Be Different or be dead

November 13, 2023

How Devoted Customer ‘Heroes’ Make Unparalleled Winners

How Devoted Customer ‘Heroes’ Make Unparalleled Winners.

Looking for a simple Move that will transform your organization into an unmatched high performing machine?

As I’ve said many times before, it’s not the technology, products and services that make teams standout in the marketplace.
Virtually all competitors have access to equivalent technologies and their product features are all basically the same, give or take.

Customer experiences, on the other hand, is the playing field where winners are created. Organizations that deliver dazzling, ‘gasp-worthy’ and emotionally drenched experiences for their customers always come out on top of the competitor heap.

These organizations understand that it’s the customer-infused culture that consistently delivers WOW! customer moments, and often in ways that create a great deal of discomfort for the leadership hierarchy.

My ‘Customer Hero’ Move is an incredibly powerful loyalty building tool that essentially dispels the ‘formality’ of an organization—hierarchical structure, internal rules & policies—in order to take care of a customer and their immediate needs.

Now a definition.

The Customer Hero is someone who advocates for a customer on the inside of an organization. This is the person who ‘does battle’ with all the rules, policies and red tape that is preventing the customer from getting what they want.

This is the ‘warrior on the inside’ who fights for the rights of the customer in the sea of restrictions that exercise the needs of the organization and not the customer.

And this is the zealot who is prepared to put themselves at risk and fight against the organizational ‘injustices’ that sometimes unfairly disable customer rights at the expense of horrific experiences and body blows to customer loyalty.

We need cultures that honor Customer Heroes.

We need Customer Advocacy to be something organizations WANT to do to themselves because they understand how important it is to long term growth and performance.

We need organizations that exist to serve the customer even though at times we have to ‘suck it up’, admit that one of our rules or policies is DUMB and break it for the greater good of long term customer loyalty.

We need leaders to get over themselves, lose their ego and practice what they preach. All too many espouse the Holy Grail of creating memorable customer experiences, yet don’t ‘eat their own dog food’.

They force policy down the customer’s throat and punish the employee who fights against it in order to actually deliver what the customer experience demands.

It’s time.

Time to declare the Customer Hero philosophy in our organizations and espouse advocating against disempowering processes that destroy customer loyalty.

Time to make customer advocacy inside our organizations a priority plank of our Values platform.

”We will be the customer’s Hero in our organization, fighting for their rights at all cost.

Time to honor and reward those Heroes who, against inertia and resistance, push forward unrelentingly to advocate for their customer.

And it’s time to assume the customers’ pain when they are forced to fight for their rights on their own.

It’s time to do the audacious thing.

Cheers,
Roy
My 75+ Podcast Shows that will change your life.

My Podcast Show Audacious Moves to A BILLION.

My BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series.

‘Audacious’ is my latest.

• Posted 11.13.23 at 06:25 am by Roy Osing
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October 30, 2023

Why Dumb Rules must be destroyed if you are to be successful

Source: Unsplash

Why Dumb Rules must be destroyed if you are to be successful.

What’s a ‘Dumb Rule’?

A ‘Dumb Rule’ is an internal rule, policy or procedure that simply doesn’t make any sense to a customer. It annoys them!

They are so passionate about the alleged stupidity of the rule that they refuse to do business with an organization because of it.

They run from the organization screaming to their friends how terrible their service is.

A ‘Dumb Rule’ is conceived generally as a customer engagement control mechanism.

Dealing with Dumb Rules is rarely viewed by an organization as an important part of strategy development, but attacking Dumb Rules was one of many tactics I used to improve the execution of our strategic game plan as we marched to A BILLION IN SALES.

The Dumb Rules initiative was part of my ‘Say YES!’ strategy which had the objective of removing the roadblocks that prevented people from delivering superlative experiences for customers.

I made eliminating Dumb Rules an integral part of our Strategic Game Plan.

Why are Dumb Rules so important to a business?

▪️They control customer engagement and get in the way of making it easy for customers to engage with an organization.
▪️They get in the way of building customer loyalty.
▪️They result in customers telling others how ‘bad’ and uncaring an organization is.
▪️They obstruct the provision of delightful customer experiences.
▪️They introduce unproductive ‘friction’ in a business that prevents seamless delivery of products and services to customers.
▪️Employee engagement suffers when frontline people have to engage Rules that customers hate.

What if the Dumb Rule can’t be eliminated because it’s a legal or regulatory requirement?

Yes, certain rules are required by law or regulatory governance.

First of all do your due diligence to make sure that the claim is real and not the posturing of a champion who doesn’t want their rule or policy removed.

If the rule is necessary, however, then at least look for ways to make it customer friendly.

And reconsider how the rule is enforced with a customer; what communications strategy is used. Is it friendly and helpful or is it demanding and intimidating?
Take the time to design the customer communications content to minimize an adverse reaction; it’s not always possible but it is worth considering doing nevertheless.

If you are able to expunge even 20% of the dumb rules you have in your organization, your customers will reward you with their loyalty and your reputation will soon attract new customers as well.

What is an example of a of Dumb Rule?

