You Are Free to Choose Your Home Care Provider

Freedom of choice is a bit like freedom of speech. Most people would agree that both are fundamental human freedoms and that they are not absolute – in most cases my freedom (to choose or speak) cannot extend so far that it affects you adversely. Another quality these freedoms share is that we don’t appreciate their importance until we are denied them. Let’s focus on the freedom to choose.

The Freedom to Choose

When I first went to secondary school aged 11 the only thing that I was interested in was sport and the sport above all that I was interested in was football. The academic side of school life held no interest for me. I’d known I was good at football from about the age of 8. I didn’t know that I was also a very good cross country runner; principally because I’d never done cross country until I went to secondary school.

We played football matches on Wednesday afternoons after school. The team for the match would be posted on a notice board on the Monday before the match. There was a football match on Wednesday 21 October 1970 (yes I remember the date). The team was posted on Monday 19 October. As usual my name was there on the team sheet. Unusually, this week, there was a second team sheet on the notice board. It wasn’t a football team sheet: it was a cross country team sheet; I was in the cross country team, and the race was to be on Wednesday 21 October 1970.

Thus it was that I was down to play two different sports, on the same day at two different venues. As far as I was concerned, I would choose to play football. I did nothing about it merely decided that I would turn up for the football team (with the hindsight of 45 years that was not a good move on my part). The football match was to be held at home; the cross country event away at another school. I went to the school changing room after lessons, got changed and waited for the team talk before we went out onto the pitch.

I never got to hear the team talk. The teacher who managed the football team (let’s call him Mr G) came into the changing room with a teacher (I’ll call him Mr A) I did not recognise and pointed to me. Mr A told me that the team bus (cross country team bus) was waiting for me. I explained that I was down to play football. Mr A was the senior of the two teachers. He pulled rank on Mr G and that was that.

Even with the passage of 45 years (that’s almost half a century!) I still recall how I felt at 3.45 pm on Wednesday 21 October 1970. I was angry that people in authority had made a mistake and they were angry with me for choosing what I wanted to do rather than what they wanted me to do.

I felt impotent. I explained my actions as well as I could. I wanted to play football. I couldn’t do both. They wouldn’t listen. A third teacher joined them and all three told me that I had to take part in the cross country event. I just could not get them to accept that they had presented me with the choices of two sports and I had chosen the sport I wanted to play.

There was also a feeling that I had no control over something which I should be in complete control of. The way I reasoned things at the time is exactly how I would reason things now. I accepted that there were things in life over which I had little or no control – I had little choice over the fact that I had to go to school, for example. However, there were parts of my life over which I should be sovereign – such voluntary activities as playing for school teams seemed to fall into the category of activities over which I was sovereign. But my freedom to choose had been wrested from me and, at the time, this felt pretty unfair.

The Freedom to Choose Your Home Care Provider

In the greater scheme of things, the event recounted above is pretty trivial. The experience I had was trivial: but having your freedom to choose taken from you is not trivial. What happened to me might have been a little unfair (no worse than that); however, when it comes to things that matter, having your freedom to choose denied is the most egregious injustice. Having your freedom to choose your home care provider is one of those aspects of your life over which it is of fundamental importance that your freedom is not interfered with.

Home care, or domiciliary care as it is sometimes referred to, is care provided in your home. There is no particular pattern that this care has to take. At one extreme, it could be just one visit a week for one or two hours for someone to help you around your home. At the other extreme care could be provided by a live-in carer. The tasks that carers carry out are wide-ranging. In short, most things short of nursing care can be covered by a home care provider.

Home care is usually provided by private companies. These companies may provide services under contract with social services or directly to individual private clients. The services provided by home care companies allow you to remain living in your home for as long as you are able. This is arguably one of the most important (if not the single most important) contributions that home care providers make to individual people’s lives – and by extension to society in general.

There is little doubt that the desire to remain living in their homes and maintaining as much independence as possible in their lives are two of the most powerful factors that motivate people to choose domiciliary care. There are choices, of course: friends and family may provide care and residential care is an option for some people.

It is important that people who need care have the option to choose care in their homes. But their choices have to go beyond that. It is fundamentally important that people can choose the company that they want to provide their home care. Put yourself in the shoes of someone choosing home care. The position is very simple. The care is being provided in your home. It is absolutely right that you can choose who comes into your home to provide your domiciliary care.

Personalisation

Everybody has a choice when it comes to choosing home care and this includes people who are funded wholly or in part by social services.

There was a time, and it was not so long ago, that the providers of domiciliary care took a paternalistic approach towards their customers. Paternalism means that somebody else knows what’s best for you. In the context of domiciliary care, it was usually social services who thought they knew what was best for you. But things have moved on. Domiciliary care is now guided by the idea of personalisation.

Personalisation is an approach to domiciliary care that is the exact opposite of paternalism. Personalisation recognises that you are the person who knows best what is suitable for you when it comes to choosing domiciliary care.

Therefore, personalisation places you at the centre of everything that happens with regard to your care. It’s all about your independence to choose. Control is handed over to you to be able to choose what type of care you want, who you want to provide that care for you and when you want it provided to you.

Personal Budgets

Of course, the obvious question is how you can have this independence, control and choice over your care if social services are paying partly or in full for your home care? And this is where personal budgets come in. A personal budget is a sum of money that is given to you to pay for the care that you need to meet your eligible needs

To get a personal budget there are two assessments that have to undergo. First, you need to have your care needs assessed. This is called a community care assessment. For more information on community care assessments (specifically in Kent) see Eight things to know about Community Care Assessments by Kent County Council.

Second, you need to have a means test, sometimes referred to as a financial assessment for more information about financial assessments (again, with specific reference to Kent) see How to get financial help for home care from Kent Social Services.

