Be Different or be dead

June 28, 2021

Why customer loyalty is not determined by what the organization sells

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Why customer loyalty is not determined by what the organization sells.

Why do people buy from one organization over and over again?

Is it because they:
▪️‘love’ the business?
▪️love their commitment to sustainability and the environment?
▪️love the way they support the communities in which they operate?
▪️love the products and services they offer?
▪️deliver consistent high levels of financial return to investors?

In a generic sense, the question really is: “Are customers loyal to an organization because of what they deliver — i.e. output related— or because of the way they deliver it — i.e. process related?

Output or process: which is the determinant of customer loyalty?

I don’t see much differentiation among businesses in terms of what they produce. If you’re in the communications business, you’re going to have internet and home phone service in your product portfolio.

If you’re in the financial business you’re likely to offer essentially the same financial products such as basic savings, retirement savings, and education savings accounts as well as other products such as term deposits and investment vehicles.

I’ve written much about the fact that even though competition is fierce and growing relentlessly in global markets, differences among competitors that are both meaningful and compelling to customers are shrinking and are becoming less and less obvious.

Increasing competition is ironically resulting in less meaningful differences among combatants.

It’s a surprising result.

You would think that as competitive forces escalate, a business would get better at creating a sustainable competitive advantage in the markets they compete in.

But they’re not. My observation is that every participant basically looks the same and they all exist to produce something for the masses, using price to attempt to separate themselves from the crowded mob around them.

And generally, production-oriented, mass motivated and price focused organizations tend not to be a huge loyalty magnet; customers come and go based on short term satisfaction.

Sustainable loyalty actually has little to do with what is produced by a business; rather it is a process-based phenomenon with people as the nucleus.

People buy when they’re happy; when the engagement they have with an organization ‘feels good’ and they feel their cravings are being addressed.

And warm feelings are not likely to be continuously produced by a product or service which turns into old or used eventually when the lustre of ‘the new’ wears off.

These are the process and people things that, in my experience, create warm experiences for people and make them coming back:

1. Easy-to-do-business-with processes

There are two principles that are critical in terms of having ‘customer friendly’ processes.

First, build systems to enable customers to engage with the organization the way they want rather than force them to comply with processes designed with company efficiency as the main design criteria;

What percentage of customers that use a company’s website are ever asked if they like the navigation and buying experience? How many of them are asked to pass judgment on the artificial intelligence technologies used?

I doubt it ever happens.

Organizations build systems with scale and productivity in mind not with customer satisfaction as a key driving factor.
Furthermore, they serve as a factory to the ‘normal’ masses who are content to comply with whatever business processes they use and not the outlier ‘weird’ ones who require special handling — a group by the way growing larger and more powerful everyday and sometime soon will eclipse ‘the normal ones’.

Second, ensure that internal rules and policies serve the same customer purpose: to enable not restrict, to ‘say yes’ not ‘say no’, to empower not control and to please not disappoint.

Ever heard of a company asking their customers to participate in a panel to evaluate whether or not the policies of the company made any sense to customers? Whether they made it easy to engage with the company? Whether they were understandable or just plain dumb?

Unfortunately, I’ve never seen an organization enlightened enough to take such a risk and welcome their customers in to help manage their business.

2. People who like to serve

The majority of warm feelings that customers experience are induced by human beings. Technology might impress you, but people can delight you, blow you away, mesmerize you, dazzle you, surprise you, shock you and astonish you — all symptoms of loyalty building.

So it follows that organizations need to hire the type of person who can cause these types of feelings to exude from other people. Yes, they have to be intellectually competent to qualify for a customer server role,  but beyond that they must possess the innate hunger to care for another person and be driven to satisfy whatever craving the customer has at the moment.

Most businesses aspire to provide memorable experiences for their customers, but the quality of the engagement process doesn’t back up the claim. Their customer contact repair folks may be great at troubleshooting an internet problem sitting in a call Center in the Philippines, but the engagement moment with the customer falls short of being warm and caring. It’s often frustrating, cold and harsh.

It’s absolutely true that delighting a customer time and time again will deepen the affection the customer has for the organization and will lead to sustaining loyalty. The catch though is to have the type of ’human being lovers’ in place to pull it off.

Let me crystallize the loyalty takeaways for you:

— Customer loyalty has more to do with HOW you conduct your business than it has to do with what your business produces.
— Loyalty is created when business processes are created in the image of making it easy for the customer to do business with an organization.
— Loyalty grows from customer affection which is earned by having caring customer servers who are the natural architects of warm moments customers experience.

Businesses don’t create customer loyalty; processes and people do.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 6.28.21 at 01:45 am by Roy Osing
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June 21, 2021

What is the best way to describe high performance?

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What is the best way to describe high performance?

When someone does a great job delivering results, how do you describe what they’ve done?

When the results of their efforts go beyond what is expected, what words do you use to capture the moment?

Performance appraisal is viewed as mainly an HR thing; a system developed by human resource professionals and used by organizations to rate how well an individual is fulfilling the role expected of them.

And in most cases the terms of reference — the context — for the evaluation is their position (job) description. Whatever is defined in the job description as key result areas gets appraised.

I’ve always had difficulty with the traditional appraisal system because it’s not particularly helpful identifying brilliant people who should be watched for the highest leadership opportunities.

Standard appraisal systems typically describe what the individual has achieved over the appraisal period — generally the previous year — then the appraisal moves from this narrative to choosing a performance category such as, for example, ‘excelling’, ‘exceeding’, ‘fully satisfactory’ and ‘unsatisfactory’ relative to the standards of their position as well as the specific objectives they were given.

A person given an ‘excelling’ rating will have demonstrated that they had consistently exceeded their role standards and delivered more on every objective given to them than was expected.

The problem is that the performance description is entirely based on the person and their accomplishments; it’s a very narrow perspective on their capabilities. By its very design, it provides little value in terms of comparing how this person performed relative to others.

The use of performance evaluation committees tries to provide a forum where individuals can be compared. I present the evaluations of my people to the committee and others do similarly and then we subjectively compare them to see if we can agree on who has demonstrated the better performance . Acrimonious debate always ensues over who the ‘winner’ is with no one wanting to admit another employee is better than their own.

And it’s this very perspective that is relevant when it comes to identifying the high potential people who should be in senior leadership positions.

It’s ALL about comparing people in terms of what they’ve achieved and the mark they leave on the organization.

To feed the need for leadership, a new performance dashboard is needed; one that moves away from excelling and exceeding performance to ‘stand out’, ‘unmatched’ and ‘incomparable’ performance

We need to identify people who stand heads and shoulders above everyone else; individuals who are the ONLY ones who do what they do. People who achieve results in a way that others don’t; who don’t rely on benchmarking and best practices as their guide.

THESE are the individuals who should be tagged for the future opportunities that come available and these 5 key results areas should be the anchors of how their performance is appraised.

Having a ‘go’

Incomparable performers try more than others. They understand that success rarely happens with a single shot but rather as a result of how many attempts they make at getting it right. So these people take risks and are a constant buzz of activity as they try this and try that, until they find the right formula.

There is no appraisal methodology that I know of that tracks and measures a person’s effectiveness in making tries, and yet it is a key ingredient that separates the amazing ones from the commoners.

Against the flow

Standout people look to go against the flow; they observe the most common approach others would likely employ and they go in the opposite direction and do a 180.

“What if we did the reverse?” is a question that pushes them against the momentum of the common solution and exposes opportunities others can’t see. They look at a best practise and ponder what would happen if it were turned on its head. They love inventing “outrageous” methods and concepts and apply them to their work.

The owner of The Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas went totally against the flow when he decided to open a restaurant that offered ‘deathly’ food — the Triple Bypass Burger has 20,000 calories. Outrageous indeed!

A picture with words

The ONLY ones tell stories to bring their work to life and capture the imagination and support of those around them. They add emotional appeal to what they do. They know if others are only intellectually aligned with their work it’s insufficient to garner their unwavering support; they need to be emotionally hooked.

So they tell a story of what it would look like when their solution is implemented. For example, if it’s in customer service, marketing or sales, their story could describe the enhanced experience the customer will realize. There is no better way of defining the benefits of the solution being worked on than painting a picture of the outcome through a story.

Helpers

‘Unmatchables’ perform at nosebleed levels because they ask ‘How can I help?’ constantly, when engaging others to help resolve an issue

The only way teams can deliver is if they are able to do their work unencumbered by the internal grunge that typically gets in the way — policies, rules, procedures that are barriers to their progress.

Unmatchable performers make it their number one priority to cleanse the working environment of noise and clutter for their team mates, greasing the skids for people to deliver more than what is expected.

Looking through a different lens

‘Like-no-others’ look at opportunities in a way others don’t; they are constantly looking for different ways to achieve a task.

Every time they are presented with a challenge no matter how big or small, they ask themselves “How can I do this differently?”.
The need for these people to put their own twist on what they are doing pervades their thinking so that it is automatic; they don’t even think about it.

Let’s change the way we search for people who are truly remarkable; who are distinct from the common herd.

Measure how well individuals stand out from one another in performing their roles.

For it is this tribe we need leading our organizations.

Cheers
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 6.21.21 at 01:00 am by Roy Osing
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June 14, 2021

10 questions to find out if you’re really customer focused

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I’ll bet if I asked you if your organization has some level of being customer focused as a part of your business plan, you’d say “Of course”.

And you wouldn’t be alone.

Most, if not every company espouses the importance of providing their customers with awe-inspiring service; it’s generally a fundamental element of their overall strategy.

The issue for me is that even though ‘being customer focused’ is proclaimed as a leadership priority, when you look closely at the actions taken by employees to serve customers, there’s a big gap between the aspiration and reality.

The claim is simply that, an empty aspiration with no substance to support it.

So, let’s have some fun with this.

Here are 10 questions which, based on my 4+ decades of leadership experience involving customer service, point to the ones who are actually serious about delighting customers as opposed to those who like to talk about it but not do the hard work to deliver it.

If you answer ‘YES’ to 6 or more of the questions then you are serious about creating memories for the people you serve; if you answer ‘YES’  to less than half of the questions your words are outpacing your actions and you’re fooling yourself that you care about your customers.

Ok, so let’s begin. And be honest because you’re only hurting yourself if you falsify your responses.

▪️Do you have a formal customer service strategy in your organization?

▪️Does the compensation plan for executive leaders include a customer service component that accounts for at least 25% of their annual bonus?

▪️Do you formally measure how customers feel about the service experience they’ve had with you?

▪️Do you have a recognition and reward system that regularly honours ‘service heros’, employees who have gone above and beyond to serve a customer in an exemplary way?

▪️Do you measure how well internal customers are served by their internal suppliers recognizing that if internal customers are not served well, it is unlikely that real customers won’t be served well either?

▪️Do you have a specific program to eliminate the dumb rules in your organization that are constantly annoying your customers?

▪️Are your salespeople measured on how effective they are at discovering the secrets of their customers?

▪️Does marketing have a ’ME’ philosophy to create personalized value packages for your customers as opposed to a product flogging mentality?

▪️Is your customer service call center managed to enhance the customer experience as its primary responsibility with cost management taking a lesser role?

▪️Does your organization have a specific recovery strategy when a service mistake has been made and a customer is screwed over?

There you have it. Being customer focussed is more than a helium-filled slogan. It requires synchronization of every last part of the organization to work in harmony to achieve that goal.

How well did you do? Good or bad, I hope you stay on the path of doing a better job of taking care of the people who give you their hard earned money every day.

