Be Different or be dead

June 14, 2012

Why a ‘high definition’ moment is critically important to your business

Source: Unsplash

Why a ‘high definition’ moment is critically important to tour business.

A high definition moment is an interaction between a customer an an organization that is jam-packed with emotion

HD moments either leave your customer breathless or pissed-off. Gasping or in pain. Dazzled or postal. They are vivid in terms of the feelings that are created between person and company.

They are of such high resolution that the picture of what you are experiencing is easy to describe and relate to others (both good and bad news depending on the outcome).

HD Moments are, as SAS CEO Jan Carlzon coined Moments of Truth when advocacy bonds are established with customers or enemies are created.

Or as Seth Godin proclaims, when sneezers who spread your good word to others are born for your organization or protestors scream how crummy you are.

High definition moments are strategic

Loyalty is either created or destroyed. Any organization must as a strategic imperative create HD moments for their fans if they are going to thrive and survive.

How do you create HD moments?

It’s about building a team that can create these kinds of feelings every time their organization touches their customers:

> HAPPY
> AMAZED
> WARM
> FUZZY
> DAZZLED
> BREATHLESS
> GASPING
> SURPRISED
> IMPRESSED
> MAGICAL
> SMITTEN
> HONORED
> IMPORTANT
> HEARD

How often have you felt this way when doing business with a company? How often have you felt warm and fuzzy when interacting with an automated voice response system? Never I suspect.

Consider the HD moment as the driving force in architecting customer interactions in your organization

Assign a senior person as The Chief High Definition Moments Officer to make it matter in your organization and establish a high priority for it.

Recruit people who are at ease with honouring others. Establish rules and policies that leave your fans breathless.

Engineer automated systems to surprise people.

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

• Posted 6.14.12 at 10:00 am by Roy Osing
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May 24, 2012

How a trauma can be a great teacher for marketing

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How a trauma can be a great teacher for marketing.

Riots. Horrific Accidents. Shootings. Natural Disasters. All of these events can have a damaging impact on a person. And in most cases, experts are brought in to counsel the victims and others that are touched in some dramatic way.

Trauma counselling operates on the simple premise that each person’s reaction to a cataclysmic event will be different.

And to effectively treat that person you need to first, understand their reality and second, design a remedy that reflects their specific needs.

If personalized treatment is a natural thing in trauma cases, why do organizations have difficulty doing the same thing for their customers as business as usual?

Why do they continue to push a single product solution to each of their customers?

Why do they create vanilla services they then try to market to everyone?

Why do they behave as if individual needs, wants and desires don’t exist and that everyone is the same?

Let’s take a page from trauma management and apply what they do to everyday business.

Trauma marketing principles:

▪️ Each person in your target market is unique in some way. Attitudes. Biases. Beliefs. Lifestyles. Discover their uniqueness. Define it precisely for each and every one of them;

▪️ Build the ‘remedy’ that fits their profile precisely. ONLY for her and no one else. Built for her. To reflect her character mould;

▪️ Treat them with care and sensitivity. Ask for feedback on your remedy. Adjust it to better fit her requirements;

▪️ Pretend you are entering a disaster scene and have to treat distraught people who may be scarred for life.

Look for their special needs and cater to them accordingly.

People are all different; personalize the solution and treat with care.

Interesting that we can look to other professions to see how they deal with humans and get insights into how our customers should be treated.

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

• Posted 5.24.12 at 10:00 am by Roy Osing
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May 21, 2012

5 easy ways to waste your time and blow your career

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5 easy ways to waste your time and blow your career.

Having a successful career requires that you make the best use of the time you have available.

But if you really want to be ineffective, and a time waster here are 5 things you can do:

Put a to do list together of at least 10 things to be done
This will show your intent to do a lot of things but will guarantee that you will make little progress in any of them despite the huge amount of time you spend on them. Brainstorming and then multitasking is a great way to look really busy and waste time.

Kiss up to your boss
Focus on what THEY want. Ignore the priorities of the organization and just look to your boss for a sense of what you should be doing. Devote your day to asking what you can do for them. Ignore your business plan.

Write activity reports on what you’ve been up to
Include every move note detail — meetings, who were there, conferences attended and so on.
Share your reports with everyone you can think of. Make sure people know you’re a busy bee.

Send emails when you have something to say
And make every message sound complicated because it communicates how important you are.
Never have face-to-face meetings with people even virtually. They can be upsetting sometimes and could force you to answer questions you’d rather avoid.

Stay late at the office
And make sure everyone knows you’re doing it. The more time you put in, the more activities you are engaged in. Therefore you get the most out of the time available. And be sure to include your hours in your activity reports along with a complicated sounding reason you decided to put in the extra time.

It’s not easy mismanaging your time, but if you follow these 5 actions you’d be surprised about how little you will accomplish.

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

• Posted 5.21.12 at 10:22 am by Roy Osing
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May 16, 2012

Why your language must change if you want to be customer focused

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Why your language must change if you want to be customer focused.

If you are like most organizations, you have your own language.

Whether you are in the communications business, the law profession, or medicine, over time people develop a vocabulary specific to you; it is understood by all.

The problem is that your unique language is reflective of looking inward to your products, technology, systems, and operating procedures rather than outward to your customers.

If you don’t ‘customerize’ your language you can hardly say that you are addicted to serving customers in every way possible.
The words and music don’t match.

In addition behavior can’t change to be outwardly directed to the customer if the internally focused language implies the opposite.

A few examples.

‘Calls processed’

Most organizations have call center operations which typically handle sales and service responsibilities. The productivity objective of most call centers is to process as many calls with as few resources as possible. Other metrics include call speed of answer and average call handling time.

The common denominator of this operation is the word ‘call’. You process calls. You answer incoming calls as fast as you can. You try and minimize the length of each call to maximize productivity.

The problem is that the customer is missing in action. If the call is the focus with implied productivity measures, it is hardly a wonder that taking care of the customer on the call gets lost as a priority.

Employees are more interested in call productivity — because they are rated on it — than creating memorable experiences for customers.

The solution is to eliminate the call processing mentality and start talking about serving customers.

Start talking about the number of customers served; customer wait time and customer serving time.

‘Customer commitment’

At least the customer is in this expression, but it lacks the personal dimension that is so important in serving customers well.

I like the word ‘promise’. Companies make commitments; people make promises. There is much more serving power in customer promises than customer commitments.

The productivity metrics become much more meaningful and visceral under the promises notion. What % of customer promises did you keep? How many promises did you break? Who in the organization is the best at keeping customer promises?

WOW! Much more powerful and easy for employees to relate to than the company commitment paradigm.

To change your language to reflect a customer focus, follow this action plan:

▪️ Develop a dictionary of your current language;

▪️ Identify the word/expressions that you understand but which lack the punch of passionately serving customers;

▪️ Create customer words to replace the internal jargon focused ones;

▪️ Change internal success metrics to reflect your customerized language. For example measure promises kept rather than commitments met;

▪️ Communicate to employees why you are changing your language; emphasize that serving customers is a critical element of your business plan.

You can’t have it both ways: saying that customers are your most precious asset yet through your language highlighting the internal fabric of your organization.

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

• Posted 5.16.12 at 09:13 am by Roy Osing
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