I don’t think she even asked for my phone number.)  I then put my Vanguard Method hat on and got her to admit that she couldn’t see anything more on her end than I could see on my online application.  Of course, at the end of the conversation, she asked if there was any else she could help me with (she hadn’t helped me with anything.)  She then asked me if I would be willing to take a survey.  My answer was, “Oh, yes!”  When she tried to transfer me, she must have hit an invalid code, and I went into an infinite loop telling me that the code I entered was incorrect and to re-enter it.  Needless to say, I didn’t get to the survey.  How convenient!

Do I feel like my call was very important to them?  YOU BETCHA!”

Apparently, my reader isn’t the only one with problems attributed to ACS – see Consumer Affairs website.  ACS needs to discover the counter-intuitive truth that good service costs less.  Remember, don’t blame the agent!  The system designed by ACS management is the issue as they designed the system.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the Vanguard Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal got my attention.  The article is titled, Why We Lie and describes the fact that 1% cheat no matter what you do.  The rest just need to have deterrents to keep them mostly honest.

The telling example in the article describes this by “locked doors” that will keep the mostly honest people out as the locked door eliminates an opportunity.  However, the 1% will get in a steal stuff no matter what.

Isn’t this the way of the world?

There are many different forms of lying and cheating.  Executives will cheat for rewards, especially when the culture encourages this behavior.  Consultants will even steal clients by misrepresenting facts and changing history to support their intent and position.  Sometimes it comes in the form of hidden fees to customers.

Regardless, you can”t prevent people from cheating and lying that represent the 1%.  However, many organizations attempt to do so.  This is done by separating the work so that someone can’t cheat.  Seems logical, but separating the work loses the accountability that provides the deterrent to the “mostly” honest people.  Instead, once the work is separated no one is accountable.

Designing work that is interesting and challenging provides a positive deterrent to workers and provides a better leadership strategy.  This counter-intuitive truth that better work brings is something that can separate your culture and your service from all others.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the Vanguard Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Boeing 757-200 takes off at Manchester Airport (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Airlines have generally been poor performers in the customer experience.  Pretty much every airline can not get it right.  I was going on a trip to Portugal and found Jet2.com and thought, “OK, budget airline . . . how much worse could it be?”  The answer is somewhere between a lot and criminal.

The website showed the really low fares, but there are fees for just about everything from breakfast, luggage and my personal favorite  . . . checking in on-line.  You see if you fail to check in on-line you have to pay about $27 for the privilege.  I had forgotten this and although I thought $27 was a bit steep, I paid it.

However, while I was waiting to pay a couple in front of me had tried to check-in on-line and the check-in failed.  I listened to the story as they spoke to a manager about the on-line issue.  The manager asked if they had written the error message and error code down (who would think to do that?).  Because the couple had failed to write down these two important pieces of information, they were out over $55 – at least if they wanted to travel that day.  I thought to myself, “who would think it is intuitive to write the error message down, besides shouldn’t the website working be the responsibility of Jet2.com?”

I made a mental note to be sure to work out something with the front desk at the hotel to print my return ticket.  When the day before leaving arrived, I went to work to “check-in” for the flight the next day.  The website asked for a series of passport information.  You have to select your country of issue (for the passport) and what country you lived in – both are the USA.  The first drop down menu had USA, but the second one did not have “USA” as a country to select.  Entrapping technology for customers is a huge problem in service, everyone wants to send customers to cheaper channels – they rarely become cheaper when you look end-to-end.  Variety in service demand sees to that.

When I arrived at the Portugal airport the next day, I knew that I would be blamed somehow for the website snafu, I just wasn’t sure how – so, I played it out.  The check-in desk told me I would have to go to a different desk to pay or plead my case.  Two other families were already there because the had hit the wrong airport during check-in and the other was confused about the selection – both wound up having to pay.

My turn, I explained to the agent about the drop down menu missing “USA” and the response was even more egregious than I had expected,  “We have had USA residents check-in on line before and they had no problem.”

Seriously!  This is a response that has nothing to do with MY problem – are you kidding?  I implored her to look on the website and see for herself, but she would have none of it.  I paid my (close to) $30 this time and decided to use the power of the internet to exact retribution.

The issue to me is that this airline can not or should not survive.  Allowing such poor service and getting away with it needs a public verdict or at least disclosure.  With all the failure demand coming into the desk at Jet2.com, it will eventually collapse under its own cost structure – it requires people to deal with these problems even if they get paid.  Add in the number of people that will swear never to fly them again and they will not last.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the Vanguard Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

I was talking with a colleague regarding past experiences with clients and he came up with a beautiful explanation for sales with some companies he had worked with in the past.  The “sales prevention” team was the label given.  Both a humorous and sad label.

Organizations are desperate for revenue in these economic times and push methods reign to “get the revenue.”  Some times organizations use manipulative methods to up-sell or convince the customer of an “unrealized” need.  Most of this stuff is BS and actually can work against you in raising costs.  Returns are a good way to identify some of these costs to hit revenue numbers.  When customers buy things that don’t fit their needs they return it and there is cost associated with returns including distrust from the customer that can’t be measured.

Sales departments that can’t help customers solve problems can actually prevent sales.  When non-sales calls are taken in a sales area they often get passed to customer service.  Most service organizations see this as a good design as they have sales “specialists.”  The customer, however, sees it as another barrier to overcome.  not helping a customer at point of contact creates great dissatisfaction . . . it prevents sales.

Some sales folks are more interested telling you about their knowledge than helping you solve the service problem they have whether it relates to purpose (value demand) or a problem the service organization created (failure demand).  I roll my eyes when I great detail about the features and benefits that don’t matter to me from a sales person that is working hard to convince me.  Most customers want to call to buy, but the failure demand and the salesperson get in the way . . .  more sales prevention.

Making sales is a process of discovery.  How do I enable the customer to get what they need and not more than that?  Or helping them discover new ways to get jobs they need done more effectively and efficiently.  This is sales enabling.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the Vanguard Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.