Support leaders are transforming their organizations through value-added support, knowledge management, and Web 2.0 techniques for customer engagement. All these initiatives require people, process, and technology changes.

Support executives generally implement people and process changes quite successfully. The challenge is in the last part of the equation: people. Whether we blame “politics,” ineffective middle management, or stubborn front-line staff, initiatives that fail generally do so because of people issues.

This article focuses on strategies that leaders have successfully used to align people with organizational goals and initiatives. These strategies are common sense, but are often ignored in the rush to deploy a tool or train people on a new process.

Change Leadership: Because “Change Management” is an Oxymoron

At The Brink of Transformation
We’re at the start of a profound transformation that is revolutionizing all aspects of business, but especially service and support. Two megatrends are driving this change:

• “Web 2.0,” or the death one-way communication. The old dynamic was simple. Organizations talked, messaged, positioned, and spun, and users paid attention—or not. The conversation was one-way. For all the talk of the Internet revolution, the fundamental dynamic didn’t change: marketing talked and hoped users listened.
  
  Today’s web is fundamentally different. The rise of wikis, blogs, forums, communities, social networking, and other forms of user-created content mean that we’re all talking. For example, Wikipedia is quickly becoming the reference of first resort, with over 2 million user-written entries in English alone. Technorati tracks over 100 million blogs and 250 million pieces of “tagged social media.” Collaborative bookmarking sites like digg and de.licio.us make us all editors, as well as authors.
  
  
• The Net Generation. Author Dan Tapscott has tracked the generation after Gen X and Gen Y—the “echo” from the baby boom. Tapscott’s research shows that this generation, which has grown up with computers, always-on internetworking, social devices, and electronic collaboration, takes a fundamentally different approach to work, play, purchasing, and consumption. They insist on having an active role in how they customize and extend their purchases, and will not settle for closed systems, be they cars, clothing, or software.

Our business, service and support, is in the crosshairs of these changes. We were the first to effectively harness user communities and support forums for business advantage. Those of us with public content have made peace with Google being a core piece of our content delivery strategy. Leaders are experimenting with talkback forums and wikis on self-service content. And having an effective knowledgebase for internal and external users is simply table stakes.

But Struggling to Execute
Still, dealing with the day-to-day challenges of service and support is difficult enough, even without adding in Web 2.0-style interaction or the value-added services we need to provide to defend our margins. Consider these data points:

• 60% of CRM initiatives are perceived as failures. (Gartner)
• Self-service sites average a 48% success rate. (SSPA)
• 12% of online inquiries to leading financial institutions are answered satisfactorily. (Microsoft)

As IT critic Nick Carr puts it, “Over the years, big companies have dumped a lot of money into computer systems that promise to automate ‘knowledge management.’ Most of that money has been wasted…using them turns out to be more trouble than it’s worth, particularly for those employees who have the most valuable knowledge—and the platforms and repositories fall into disuse and are eventually, and quietly, dismantled.”

A Matter of Priority
We’re all taught that initiatives—whether CRM, self-service, knowledge management, or Web 2.0—require three components for success: people, process, and technology.

We generally pay lip service to this, but when it comes down to it, we lavish our money and attention on technology. It’s ‘sexy,’ exciting, and comes with friendly and persistent sales people who make sure that we stay focused.

But is technology the right place to focus? Sure, some of what we do is rocket science, but most of the technology we deploy is well-understood. There’s no mystery in how to build a case-tracking system or a customer database. Besides, truly transformational technologies are often very simple. The first wiki was written in under 100 lines of Perl. And, it’s possible to achieve business success with imperfect technology.

The next focus of attention is business process. And it’s very important to get the process right. But there, too, there is an increasing body of proven practices. And, we’ve also seen organizations succeed with wildly different processes: different SSPA members create high-quality content with dedicated teams, process specialists, or Knowledge-Centered Support. So the optimal process, while important, is clearly not the key success factor.

Of the three components for success, the most important—and often the least invested in—is people, our ultimate legacy system. People are much more complex than process or technology! Today’s executive faces singular people challenges:

• Loyalty: the old social contract has been broken. Employees no longer expect loyalty from their companies, nor are they generally inclined to give it. And, in many cases, the people delivering support work for partner companies.
• Demographics: Motivations and expectations are very different among boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, and the Echo.
• Diversity: organizations increasingly comprise a much broader range of cultural perspectives, often spread across a full day’s worth of time zones.
• Experience: many employees are unhappy veterans of failed initiatives or abandoned causes. There’s always proof why “this can’t work here” or “this is just the flavor of the month.”
• Popular culture: managers in the 1950s didn’t have to deal with employees who enjoyed “Dilbert,” “Office Space,” and “The Office.” In today’s pop culture, management is literally a joke.

Change Management? Change Leadership!
The response to the importance of people issues has generally been to deploy “change management professionals” as part of initiatives. This has met with limited success.

For one thing, the words we use are important. If there’s one thing change can’t be, it’s “managed.” To manage something is to “handle, direct, govern, or control in action or use.” Good luck “directing, governing, or controlling” knowledge workers who feel threatened by the change you’re proposing.

A better model is leadership, “the act of going before or with to show the way.” This is the essence of an initiative champion’s job. And the reality is, leaders can’t hire other people to do this.  The leader’s very role makes him or her the person who must lead.  Leaders can get advice from professionals, but must do the hard work themselves.

