January 25, 2005

LOYALTY. IS. EARNED.

                     

🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week

LOYALTY. IS. EARNED.

Customer loyalty isn’t created by points, programs or clever promotions. It’s earned by how an organization treats the customers it already has—every damn day.

Bold Decisions Create Extraordinary Businesses.

I hope it helps you create yours.

Stop trying to buy customer loyalty. EARN it.

Most organizations are obsessed with getting new customers.

More leads. More prospects. More acquisition campaigns.

Meanwhile, the people who already chose them are treated like yesterday’s news.

That’s nuts.

Your existing customers have already done the difficult thing.

They chose you.

Now give them compelling reasons to keep choosing you.

Loyalty isn’t something you own.

It’s something you earn every damn day.

⚡ 7 Ways to Make Loyalty Happen

Here’s how I did it.

🎯 #1 — Nail the basics.

Before you try to DAZZLE people, make damn sure your basic product or service works.

Every time.

Customers don’t care about your fancy loyalty program if your core service is unreliable.

Deliver what you promised.

Reliability isn’t sexy. But without it, everything else is lipstick.

🤩 #2 — Create Dazzling Moments™.

Good service isn’t enough.

Create experiences people don’t expect.

Something that makes them think:

“WOW! I didn’t expect THAT.”

That’s a Dazzling Moment™.

It doesn’t have to be expensive.

It has to be personal, relevant and unexpected.

That’s what people remember—and talk about.

🛟 #3 — Turn OOPS! into loyalty.

Things will go wrong.

Guaranteed.

What matters is what you do after you screw up.

That’s OOPS! Service Recovery.

Own it.

Apologize.

Fix it FAST.

Then do something unexpected to recover the customer’s trust.

Don’t defend the mistake.

Recover the relationship.

❤️ #4 — Hire Human Being Lovers.

Stop hiring people simply because they have the right résumé.

Hire people who love serving other human beings.

You can teach systems, processes and product knowledge.

It’s a hell of a lot harder to teach someone to care.

I hired for goosebumps.

People who got a charge out of helping someone.

Customers can FEEL the difference.

👍 #5 — Build a Say YES!™ culture.

Most organizations have accumulated rules designed to protect themselves.

And customers pay the price.

Build an Organizational Instinct™ to solve customer problems rather than defend organizational policies.

Give your people permission to Say YES!™.

Start Killing Dumb Rules™ that prevent them from doing it.

Customers shouldn’t have to fight your organization to do business with you.

👟 #6 — Lead by Serving Around™.

Get out of the office.

Talk to the people actually serving customers.

Ask them:

“How can I help?”

Then remove the barriers preventing them from executing your Strategic Game Plan™.

Serve the people who serve the customer.

That’s leadership.

🎁 #7 — Reward loyalty BEFORE acquisition.

This one drives me crazy.

A company advertises a spectacular deal.

An existing customer wants it.

“Sorry. New customers only.”

Really?

You’ll give a stranger a better deal than someone who has been paying you for years?

Backwards.

Give your loyal customers first shot at your best deals.

Make them feel special.

Because they ARE.

💥 The takeaway.

Customer loyalty isn’t a marketing program.

It’s the consequence of how you behave.

Do the basics brilliantly. Surprise people. Recover when you screw up. Hire people who care. Say YES!™. Serve your people. Reward loyalty.

Give customers reasons to WANT to stay.

Stop chasing loyalty.

Start behaving in ways that deserve it.

🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?

🎙️ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION™ for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business.

✍🏻 Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.

Extraordinary businesses aren’t built by ordinary decisions.

They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.

Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 1.25.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

January 22, 2005

Execution Gets 80%. Strategy Gets the Other 20%.

                     

🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week

Stop Overthinking Strategy. Get Obsessed With Execution.

Bold Decisions Create Extraordinary Businesses.

I hope it helps you create yours.

Most organizations have growth backwards.

They spend enormous amounts of time trying to perfect their strategy—and then treat execution as something that happens after the planning meeting.

I learned to do the opposite.

Loosen up on strategy. Tighten up on execution.

On my journey from startup to more than A BILLION in annual sales, I learned that strategy without execution is merely an interesting conversation.