If you are found to have eligible needs following a community care assessment and qualify to have all or some of those needs met by social services you will be offered a personal budget.

Your personal budget can be held by you or by a friend or relative on your behalf. It is also possible for a care provider to administer the budget for you. In some cases, you may want the local authority to administer your personal budget.

Direct Payments

Once you have been awarded a personal budget, you should also be offered an opportunity to receive this in the form of a direct payment. Direct payments work in a very straightforward way. Kent County Council pay an amount of money into your bank account or onto a Kent Card. The Kent Card is a Visa debit card and you can find out more details here. You then use this money to buy your care from a provider of your choice.

For more information on direct payments see How to get direct payments to buy home care and How to get financial help for home care from Kent Social Services.

Direct payments put you in charge. You are able to choose the company who provides your home care. I said at the start that the freedom to choose is something that we do not realise how important it is until we do not have it. Personal budgets and direct payments have returned to many people a fundamental freedom that had been absent.

Garry Costain is the Managing Director of Caremark Thanet, a domiciliary care provider with offices in Margate, Kent. Caremark Thanet provides home care services throughout the Isle of Thanet. Garry can be contacted on 01843 235910 or email garry.costain@caremark.co.uk. You can also visit Caremark Thanet's website at www.caremark.co.uk/thanet.

Caring for Carers: The Role of Respite Care

When you think of domiciliary care it is not unreasonable that you should think of care being provided to an individual who has care needs.  It is equally reasonable for you to think of domiciliary care as being care provided on a long term basis. Let’s look at each of these points in turn.

Domiciliary care is care provided in peoples’ homes. Home care companies can provide any service that falls short of nursing care. With home care, then, there will clearly be someone who receives care directly and benefits directly from that care. However, there may well be several other people who benefit indirectly from the care that is provided.

It is not unusual that a person who is supported through domiciliary care is also supported by various other members of his or her family and friends. In many cases, these people may be providing substantial amounts of care. Any help provided directly to one person indirectly helps others concerned with her care, even if it is just a matter of freeing up a few precious minutes in the day.

Whilst it is true that domiciliary care is very often a service that is provided on a long term basis; this is not always the case. Domiciliary care can be short term. One type of short term care is respite care. There is no single pattern to respite care. What is common to any type of respite care, though, is that it is care that benefits carers as well as those whom they care for.

We often forget that carers need a little support themselves now and again. The 2011 census estimated that there were 6 million unpaid carers in England and Wales. In many cases the care that is provided amounts to virtually a full time job. What respite care can do is allow people who care for others during the majority of the time to have time for themselves to take a break.

In some cases this may be a break to have a holiday. Respite care can be provided for any length of time. It can be provided while carers take a weekend away or a two week holiday abroad. It’s often the case that carers themselves may need to go into hospital for a short time for treatment. Respite care can be provided for the period during which the carer is away and during any recovery period.

Respite care can even be provided for just a few hours. A carer might need time to go out for a day, or just part of the day and doesn’t want to leave the person he cares for any length of time. It is comforting to know that there is someone looking after the person he usually cares for, especially if there is a danger of delays.

It may simply be the case that a carer feels that he needs a break from his daily routine once in a while. This may be just for a few hours a week, a few hours a fortnight or a few hours a month. It is well recognised that the stress of caring for someone can take its toll; therefore, it is difficult to calculate just how important these breaks can be to carers: and to the people they care for.

Garry Costain is the Managing Director of Caremark Thanet, a domiciliary care provider with offices in Margate, Kent. Caremark Thanet provides home care services throughout the Isle of Thanet. Garry can be contacted on 01843 23591001843 235910 or email garry.costain@caremark.co.uk. You can also visit Caremark Thanet's website at www.caremark.co.uk/thanet.

Making a Statement in Domiciliary Care with a Transformational Strategy

Caremark Thanet: Our Philosophy

I’m the managing director of a domiciliary care company, Caremark Thanet. We provide homecare for the residents of Thanet in Kent. We cover the whole of Thanet including Margate, Westgate, Birchington, Broadstairs, Ramsgate and the surrounding villages. We have a very simple philosophy: Our aim is to provide outstanding domiciliary care to each of our customers. On that aim we will never compromise.  

We call this a philosophy. I use the word philosophy to mean a system of principles that guides the way we conduct our practice. Some people might refer to this as a mission or a vision or some such other business sounding term. I don’t really mind what people call it. I do mind that it is something that is easily understood by our care and support workers and by our customers. 

I should certainly accept that it is a strategy – what might be called a transformational strategy. Let me explain further about transformational strategies.

Mission Statements and Vision Statements

Have you heard the one about the Chief Executive Officer and her senior management team at their business planning meeting? The CEO asks ‘Who can tell me our mission statement?’ No-one could say what it was. Two of longest serving managers thought it was still the statement that had been changed five years ago, the finance director proudly recited word for word a competitor’s mission statement, when the CEO told them what it was no-one could agree on whether this was the mission or the vision of the company and no-one could explain what it was actually saying. “So what does this mean?’ asked the CEO. An anonymous whisper answered: ‘It means we don’t know why the hell we’re here.’

That story may not be true, but like all good stories it has a moral. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a small business with two or three employees or a multi-national with thousands: a business must have a direction. If staff can’t say in a sentence or two what the business is there for, someone, somewhere in the business should seriously think about the message that is being given out not just to staff, but also to customers.  

