Be Different or be dead

April 23, 2012

Why are loyal customers sometimes really too much trouble?

Source: Unsplash

Why are loyal customers sometimes really too much trouble?

The people who choose to be loyal to our organization and consume our products and services are a pain

They are annoying.

They come late and expect us to stay open.

They come early and expect us to open.

They don’t like some of our staff; they have “attitude”.

They change their mind.

They are too sensitive about getting their needs met.

They tell their friends how bad we are when we make a mistake or break a promise.

They are always looking for a special deal.

They are inflexible; always want to get exactly what they asked for.

They always criticize us but rarely praise what we do.

They complain about our prices.

They expect to be served by friendly staff regardless of the crumby day we are having.

They never seem to be satisfied regardless of what we do for them.

They think they are the only ones we have to take care of. It’s all about them.

They stress-out our staff.

They get upset about our policies without understanding them.

They shop around; their loyalty is inconsistent. They don’t seem to appreciate what we do for them.

Some days it makes you think another line of work would be preferable.

Problem is you can’t avoid customers. Gotta figure out how to live with these unpredictable and demanding folks since we can’t live without ‘em.

What’s your gotta live with ‘em’ strategy?

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

• Posted 4.23.12 at 10:19 am by Roy Osing
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April 16, 2012

3 simple ways to protect your most valued customers

Source: Pexels

Who’s on your endangered list?

Your top ten (or 20 or 30…) revenue producers. The folks that give you a disproportionate amount of your cash flow. The people who have been loyal to you for years.

They give a damn about you and what you do.

The people who, if you lose, will cause major harm to your business. The people who, when they leave, will spread a negative word about you to their friends and associates.

What are you doing to protect them from competitive assault and to immunize them from catching someone else’s ‘value virus’?

Here are 3 things that have worked for me.

1. Engage with them regularity

Call them personally. Never delegate this to others. They are extremely important to your well-being so what is more important than giving them your personal attention? Nothing!
Book it on your calendar. Make it matter. Put it ahead of everything else. Never postpone or cancel.

2. Offer any special promotion the them first

Never try to entice someone to leave their current supplier and come over to you with a promotional deal without providing a better deal to your loyalists first.
It’s an insult to your fans to offer a special deal to a non-customer while ignoring those who made you successful.

3. Establish a dedicated customer service line for this group

Special customers deserve special treatment everyday. Your “endangered species team” should be all-ways on for them 24X7 If they have literally ANY issue, your team will be there to take care of them.

Make a big deal of this. Communicate “the team” internally and explain why you are doing it. Have a personal face-to-face meeting with each endangered customer and tell them what you are doing and why. This is your opportunity to reiterate how important they are and how much they mean to your organization.

3 things that will prevent your most critical loyal customers from entering the zone of extinction.

Have a go.

You have everything to lose if you don’t.

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

• Posted 4.16.12 at 10:06 am by Roy Osing
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April 14, 2012

Why being comfortable in your current position can destroy you

Source: Unsplash

Why being comfortable in your current position can destroy you.

It is very easy to get into the relaxing position of staying the current course of your business

Continuing to manage your organizational affairs with the assumption that what got you here will get you where you need to get to.

This is momentum management.

The reality is that the marketplace rarely lets us get away with this. It is always changing as a result of demand, competitive and economic factors.

The most common case is economic fluctuations which can ravage businesses that continue to do things the way they have always done them assuming that eventually they will pay off.

When things are going well (growing demand for your services, loyal customers and healthy market position) we can disguise certain inefficiencies but when things are not going well we stand “raw naked” in the marketplace completely exposed and will be punished for our inadequacies.

When the wind is blowing fast enough, even turkeys can fly. But as soon as that wind dies down, the turkeys start dropping — Steve Gedeon, Ryerson Entrepreneur Institute, Ted Rogers School of Business .

The point is that in the face of constant unpredictability you need to be driving change in your organization, you need to be a change leader.

You need to be forcing organizational discontinuity to prevent the momentum management dilemma from happening.

I appreciate that change, particularly being the forcing agent of it, is uncomfortable. But if you want to be identified with moving your team successfully into the future and avoiding the recessionary road kill you really have no choice.

The essence of change leadership is to initiate new creative ways to cause an overwhelming distinction between you and your competitors.

To stand-out not fit-in.

And to take responsibility for this change within you organization. To take risks. To make mistakes but to learn from them.