🎯 Get Your Strategy Just About Right™

You can’t create a perfect strategy.

Customers change. Competitors move. Unexpected opportunities appear. And occasionally the market delivers a body blow you never saw coming.

So stop trying to predict everything.

Get your strategy Just About Right™ and put most of your energy into execution.

Think roughly 20% strategy. 80% execution.

I call this Head West™.

Know where you’re going without pretending you can predict every turn along the way.

My Strategic Game Plan™ was designed for exactly that purpose. It answers four questions:

HOW BIG? — Declare your 24-month revenue growth objective.

WHO to SERVE? — Choose the Customer Groups with the potential to deliver HOW BIG.

WHAT do they CRAVE? — Discover what those chosen customers repeatedly care about and reward.

HOW will you COMPETE and WIN? — Create The ONLY One™ that separates you from the Herd of Sameness™ and addresses what your WHO cares about.

Now you have direction.

Stop planning. Start moving.

🔥 Ride the Execution™

Execution is where strategy meets reality.

It’s where assumptions get tested and the plan gets smarter.

Execute. Learn. Adjust.

That’s Be Imperfect FAST™.

Create Line of Sight™ so everyone understands how their job contributes to the Strategic Game Plan™.

Lead by Serving Around. Get close to the people doing the work, ask “How can I help?” and remove barriers.

Cleanse The Inside. Kill dumb rules. Simplify processes. Reduce touch points and friction.

Hire for Goosebumps™.

You can teach skills. You can’t train people to like people.

And create Dazzling Moments™ that surprise customers and give them reasons to stay.

🚀 What’s Your Next Audacious Move™?

Stop polishing the plan.

Get your strategy Just About Right™.

Then move.

Execute. Learn. Adjust.

And keep moving.

Because growth isn’t produced by the plan you write.

It’s produced by what your organization does with it.

🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?

🎙️ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION™ for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business.

✍🏻 Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.

Extraordinary businesses aren’t built by ordinary decisions.

They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.

Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 1.22.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

January 18, 2005

Put Common Sense Back In The Room

                   

🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week

PUT COMMON SENSE BACK IN THE ROOM!

Bold Decisions Create Extraordinary Businesses.

I hope it helps you create yours.

There’s something missing in too many organizations today.

Common sense.

We have more data. More technology. More policies. More processes. More AI.

And somehow, organizations still make ridiculously stupid decisions.

A customer has a simple problem, but the employee can’t solve it because “the policy doesn’t allow it.”

A process has 14 steps when three would do.

A rule created 10 years ago is still followed even though nobody remembers why it exists.

And when someone asks, “Why the hell are we doing this?”

The answer is usually:

“That’s the way we do it.”

🚨 People stop thinking and start complying

Organizations love structure.

Rules. Policies. Procedures. Approval levels. Technology.

Some are necessary.

But eventually the machinery takes over.

Instead of asking:

“What makes sense here?”

People ask:

“What does the process say I’m allowed to do?”

That’s when common sense disappears.

And customers pay the price.

💥 Build common sense into your Organizational Instinct™

The real test comes when a customer has a problem.

What does your organization instinctively do?

Does the employee reach for the policy manual?

Explain why something can’t be done?

Pass the customer to someone else?

Or do they immediately think:

“How can I solve this for them?”

That’s Organizational Instinct™ — the natural, habitual response an organization has when faced with a customer problem.

Extraordinary organizations instinctively solve problems rather than defend organizational policies.

That’s common sense turned into organizational behaviour.

You shouldn’t need a management meeting every time something unusual happens.

Your people should know what comes first:

Solve the customer’s problem.

Give them permission to think. Permission to challenge.

Permission to Say YES!™ when common sense says YES!

🎯 Apply The Common Sense Test™

Take every rule, policy, process and customer touch point and ask:

“Does this make sense for the customer?”

If the answer is NO, don’t defend it.

Fix it.

If a process creates unnecessary friction, simplify it.

If a rule gets in the way of solving a customer problem, kill it.

If employees need permission to do something obviously right, give them the authority to act.

Kill Dumb Rules™. Cut The CRAP™. Remove whatever prevents people from exercising good judgement for the customer.

🚀 The Audacious Move™

Put common sense back in the room.