Words Move Minds

Do you know your mission statements from your vision statements? Do you know the difference between your strategic objectives and your strategic milestones? And would you know how your strategic intent relates to your core competencies? Business people and managers may know all of these things, but it won’t be much help if their businesses do not have very simple message that says what it does and where it is going – a message that everyone understands and can buy into. Here’s some sound advice from smalibusinessvoodoo.com: 

‘Business strategy can be written, sketched, oral or perhaps a combination of all three. It doesn’t matter what it looks like as long as it means something to you, and indelibly imprints itself into your subconscious.’

http://www.smallbusinessvoodoo.com/ten-pillars-of-small-business-planning/small-business-planning-pillar-2-strategy/

If it doesn’t mean something to those in control of the business, the message probably won’t mean anything to anyone else. Whether it’s called a mission, vision, strategic intent or something else, a business needs to have a clearly articulated message that is short, unambiguous, understandable, memorable and motivational. Words move minds but not if they’re jewels of jumbled jargon, wrapped in verbosity and tied up with confusion.  

Transformational Strategies

If businesses are going to get the people in the organisation to buy into where managers and owners want their businesses to go there needs to be something everyone can unite behind. This can be called a transformational strategy.  Lisa Magloff, writing on smallbusiness.chron.com says: 

‘Companies may undergo transformational change in response to crisis, or in order to reposition themselves in the market. Transformational change also occurs in response to changes in technology, or as companies adapt to take advantage of new business models.’

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/examples-transformational-change-18261.html

I should add that for a business to have a transformational strategy there need be no crisis, just a desire to succeed.

On the 25 May 1961, President Kennedy said: ‘…I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.’ There are few better examples of a transformational strategy. It has all the elements that are required. Although this was spoken as part of a much longer speech, it’s very short and straight to the point; it’s crystal clear and unambiguous; eminently understandable, and given the context of the cold war and space race, highly motivational.  

Kennedy was advocating a transformational strategy for a whole nation, and he did it in one crisp clear sentence. Another example of a transformational strategy is afforded by the true story of how Antarctic explorer, Ernest Shackleton, led a party of twenty seven crew to safety after their ship, The Endurance, became trapped in ice. Shackleton and his crew had to abandon their ship, which was eventually crushed in the ice. Shackleton’s unconquerable optimism and heroic leadership help to ensure that everyone survived until they were rescued some two years later. Shackleton’s transformational strategy was a very clear and highly motivational one: survival. If ever there is an example of a group being united behind a common aim, the example of Shackleton’s Endurance expedition is it.

In the business world, the perfect example of a transformational strategy is that of Canon who in the 1980s set out to be the number 1 in the photocopier market. At the time, Xerox was the world leader and the idea that Canon could challenge them was regarded by many as nothing short of total absurdity. Canon’s transformational strategy was very clear, unambiguous and about as memorable as anything can be: “Beat Xerox”. And they did just that. 

A very interesting example of how a company can unintentionally set itself a transformational strategy is given by the British businessman, Gerald Ratner, who in the 1980s was the chief executive of his family business, a chain of jewellers. In 1991, he gave a speech to the UK’s Institute of Directors where he referred to the products sold in his shops by saying ‘It’s all crap’. Following this the value of the business went into free-fall and a new term, ‘the Ratner effect’, entered the business lexicon.

Caremark Thanet: Our Philosophy

I am more than happy for our philosophy to be called a transformational strategy. Our aim was to have a message that pretty much covers all the criteria of a transformational strategy. A clearly articulated message that is short, unambiguous, understandable, memorable and motivational. It is something that our care and support workers can unite behind. It is an unambiguous message delivered to our customers. And it’s more than just words; it is something that we practise, and it is something upon which we can be held to account by our customers.

Garry Costain is the Managing Director of Caremark Thanet, a domiciliary care provider with offices in Margate, Kent. Caremark Thanet provides home care services throughout the Isle of Thanet. Garry can be contacted on 01843 23591001843 235910 or email garry.costain@caremark.co.uk. You can also visit Caremark Thanet's website at www.caremark.co.uk/thanet.

The Qualities of Outstanding Domiciliary Carers: Number One: Time Management

Context

I’m the managing director of a domiciliary care company. We have never been under any illusion that we are only as good as the quality of the people who deliver our care services. In this respect we are no different from any other business to the extent that all businesses are dependent on the quality of their staff. With businesses in the service sector, however, where there are no products being supplied – the quality of the business is wholly determined by the quality of the people supplying the service.

Businesses often pay lip service to the idea that their staff are their most valuable asset. We don’t. Our starting point for running the business is that we realise only too well that without our customers our services would not be required, but we realise equally as well that we are only as good as the services provided to our customers by our care and support workers. For those reasons, we have a right to be very selective in the people we choose to provide those services.

Some people may call us choosy; some people may call us picky, some may even say we are impossible to please. Most certainly we are very particular when it comes to selecting the people whom we are prepared to send out to care for our customers; without any doubt, we are very demanding in the qualities we look for in our carers, I certainly would not say that we are impossible to please; we are, however, never satisfied with second best.

What qualities, therefore, do we look for when we select care and support workers? I’m not talking about the technical side of care. All the skills you need to be able to deliver care itself are ones that can be acquired. Such skills as the correct way to use a hoist, to prepare food and assist with medication can be learned. I am more concerned in this article, and other articles that will follow, with the things that are much more difficult to teach. Time management is the first of those qualities I’m going to look at. In other articles I’ll look at such qualities as communication, people skills and dealing with paperwork.

Time Management

I was once given some great advice: never be on time; always be early. Now I have to declare a particular prejudice at this point.  If there is one human failing more than any other that I find that I am increasingly highly critical of – to the point of outright intolerance - it is poor punctuality. My critical stance is such that I will devote a separate article to punctuality; however, the overlap between time management and punctuality is manifest.

Let me tell you a true story about a very good friend of mine. I’ll call him David. He and I met about twenty five years ago when we shared an office together. Everyone liked David. He was friendly, good company and a constant source of good humour. David, though, had two major problems in life: he could never (and I mean never) do anything to time and he could never say no.

