Success is Often One Step Beyond the Expected
Filed under: Customer Service, Life and Business, Performance, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
We all intuitively know that one of the keys to success or at least one of the the cures for mediocrity is going that extra little distance that makes all of the difference in the eyes of our customers or audiences.
Part of my business practice has me helping solopreneuers and small professional services practices improve their marketing effectiveness, and it never ceases to amaze me that the people that are seeking help are already good or even great. Regardless of their current level of expertise or performance, they still want to improve. They are seeking to go one extra step.
It’s exhilarating to work with people focused on growing from great to greater.
I talk with clients of clients to gain insights into opportunities and to better understand impact, buying cycles, ideas for improvement and other issues key to the marketing process. One client of a client could not say enough about the extra effort that was invested in understanding and personalizing a program for his business. That extra effort to learn and then tailor what is already priceless guidance and content to the unique needs of the client was the difference between good and great. The hard work had been done…creating the original training material. It was the extra effort to tailor it that made the difference.
It’s the little things that you do at key moments of truth that leave the lasting impression.
- It’s the effective resolution of a customer problem. Send a client away feeling like he or she received remarkable help and you may have earned a referral customer for life.
- Another example of the extra-step might be the smile and direct eye contact that the receptionist makes with you when you walk into a place of business. Compare being treated like an important and welcome person versus the all-too-common won’t make eye contact, won’t look up from the keyboard…push the sign-in sheet in front of you approach practiced in so many establishments.
- The extra effort is never misleading your client about repairs needed and going out of your way to show and educate on the what and why. We all are uncomfortable when the repairperson starts describing all of the technical reasons why we have no choice but to spend a lot of money. Change the tone and tenor of that discussion to one of educating and you’ve got a client that will gladly engage and refer you.
We all face a million opportunities to take that extra step or make that extra effort that makes all of the difference for the client.
Teach your people and remind yourself to go one step further than anyone else and you will find success much closer than you thought.
Leading in the Trenches-What Do You Do? And No One Buys Gobbeldy Gook
Filed under: Career, Customer Service, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Marketing, Marketing Yourself, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
OK, this might seem like an odd one, but ask most people what they do and what do you get? “I’m an accountant,” or, “I work in marketing/customer service/support” etc.
Attend a business-networking event and listen to the introductions. “We’re a leader in…” or, “We make…” or, “We’re a software company…” etc.
Boring. Hard to stimulate interest with an answer that makes someone want to reach for the bacon-wrapped water chestnut and shout, “Next!”
Take it a step further. Apply a modified form of my “Trade Show Floor” test to your colleagues at work. It goes like this: “Hey, if someone asks you what our firm does, how do you answer that question?”
Quick background on my “Trade Show Floor” test and a note to marketers and sales executives everywhere: when I walk trade shows, I like to ask the booth staff what their firm does. Instead of crisp, audience/customer-focused verb phrases that make me want to learn more, I usually get unintelligible gobbledygook. The more tech-oriented the show, the more tech filled gobbeldy gook that I get.
To the best of my knowledge, no one is in the market to purchase gobbeldy gook. If your numbers are down it is possible that your people are trying to market and sell gobbeldy gook. Remember, no one is buying this stuff!.
Back to your colleagues and the question. I’m willing to wager a cup of leadership caffeine or your favorite coffee that the answers are closer to gobbeldy gook than to clarity. Imagine the chaos if you have a whole company of people that cannot simply describe what your firm does and for whom. (Sure hope I got that whom/who thing right…it’s been a life long struggle.)
Core questions to ask and answer:
- Who do you serve? Who are your customers?
- What vexing problems do you solve for your customers?
- How do you uniquely solve those problems? (Your Purple Cow factor. Thanks, Seth Godin.)
Wrap it all up in a verb phrase. Before you know it, you’ll have John Jantsch’s (Duct Tape Marketing) version of a talking logo. I love John’s examples (I paraphrase):
Typical: “I’m an architect.”
Revised: “I’m an architect that shows contractors how to get paid faster.”
Typical: “I’m a tax accountant.”
Revised: “I show recently divorced women how to dramatically reduce their taxes.”
Executed properly, you’ll have people saying, “Wow, tell me more.”
The Bottom Line:
Quit boring people to death with your personal and professional introductions. Tune up your descriptions, try them on for size and when the accurately describe what you do for a specific audience in terms that seem to interest people, make certain that the description is taught to everyone in your firm and that it jumps off of your website and all of your materials.
