BLOGRIGE

Customers of the Future, We Are Listening

 

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey 

How well do you know your current customers? Or perhaps a better question is how well do you know your future customers?

Concordia Publishing House (CPH), a 2011 winner of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, believes it is listening to the voice of its customers and positioning itself to produce innovative products for the future. With overall customer satisfaction scores of 98 percent plus, the St. Louis, Missouri-based publishing arm of The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod is using the Criteria for Performance Excellence to guide its sustainability into the future.

“With God’s grace, CPH has achieved a level of excellence that few major corporations realize," says Dr. Bruce G. Kintz, President & CEO. "As a Christian organization we are humbled by our achievements and as a thriving publishing house we are proud to represent both innovation and sustainability in this ever-changing marketplace.”

One way that CPH addresses that ever-changing marketplace is through its Emerging Products team that explores the use of state-of-the-art technologies to deliver new and innovative products such as eBooks, iPhone/iPad releases, church management software, and Web-based curriculum builders that can be customized. The number of electronic products (eProducts) offered by CPH increased from 457 in 2008 to 1,927 in 2010.

The 139-year-old organization also uses voice-of-the-customer procedures to gather input from customers for compliments, product ideas, and complaints. Through the Center for Client Retention, CPH addresses market shifts in loyalty by collecting and analyzing data from customers of competitors, and then categorizing sales and customer trends in more than 50 different ways to identify relationships between certain products sales and types of customers.

CPH and other Baldrige Award winners will be sharing best practices at the 24th Annual Quest for Excellence Conference in April 2012. What better place to learn and share best practices on how to understand your future customers?

A Global Success Story

Posted by Pamela Wong

Organizations that have won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award are an elite group, no doubt about it. But there is an even more elite group—the handful of those organizations (just five) who have won the award twice.

The most recent of these is MEDRAD, which won the Baldrige Award first in 2003 and again in 2010. Part of Bayer Health Care, MEDRAD is a global company recognized as the number one manufacturer worldwide of injectors used in radiology and cardiology. Since 2003, MEDRAD has doubled in size. At the end of 2010, it had generated $690 million in revenue. It holds about 70% of the global market share.

Obviously, MEDRAD must be doing a lot of things right. President and CEO Samuel Liang has attributed its success to the firm “embracing all of the key dimensions of Baldrige.” One dimension that really stands out to me is MEDRAD’s customer focus.

MEDRAD truly listens to the voice of its customers. It has created the Customer Satisfaction Advisory Board (CSAB), which works cross-functionally through all areas of the company. Whenever a customer touchpoint occurs—thousands of them each year—the CSAB surveys and measures the experience.

To measure customer satisfaction, MEDRAD uses the net promoter score (NPS) methodology, which asks customers just one question, on a 10-point scale: How likely is it that you would recommend MEDRAD to a friend or colleague?

The responses fall into three categories, from highest to lowest: promoters, passives, and detractors. The NPS is determined by subtracting the percentage who are detractors from the percentage who are promoters.

Using the NPS, the CSAB benchmarks MEDRAD’s performance against other Fortune 100 companies. Then, it provides the feedback directly to the MEDRAD executive committee’s monthly meeting, where several hours are devoted to customer satisfaction.

MEDRAD takes the customer feedback and translates it into operations in a way that leads to improvements in customer interactions and/or to product improvement and development.

“The fact that net promoter scores have gone up means also that we’re meeting customer needs; they’re satisfied with us,” says Liang.

“We have a group of individuals who wake up every day thinking customer satisfaction,” he says, speaking of the CSAB. “But it’s not just them. [Customer satisfaction] is ingrained across the entire company.”

The NPS works for MEDRAD. What customer satisfaction metric does your organization use? How has it worked for you?

 

Why Should Senior Leaders Become Baldrige Executive Fellows?

Posted by Bob Fangmeyer 

The Baldrige Executive Fellows Program is an executive development program centered on forming relationships with and learning from Baldrige Award Recipient senior executives. Award Recipients are not “perfect” organizations, but they have demonstrated role-model excellence in the approaches they use and the results they have achieved. The Baldrige framework is founded on a set of core values that include visionary leadership, customer-focused excellence, organizational and personal learning, valuing workforce members and partners, management by fact, innovation, and a focus on the future. Award Recipient senior executives embody and are personally committed to these values.

In 2010-11, the inaugural cohort of Baldrige Fellows had the opportunity to personally interact with and learn from at least 20 senior executives from various Award Recipient organizations. The benefits to participants included accelerated leadership development, unique insights to and in-depth learning from world-class organizations and their senior executives, and relationships with other executives that will benefit participants now and into the future. Watch the video to hear what the 2011 Fellows had to say about networking with and learning from the Award recipients. 

Follow the links to hear what they said about each other, and to learn about their capstone projects. If this program sounds interesting to you I invite you to review the Benefits for Participants and Baldrige Fellows Prospectus and contact me or visit our website for more information. Applications for the 2012 cohort are due no later than December 31, 2011.

It Takes a Village

Posted by Pamela Wong

 

Ever since my youngest graduated about 18 months ago, I sometimes feel a pang when I drive past the high school. No longer am I involved the way I was as a parent of three students. My children all attended Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) in Maryland, the 2010 Baldrige Award winner in education. Their schools all recognized the importance of involved parents to their mission.

Although I’m no longer the parent of a student, that doesn’t mean that my opportunities to contribute are over. For MCPS strategically uses partnerships—community, civic, and business—to achieve improved student achievement. In fact, the MCPS Board of Education includes these partnerships as one of its academic priorities.

Community members provide assistance in IT and tutoring and speak at career days. Businesses contribute funds for football uniforms or school-based after-prom events that provide a safe environment for teens. They open their offices as a quiet place for students to take advanced placement exams. The list goes on and on.

MCPS’s Office of Communications and Family Outreach (OCFO) focuses on building community partners. OCFO has created an online principal’s toolkit that provides strategies, tools, and workshop materials to use in developing relationships with these stakeholders. Based on the following results, it appears that the efforts are working:

·         In 2009, 89 percent of the schools had created partnerships with businesses or the community for a combined total of 808—an increase of 346 percent since 2007.

·         In 2009 alone, volunteers logged 426,054 hours of service.

·         From 2008 to 2010, between 94 percent and 100 percent of community members involved in determining what residential areas will provide students for newly built schools were satisfied with their opportunity to participate.

How are schools in your area using community partnerships? Let us know!

 

 

 

Baldrige Can Help Organized Crime

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

After all, for better or worse, organized crime is just another business sector.

So, what led me down the path of crime? It could have been the need to raise funds for the Baldrige Program. But it was actually a blog post by Marc Goodman, a senior adviser to Interpol. His post was on what business can learn from organized crime executed well. He claims there are five lessons business can learn:

1. 1.  Use the news to create opportunity. In crime, this could run the gamut from immediately following natural disasters and setting up a credit card scam to get donations to a local group that tracks your hometown news to see who has gone off to visit family in another state and then burglarizes those houses. In business, it could mean being ready with abundant supplies for sale when bad weather is predicted and advertising ahead that you will have the supplies available. Using news to create opportunity can benefit all business sectors.
2. Outsource to specialists.Identity thieves know where to get those holograms replicated for credit cards. And good manufacturers know who to partner with for critical supply chain needs.
3. Cash isn't the only incentive. Criminals can challenge their workforce with sophisticated security systems. Nonprofits can engage their workforce with the good they are doing for humanity.
4. Exploit the long tail. Scammers will experiment with different e-mail approaches to keep the scam alive. Businesses can seasonally adjust messages to keep business thriving.
5. Collaborate across borders. It is all about supply chains in crime and business and in today's shrinking globe they are global.

So, how does this relate to Baldrige? The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence ask you the right questions, no matter what business you are pursuing. And furthermore the Criteria help you put key considerations in perspective for enterprise oversight. Let's look at the five examples above.

1. The Baldrige Criteria ask about all aspects of planning and how you are agile to adjust to changing conditions.
2. The Criteria ask all about design and execution (pardon the pun in this case) of your work systems. How do you make those critical decisions about what you will do with your own workforce and what you will do through partners, collaborators, or your supply chain?
3. The Criteria ask all about employee motivation, engagement, and reward and recognition.
4. The Criteria ask about engaging the customer, listening methods, and even the use of social media.
5. The Criteria ask specifically about supplier selection and supply chain management.

Maybe most importantly, Baldrige begins with the Organizational Profile, in which you describe the nature of your business and your operating and strategic environment. All your subsequent responses are based on your profile. I'd love to read the Organizational Profile for an organized crime organization. What could I learn from them for a performance excellence program or for your business?

Follow the Yellow, Brick Criteria

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey

 

In times of disappearing budgets and funds, many organizations—the Baldrige Program included—need to take an introspective look at themselves and take actions to survive and better yet to reinvent themselves. Senior leaders could lose sleep wondering how to make up for the budget shortfall or could look to a proven place to ground themselves in a validated business tool—the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence.

Here, organizations of all types and sizes, across all sectors of the U.S. economy, can find a roadmap for the future by focusing their thinking on the guiding questions of the Criteria. For example,

• How do you create an environment for organizational performance improvement, innovation, and agility?
• How do you consider the balance and needs of all stakeholders and enhance your ability to adapt to shifts in market conditions?
• How do you ensure transparency in operations and accountability for actions?
• How do you ensure that your strategy addresses your organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats?
• How do you market, build, and manage relationships with customers to retain them, meet their requirements, and increase their engagement with you?
• How do you decide which process within your overall work systems will be internal to your organization and which will use external resources?

See the Criteria for additional ways to guide your thinking across the categories of leadership; strategic planning; customer focus; measurement, analysis, and knowledge management; workforce focus; and operations focus.

In times of budget crisis—indeed in all times—let the Criteria be your guide.