Everyone in the company knew that if you asked David for anything he would always say yes. And everyone knew that if you asked David for anything you would not get it on time. You would always be chasing him.

What people did, of course, was to give David deadlines several days and sometimes weeks in advance of when the true deadline was. In a short time, this just had the effect of bringing everybody’s’ deadlines forward and did nothing to help David. After a while, David’s line manager decided that it would be good for David to go on a time management course.

The time management course just made things worse. One morning, I found David frowning over a list he was drawing up. He looked unhappy. I asked him what was wrong. He explained that he had been advised on his time management course to draw up a to do list and prioritise the jobs he had to do on any particular day. The problem was that he was now taking over an hour (sometimes up to two hours) each day deciding what should be on his list and in what order of priority they should appear.

I’m not saying that time management techniques are not a good thing: they can be. I’m not saying you should not adopt some of these various time management techniques: you should if they work for you. What I am saying is that you need to be selective: and know when to say no.

Let me make the point again. I’m not saying that time management skills should be ignored, but they have to work for you. Different techniques work for different people. This is put very well by dumblittleman.com:

“Time management is a skill that takes time to develop and perfect. It also is a skill that is different for everyone. Your best bet is to try a variety of different approaches until something clicks in your brain and sticks in your routine.”

http://www.dumblittleman.com/2008/02/11-solid-ways-to-improve-your-time.html

And you need to know when to say no because of the nature of psychological time. You need to be able to say no so that you can focus on doing the things that are most productive. And what is most productive may not be drawing up to do lists.

Chronological Time and Psychological Time

Chronological time is the same for all of us. One day is one day; one hour is one hour, and one minute is one minute. We are all equal in the amount of time available to us in a day. Psychological time varies from person to person, and varies for each person according to the activity. As entrepreneur.com explains:

“In real time [psychological time], all time is relative. Time flies or drags depending on what you're doing. Two hours at the department of motor vehicles can feel like 12 years. And yet our 12-year-old children seem to have grown up in only two hours.”
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/219553

You will be very familiar with the idea of psychological time, or real time. Remember how slowly Christmas used to come around when you were a kid? How quickly does it come around now that you are an adult? And it is because of the way psychological time varies that you must learn to say no. You may think that you have plenty of time to complete a task, so it’s fine if you add on one more little job. Then the time you thought you had is just gobbled up.

Time flies when you are having fun. When you are having fun it is easy to lose track of time. When you lose track of time your time management ability is at risk. As a care and support worker you never want to be in a position where your time management skills are at risk.

Carers and the Duty to Say No

The nature of care work is that it is fluid. The calls that a carer has each week are unlikely to remain the same week in week out. Customers change the times that they want calls; carers go on holiday and go sick and cover is required, new customers are taken on and old customers, for various reasons, end their calls.

If we offer calls to you as a care and support worker and you accept our offer, our position is a very simple one: you have a moral, obligation to us and to the customers whose calls you have agreed to do to carry out those calls on time to the very best of your ability.

Once you accept the commitment of a care call, a large number of people come to rely upon your carrying out your call. We rely upon you; your customer relies upon you; your customer’s family rely upon you; other cares rely upon you, and other people dealing with your customer that day may rely upon you. That’s a heavy weight of responsibility.

Let me emphasise something: you have no duty to accept our offer or work. You do have a duty to decline our offer if you know that you will be unable to fulfil your commitment.

Once you have committed to doing calls you are under a duty to decline any other offer of work (or any other offer for whatever it may be, even if it is an offer of fun where you know time will fly) that might prevent your completing the calls to which you have committed yourself. I won’t pursue here the point about promising to do work and then reneging on that promise – that’s for another time. I’m more concerned here with taking on too much.

How to Say No

I’m not for one moment going to tell you that this is easy: it’s not. David used to find it very hard to say no because he was quite simply a thoroughly nice person. He hated the thought that he might offend people and he always wanted to help but he ended up offending them anyway and not helping them at all.

The truth is that there is no easy way to say no. When it comes down to it there are two approaches you can take. You can beat about the bush and offer all sorts of explanations about why you can’t do something, or you can come straight to the point and just say no. I’m not saying that you should be rude: far from it. You should be polite but firm. As Celestine Chua puts it:

“The simplest and most direct way [is] to say no. We build up too many barriers in our mind to saying no. ...Don’t think so much about saying no and just say it outright. You’ll be surprised when the reception isn’t half as bad as what you imagined it to be.”

http://zenhabits.net/say-no/

Organising Your Time

One of the most organised people I have ever known worked in marketing. She used to organise her time by using an electronic diary. She would shade out chunks of time in various colours that related to the different activities that she had to do. It worked for her. I don’t recall her ever missing a deadline or forgetting anything.

Different techniques work for different people. If you know you have difficulties managing your time, you need to find the thing that works for you. If you simple cannot organise your time, then however strong your other caring skills are you will be lacking an essential quality that we look for in all our carers.

You may have heard of the 80:20 principle.  In short, this principle tells you that 20% of the tasks you undertake are vital to your productivity. The other 80% of your tasks, whilst not trivial (although some will be) are the ones that make you least productive. The 80:20 rule has its roots in economics but it has very real world applications, as Yaro Starak explains:

“The good thing about the 80/20 rule is that you don’t have to understand statistics to be a believer. Yes it has foundations in economics and yes, it was ‘proven’ using statistical analysis by a man named Pareto, but it is not meant to be understood only by economics professors.”

I’m not convinced that it’s possible to prove the 80:20 principle. However, I think there is plenty of evidence that many of us are prone to waste our time on things that make us poor time managers, like my old friend David’s writing out his to do list. Identifying some of those time wasting activities can help improve time management. But it is ultimately down to you to identify these things.

Conclusion

Let me finish with the point I made at the beginning. Our starting point for running the business is that we realise only too well that without our customers our services would not be required, but we realise equally as well that we are only as good as the services provided to our customers by our care and support workers. For those reasons, we have a right to be very selective in the people we choose to provide those services.

The point is a very simple one; if you cannot manage your time you will be incapable of providing the outstanding service that we have a duty to provide for our customers and they have a right to receive.

 Garry Costain is the Managing Director of Caremark Thanet, a domiciliary care provider with offices in Margate, Kent. Caremark Thanet provides home care services throughout the Isle of Thanet. Garry can be contacted on 01843 235910 or email garry.costain@caremark.co.uk. You can also visit Caremark Thanet's website at www.caremark.co.uk/thanet.

Domiciliary Care and the Art of Customer Service

Introduction
My wife and I run a domiciliary care company. We are based in Thanet down in South East Kent. We are a business. We are part of the service sector. We provide a very important service to some of the most vulnerable people in our society. We view our customers in the same way as any outstanding business should, which means that our philosophy is very simple. We aim to provide outstanding domiciliary care to each of our customers: And on that we will never compromise.

Customer service, therefore, is at the very core of what we do. We know our customers have choices. They can choose to go to one of Thanet’s many other home care providers. However, we want them to exercise their choices in favour of us. We want people to become our customers, remain our customers and recommend us to others who will in turn become our customers.


Customer service is not a science; it is much more of an art, and as with any art there are imperfections. My approach to customer service has been shaped, principally, by personal experience and by the views of certain writers on the subject. From these two particular influences I have adopted a number of principles that I believe are at the heart of outstanding customer services. I hope you will read on to find out more.

Lessons from Experience

Shortly after my twentieth birthday I went to work in an art gallery. My job was to make the picture frames. The business was run by one man, I’ll call him Peter. We did quite a bit of work for restaurants and pubs. We would source and frame pictures around the particular theme of a restaurant, pub or whatever the establishment might be.

We also did some bespoke work. Customers would bring in their pictures or photographs and we would frame them. A few customers would buy pictures from us. Many of these would be prints of famous paintings – the impressionists were quite popular. Selling pictures – particularly original and limited edition pictures – was an aspect of the business that Peter wanted to expand; but it never really happened, for good reasons as you will discover below.

Peter was not an easy man to get on with. Many people simply did not like him and would do their best to avoid him. He knew this and, publicly at least, took great delight in it. On occasions, however, he could be charming. More often, he could be rude, arrogant and, at times, thoroughly obnoxious.

Peter frequently displayed his less desirable traits towards his customers (more usually potential customers who were soon dissuaded from becoming customers). There were a small number of customers who came back time and time again. These people were treated by Peter with a service that was almost servile – and I could never work out what it was about this handful of people that Peter treated very differently from the vast majority of others who came into the shop.

With most potential customers Peter revelled in being contrary. If customers asked for advice: he’d refuse; if customers did not want advice: they got it forced upon them; if a particular moulding for a frame was out of stock: he would refuse to order it for customers who requested it; if a particular moulding was in stock; he’d insist that customers who wanted it must have another. I could go on, but you get the picture (pun intended!).

Peter went out of business in about 1986. I’d left a couple of years before. I was not surprised to discover that he went out of business; I was surprised that Peter lasted as long as he did. As I said above, Peter never expanded the picture selling arm of his business and the picture framing aspect was always a very small part of what we did. It was the work for pubs and restaurants that brought in the money, which was never very secure at the best of times.

The recession of the 1980s forced hospitality chains to curtail their spending. This had a devastating effect on the business. By 1981, Peter had started to feel the squeeze, but did little to improve things. From about 1983, the business was in trouble. By 1984, the work from the hospitality companies was not enough to keep the business afloat. There was certainly a market for the bespoke framing service: competitors locally appeared to be doing very well notwithstanding the recession. Peter, however, continued to bite that hand that wanted to feed him.

Whilst I worked for Peter, I never thought too much about how Peter ran his business. I guess I found it amusing. Sadly, though, it wasn’t amusing for the people who lost their jobs when Peter went under.

Customer Service

I am obsessed with customer service. That is no exaggeration. If I’m on the receiving end of poor customer service I’m – to put it mildly – angry. If any of my staff are responsible for poor customer service I’m equally angry – perhaps even angrier – and that anger is accompanied by heavy doses of disappointment and regret at what they have done and contrition towards the customer we have failed. Once again: that is no exaggeration.

Marketers – especially social media and content marketers – often say that content is king. That may have a great deal of merit lying behind it. However, it is the customer who rules. The customer has always ruled; the customer will always rule. Provide your customers with what they want and you are more likely to retain them as customers. Retain your customers and give them outstanding experiences and those customers are more likely to recommend your services to others.

This is not exactly ground-breaking stuff. If you take a look on the reverse of a Bank of England £20 note you will see a picture of a singularly brilliant man. Adam Smith lived during the eighteenth century during which time he was a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. He held a chair in moral philosophy at Glasgow University and is sometime referred to as the father of modern economics.

Amongst Smith's many erudite utterances stands one that contemporary businesses, however large or however small, would do well to heed. The real cost of any product or service, explained Smith, is the time and trouble of acquiring it. For latter day business people the message is that you should ensure that your company has a customer centred philosophy that delivers superior value.

In Search of Excellence

Today there is a mass popular business book publishing industry like never before. I have to say that I’ve never been that keen on that particular type of book, with a few notable exceptions, one of which is In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, the book that some commentators credit with creating that aforementioned publishing phenomenon. I have written about this book before, and I have no doubt that I shall write about it again. I should wholeheartedly recommend it as staple reading for anyone in business.

