Virtual Workshop/Community announced

Assessing quality from a customer's perspective.  

Supporting providers in deciding what quality looks like and then creating learning experiences for those providers by helping them ask customers "How are we doing?"

Practice 'Ground Rules'

1. Get feedback from real customers or in some cases potential customers.  This is important to provide validity but also, maybe less obvious, to create an opportunity to communicate intentions, and recognition not only to customers but to fellow team members and other teams as well (recipe for long-term customer focus).  Asking real customers "How are we dong?" also grows relationships in these areas to provide follow through with existing initiatives in customer service, teamwork, and collaboration.
2. This "best practice" is user-centered.  You must begin with a provider team.  The team will need "support" from other internal management function teams within the organization, principally, supervisors, Marketing, and HR.  This helps build the relationships between team members and other teams which is one of the three principle relationships needed for long-term customer focus. 
3. This is simply a practice or tool, not a program, procedure or system and does not replace or substitute for anything else.  In other words, you don't plan it - just do it!  It is a never ending journey so you can relax and have fun - learn by doing, make adjustments along the way.
4. Do not change a single thing you or your team members are doing operationally because of the practice.  It is an activity that will facilitate the follow-through of your current operational procedures.  This ground rule makes it easy to do a trial or project with one single team in your organization.  You can then grow it, as with any other soft skill, from team to team.
5. Your organization currently gets customer feedback and it is no doubt shared with the provider teams.  This tool does not replace that.  In fact, most often, you and Marketing can look to certain forms of customer feedback, such as surveys, to help provide the "what" for critical actions to succeed as a team.  This practice provides "a secondary feedback on the frontlines" for follow through in daily operations by involving providers in the "how" we are going to accomplish these actions.  This involvement comes from the learning experiences created by asking, measuring, and sharing customer feedback.  The basic rule is - Management, in a support role, provides the "what" and the provider teams determine their own "how".
6. Keep it simple!  Don't try to do it all at once or get it perfect before starting.  Get started, even if it means making more mistakes, and find out the most important ten or twelve things you need to know, measure and share.  Keep your purpose in front of you in the form of a poster or chalkboard - "Ask our customer, "How are we doing?"  
7. Do not pay $1 for customer feedback!  Don't misunderstand, you can say thank you with a gift, discount, or simply a card or note (handwritten is great), or any combination.  Any type of recognition that displays you and your providers' intentions  - that's the purpose.  If you pay money, not only is it not as personal, but over the long haul the persons giving the team feedback, even if they are true customers, will become an expert.  
8. Do not apply deadlines, goals, schedules, or time lines that are management tools for "hard skills".  This is a journey that you can start today but will never finish and the skills learned along the way will be soft ones of leadership and coaching.  You do, however, want to know where you are by using Scoreboards (measure) and Bulletin Boards to share feedback with everyone (Boards may be electronic for virtual teams)
9. We provide the framework for initiating the practice with our Handbook and support with a five pathway Workbook providing help when and where you need it.  Each organization must develop its own forms, recognition, bulletin board, and scoreboard as this is part of the learning process and constantly evolving to meet customer and organizational needs.  Every industry and every organization within each industry has its own history, culture, and expectations.  For this reason, every team initiation of the customer focus practice needs to be an learning experience and evolve with the deployment.  We work with each team leader and their supervisor to learn to build long-term customer focus.  Being user-centered the practice should be built one team at a time but the same experiences can be applied between teams in the same organization as you want consistency of such relationships as collaborative support and customer service.  

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