Category Archives: students

Career-Professionals, Service Excellence, students, Village Cinemas Australia, What Matters, What Really Matters

A not-so-service-excellent experience

Introduction
The purpose of sharing this story is to highlight just how easy it is for organisations to easily and quickly perform below expectations. Usually the core reasons for performing below customer expectations lie between a lack of balance between passionate staff and appropriate systems & processes to support those staff. Below is a story based on my perceived service experience. It is therefore biased because it only contains my side of the story. This is okay because that is how service works. All of us are trying to meet or exceed the expectations of our customers (or use a different word if the word ‘customer’ does not work for you) based on their perception of their experience with our organisations.

I am not going to reveal in this blog what I think the Village Cinema organisation and the specific staff members involved could have done to improve our service experience. Rather I am going to leave that open to your suggestions. Consider yourselves consultants and you have been brought in by Village Cinemas to review this case and to help them to understand whether or not there is anything that they could do to improve their service levels. The research on Employability Skill development recommends that leadership (which includes ‘systems thinking’ skills), problem solving, communication and enterprise skills incorporate the skills necessary to provide service excellence. In this context I’m going to tell you the story of our experience and then leave it open to you to practice the above-mentioned skills to make suggestions in the comments sections about what both Village Cinemas and the specific staff involved could have done to enhance our experience.

The story
My wife, Michelle and I finally had an opportunity to use some gifts that we had been given for our birthdays last year. As parents with four children we have not had a night away on our own since we began our family some nine years ago. Our youngest child has just turned two years old so we thought that he’d be old enough to have relatives look after him and our other three children while we went away overnight. The hotel is located in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs and is situated amongst a substantial shopping and cafe precinct. We had chosen this time to go away because it corresponded with our 13th wedding anniversary. Our gifts included an overnight hotel stay including breakfast and a late check out and Village Cinema Gold Class tickets. The hotel in which we were booked is literally 100 meters from the Village Cinema complex so we decided to take the opportunity to use both gifts at the same time.

After having had a very smooth check in process at the hotel in the early afternoon, Michelle and I decided to wander down to the cinema to see if we could book some seats at the cinema. We were aware that because the Gold Class seats were limited it was possible that there might not be any seats available that evening, so we were also prepared to book seats for the following day. Prior to leaving our hotel room we noticed that the expiry date stamped on the Gold Class tickets was 1 month and three days prior. We had not noticed this date before. We decided that we would immediately draw the attention of the staff to the date and offer to ‘pay the difference’ between the value of the tickets and any price increase that may have occurred since the tickets had been originally purchased. Our confidence was high that a simple solution could be found to this problem.

On arrival to the cinema there was no queue and we were able to immediately approach one of the two sales staff working at the booking counter. We quickly explained our situation including the fact that we were using gifts provided to us from the previous year and that we were celebrating our wedding anniversary, this being our first overnight stay on our own since we had started a family. We highlighted the date issue and asked if anything could be done to help us. The first sales clerk told us that she, “…didn’t think it would be a problem” but felt that she needed to refer us to her manager who was sitting beside her. We were ‘swapped’ with the customers that the manger was serving and we once again explained our story. As accurately as I can recall the following conversation took place. “G” represents when I was speaking, “M” when Michelle was speaking and “VC” when the manager representing Village Cinemas was speaking.

VC: “Yes, we automatically provide one months grace from the actual expiry date on the gift vouchers. Unfortunately you are three days over that grace period and they won’t let me authorise it. The only way for you to use the vouchers now is to call them (hands us a card with a 1300 number on it).”

M: “But we are here now and we’d like to solve the problem now. We are happy to pay the price difference if there has been a price rise since the vouchers were purchased”

VC: “Oh, the price isn’t the issue.”

M: “What is?”

VC: “They won’t let me approve it. As I said you’ll have to call them using the number on the card that I have provided you.”

G: “Who are “they”?”

VC: “Oh, our corporate office.”