The book has come in for a bit of criticism in recent years, not least because some of the companies held up by the authors as paragons of excellence have seen their fortunes dip in the years since the book’s publication in 1982. However, many of the books principles, I should suggest, are sound, and offer businesses a source of first rate advice for improving their customer service.

I confess that I have drunk deeply from the cup that is In Search of Excellence and become intoxicated on the “… eight common themes which [Peters and Waterman] argued were responsible for the success of [their] chosen corporations, which have become pointers for managers ever since.” I’m not expressly going to refer to those themes; however, much of what follows is underpinned by the work of those two authors.

All Experiences Are Valuable

I’ve always taken the view that all experiences are valuable. Human beings learn from experience. Sometimes the worst experiences are the ones we learn most from. My time working for Peter in no way constitutes a bad experience. Quite the reverse in fact: it was a time when I was extremely happy. My time with Peter, though, did provide me with a formidable learning experience. I came to appreciate this many years after I left Peter’s gallery.

I am going to go through just six principles that I consider to be central to providing outstanding customer service. My time with Peter offers me innumerable examples of a business failing to follow these simple rules and, ultimately, suffering the consequences.

The following are not the only principles of outstanding customer service: there are others. The following may not be the most important principles: there may be others that could conceivably claim a higher ranking. They are not principles in any particular order: there is a solid case to be made for all to share star billing. One thing is sure, however: companies that fail to do these things are not providing outstanding customer service. Indeed, fail to do these things and providing outstanding customer service is next door to impossible.

Principle Number One: Always Be Polite

I know this is obvious: it is obvious. But how often does it fail to happen? How often have you been subjected to the rudeness of some company employee? Let’s look at things from the employee’s point of view: customers might rule but sometimes they can be very challenging. And that is very true. Impoliteness is not a one way street. For that reason, employees who deal with the public need very special skills.

Many might disagree with this but I’ll put it out there anyway. There are some things that cannot be taught, and one of those things that cannot be taught is how to deal with people. Either you can deal with people or you can’t. If you can’t deal with people, there are a few things you can learn to make things easier for you, but you will never learn how to do it in the way that it is done by someone to whom it comes naturally. It is something that is innate.

Even Peter knew this. He knew that he could upset people just by being in their presence. Fortunately, he had someone who was far better at dealing with customers than he was. I'll call her Beth. She’d worked for him for a number of years. Now and again he would let her deal with customers. I never knew what the criteria were for assigning Beth to these customers. Peter never gave any reasons; however, he was quite open about the fact that when he sent Beth to deal with customers it was because he wanted to win their business.

Principle Number Two: Answer the Telephone

When I worked for Peter, I never answered the telephone. Peter insisted that he or Beth answered it. If he was in the gallery he would usually answer it. If he was busy Beth would answer it.

Some companies set targets for how quickly the telephone has to be answered. There’s nothing wrong with such a target so long as answering the ‘phone is not the job of just one person who has multiple other tasks to do and things are so busy that the ‘phone rings every five or six minutes.

Peter used to set a target for how quickly (or more accurately how slowly) the ‘phone had to be answered. He used to say that it should ring fifteen times at least. His reasoning – I’m not sure whether dignifying what follows as being the product of reason is justified - was that if the call was important the caller would hang on or would ring back!

If someone is taking the time to ring my company then it is right that I should assume that the call is important. What may seem a trivial matter to me may well be of monumental importance to the caller. Of course, there are times when it is physically impossible to answer the ‘phone immediately. Today, however, there are various ways that customers can leave you a message and you can then ring them back the first moment you have a chance.

Principle Number Three: Return Telephone Calls

This follows on from the above principle about answering the ‘phone. Inevitably, there will be times when a customer calls and the person she wants to speak with is unavailable. It beggars belief that anyone in business would not claim it as a company mantra that calls must be returned at the earliest opportunity. It may beggar belief but the failure to return calls happens all too frequently.

I have no idea how many customers Peter failed to gain (and how many existing ones he lost) through his arrogant insistence of returning only certain calls. Peter would go out once or twice every week usually to auctions or art galleries. He would be out the whole day and Beth would answer the ‘phone and diligently take down messages for Peter’s return (these were the days before mobile ‘phones).

Beth told me that he would return calls from friends and usually from designers who worked for the large hospitality chains. He would never return a call from a name he did not recognise, unless it was a new designer, and rarely return a call from private customers even if he did recognise the name. When the gallery was doing quite well in 1979 – 1980, Beth said it was rare to receive fewer than 10-12 calls a day.

Just recently I had to contact a local firm of solicitors. In my area this firm is very well known. I asked to be put through to the department I needed on five separate occasions spread over about five weeks. On each occasion there was no one there to take my call. On each occasion I asked if someone could call me back. On each occasion I was assured that I would be telephoned. On no occasion was my call returned.

In my business, it is not too much of an overstatement to say that my insistence that staff return calls at their earliest opportunity comes close to being a mania with me. I have four simple rules. Number one, if you are asked to return a customer’s call, return the call as soon as possible. Number two, the person who takes the call initially should indicate to the caller when the person the caller wishes to speak with will be available. Number three, if there is someone else who can deal with the matter then that person should have the call transferred to him immediately or should be asked to call the customer at the earliest opportunity. Number four, always keep the customer informed, which brings me to my next customer service principle, number four…

…always keep the customer informed…

…because sometimes the world conspires against you and you cannot do what you have said you will do. In my experience, people are very reasonable so long as you let them know what is going on.

