ALWAYS Play the Long Game
In the world of customer experience, there are two approaches that I see taken. The approach of “win the battle,” and the other of, “do your best on the battles, but focus on winning the war.”
Yes, I know these are so close to the common action movie quote, “you may have won the battle, but you have not won the war!” In the world of CX, this saying is so critical for us to focus on. In our world, the metrics can become overwhelming and lead us to misunderstand the loss of a battle to make rash decisions that can lose us the war.
One place I see this all too often is in the world of outsourcing. So many times I will see a leader use one or two missed metrics to change vendors. But, if they were to just zoom out from the 1 week or 1-month focus they used to justify the change they will see the vendor was making steady progress to improve. This leads them to leave a vendor that is regularly improving and now need to start over from square one and lose out on all that knowledge and wisdom their former vendor gained while they worked together.
Now to be clear I am not saying there are not times when a single miss warrant moving vendors, but what I am saying is that teams so often will take a single metric or short timeframe to focus on rather than looking at the long-term progress. Leading the company to take a major setback which many times ends up hurting the business operations greater than it would have than sticking it out with their current partner.
So what can your team do better to win the war?
First off be very careful of understanding the motives of a team member. Too often I see a new leader come in with relationships with former partners or employers and use every excuse to move the business to those old partners. Now in many ways, this may seem like a good thing, but what too many people miss is the real motives behind the move. Let me now share the dark secrets of the outsourcing space that most people do not want people to know!
Outsourcing companies commonly pay LARGE commissions to previous clients and employees for sending business their way.
The outsourcing space is built on the foundation of brokers locating and placing business with companies. But, what most people don’t know is that many former employers and clients also make these commissions for sending their new employer to their former partner. Many times without any consideration for the quality of service as they are more focused on the backend commission they are about to earn from getting the business moved.
Moving vendors to show their power in the business.
There may be no more common event than a new VP moving their business to a new vendor just to save $.25 /hr to show value to the company. The issue is that when you zoom out at stop looking at the $.25 and understand the long-term cost of the move you will find out you ended up paying 3x - 5x for the move. Again it is so critical to remember CX is a war, not a battle.
Making their bonus by compressing spend
This one was always my favorite. When a Director or VP moves the business simply to save just enough money to juice their bonus for a quarter. The worse thing is that so many times this occurs in the same year or quarter they end up leaving the business. Now leaving the company with a new partner with little to no experience and a new leader, or more common, no leader to help guide the new vendor to success.
Sometimes hard decisions have to be made, and all of us leaders have had to make them. My primary point here is to ensure that the final choice is being made with the long-term success of the company clearly in mind, and with all motives for the choice made well understood by all parties involved. If you feel that any of the above three motives may be playing in the final choice then immediately stop the choice and focus on the war, not the battle.
In the end, every leader will have to make their own judgment call. I just hope that this article can help you understand that there are many angles you must see when making the final choice when you are faced with a highly emotionally charged moment that so many times can lead teams to make very costly long-term decisions.
To Your Success & Prosperity!
Michael McMillan
