Blitzing

This is where you take focused and overt action to show you are listening.

The ‘blitzing’ process can be employed as part of your regular improvement and quality routines to analyse and consider the deeper issues that have been raised over a time period.

If appropriate, it’s best to focus on just a few issues raised in the feedback, rather than dividing resources too thinly across many issues. We’ve proven that communication back to customers is just as important as improvement in its own right, so you need to establish a routine for using the voice of your customer to bring about better performance.

1. Quickly choose something mentioned in the feedback that is digestible to put heavy focus on – we call this ‘blitzing’. That’s more effective than the natural temptation to launch into multiple issues and so spread resources too thinly
2. Communicate to your people and ask them to think what they can do to contribute. Make sure your people in the field are confident and consistent about what they are saying
3. Keep participants in the loop about action you are taking: first as soon as possible after their feedback has been received; then update progress midday between ‘waves’ (or rounds of feedback)
4. Just before the next wave, sum up what’s been achieved and communicate it well
5. Move on to another blitz next wave.

It is easy to over-commit to improvement and challenging to communicate well enough those few you are doing this wave to improve.  Participants will feel listened to as long as they see that something is happening.