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

• Posted 4.14.12 at 10:18 am by Roy Osing
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April 12, 2012

Why this excellent book on ‘Delivering Happiness’ will blow your mind

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Why this excellent book on ‘Delivering Happiness’ will blow your mind.

This book fits into the category of timelessness. Written several years ago, it takes us through the creative things Tony Hsieh — may he Rest In Peace — as leader introduced to make Zappos an organization that ‘delivered happiness’ to its customers.

His ideas and methods are as relevant today as when the book was written. In fact my observation is that organizations today are doing a poorer job at delivering WOW! service than ever, despite what they say about themselves. It should be a must-read for today’s leaders.

This was my review in 2012. It’s still one of the best guides for leaders who want to do more than simply aspire to have a customer focussed culture, they want to deliver it.

I rarely find an organization that practices what I fundamentally believe is required to distinguish oneself in the market to succeed and survive. My regular reader will know that I am relentless in advocating proven and practical practices to create distance between yourself and the competitive herd.

I am a ‘simple’, ‘execute’ and ONLY strategy hawk, a ‘value’ marketing guy, a ‘relationship’ sales believer and a ‘dazzling experience’ customer server

This book is evidence of a leader that also believed in these principles and built a phenomenally successful business by relentlessly applying them.

Tony has created an interesting and enjoyable read by his informal captivating writing style. You don’t have to ‘fight the words’ on every page. You find yourself easily consuming page after page effortlessly. The recounting of his early years and what he did to prepare himself for ‘The Show’ was informative and to the analytical hemisphere in each of us made it easy to predict his future as a business entrepreneur.

But what impressed me was the rich examples of what he did to establish Zappos as a stand-out company; one that focused on a single value dimension to attract and build a loyal customer base; one that literally created a culture that served his chosen strategic direction.

In no particular order, here is a sample of the climax learning moments for me in Delivering Happiness:

▪️ Never outsource a core competency. He unlike others resisted the economic temptation to outsource his call center operations;

▪️ You always have a choice of which table to sit at (from his poker days). Choose the table - pick the customer group to serve - that maximizes your chances of success. WHO to serve;

▪️ He had an audacious goal of generating $1 Billion in revenue by 2010. This growth goal drove all activity in the business. An excellent example of HOW BIG in action;

▪️ Lifelong learning through the Zappos Library. People make their business - everyone’s business!

▪️ THE strategic driving force behind Zappos is to create WOW! experiences for customers, employees, suppliers and owners. Tight strategy. Easy to understand. Easy to relate to;

▪️ All activities are aligned to the service experience goal. Direct line of sight for all people in the organization. Random Acts of WOW-ness are expected and are a part of performance management;

▪️ When Zappos can’t supply what the customer wants, they are directed to research their competition. They are driven by the relationship not the short term sale. Lose a sale but save the customer;

▪️The language of Zappos is all about the customer — Not Call Centers, but The Customer Loyalty Team;

▪️ They created, published AND - more importantly - practice the Ten Core Values of Zappos;

▪️ The #1 Core Value = Deliver WOW Through Service;

▪️ ‘The power of 1%’, a blog posted by Alfred the CFO/COO. A brilliant example of ‘get a nano-inch’ of progress FAST. Increments of advancement add up to impressive performance improvements;

▪️ Weirdness is promulgated as a differential advantage. Tony’s words “We want the company to have a unique and memorable personality”;

▪️ Build a pipeline of people rather than thinking of individuals as assets. You need to build a steady stream of people with the skills and competencies you need. A Pipeline Team delivers courses to various departments.

As an author I was WOW’d by the way Tony and crew distributed the advanced copy of his book for comment. Delivering Happiness was made available to bloggers who post blog articles regularly with a ‘promise’ to blog the book on the Publication date June 7, 2010.

What a slick method of, first, getting the Advanced Copy out to a large group of people; second, receiving complementary promotion of his book, and, third, gathering a repository of testimonials for his book. Brilliant example of how Authors can use Social Media to leverage their work. Nice!

Rarely have I seen such a cornucopia of ‘stuff’ that not only mirrors the business practices I believe in but which also have been executed in the real world. Tony has personally breathed life into the notions that people espouse as the right things to do. He did it and he nailed it in his book.

I strongly recommend Delivering Happiness to anyone looking to build something successful and memorable.

Cheers,
Roy

Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 4.12.12 at 10:00 am by Roy Osing
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