Don’t leave people guessing on the most important of all personal and professional marketing issues.
“Hey, what does your firm do?”
Leading in the Trenches: How Well Do You Know Your Customers?
Filed under: Customer Service, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Making Decisions, Management Education, Marketing, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Product Management, Professional Growth, Quality Systems Management, Strategy, voice of the customer
Note from Art: Leadership is about driving the right results in the right way. We often focus on the interpersonal dynamics of leadership and the characteristics and behaviors of effective leaders. And while those issues are critically important to a firm’s success, so is ensuring that everyone is focused on the activities that create value. This inaugural “Leading in the Trenches” post will introduce an on-going series focused on applying effective leadership practices to improving critical organizational practices.
Enjoy!
The word “Customer” takes on a larger than life meaning inside most firms. It’s bandied about in meetings in slightly reverent tones. “Oh, the Customer raised this issue. This must be important.”
It’s used as an argument stopper by those that claim to speak with the Voice of the Customer. “If that’s what the customers want, we’ll have to give it to them.”
Sometimes, it almost seems like the customer is the enemy. “They don’t understand our product. If they would simply attend training, we wouldn’t have to keep simplifying our user interface.”
And at high levels, THE Customer is the reason for new strategies, directions and programs. Listen to a CEO spout a new direction or shift a paradigm and the name of THE Customer will be invoked somewhere.
Spend some time listening to all of the things done in the name of the customer, and you would be correct if you asked yourself and everyone around you, “who is this customer, anyways?”
I do this with clients (notice the subtle word shift!) and the answers are fascinating.
Them: “Well you know, people who buy are products.”
Me: “Who?”
Them: “You know, consumers.”
Me: “Which ones?”
Them: “The ones with money.”
-
OK, that’s a bit of an extreme case, but it happened. More often than not, I’ll receive a description of a general class of individuals surrounded by demographic and geographic information. When I probe for a detailed understanding of who these people are, why they buy and what key problems they are solving with our offerings the answers begin to resemble the narrative above.
The Issue:
If you don’t know your customers at a sufficient level of detail, including their hopes, dreams and emotions, everything you are doing includes a high degree of guesswork and randomness. Your messaging likely includes a great deal of blah blah about your firm. Promotional activities are fired from a shotgun, and while they occasionally hit something, there is no viable, sustainable marketing system in place.
Sales efforts are grossly sub-optimized and new product and service development efforts are at best hunches.
Yikes!
It’s time to Grok Your Customers:
The authors of Tuned-In (one of my three most referenced marketing books along with Duct Tape Marketing and Crossing the Chasm) talk in detail about the need to understand individual buyer personas at a deep level. They invoke the term “Grok” popularized by Robert Heinlein in his science fiction classic, Stranger in a Strange Land, and encourage firms to “grok their customers.”
While I don’t encourage the method used in Heinlein’s book…final grokking (if memory serves) occurred once someone died and their remains were made into a nice soup and consumed, if you were able to effectively “grok your customer,” you would come to understand him as well as or better than he understands himself.
The essence of this is of course, you want to understand the customer at an emotional level and use this knowledge to create and deliver messages, products and experiences that address core emotional needs and that fix vexing problems.
John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing, talks about defining an ideal customer…one that values what you offer, is profitable for you, and values you and the experience so much that he/she will readily refer you. In order to reach the point where your focus is solely on people that value what you do (the ultimate, well-qualified target audience), you’ve got to put effort into pushing beyond the demographics of a class of customers into learning through observation and interview.
Knowing Your Customers is an Issue for Large and Small Alike
In a recent article (somewhere) on the on-going makeover and turn-around program at Starbucks, it was reported that Howard Schultz bowed to internal team pressure to begin forming a detailed understanding of customer personas…a shift away from the traditional Starbucks focus on creating a culture around their mantra of “rewarding everyday moments.” Accordingly, it is reported that you can hardly walk through Starbucks headquarters without tripping over cutouts of the core customer personas…all named and labeled with demographic and psychographic attributes. Instead of building a culture for an amorphous audience of coffee drinkers, they can focus on defining their stores, products and services for very specific consumers that value what they have to offer.
The Bottom Line:
Quit talking about customers as an amorphous glob of individuals that you bill. Start understanding who your profitable customers are and importantly, start learning about the real problems that you solve.
Remember, Peter Revson of Revlon cosmetics didn’t sell make-up, he sold hope. And the person buying a drill at the home store doesn’t need a drill, he needs a hole.
Quit guessing about your customers and start observing, listening and revisiting on all levels how you are engaging with these people that value what you do for them.
The Human Touch in Customer Support-An Endangered Species?
Filed under: Customer Service, Management Innovation, Performance, Quality Systems Management
Note from Art, OK, this is a bit of a rant on the state of customer service in some firms. If you find the topic disagreeable, leave me an e-mail or dial my phone and press 1 to…
Perhaps my age is showing here, but sometimes, you just need human contact! For customer support that is!
The issue is customer service and specifically, the increasing number of businesses that I am running into that offer no or extremely hard-to-find contact with a human for support or account questions.
I’ll admit that my “0 for Operator” button is worn thin from attempting to power my way through automated dialing systems at every possible encounter. I view it as my inalienable right to attempt to foil the evil machinations of automated systems that I suspect are responsible for a societal rise in average blood pressure.
I get that we are in a digital age and you can bet that I solve many, many problems through searching on the internet before I ever reach for a phone. Survival in this age almost requires you to be a super sleuth on the search engines, artfully choosing and scientifically iterating on word choice combinations like, “Why is my *&()(*)* g-mail account inaccessible?” or, “Google-mail problems 9/1/09.” The latter selection worked better than the first.
I also understand the cost implications of having people available to answer questions. Taken from a cost-only perspective, I’m sure it’s tempting to consider either the nefarious off-shoring option, where “Arlene” with a thick accent will spend 20 minutes running you through the script on rebooting your DSL modem that you could recite in your sleep, or, to automate on the web or on the phone. Cost smart and revenue and loyalty blind!
Note to those firms that think your FAQs answer everything. They tend to do a great job answering everything that I might need to know someday. They generally fail on the question I’m trying to get answered right now1
Ordering a Hamburger in the Drive-Thru Just Got Off Shored!
From the school of non-essential news on interesting and potentially silly advances in customer support systems, did you know that some fast-food chains (they prefer that we call them Quick Service) have been experimenting with drive-thru off shoring?
You pull up to the drive-thru. “Arlene” with the thick accent puts my DSL support call on hold and greets you, takes your order, asks if you want to supersize it and then places the order for the store employees to fill.
You’ve just gone halfway around the world and back to ensure that you can get your daily dose of “build your own heart-attack” in a bag, but I guess they maintained the human connection. Sort of. (OK, I confess that I’ve seen the reported statistics on labor savings, increased store productivity and increased drive-thru throughput, and they are impressive. Doesn’t mean that I have to like it!)
A Classic Case of a Poorly Conceived Support System or How to Destroy Value & Reputation in a Hurry!
My particular “beef” today is with an as of yet unnamed service provider that offers no way whatsoever to reach a human being to deal with account issues. Customers can sign in and check up, but they apparently cannot check out!
The service provider appears by all measures to be highly reputable and clearly offers a quality service for business professionals. The billing is monthly to your credit card, and in my case, after a few months of experimentation, I decided that as much as I liked the service, I wasn’t ready for it yet.
I set about figuring out how to discontinue my account only to discover that there is absolutely no way to do this. There are no instructions. There are no life-lines. There are no people!
Eight Frustrating Steps:
- I looked for a corporate phone number. Nothing.
- I scoured the FAQs and used the Help function on the Web. Nothing.
- I scoured the regular e-newsletters from the company for information on support or for evidence of the phone number. Nothing.
- I submitted an on-line help-desk ticket and waited for a response. Nothing. (This was in contrast to all other help desk tickets that I had submitted which had an auto-response indicating that the message had been received and fairly prompt (within a few hours) follow-up. Nothing.
- I checked my credit card bill for the phone number and dialed it. Answering machine. The “0” button took me in an endless loop. I hung up.
- I searched the web and found some legal information on the business including the phone number. Same as the number on my credit card. There was another search engine result that indicated that this business regularly has a phone mailbox that is full.
- I dialed, recorded a polite but clear message and even praised the product. This is absolutely not about customer satisfaction. I asked for the courtesy of an e-mail or phone call to confirm that my account was closed. After a week, nothing!
- I attempted to login to my account and noticed that my access was denied. I’ve made a small leap of faith and suspect that this is my confirmation. You can bet I’ll be monitoring my credit card bills and if a charge shows up, I will let the guard dogs at the credit card company fix this. In contrast to this particular service provider, the two times I’ve had disputes, these people have been incredible.
