Anti-depress tool for managers

Working as a manager can be difficult and depressing sometimes. Why? Well mostly because a big part of a managers day is filled of dealing with problems. Sometimes a customer is not satisfied with your teams work, the technical systems fail, a member of your group forgets something and so on. We have all seen the phrase "I am not satisfied with this - I want to talk to your supervisor" on a movie. Then the poor supervisor, who knows nothing of the issue and has nothing to do with the problem has to deal with this nervous customer. Have you seen a movie where a satisfied customer wants to praise your work and talk to your supervisor.?

So if you, as a manager, deal with problematic customers, problematic services and incidents.... you actually start to see things in a wrong perspective. Actually, in a worst case you might even start to wonder why anybody even buys your services.... Due to the nature of manager's work this might even happen in a situation where 99% of your customers are really happy and 99% of the services are working great. You just don't know about it because you work with the 1% of problems.

Now, there is a great solution to solve this problem! We in MicroLink have been using it for almost a year now and are really happy with the results. Actually, the results of this methodology surprised us in a really positive way!
The solution is to ask "The ultimate question" from your customers. Ask them "How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?". I bet you will be surprised on how many of your customers answer "Yes" to that question. And even more you get loads of suggestions from your customers. So from the feedback you can make an action plan and make your team work better. You can change your work from constant "firefighting", "surprise problems" and "dealing with unhappy customers" to an objective plan and action. You also get an objective measurement on how happy your customers are and can share that with your managers, salespeople and your team. You get an objective, measured argument against the "there are always problems with your team" claim. :-)

Now, why am I writing this? Well, to help you solve the problem also! We are launching a really easy-to-use IT solution for implementing the methodology. If you want to use it (currently for free of charge) then e-mail me. The system works so:
- You have a sales case or a service call with your customer.
- After the case is closed you send your customer an e-mail, stating it was nice doing business with you. You also put the e-mail address of our service to the blind-copy field.
- Our system gets the e-mail. Checks if this customer has been surveyd recently. If not, then it sends the customer an e-mail with the 3 question survey. The questions are: On 0...10 scale do you recommend our company in the view of this case? On 0...10 scale do you recommend our company overall? Why?
- The customers answers the questions on a web-page.
- You get the feedback and graphics via a web-page.

The beauty of the solution is that your team members don't have to learn a new system and you don't have to integrate any IT systems. All they have to do is put the system's e-mail on the blind-copy field.

Feel free to contact me and give the system a go!