Operational Excellence in Project Management

This post is aimed to provide you a preview about the cultural change behavior we have to execute to provide our After Sales team a customer success mindset, 

I started to worry about this theme about 3 years ago, and what motivated me were some factors like:

• quality of service delivery,
• provision of the service in a reactive way,
• lack of commercial synchronism and account strategy with sales staff,
• little contact with the customer base by the after sales team.

On top of that I would like to liminate comments very common in our team such as:

• "Ah but the customer did not use my product right",
• "The client did not complete the deployment",
• "He did not change the processes he needed within the company,"
• "His analyst was doing soft body."

Our deliveries were never bad, after all they were in use: best project management practices, ITIL® and an excellent technical team. But something was missing...

For a period of eight months I started to visit about three clients a week and asking these directors of companies from the aftermarket point of view:

• If the deliveries of the team services were done with quality and,
• What is value delivery of services from the perspective of the customer

It was a profound and fundamental experience that changed my view of: provision of after-sales services, customer expectations management alignment of after sales team with sales staff after-sales service assuming a leading role in the sales process I ended up "discovering" this topic in conversations with three colleagues who already practiced it. I wanted to share this experience with you, but before moving on I did a quick internet search on the definition for Customer Success:

It is a professional or department actively focused on thinking of solutions that improve the life of the client next to the services offered by the company - Tomás Duarte - Blog Tracksale - 2016

It is the job of proactively orchestrating the consumer journey toward the solutions he pursues - and that are always evolving - Lincoln Murphy - Endeavor.org - 2017

It is strategizing thinking about the success of the consumer and working to ensure that they have the best possible experience in your company - Isadora Lopes - Outbond Marketing

Ensure the best possible experience for your customers through value creation. - Lilian Oliveira - Sambatech

  When your customers achieve the desired result through interactions with your company - Talita Batista - Rock Content

and strong comments as :

I also came across a market indicator that I could not confirm the source of the information where it is 7 times more expensive, between conquering a new customer and retaining an old, acording to Gallup customer retention raising rates by only 5% can increase profits by 25-95%, and Gallup says B2B customers with high customer engagement scores achieve 50% more sales revenue and 34% more profitability than other companies.

Customers are in control and if this does not happen in your industry, it will soon be a reality, so get ready!

How can after sales professionals help this journey to customer success?

Change of mentality

After-Sales should look for the definition of customer success for this customer and they will need  to walk in the same direction. I am not talking about  project business objective , the relationship goes beyond om that, you need know the market and the segment in which the customer operates.

You need to understand what strategy teams have been thinking about customer success, and work to ensure that it is the best possible experience for your business. There's no point in a highly qualified Customer Success team if the after-sales team does not respond well when a customer calls!

Leaders should ask the team questions like:

• "What can you do in your daily life that improves customers' vision of the company?",
• "How can you improve your interaction with customers?",
• "What in your work could facilitate a client's journey with the company?"

This change of attitude is fundamental because we need to deliver customer experience and quality during all customer life cycle in the company and it is expected that this will be a longer one.

Customer Activation -It is the time when we are starting to deliver a project or support, this process is often called activation, and it is critical whether you engage the customer at this stage, that is, deliver 100% of what was promised or you can the customer lose it forever.

Projects

Pay close attention here the first signs of customer loss occur during activation. Projects As for example in the exaggerated promises of marketing, or during the sales cycle, but also after sales can contribute to the loss of the client due to a poorly executed transition of the project team or,  the support team that during an occurrence rotate the client for a generic email, such as "support" or "contact."

It may even be that the seller simply disappears after receiving your money.

The client's experience at this stage is fundamental. It can be done through a well-designed and structured service kick-off of elements such as:

• business objective,
• goal of the client,
• demonstrate to the customer where he is within the cycle journey of offers (sales will love),
• pitch elevator of the project manager or services, among others.
• remember to use the best service practices that meet the customer needs not yours.

Support

Many companies still understand that this phase is break and fix, which is, reactive, I affirm that the company should move to be proactive as quick as possible in this segment, some tips :

• Search for patterns that may indicate that a customer is having problems, monitoring applications, data, and infrastructure issues that can negatively impact the customer experience are all ways to become proactive.
• When there are several calls it can mean that the customer is engaged, now if it is taking too long for the service to be fixed there may be a risk of "churn" or not be an evangelizador client that recommends your company,
• Do not confuse with SLA, we want the success of client.
• Sustaining the customer's success vector can help them to find priorities in the queue of requests; perhaps a high-value customer who has a positive success vector can wait as long as we focus on the lowest-value customer, but an at-risk customer must be first.