Change leadership techniques that have been demonstrated to work, ideally when used together, include:

• Establishing transformational metrics
• Understanding and using workplace motivators
• Creating a strategic framework
• Developing and implementing a communications plan
• Handling objections positively and forthrightly
• Facilitating deliverable teams who own key pieces of the project
• Coaching

Transformational Metrics
In his book Transforming Performance Measurement, Dean Spitzer of IBM asks us to consider why we measure.  Often, the answer is to reward and punish.  Dr. Spitzer suggests that a much more productive use of metrics is to learn, and improve—to foster an organization-wide dialog about our strategy and how to execute it.

He also cautions that transformational measures—that is, ones that drive a new organizational strategy—are rarely found out of the box in management dashboards.  Because they are new, and transformational, they’re often not easy to measure precisely.  But, it’s more important to have imperfect and subjective measures that align to a strategy, rather than standard measures that are precise but don’t drive strategic behavior.  (In service and support, we often see this dynamic with average handle time, or first call resolution—easily measured by the ACD, but susceptible to abuse.

So, the first step to aligning people with an initiative is to make sure that everyone is focused on learning from measures that align with the overall strategy.

Workplace Motivators
In his seminal HBR article, “One More Time:  How Do We Motivate Employees,” Frederick Herzberg observes that there are two kinds of workplace motivators:  hygiene issues that have to be there (like a fair salary or reasonable supervision) and true motivators.  It’s the presence of these motivators that get knowledge workers out of bed each morning excited to work.

When thinking through new initiatives, leaders should consider how they create motivation:

• How will employees feel a sense of achievement?
• How will they receive recognition?
• How will this make their jobs more interesting and relevant?
• How will it provide them more responsibility?
• How does it present opportunities for advancement and growth?

These positive motivators will make much more difference to employees than the opportunity to earn cash incentives or prizes—and won’t encourage people to game the metrics.

Strategic Framework
Surprisingly, and frustratingly, employees often don’t know why they’re being asked to do things—what the strategy is, and how their actions support the strategy.  What seems obvious in the corner office can be very murky out in the cubicles.

The Strategic Framework is a short document that puts the motivators and transformational metrics into context.  It lists:

• What our objectives are (for the enterprise, customers, and staff)
• How specific actions in the initiatives align to those objectives
• How we’re measuring performance against our objectives
• How we’ll know we’re successful

This is a great tool not just for staff members, but also for executives—especially when reorganizations, mergers, or tight budgets require initiatives to re-justify themselves.

Communications Plan
Marketing communications teams carefully craft key messages for different customer segments, and then plan how to deliver those messages to prospects.  Initiatives that require change should do exactly the same thing for staff.

The communications plan should describe for each group of stakeholders:

• What’s in it for me (based on the analysis of workplace motivators)
• The elevator pitch:  the big idea in 10 seconds or less
• Likely objections and responses

The plan should also describe how the message will be communicated, through kick-off or all-hands meetings, 1:1 meetings, newsletters, executive drop-ins, or simply management by walking around.

Handling Objections
A key element of implementing the communications plan is to encourage and address objections.

To handle objections effectively, it’s important to validate and respect the person who raises the objections.  This isn’t to say that you agree with the conclusion, but that you think the underlying concern is valid—as it generally is.  Listen for the personal and emotional aspect of the objection, which often hides behind objective-sounding analytical statements.

Once you’ve appreciatively listened to the objection, the objective is to position yourself on the employee’s side, and to use the workplace motivators and benefits from the communication plan to offer an alternative perspective.  For example, if an employee is concerned about job cuts after a self-service initiative, describe how their knowledge contributions should be the basis of the initiative’s success, and the better they share their knowledge, the more value they have to the organization.  Don’t flim-flam them or offer security that doesn’t exist, but do show them how it’s possible to succeed.

Deliverable Teams
Steering committees are nice, but real ownership and buy-in comes when the stakeholders are actually designing how the initiative will work.   It requires substantial trust to let employees set their own metrics and goals, for example, but you’ll often be surprised at how much they demand of themselves.  And you’ll be pleased at how seriously teams take goals they’ve set themselves, or follow processes they’ve designed with your facilitation.

Coaching
Training is important, but isn’t sufficient to bring about real organizational change. That only happens with coaching, where peers work together to reinforce what they’ve learned, provide encouragement and feedback, and develop habits. As the Public Personnel Management Journal notes, training plus coaching resulted in productivity increases of 85%, as compared to 22% for training alone.

For coaching to work, managers must pick the right coaches—people with “people” and influence skills. (Often these are not the technical experts.)  They must also preserve time to coach, especially during the two months or so it takes to really develop new workplace habits.

Conclusion
Service and support organizations have unparalleled opportunities, if they can embrace the tectonic changes in the industry.  While process and technology are essential to seizing the opportunities, the real lever of innovation is the people inside the organization.  Executives and program champions can successfully lead change by:

• Creating and using transformational metrics
• Understanding how to create new opportunities for motivation
• Capturing and communicating a strategic framework
• Creating and executing a communications plan
• Handling objections constructively
• Staffing and empowering deliverable teams
• Implementing coaching

About David Kay……………………………………………………………..

David Kay is Principal of DB Kay & Associates, which offers support organizations strategic consulting on knowledge management, self-service, and collaboration. He is co-author of Collective Wisdom:  Transforming Support with Knowledge, the first book on knowledge management for technical support.  He is an award-winning contributor to best practices in customer support, holds patents on support technology, and speaks frequently on support issues. His customers include Cisco, Tektronix, Research In Motion, Qualcomm, VeriSign, Cognos, and Openwave.

Questions?  Feedback?  Contact David at info@dbkay.com or through www.dbkay.com