G: “I don’t understand how it is that you refer to them as if you and them are separate. To me ‘you’ are both Village Cinemas and we’d prefer to be able to sort this out now. We don’t want to have to wait for the corporate office to sort this out because we might not be here by the time they sort it out. Surely this isn’t that hard. The vouchers have been paid for and we are happy to pay more if there has been a price increase. We don’t think that we are being unreasonable.”

VC: “I’m sorry. It’s the policy. There is nothing that I can do.”

M: “There is no-one else here that you could call for assistance?”

VC: “Yes, but they won’t say anything different to me.”

M: “Would you mind calling that person please.”

VC: (picking up the phone) “Ok.” Dials number and the call is answered as the manager says, “Hi! We don’t accept overdue vouchers do we.” (from our perspective this was said more as a statement than a question.) The manager proceeds with a couple of “Uh huh”s and hangs up the phone.

VC: “I’m sorry, as I said you have to call the 1300 number on the card.”

G: “Why do we have to call them? They are part of Village Cinemas like you are so I don’t understand why we have to call them. Do you mind calling for us?”

VC: “You have more of a chance to be successful with them than me.”

M: “So that’s it then?”

VC: “Yes.”

We left the counter highly disappointed with our experience. It seemed that there had been little effort to solve the problem. In fact from our perspective we had been the only ones who had offered a timely solution and that had been quickly pushed aside.

Reluctantly we decided to call the number on the card that we had been provided. The clerk who answered our call informed us that it was not possible to solve this problem over the phone and that the only way that the problem would be solved was by sending an email to an address that was also provided on the card (the phone number was literally 20 times the size of the email address) and that it would take a minimum of three days for a response to our email.

We both decided that we would skip the cinema and not let our poor experience with Village Cinemas ruin our overnight stay and decided to use our time doing a different activity and we went ten pin bowling (that proved to be a great time!).

Solutions
You are now providing consulting advice to both Village Cinemas and the staff members involved. Your advice to Village Cinemas may include strategic advice regarding their systems and processes. Your advice to the specific staff members may include your suggestions regarding how they could have managed our experience so that Michelle and I didn’t walk away feeling like our experience could have and should have been better.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Career-Professionals, High Performing Teams, students, What Matters, What Really Matters

Setting Groundrules – The Why and The How

Groundrules are a simple and effective way to significantly ENHANCE team performance. Yet most people don’t create them. Don’t be like them, be different. Follow the simple Three Questions Structure set out in this episode to both create groundrules and to keep them ALIVE for your team. Your team’s experience of working together as well as your performance will both be ENHANCED.


The problem
If you like being like ‘everyone else’ then I recommend that you don’t read any further than this first sentence. If you want to be different and to increase the probability that the people with whom you work can be successful, then continue to read.

Over many years I have been involved in helping people to create high performing teams. Recently I have been facilitating a number of workshops on this topic. One of the fundamental steps for creating a high performing team is to set groundrules. Less than 5% of workshop attendees report that they have ever been in a team where groundrules have been created. When I then ask, “How many of you have experienced being a member of a high performing team?” very few participants report that they believe that they have experienced a high performing team.

While there are a number of factors that affect the capacity of a team to perform to its potential, the existence of groundrules is one of the factors that has a significant impact on a team’s capacity for high performance.

What is then interesting is that workshop participants often say, “Look, groundrules sound okay, but we don’t have time for that stuff!”.

It’s interesting how people often say and/or believe that they don’t have time to do the very things that will save time and enhance performance. What I’m about to say next may seem a bit odd, but in the context of creating a high performing team, slower is faster! I encourage you to be different from most other people and to try the following process for creating groundrules. It isn’t hard, people will respond positively and it takes less than 20 minutes (it’s even faster after you have had some practice!).

The process
I would like to recognise Jock MacNeish (a member of this community) for teaching me this very simple process that I have adapted from his book, Teams – The First Twelve Weeks that was co-authored with Tony Richardson and Angela Lane.

The process involves a whole team conversation and agreement around three questions plus a simple way to keep the groundrules ‘alive’ after they have been created.

Question 1
At work (or study) what team member behaviours happen that really annoy us, let us down or stop us from performing to our expected standards?