In my research I found some very interesting tools that will help you in this work (https://www.gainsight.com/ and https://www.neoassist.com/) that operationalize the customer's life cycle

Happy customers, buy more, pay more, recommend the company to friends, volunteer for case studies, and help you promote new fetures. Satisfied customer is the best advertisement.

This is a series of 3 posts that I've been writing, in the next two post I will address customer success from the perspective of project management and subsequently recurring services

Every project manager has had the experience of a client who simply does what he should be doing for the benefit of the project, making life difficult for everyone in the project team and the company, so you need to chase him

How can we deal with such a situation?

In practice , what can be done?

Let me try to help you here::

• Kick Off Meeting - at he beginning let him know and its main sponsor the importance of the project and its benefits with your customer,

• Vision of the future - inspire your customer thru vision of the future about his project, make sure he understand it creating an emotinoal connection,

• Meet your "super busy" client -  make sure they both know exactly what the short, medium and long term objectives. This will let you divide the work among its resources properly from the beginning, rather than discuss it later. Follow this discussion with a clear project schedule, indicating key milestones,

• Set expectations and priorities from the beginning - make sure that all stakeholders in the project have their expectations aligned and properly handled, and remember "first things first ",

• Schedule weekly status meetings - Modern technology makes meetings easier to be carried out regardless of the distance, it is essential that meetings with your client are conducted on a recurring basis at a pre-defined time, it is recommended that you ensure that your client is aware about recurring meetings through the programmed reminders, especially if you are doing it remotely. After a short time , these meetings will become a point where you will capture his attention,

• Business Lunch - Try to meet him during business lunch and share project status with him, sometimes this is the best and only opportunity you may have,

• Follow-up via telephone to report critical areas of progress - to send the project progress report that contains critical information , that is, required action or not , call your " busy" customer and report on the status and required actions . I say this because the chance he will read his report are minimal. Never connect to whether he received the report, only call with a purpose,

• Have alternative contacts with your customer - as your client is too busy to handle the project is highly recommended that you have a second client as a contact so you can address when the project events become "a little agitated"

?Managing a project can be difficult but rewarding at the same time , the opportunity to deal with difficult customers will give you a great advantage:

Experience !

Adaptaded from the article "Managing a Client who is Too Busy to Focus" de Christopher Scordo 

There are moments in our professional experience, mainly in between projects that we start to think in how we can be a better professional in project management...

I would like to share with you what I have learned from my historical experience and share with you my own lessons learned in 8 steps in the followin priority:

• Step 1 - Commitment - Top prority  and most important one ! Commitment means not be talking as crazy and promissing a lot of things in what should be done in project activities.  The world is full of good intentions and there are project managers who say they do, and those who actually exercise it. Be fullly engaged  and delivery what is promissed in the project and as a professional.
• Step 2 - Make a plan for your professional growth, with attainable goals and fulfill your word. You have to keep the promises you made to yourself, am I right ?
• Step 3 - Let members of your team, project sponsor and customers knows that you are seeking improvement opportunities (be humble), everyone will appreciate your attitude and openness to new learnings, this will reflect positively on the behavior of all of them and as a consequence feedback will be provided by them.
• Step 4 - Improvements - with the Commitment step assured , it's time for you to define exactly which areas you need to seek for improvements: soft skills, hard skills, people management, leadership skills, financials, etc. Understand deeply each one of those improvements in what they really means to you, document each one with goals to be achieved, deadlines and metrics in how to achieve those goals
• Step 5 - Learn from your mistakes - ask yourself what I have learned from my mistakes ? Everybody commit mistakes...

  Step 6 - Feedback - Have courage ! Ask for feedback to your team, your manager and your customers, do not wait for formal feedback process in your company (if any), the sooner the better, so you can act more quickly. Listen actively and carefully what they have to say, address the negatives issues and look further to improve the positive aspects

   

• Step 7 - Find a professional role model - The best way to be a better project manager is watching how the big project managers work, observe their skills and knowledge they have, try to find them at meetings, conferences and events where they will be speakers.Read what they publish and write down the points that impressed you. A very productive way is to seek a mentor (will work faster).
• Step 8 - Education - Since you are elaborating a plan to fill the gaps seek for companies that are enable you to close these needs thru continued education.  Do not expect to be unemployed to study, remember you are a project manager and provisioning should be part of your income (salary) in a ledger account (savings) where after a certain period of time you can use these savings to invest in you. 

Now that your plan is ready, remember to run it to perfection! 

Nelson Rosamilha, PMP, Prince2 Practitioner
[email protected]
www.rosamilha.com