The Hindu Business Line : Be obsessed to excel

Moving beyond passion: Geet Seethi (left), Vishwanathan Anand (centre) and Roger Federer (right) have remained obsessed withtheir sport. Organisations must take a cue to bring a similar obsession into customer service.

Ramesh Venkateswaran

Much is said about excellence and the means to achieve it. From the time of the famous In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman, people have written about the virtues of excellence, paths to excellence and the qualiti es needed to be excellent.

At a recent conference, Custommerce, on customer service and service delivery, I heard Geet Sethi talk about excellence and what goes into creating excellence. As an eight-time world champion in billiards and snooker I guess he knows what he is talking about – been there done that!

The concept itself was very interesting and simple and it set me thinking back to what we normally attribute to excellence. The words associated with excellence in various frameworks include passion, focus, commitment, competence and culture, among others.

Geet spoke of two essential ingredients of excellence. To put it in a nutshell, to be excellent one must be obsessed (not just passionate, mind you) and one must concentrate (and not just focus). I found this interesting and looked back at my own life, my experiences and tried to see how one could apply it to customer handling and service excellence.

Obsession

To be absolutely great at what one does, one must be obsessed. Madly obsessed, as Sethi put it. This is quite different from passion, which we often talk about as an essential component of excellence. I tried to get at the difference between passion and obsession. The dictionary describes ‘passion’ as an intense desire or enthusiasm for something. Obsession, on the other hand, goes further in terms of emotion — fixation, consuming passion, mania. The key difference between ‘passion’ and ‘obsession’ seems to be the degree of involvement. It has to be maniacal, mad, consuming. None of these adjectives have particularly positive connotations and yet, if we look at a positive obsession, it will help.

As I think about it I see the difference. I have prided myself on my passion for some things. When I was young I was passionate about sports – badminton, in particular. This passion was good enough to make me a player of reasonable standards where I went on to represent my university and State. But this passion did not take me to be a national or international player. I was not consumed by it. As a young guy, I had my fun with late night parties, skipping practice sessions because I was tired and other similar excuses! Prakash Padukone, my contemporary, was obsessed. He went on to win the All England Badminton title.

Today, if we talk of being truly different and want to stand out in a crowd, passion is not good enough. Federer, Nadal, Vishwanathan Anand, Tiger Woods, I am sure they all go beyond being passionate about what they do. They must be obsessed. One must be maniacal about what we want to do or achieve. It must consume us to think, eat, sleep, breathe, dream it at all times.

This seems unreasonable in an organisational context and for delivering service. We are talking about people who are doing a job – how can we expect them to be maniacal in satisfying customers?

We need to ask ourselves: Is our organisation obsessed with delivering the highest levels of customer service? Will we do everything we can to satisfy or delight the customer? To what lengths will we go to honour a promise made to a customer? What will we do to see that we make good on failures so that customers are not inconvenienced and we do not break the faith they had in us in the first place? Does everyone in the organisation have the same burning desire to see that every interaction with the customer is memorable? An organisation that is obsessive about service delivery would essentially put the customer at the core of all operations and processes. That’s it.

Concentration

As I think about concentration I see its meaning and relevance in achieving excellence and being great. Focus is strategic. Concentration is tactical. Or is it the other way round? It really does not matter. Focus is important — to know our goals, objectives and to keep our eyes on the target. Concentration is about being in the present and in the now. It is about total attention to the task at hand and not letting the mind wander. Geet gave the definition of concentration from the Vedantic treatise by Swami Parthasarathy — the intellect supervising the mind to be in the present.

The wandering mind is often the undoing of many good deeds. Distractions, preoccupations, anxieties and thinking of the future take away much of our energy. If we are not in the present, our mind is not fully concentrating on the task on hand and hence we do not do justice to what we do or to the person in front of us. In today’s world the scope for distractions are plenty. It is essential to find ways and means of reducing or eliminating these possibilities for distractions and loss of concentration.

What this means for service delivery

We need to make our organisation obsessed with delivering high quality service. It may be unreasonable to expect all employees to be crazy or maniacal about the customer at all times. It may also not be desirable as employees need to run their own lives and switch off from work when they go home. But during work hours, organisations need to create situations that help employees get obsessed with the customer. There should be ways by which employees switch on to their roles as they enter their work space. When employees get into their job roles, they must be single-minded about service and the customer. Nothing else must matter. This is possible.

Everyone in the company must be obsessed with delivering the best for the customer. One easy way to bring in this obsession is from the top — through senior management role modelling and clearly stated policies. Stories of FedEx and Nordstrom and their maniacal commitment to service are discussed in every management school. It is possible to be obsessed with delivering the best to the customer and also remain profitable.

The element of concentration is even more interesting and simpler to implement. Some years ago I consulted for a leading shipping company. One of the major issues that customers had with the company was that the frontline customer sales representatives would keep getting interrupted by telephone calls while talking to customers across the counter. And vice-versa. This was solved in a very easy and cost-effective manner. We decided that all counter staff who dealt with customers would not handle telephones. They could use the telephone only to make an outgoing call in connection with the customer they were dealing with. We had another desk with the representative handling only telephone calls with no customers to deal with across the counter. Interestingly, not only did customer satisfaction levels go up, productivity also went up.

In today’s world, we have major distractions in the cell phone, the laptop and their attendant services such as SMS and e- mail. It is very common for such people to be looking at their cell phones or laptops while talking to customers. They neither pay attention to nor concentrate on the customer while interacting with them. This is not only sheer bad manners; it also results in ineffective interaction. An easy way to solve this problem is to have a company rule that bans any form of external distraction – read cell phone or laptop — when people are interacting with one another. I believe this is especially necessary in India where our etiquette when it comes to interpersonal interactions is pretty low.

Lesson for senior management

I do realise that excellence is a complex word and cannot be simplified to just two words. The lesson for senior management, however, is simple. Get the employees crazy about the customer in any manner that is appropriate for the company. Secondly, when dealing with the customer, concentrate. Concentrate on her fully without letting anything or anyone distract you or prevent you from giving undivided attention to her.

Surely you cannot go wrong with either of these two approaches?

(The writer is Director, SDM Institute for Management Development, Mysore.)

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