terça-feira, novembro 01, 2011

Indicadores e batoteiros

A revista Harvard Business Review deste mês publica um artigo que merece alguma reflexão "Office Depot's President on How "Mystery Shopping" Helped Spark a Turnaround" de Kevin Peters.
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"The office products retailer was measuring customer service using metrics— such as the cleanliness of bathrooms—that didn’t drive sales. (Moi ici: Erro fatal cometido por tantas empresas. Medir e monitorizar indicadores que não têm nada a ver com a estratégia) Its new president is trying to fix that by retraining the staff and transforming the company.
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When I became the leader of Office Depot’s retail stores in the United States, in 2010, the first thing I tried to do was figure out the meaning of a puzzling set of facts. Our sales had been declining, and although that’s not unusual in a weak economy, they had declined faster than the sales of our competitors and of retailers in general. At the same time, the customer service scores our third-party mystery-shopper service was reporting were going through the roof. This didn’t make any sense. How could it be that we were delivering phenomenal service to our customers, yet they weren’t buying anything?
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To understand these contradictory data points, I decided to do some mystery shopping myself. (Moi ici: Recolher informação em primeira mão, antropólogo que mergulha na tribo. Por exemplo, quantas vezes por mês é que um administrador de uma CP viaja incógnito num suburbano? E no metro? E no Pingo Doce? ... E numa obra? Ainda esta semana fiquei impressionado com a falta de espírito crítico numa obra na via pública em Famalicão... descarregar separadores de betão por métodos artesanais... fez-me lembrar um berbequim manual que o meu pai comprou em 1969) I didn’t wear a suit. I didn’t wear a blue Office Depot shirt like the ones employees wear in all our U.S. stores. Instead I wore a faded pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap. I didn’t tell anyone I was coming to visit, and in most cases I didn’t let anyone know afterward that I’d been in the store. What I wanted was to experience Office Depot in the same way our customers do. Over the next several weeks I visited 70 stores in 15 or more states.
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Our mystery-shopping scores were correct. You know what was flawed? Our scoring system. We were asking the wrong questions. (Moi ici: Os indicadores contam histórias, podem é ser histórias sem relevo para a composição da Grande História que é a estratégia de uma empresa. Sem um balanced scorecard assente, ou decorrente de um mapa da estratégia, é muito difícil medir o que realmente interessa.) We were asking, Are the floors clean? Are the shelves full of inventory? Are the store windows clean? Have the bathrooms been cleaned recently? Think about that for a moment: How often do you go to the bathroom while shopping for office supplies? It turns out that customers don’t really care about any of that. Those factors don’t drive purchases, and that’s why our sales were declining. It would be easy to blame our associates for ignoring shoppers, but under the system we’d built, they weren’t doing anything wrong. They were doing exactly what we’d asked them to do—working to keep stores clean and well stocked instead of building relationships with customers. (Moi ici: As pessoas comportam-se de acordo com os estímulos que proporcionamos!!! Acho sempre graça a as empresas surpreenderem-se porque os seus vendedores desprezam os produtos que lhes dão menos comissões. Duh!!!!!!! Estavam à espera de quê!?!
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My conversations with customers   (Moi ici: Muito mais interessante que os inquéritos de satisfação...)  gave me three insights into how we should transform our business to become more competitive: One, we had to reduce the size of our stores. They were too large and too difficult to shop in. Two, we had to dramatically improve the in-store experience for our customers. That meant retraining our associates to stop focusing on the things our existing system had incentivized them to do and focus on customers instead. Three, we had to look beyond office products to provide other services our customers wanted. They wanted copying, printing, and shipping. They wanted help installing software and fixing computers. We needed to expand our offerings if we were to remain relevant to our customers."  (Moi ici: Basta conversar com os clientes sem ideias pré-concebidas e pensar na experiência de compra)
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E, como tantas vezes refiro aqui, sob o marcador da "batota":
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"When a retailer delivers poor service, many people are quick to blame the employees. In my experience, it’s more complicated than that." (Moi ici: Quantos funcionários nascem ensinados? Quantos funcionários sabem qual é a experiência que a loja quer proporcionar? Ás vezes aparecem uns fora de série... mas, como digo nas empresas, temos de colocar gente normal a ter desempenho excepcional. E, isso só acontece quando o sistema prepara as pessoas para entregarem esse desempenho de forma natural, por isso é que lhe chamo "batota", porque quem está de fora não imagina a preparação por trás de uma actuação ... "normal" )
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