When customers brought pictures into Peter’s gallery to be framed they would be given a receipt and on that receipt Peter would write a date from which customers could collect their framed pictures. All too often, we failed to have the pictures framed and ready for collection by that date. Some customers were fairly phlegmatic about things; some were irritated; some were angry. If Peter dealt with the angry ones the outcome was almost inevitably that they were given back their unframed picture and told to go elsewhere. If Beth dealt with them, in Peter’s absence, she would ensure that the picture was framed within the hour and we had a relatively happy customer. I don’t recall once our ever doing the simple task of ‘phoning a customer to tell him his picture would not be ready on the day we said it would be ready.

It is always a salutary experience for managers and business owners to put themselves into their customers’ shoes. They should do it often and ask the question: “As a customer, what are the things that are likely to make me view a business in a particularly unfavourable light?” High on the list of answers will surely be: “Not knowing what is going on”.

Principle Number Five: Say Yes

There are few words more pleasant for a customer to hear than “yes we can do that for you”. Don’t misunderstand me here. I’m not for a moment suggesting that you should say yes to everything that customers ask for, however unreasonable. If you are an electrician you’re probably not going to agree to plaster a customer’s walls; if you’re a physiotherapist you might draw a line at dental surgery, and if you’re a tree surgeon unblocking drains may not be your thing.

The point I’m getting at here, is that businesses should take every opportunity to delight their customers with the services that they can offer. Electricians may not plaster walls but they may well be able to recommend someone who can do the job.

A couple of years ago we took out a group of staff for lunch at Christmas. The choice was a Christmas menu, which some people wanted, or the normal menu, which others wanted.  However, the restaurant insisted that if you were sat on one table you must all choose from one menu or the other. Eight people on one table had to have the same menu. Eight people split into two groups of four and each group on a separate table could have had a different menu.

Once again, I should exhort business owners to put themselves in the position of their customers. Peter either could not do this or perversely could do it very well and knew exactly how to make his customers miserable. Beth seemingly had the ability to empathise with customers.

Principle Number Six: Promise Less; Deliver More

I think this principle is very much implicit in much of what has gone before. Never, and I mean never, promise what you know you cannot deliver. Just in case I haven’t made that clear let me say it again: never promise what you know you cannot deliver. The temptation is often to promise something to win business even though you know the chance of your delivering on your promise is less than that of winning the national lottery jackpot (and that by the way is a one in 13 983 816 chance; your chance of being hit by lightning is significantly higher).

For a small period of time I worked in car sales (this was after my time with Peter). Note I didn’t say that I sold cars. I didn’t say that because it would be stretching a point to say that I sold cars. The reason I worked in car sales for a short period of time is that I was not particularly successful at selling cars. The point of this is that I used to work with sales people who would promise almost anything to get the sale. The consequences of this were usually three-fold (at the minimum). First, there would be a pretty upset customer to deal with at some point in the near future following the promise that had been made but not fulfilled. Two, that customer would not come back to the dealership a second time. Three, that customer would never recommend the dealership to people he or she knew.

Conclusion

I know what you are thinking: you’re thinking that surely some of these principles clash with each other. For example, principles five and six appear, potentially, to be inconsistent with each other. And you would be right to point that out. But that’s the problem with any system of principles: unless there is a hierarchy of principles clashes are inevitable.

Providing outstanding customer service is not a science; it’s an art. There will be times when things go wrong; there will be times when you cannot do what you would like to do for your customers, and there will certainly be times where you are faced with dilemmas. Do one thing and you get an undesirable by-product; do a second and you get a different undesirable by-product. In situations like this I should submit that the course of action you should take is the one that is least damaging to the customer. The alternative is to do what Peter would have done: take great delight in upsetting a customer.

 Garry Costain is the Managing Director of Caremark Thanet, a domiciliary care provider with offices in Margate, Kent. Caremark Thanet provides home care services throughout the Isle of Thanet. Garry can be contacted on 01843 235910 or email garry.costain@caremark.co.uk. You can also visit Caremark Thanet's website at www.caremark.co.uk/thanet.

What Businesses Can Learn From the Golden Rule

Introduction

You may not have thought too much about what businesses can learn from philosophers. You may be tempted to thing that philosophers raise far more questions than they answer with their seemingly interminable logic chopping. To some extent, the criticism has merit. However, there is a principle of ethics known as the golden rule that I should submit businesses can learn from.

You will have heard of the golden rule. You’ll find it mentioned in many cultures; amongst other places, you’ll find it in Confucius; you’ll find it in Islam; you’ll find it in western philosophy, and you’ll find, perhaps, its most well know version in Christian ethics. The golden rule goes something like this: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  Here’s Kaitlin Roig DeBellis on the golden rule:

“We all learned it in Kindergarten: the golden rule. Treat others the way you want to be treated. As five-year-olds we are given many concrete examples of what this means and what this looks like. As adults it seems this rule can often be forgotten.”

So what has this got to do with running a business?

Marketing and the Golden Rule

Let’s take a little trip into the world of marketing. Let’s be brutally honest here: marketing does not always enjoy a good press. Indeed, there was a time – and this was a time not so very long ago – when marketers had a reputation that was only marginally on the positive side of the reputations enjoyed today by dodgy car dealers, PPI recovery cold callers and politicians.

Marketers took the view – and sadly some still take this view - that it was their job to ensure that their company’s goods and service were sold – no matter what. If achieving the profit goal meant misleading customers, leaving customers unhappy and ensuring that those customers never dealt with their companies again – well that was all part of the marketing, sales-centric ethos.

You may well be thinking that surely what I have described above is the job of those involved in marketing. And I would not for one moment disagree that marketers have the job of ensuring that their company’s goods and service are promoted and sold: but not at all costs. That is the point: not at all costs. The sales-centric orientation was very much a hangover from the industrial revolution and marketers today are still living with the tarnish it has had on their reputations.