The Bottom-Line
So many customer service approaches today are cost-focused and revenue and loyalty blind. In my opinion, many of these systems create new vexing problems for their customers. At a minimum they add stress.
In spite of the quality service of the thus-far unnamed service provider described above, I will be ice-skating in you know where before I come back to this firm. In fact, I will seek out a competitor, assuming I can find one that doesn’t operate like a “Roach Motel.”
Would it have been so hard to set up a friendly procedure to cancel accounts? Why send otherwise happy users away ticked off and vowing never to come back?
Solve problems with your customer service and support approaches…don’t create new ones.
Rant over.
Looking for A Framework to Rebuild Your Business? Think Baldrige
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Current Affairs, Customer Service, Leadership, Leading Change, Management Education, Management Excellence Tips for Tough Times, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Quality Systems Management, Strategy, Talent Management, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List, voice of the customer
My own personal observation is that the Baldrige National Quality Program is one of the most misunderstood, unknown and poorly marketed great programs for organizations seeking a framework for business performance improvement.
Cash for Clunkers, it ain’t! We would all be better off if it got one-tenth of the airtime of that well documented automobile sales promotion.
What’s the first thing that you think of when you hear Baldrige? Of course, quality jumps to mind and specifically, thanks to advertising, many people think of automobile quality. If you’re like most people, you’ve seen pictures of the actual glass award in commercials and you might have even viewed a clip of one of our Presidents shaking hands with the CEO of a Baldrige winner.
I recently asked a small group of professionals what they knew about the Baldrige program and one person asked whether it wasn’t a quality award for winners of the JDPower survey! At least she was partially right, as quality is an important component.
OK, and in my opinion, that’s the other misnomer. Certainly the program has its roots in Quality (with a capital Q), but it’s much more comprehensive than the many other very good programs and frameworks that focus specifically on quality and process improvement.
Baldrige is a comprehensive framework for organizational performance excellence, focusing on seven core categories (the criteria):
- Leadership
- Strategic Planning
- Customer and Market Focus
- Measurement Analysis and Knowledge Management
- Workforce Focus
- Process Management
- Results
From the Baldrige website: ‘The criteria are designed to help organizations enhance their competitiveness by focusing on two goals: delivering ever improving value to customers and improving overall organizational performance.’
This is much bigger than measuring defects. This is much bigger than a glass trophy.
Resources You Can Use Immediately:
I encourage business professionals at all levels to become familiar with the Baldrige program and the treasure trove of incredible materials…many of which are either free or low cost.
Read: The Criteria for Performance Excellence. It’s better than a month of MBA courses on understanding the criteria in detail and what factors are considered when evaluating high performance in those areas.
Download and Use: the two great surveys: “Are We Making Progress” and “Are We Making Progress as Leaders”. These are free, and you are encouraged to use, copy, distribute and employ these surveys inside your organization. (Note to my many leadership blogging/consulting/training friends, this content is golden!) Even outside of the umbrella of formal pursuit of the Baldrige Award, these survey instruments can prove remarkably helpful for any firm attempting to assess where it is at on many levels.
Review: the Judges Survey of Applicant Satisfaction presentation summarizing the survey results on what prior participants have to say about the program. Most joined for the purpose of driving improvement…not to win an award. The participants also indicate areas of improvement for the Baldrige process and examiners.
Purchase and watch: for $35 plus shipping and handling, the detailed Award Recipient DVDs. While there is a bit of program hype, mostly you’ll gain context on how some now pretty impressive small and large companies have used the program to dramatically improve their organization’s performance. These live case studies are priceless.
Talk: to a Baldrige program award winner or an examiner. The program and participants are remarkably open to inquiries and to sharing experiences and highlighting what to expect if you decide to pursue the process. Watch the videos and place a few calls and you’ll have some remarkably fresh insights and ideas on the program and how it might help your business.
Consider: applying. While there is ample material on what is involved and there will be time required to apply…and of course to assess, you gain access to some of the best, low to no cost business performance consulting on the planet through the Baldrige examiners. Again, don’t underestimate the commitment required to benefit from the process, but don’t run away from it because of that either.
The Bottom Line:
It’s time to shake our misperceptions about Baldrige. It is a powerful framework for business performance improvement. I’ve dealt with many CEOs that behind closed doors admit to not being certain about where to start and what to focus on to fuel results.
Before you call on the expensive consultants, take a few hours and investigate Baldrige. You might just find some great starting points.
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