Record the behaviours that are discussed in this conversation.

Question 2
In the context of our response to question one, what groundrules do we need to agree to so that these behaviours won’t occur in our team?

Record the groundrules that you agree upon. These will be the groundrules for your team.

Question 3
What will we do when a person breaks one of our groundrules?

This is a very important conversation. It allows the team members to discuss the consequences for breaking the groundrules before they have been broken, which enables all the team members to be very clear about what they can expect to happen should a groundrule be broken. Another benefit of this conversation is that it allows the team to recognise if any of the groundrules that they had originally created were not as clear as they could have been. As an example, people often create a groundrule such as, “We will always be on time for our meetings.” The reality for many people is that on occasion they will be late for a meeting. Discussing the consequences for such behaviours allows the team to then discuss what is expected once you know that you are going to be late which will happen to even the most diligent team members from time to time.

A final benefit of the third question is that it clarifies the behavioural standards expected for all team members. This increases the pressure for people to behave to those standards because they are both explicit and everyone in the team participated in their creation.

Keeping the groundrules ‘alive’
There are two relatively simple ways to keep the groundrules alive.

a.) Create an artefact of the groundrules. I’ve worked with some teams where they have created a cafe menu and placed it in a menu holder. When the team meets they place the menu in the middle of the table. While they might not explicitly look at the menu, the artefact of the menu reminds people of what they have agreed. It’s a simple thing to do and it works.

b) Every once in a while include the groundrules as a topic for conversation in your meeting agenda. Ask, “How are we going with our groundrules?”. Should a new person join your team it is critical that you conduct a conversation with that person explaining your groundrules, and provide them with a genuine opportunity to contribute to updating the groundrules. This process keeps the groundrules fresh and relevant for the specific members of your team.

Please don’t be like ‘most other people’. Be different and give the teams of which you are a member every chance for success. Create groundrules for your team and keep them alive. You’ll find that they will not only enhance the positive experience of being in your team, but your performance will most likely improve as well!

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
career, Employability, Professional Development, students, volunteering

The Importance of Employability Skills Recognised in India

The Press Trust of India in Mumbai has reported in the Business Standard newspaper that Indian students have identified that they have a significant lack in development of key employability skills, with a particular focus upon communication and decision making skills.

The survey was conducted with over 1000 students studying across 20 institutions emanating from Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. The full report can be read at http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/majoritygrads-lack-key-biz-proficiency-skills/371077/

The significance of the report is not that the students have identified that they lack development in some key employability skills. This finding is common throughout the world, including Australia. What is of significance is that the article is evidence, yet again, of the global nature and importance of developing employability skills. The very nature of employability skills is that they are skills that relate to practical situations. In other words, employability skills cannot be learnt in a classroom alone. This is one of the reasons why we constantly recommend finding and/or creating opportunities to put employability skills into practice.

We also advocate that the conscious and strategic choice to practice these skills will significantly enhance their development, as opposed to unconscious development of the skills. An important issue arises, however, for international students studying in places like Australia. How do these students access opportunities for practice, especially during an economic downturn? Part-time work is still available so that is one option. Volunteering is another.

Recently I was speaking with a friend and colleague who is involved with the Rotary Club of Australia. His view was that Rotary Clubs provide a terrific environment for international students to not only volunteer and serve their community, but also provide an excellent entry point to local Australian networks. Such networks, he argued could also result in part-time work and, in some cases full time work. He also argued that Rotary Clubs also provide an excellent environment for international students to speak English on a day to day communication level, an experience which over time can have a positive effect upon a student’s overall communication skills. Such suggestions seem relatively simple and on one level they are. The hard part is taking action and placing yourself out into the unknown. I’d argue that international students are well experienced in taking action and placing themselves in challenging circumstances – after all, haven’t they taken incredible action to leave home and to come and study abroad, often when English is a second language and the culture is completely different! In this context, if you are an international student and you are concerned about the development of your employability skills, consider participating in organisations such as Rotary as the benefits would seem to far outweigh any disadvantages.

Visit http://studentsthatmatter.ning.com for more information

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com