Cheers
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 6.14.21 at 05:52 am by Roy Osing
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June 7, 2021

How losing the top job can make you better off

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How losing the top job can make you better off.

If anyone had told me that one of the worst moments of my career would pay off in spades in the long run, I wouldn’t have believed it.

The position of president was up for grabs and I was one of the shortlisted candidates; it was a huge opportunity and a huge responsibility. (The company had $2-billion in sales at that point).

I suspected who else was in the running. All were colleagues in the company, all were people I respected, and all were people I wanted to beat – badly.

The selection process comprised the usual headhunter interviews and leadership testing, followed by an interview with the selection subcommittee of the board.

I nailed the headhunter component of the selection process and was told that I had the top scores from the testing.

Even though I thought I could have handled the board interview better (I didn’t handle the finance questions particularly well I thought), I didn’t think it was a disaster and I wasn’t concerned that it would destroy my chances to win the contest and grab the prize.

The day of reckoning arrived. The board chair called all executives into the boardroom to announce the winner of the battle for president.

I was very nervous and expectant; my adrenalin was rushing.

All eyes were on me as it was common knowledge that I considered myself to be the front runner for the job.

It was over in a heartbeat. One of my colleagues and a very good friend with whom I ‘grew up’ in the organization was the winner.

The words announcing his appointment had barely left the chair’s mouth when I was overcome by agonizing pain in my gut. I couldn’t take a breath.

I thought I was well prepared for a decision that could go against me.

I had done my premortem work — practising ‘hindsite in advance’ — to protect myself for a negative outcome by thinking through my ‘do not be surprised’ plan: the actions I would take if the outcome went against me.

I imagined that each of the candidates would win and I prepared response plans in my head in the eventuality one of them was selected.
My concern was that if I didn’t have a plan to deal with a negative outcome in real time, the surprise could very well cause me to say, look, or do something that would not serve my long-term career goals very well.

It’s one thing to have a plan but it’s quite another thing to have to execute a worst-case scenario in front of the board chair, my executive peers and my new boss.

Without hesitation – it must have been an involuntary response as I don’t recall consciously thinking about it – I arose from my chair, walked over to the winner and congratulated him in a heartfelt manner.

I made sure everyone could see it and could hear my words; I offered him my support and unwavering loyalty.

They were all surprised with how I handled the situation, given that they understood how much I wanted to be president.

The feedback I received was gratifying. My behaviour was deemed ‘mature,’ indicative of a senior executive leader who could take a punch in the gut and who could place the needs of the organization before his own.

My currency with the board and executive leadership team escalated. My career continued to be rewarding and I was given many exciting opportunities to learn and contribute to the organization’s success.

No one could have convinced me that losing a senior promotion such as this could ever be a long-term career sweetener that allowed me to learn, practise and develop my own dimensions of stand-out leadership.

But it did.

It’s all about how one deals with a bad hand. You can bail out screaming how unfair you’ve been treated, or you can look for a way to turn a bad lot into a prosperous outcome for everyone. And you can take a short term view or a long term perspective.

Muzzle your ego, suck it up and make the call with your long-term interests in mind.

P.S. In anyone’s career there are always going to be setbacks; no one ever gets to reach their career goals in a straight line — strategic meandering is the normal route.

Here’s my list of what you need to consider if you want to be a ‘survivor leader’ in the face of these body blows:

▪️ Always do what’s right for the organization even though it could place you at personal risk.

▪️ Shut your mouth — pause and breathe — and suck it up when you get hit with a disappointment.

▪️ Look to the horizon not your shoes when making a decision in a emotionally charged situation.

▪️ Go against the ‘popular’ advice when hit with a career blow. It may not feel good but it’s often the best course of action to take.

▪️ Keep working hard in the face of adversity and show ‘em what you got.

▪️ Be wary of advice from those close to you. Sometimes their judgement is more clouded by emotion than yours is.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 6.7.21 at 06:33 am by Roy Osing
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