Chapter: "Strategic Planning and Customer Satisfaction: The Ultimate Drivers of Change Management," by Beverly Hyman

Financial Publishing Company

Background

On a spring day, the publisher of six well-known, monthly technical financial-services publications called his director of publishing services into his office. The publisher charged his subordinate with making the publications user-friendly. The CEO had announced that customer service was one cornerstone of the new strategic plan. A second cornerstone was professionalizing the skills of the organization by making an investment in the professionals in the firm. In the publishing arm of this 3,000-person, multiservice, highly visible financial services corporation, succeeding in the second endeavor was an awesome feat.

The Players

The following six levels of key players lay between the CEO and the subscribers who ultimately read and used the financial information XYZ published:

  • Eight executive directors, one for each business unit: The publishing end the business was minor for them compared with product sales of tangible financial services. It was not that they thought the publications were trivial, but their bottom line was not directly dependent on them.
  • The publisher: He had a high stake in this plan. He wanted tangible evidence of change to demonstrate his ability to the CEO.
  • The director of publishing services: He was a true professional in publishing and saw this plan as an opportunity to significantly upgrade the publishing products for which he was responsible.
  • The editor-in-chief of the flagship publication: He hoped that this effort would solve some of the day-to-day business problems he had receiving articles and other written material from as many as 800 in-house business analysts, economists, and financial services specialists each year, none of whom were professional writers.
  • The editorial staff: They hoped this effort would empower them and make them less at the mercy of the nonprofessional contributing writers whom they served on a daily basis.
  • The writers: They initially thought this plan would be nothing much, just business as usual.

The Problems

The director of publishing services fleshed out the problems:

1. How would the customers, or subscribers, like to see the publications change? The director of publishing services had undertaken a large readership survey about content only a year ago. Content was in line with subscribers' tastes; format and style got lower grades.

2. Assuming publishing services management could determine the needed format and style, how could those managers get all the people involved to agree on the changes and, much harder, get those format and style changes implemented? The changes had to take place at the level of each individual contributor. Editors had neither the time nor expertise to rewrite the huge numbers of long, technical articles submitted to them.

The Steps

There were 11 steps to implementing the change (here are the first five):

1. The director of publishing services shopped for a consultant. He wanted someone who met the following criteria:

  • was local and could be easily available
  • had a track record with companies in the industry
  • was seasoned and credible to the highly educated, well-paid professionals at the firm
  • had experience in writing for publication
  • was an outstanding course developer and trainer
  • was with a firm that was large enough to handle this size job.

2. Before making his final choice, the director of publishing services invited four executive directors (EDs) and the publisher to a joint interview with the consultant. He asked the consultant to meet one-on-one with the other four EDs. The information she derived from these meetings, the familiarity she established with each ED, and the goodwill she established set the tone for the whole project.

3. After the director of publishing services hired the consultant, he quickly brought other team members into the process. The manager of marketing, the senior editors, and the most prominent writer contributors all oriented the consultant to the task at hand.

4. With the manager of marketing, the consultant set about designing and conducting focus groups to reach consumers and determine what style and format changes were desirable. Before conducting the outside focus groups, the consultant ran trial focus groups with internal people, mostly contributing writers. Focus groups were designed to represent each of the types of subscribers to the publications. The focus groups were videotaped, and the CEO watched an edited version.

5. Many concrete recommendations came out of the focus groups. These were discussed with the EDs, the publisher, the director of publishing services, the editor in chief, and the editors. They were codified into a simple-to-use manual for the whole company with lots of examples of right and wrong style and format usage.