And make it part of your Organizational Instinct™.

When a customer problem hits, your people shouldn’t instinctively ask:

“What does the policy say?”

They should ask:

“What makes sense for this customer?”

Then give them the freedom to do it.

Because common sense isn’t really missing.

Too many organizations have simply trained it out of their people.

🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?

🎙️ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION™ for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business and having a remarkable career.

✍🏻 Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.

Extraordinary careers aren’t built by ordinary decisions. They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.

Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 1.18.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

January 17, 2005

Disney Doesn’t Talk Service. It Bakes It In.

                   

🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week

Disney Doesn’t Talk Service. It Bakes It In.

Bold Decisions Create Extraordinary Businesses.

I hope it helps you create yours.

A couple of weeks ago, we interviewed Vance Morris on the popular Fast & Furious podcast.

Vance spent 10 years as a leader at Walt Disney World, so we were particularly interested in what he learned about The Disney Service Experience.

Disney has an extraordinary ability to create guest loyalty.

But here’s what struck me during our conversation:

The magic isn’t magic at all.

It’s the result of deliberate leadership and operating practices that are remarkably consistent with many of the principles I’ve developed over decades of building businesses.

Here are four that jumped out at me.

👀 Visibility With Purpose

Disney leaders don’t lead exclusively from offices.

They are visible where the work is being done.

But I don’t believe simply “walking around” accomplishes much. I call it Visibility With Purpose

The leader is there looking for ways to help people successfully execute the strategy.

The question is simple:

“How can I help?”

That’s precisely what I mean by Serving Around™.

Leadership isn’t about checking up on people. It’s about getting close enough to the action to remove barriers, solve problems and help people succeed.

❤️ Hire Nice People

Vance made another point that sounds ridiculously simple:

Disney hires nice people.

You can teach processes. You can teach procedures. You can teach someone how the business works.

It’s much harder to teach someone to genuinely care about another human being.

That’s why I’ve always believed in Hire for Goosebumps™.

Hire people who love humans. People who instinctively want to help. People who get emotional satisfaction from creating a great experience for someone else.

Then give them the tools to do it.

🎭 Your Purpose Is Bigger Than Your Job Description

At Disney, employees learn that their purpose goes far beyond performing the tasks written in their job description.

They are there to live what the organization stands for.

And leadership continually reinforces it until those behaviours become instinctive.

That distinction is important.

I talk about Line of Sight™—people understanding the direct connection between what they do every day and what the organization is trying to achieve.

But Disney takes it further.

I call it Organizational Instinct™.

Think of it as Line of Sight on steroids.

The objective is to create a culture where people don’t have to stop and consult a policy manual every time something unexpected happens.

They instinctively know how the organization expects them to respond.

At Disney, that instinct is built around creating the guest experience.

In my Code, Organizational Instinct™ is the natural, habitual response an organization has when faced with a customer situation.

It’s not simply:

“What does my job description tell me to do?”

It’s:

“What does this organization stand for—and what should I do right now to live it?”

That’s when values stop being words on a wall.

They become the way the organization behaves.

🔄 Design the Experience From the Customer In

Disney obsessively thinks about the guest journey.

I describe this through Cycles of Service™.

A Cycle of Service maps every touch point between a customer and the organization—from the customer’s point of view, not the organization’s.

Do it for every process involving customer engagement.

Then examine every touch point.

Where can we simplify it?

Where can we remove friction?

Where can we add value?

Where can we improve the flow of value to the customer?

This is Cleanse The Inside™ applied directly to the customer experience.

🚀 The Disney Lesson

Our conversation with Vance reinforced something I’ve believed for years:

Remarkable customer loyalty isn’t created by slogans, training programs or telling employees to “provide great service.”

It happens when leadership, hiring, culture and operating processes all reinforce the experience you intend to deliver.

Disney has been doing it for decades.

Different language perhaps.

Different context.

But remarkably similar disciplines.

The lesson for every business is simple:

Don’t leave customer loyalty to chance.

Bake it into the way your organization operates.

🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?

🎙️ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION™ for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business and having a remarkable career.

✍🏻 Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.

Extraordinary careers aren’t built by ordinary decisions. They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.

Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 1.17.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink