21 May 2006

Best Practices?

Best Practices are defined by Arthur Andersen as "the best ways to perform a business process."

Questions asked on how to establish customer relationships excellence are listed below.
- What is the best way to respond to customer service issues?
- How can those requests be met effectively?
- What do best-practice companies do to find and train employees to serve customers best?
- How can a company team with customers to design, improve, market, and distribute its products and services?
- What is the most efficient and productive method of tracking and using information about customers and their purchasing patterns, attitudes, and loyalty?

However, are there really best practices? If every enterprise adopts the so-called best practices, then where is the competitive advantage?

Arthur Andersen agrees that "no single practice works for everyone in any given situation... The purpose of Best Practices is not to find the perfect solution... (but) to disturb you with new ideas and insights."

A taxi driver in ShangHai named Zang Qin was invited by Microsoft to share his success with some 50 employees. His success, defined as a monthly income of RMB 8,000, almost twice the average income of local taxi drivers, is seen as the best practice in the taxi industry. There are hard skills to achieve this kind of success, but soft skills are perhaps more important, which in this case, are positive attitude and rich experience. (Please refer to http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20060407_1.htm for the original translated article.)

Human nature is like this. According to the article by Liu Run, other taxi drivers in ShangHai are not interested in how Zang Qin makes the money but are only interested in how MUCH he earns.

MUCH is the incorrect attitude.

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