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Customer-Centered Excellence Mentoring

Our customized Customer-Centered Excellence Mentoring guides you through the challenges of conceiving and executing excellence initiatives as a Change and Transformation Leader.  Customer-centered culture (C3) Mentoring involves highly personalized, one-on-one support, at a pace determined by your initiative.

Mentoring can make demonstrable improvement in critical areas, with very limited human and financial resources.  Unlike ad hoc consultation that can go on forever, C3 Mentoring is generally defined in scope and done in a structured manner by phone with a small number of talented, highly dedicated practitioners.

 

Everyone would agree that the preferred way to create energetic, intellectual and emotional engagement with leadership is through inspiring training that equips you and your associates for success. When this is done to align the organization’s strategic direction with customer priorities, you have taken the path with greatest impact, fastest pace and best sustainability.  Unfortunately, it is not always possible or desirable to start with leadership or with training.  Constraints may include lack of leadership readiness, insufficient budget, a crisis atmosphere, or burnout from unsuccessful attempts with prior change initiatives.  Without the commitment to make the best possible start, we could either give up or take a different direction.  The following outlines an alternative direction that can work very well under otherwise daunting constraints.

Customer-Centered Excellence Mentoring can be highly effective in addressing specific business issues that can be well-defined and resolved within a short time period (typically less than 6 months).

Deliverables

We come to you by phone, custom webinar and/or online strategic tools… anywhere in the world, largely at a time of your choosing.  We work with you (and your team) on your current urgent issues to provide you with an outstanding advantage on topics such as:

  • Strategic Leadership. This includes articulation of strategic direction, formation and management of the leader team, development of KPIs, and selection of the critical few issues to address first for highest impact.
  • Change Management. The highest levels of performance can often only be achieved by first destroying constraints inherent in past thinking, outdated management assumptions and practices, and other counterproductive models of behavior.  We are expert at quickly breaking through and replacing those constraints, offering entirely new ways of thinking that inspires seismic change that feels natural and outperforms approaches that are ill-suited for this century.
  • Operational Excellence and Process Management. We help you understand and apply operational improvement perfectly designed for the service and knowledge-intensive organization of today. Most of the methods in vogue today (Lean, Six Sigma, ISO 9001, and more) spring from the manufacturing age, peaking about 75 years ago.  You can’t be best-in-class using yesterday’s methods. We help catapult your operations to unbeatable levels, using a proven new system.
  • Voice of the Customer. Many believe customer priories can be uncovered with surveys.  The evidence disagrees, generally revealing more about what is not wanted than what is desired.  We have to start by knowing exactly who “the customer” really is (often mistaken), ask the right questions or observe the most relevant behavior (usually unknown), then know what to do with the results obtained.  Big data and micro data have to combine to reveal the true goals. This is one of our core competencies; we’d love to share the secrets with you.
  • Strategic Project Management. Traditional project management starts with a known remedy.  The requirement is to manage the resources, time, talent, and risks so it gets implemented.  For projects addressing innovative change, ground-breaking improvement that advances enterprise objectives, with the desire for eye-popping results of 5-to-1 or better, the symptoms may be known but the best solution is not known. Our approach shows you how to prosper with new insights that lead to results you never thought possible.
  • General topics, unique to you and the context you are in.

C3 Mentoring is designed to guide you and your critical few colleagues in the application of the innovative C3 system, methods, and tools.  Though normally used when training is not possible, Mentoring can also be effective as support following some initial C3 training.  You will work directly with Rob Lawton, the creator of the C3 system and Tony Belilovskiy, Strategic Advisor.  After the initial organizing phase, we will usually set up a regular schedule of 60-90-minute call times, to occur weekly or bi-weekly.  Ad hoc calls can also be arranged.  Mentoring guides you successfully through the use of the C3 system, core concepts and/or tools.  Mentoring is usually chosen to address one or more of the above topics.  We will integrate, wherever possible, any tools, talents and initiatives you already have in place.​

Results

A few areas of focus, with sample results, can include:

  • Strategy and cultural change in knowledge-intensive organizations
    • Improved the competitive position of a service firm from 25th to 3rd in 18 months.
    • Have achieved better than 5:1 ROI within 2 years with multiple organizations.
  • Customer-centered Lean and operational excellence
    • Simplified and shortened the new hire process time by 80% in less than 1 year by a 5,000-person government agency.
    • Lead changes in contracting practices, saving $18,000/contract, cutting cycle time from 179 to 16 days in less than one year.
    • Changed KPI measurement practices to advance eight key areas of excellence.
  • Voice of the Customer (VOC) and customer experience
    • Increased revenue for a financial firm by $48 million in 6 months by changing how new customers were engaged.
    • Identified 5 times more customers for a technical research organization.
    • Changed airline practices, resulting in best-in-class satisfaction and luggage handling.
  • Product development and innovation
    • Advocated a customer-friendly change in a new high technology product, resulting in one of the best new launch results in recent company history.
    • Recognized by auto company management as providing keys to their innovation successes in the near term future.
  • Strategic project management
    • Improved supply management practices, saving $13 million in the first year.
    • Achieved 100% success rate for strategic projects, countering a dismal business history in an international equipment company.  Our executive client went to another firm where he repeated this result, based on what he’d learned from us.
    • Cut the imaging error rate at a major national clinic by 30% reversing customer defections.
  • Transformational leadership
    • Shortened cardiothoracic discharge times by 50% while improving patient health.
    • Improved IT management and behavioral practices, achieving best-in-class performance.  The CIO took those skills to subsequent firms, replicating results.
    • Lead several major organizations to become Baldridge National Award winners within only two years, as a direct result of deploying our customer-centered culture (C3) transformation system.

Advantages of Customer-Centered Excellence Mentoring include

  • A structured but highly customized approach
  • The lowest cost approach to achieving high impact with measurable results
  • Reduced risk of failure or under-performance of current initiatives
  • Grounding in the use of defined C3 tools (see Resources,)
  • Direct dialogue with Rob Lawton, the author/creator of the C3 system
  • Emphasis on application to specific business issues of significance
  • High probability of project completion that exceeds the prior experiences of the sponsor(s), facilitator and team members
  • ROI likelihood better than an average of 5-to-1 across three or more projects
  • Significant skill development by all those directly involved in the application projects, transferable to future issues

Contact Us for Customer-Centered Excellence Mentoring!