How would you define marketing? There are quite a few definitions. The one that I like best is the one that talks about satisfying the customers’ requirements profitably. The reason I like this is because, firstly, it makes it clear that businesses are there to make a profit. If they don’t, they go out of businesses and no-one benefits from that.

Secondly, it emphasises that the profits that businesses make should come through satisfying the customers’ requirements. Satisfied customers are good for business.  There is little doubt that some companies still adopt the sales-centric approach; however, today enlightened marketers realise that the customer is at the centre of the marketing universe.

What marketers of the past were doing, to put it very simply, was ignoring the golden rule. In fact, they were happily doing quite the reverse of what the golden rule requires. They were more than happy to treat customers one way but would never accept the same sort of treatment themselves.

Enlightened Marketing and the Golden Rule

Have you seen the film Miracle on 34^th Street? If you have you may recall the scene where Kris Kringle (played by Edmund Gwenn in the 1947 version) working as a department store Santa Claus starts advising customers where to go to find the toys that his store doesn’t have. It seems the store has hired someone who not only believes he really is Santa Claus but he’s also helping to drive away the store’s customers by advising them to go elsewhere.

However, it turns out that what Kris does is a very successful bit of company PR. The store is seen as a company which can be trusted and has the best interest of its customers at the centre of its business activities. The store’s sales increase all thanks to Kris. Okay, so this is part of a fairy story, but the principle behind what Kris does is what today we’d call an example of enlightened marketing and an example of the golden rule in action.

Kris Kringle may have been acting out of naivety or innocence. Then again he may have realised that a customer is for life not just for Christmas. (Don’t Santa’s customers come back time and time again?) He may have decided to do the store’s marketing for it and take the long view of things.

If businesses treat their customers as they would want to be treated themselves they are more likely to retain those hard won clients. Satisfied customers are more likely to deal with businesses again and again. Satisfied customers are more likely to recommend to others the businesses which have met their needs. This certainly is not a fairy story. The golden rule is a very simple principle. It is a principle that seems as close to being universal as a principle can be. It is a principle that enlightened businesses will adopt.

Garry Costain is the Managing Director of Caremark Thanet, a domiciliary care provider with offices in Margate, Kent. Caremark Thanet provides home care services throughout the Isle of Thanet. Garry can be contacted on 01843 235910 or email garry.costain@caremark.co.uk. You can also visit Caremark Thanet's website at www.caremark.co.uk/thanet.

Domiciliary Care and the Synergy between Enlightened Self Interest and Social Responsibility

Introduction

How would managers of businesses or business owners answer the question: why are you in business? Would their answer differ depending upon who was asking the question? Would any be bold enough to answer that they’re in business to make money and that there is nothing wrong with making a profit?

They might hesitate before they answered along those lines.  Like many, they might start off by talking about social responsibility, making a difference and serving their customers and community. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But are social responsibility, making a difference and serving customers and community necessarily incompatible with making a profit.

Greed is one thing: enlightened self-interest is something entirely different. The simple irreducible minimum is that businesses have to interact with the environment. Managers would not be doing their jobs if they didn’t seek out opportunities to further the interests of their businesses.

There are always competing interests; however, acting socially responsibly is not something that competes, but is something that synergises with, business interests. Consider this: enlightened self-interest and social responsibility are not diametrically opposed pursuits. They are more than just compatible pursuits: they are synergistic pursuits.

What follows is written in general about undifferentiated businesses.  However, my business is domiciliary care and I should argue that what I have to say below applies without any exceptions to that particular area of business activity.

Enlightened Self-Interest

Adam Smith, I should suggest, got it about right when he wrote that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Smith wrote those words in the 1770s in what is probably his most well-known work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. It expresses very succinctly the idea of enlightened self-interest.

In more recent times, In her book, Body and Soul, Body Shop founder Anita Roddick explains how enlightened self-interest and social responsibility work together when she talks about looking for “…the modern day equivalent of those Quakers who…made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently…”.  There’s nothing wrong with making money: it is how that money is made that counts.

Anyone who goes into business must believe that the pursuit of profit is the right thing for businesses to do. However, it does not follow from this that when businesses act they must only take into account their own interests. On the contrary, acting in ways that may appear to be in competition with a business’s interest may be decidedly advantageous. As Lynn MacDonald says: ‘Enlightened self-interest recognizes that a company's prime purpose is to make profits, but that this goal can be achieved by fulfilling its social and environmental responsibilities.’

Social Responsibility

It’s little wonder that the business world gets a bad press. Stories are heard too often about corporate greed, unethical selling practices, misleading advertising, shoddy goods, even shoddier customer service, poor treatment of employees and the list could go on.  The thing that is quite simply downright mystifying is why people in the business word insist on behaving like this when acting socially responsibly is better all round?  As the Times Business Case Studies explains:

“Corporate social responsibility can bring significant benefits to a business. For example, [it] may: attract customers to the firm's products …make employees want to stay with the business…attract more employees wanting to work for the business… [and] attract investors and keep the company's share price high…”.

If that is correct, and I believe that it is, it seems perfectly clear that acting in a way that is socially responsible is an act of enlightened self-interest. By acting responsibly, businesses are acting in a way that best promotes the interests of those businesses.

The socially enlightened answer, then, to the question why are you (whether you are a manager or business owner) in business is that businesses are there to make a profit from socially responsible business practices. 

Garry Costain is the Managing Director of Caremark Thanet, a domiciliary care provider with offices in Margate, Kent. Caremark Thanet provides home care services throughout the Isle of Thanet. Garry can be contacted on 01843 23591001843 235910 or email garry.costain@caremark.co.uk. You can also visit Caremark Thanet's website at www.caremark.co.uk/thanet.