One of my favorite dumb rule stories took place at The Mirage Hotel Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. There is a wonderful deli in the casino that serves the best reuben sandwiches ever but the customer friendliness of their policies sucks.

My wife and I showed up late one night and asked the hostess for a booth and were told flatly that our request was not possible since it was their policy to offer booths only for parties of 6 or more.

I get that management wanted to maximize the check value from these specific seats, but in this case the store was empty save my wife and me! Maximizing revenue beyond the two of us was an impossibility!

How does a business go about killing Dumb Rules?

✔️Make it a strategic imperative in the organization’s strategic game plan. Leadership issue to make it matter.

✔️Establish Dumb Rule Committees. Ask frontline people what dumb rules they are constantly having to deal with.

Frontline people know the rules and policies that annoy customers but do you have the courage to listen?

I created Dumb Rules Committees in the operations areas of my organization and appointed a leader for each committee.
Their responsibility was to seek out and destroy (or otherwise modify) rules that made no sense to customers and drove them crazy.

Fun was had by all over this concept.

Everyone, particularly the frontline, welcomed this initiative; they all were passionate about the purpose; we made real progress.

We had contests among the committees to see who could come up with the most dumb rules to kill, and we celebrated the winners.

The committees were expected to not only identify rules, policies and procedures that annoyed customers, they were also charged with the responsibility of eradicating them by taking whatever action was necessary to get it done.

My role and that of my senior leaders was to remove any roadblocks preventing the committees from getting a rule dealt with.

✔️Embed customers in the Rule design process. Design your Rule system with the customer in mind.
They will be the best ‘cleansing agents’ you could ever ask for. And they will love you asking for their help in your business.

✔️Get customer input through service quality surveys. ASK THEM about your rules and policies, and be guided by what they have to say.

✔️Hold leaders accountable to eliminate Dumb Rules. Include the task in their annual performance plan.

Dumb Rules prevent effective execution of your strategic game plan.

Irradiate them and watch the magic!

Cheers,
Roy
My 75+ Podcast Shows that will change your life.

My Podcast Show Audacious Moves to A BILLION.

My BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series.

‘Audacious’ is my latest.

• Posted 10.30.23 at 05:53 am by Roy Osing
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August 17, 2023

5 crazy simple ways to really take your customer’s breath away

Source: Pexels

5 crazy simple ways to really take your customer’s breath away.

Everyone’s talking about creating memorable experiences for their customers.

Experiences are the new black in the strategy world. Deliver amazing experiences and superlative performance follows.

There’s a great deal of talk about why creating delightful experiences is a key strategic imperative for organizations, but it seems to stop there.

There’s not too much granularity on HOW practically to go about DOING it.

So I’m going to fill that void for you.

These 5 Moves were instrumental in our ability to create and deliver quality experiences for our customers as we grew an early stage internet company to A BILLION IN ANNUAL SALES.

Our goal wasn’t to just make the customer’s experience with us enjoyable, it was to create a set of engagement dynamics that would literally ‘take their breath away’.

#1. Be consistent. — There are two components to Service Quality: Core Service—the product or service that you provide—and The Service Experience—how people FEEL when they engage with you to receive your Core Service.

Lesson #1. You can’t take their breath away if you don’t first deliver your Core Service flawlessly and consistently.

If you stumble in delivering your product, THIS is what they will remember! Anything you do after that to make their experience with you amazing is a wasted effort unless you also have an OOPS! Recovery Strategy in place.

So, to earn the right to be in the Memorable Experiences Game, you need to get your core service right.

Deliver it consistently 24X7X365.

Core Service is the prerequisite platform on which WOW! experiences are built. If your Core Service sucks, you can’t be in the Customer Experience game.

#2. Be surprising.. — Deliver what you promise—your Core Service—AND surprise them with what they don’t expect.

Surprise Me! is the essence of a gaspworthy customer experience.

It’s actually the ‘shock and awe’ of the Customer Experience World.

Surprise Me! doesn’t have to be complicated (probably a statement on the mediocrity of customer service being provided today).

Find a way to Say Yes! to what the customer wants and you’re well on your way to surprising them and earning your ‘I just took their breath away’ badge.

#3. Be flexible.. — Flex to what the customer wants as opposed to trying to jam your stuff—rules, policies and procedures—down their throat.

Conflict is not the playground for creating memories.

Empower your frontline to bend your own rules in favor of the customer when it’s appropriate to do so. Trust that they will not sell you out and that they will protect your position when they are in the rule-bending mode.

Develop Empowerment Guidelines that place most of the power with the people dealing with customers and less power with those that supervise them.

#4. Be caring.. — Boring, right? How non-strategic is that?

Well, you can’t take their breath away if you don’t give a sh*t about them!

And if you don’t leave them gasping, they won’t be loyal to you.

And if they’re not loyal to you, your revenues will suffer.

And if your revenues suffer, your performance plummets.

And…

So, I would suggest that caring and empathy IS strategic and you better find a way to infuse the Customer Moment with as much of the ‘Caring Juice’ as you can.

How? Hire employees who actually like humans. You can teach them your business but you can’t teach or train them to ‘love homo sapiens’.

It’s a recruitment issue. Start hiring people who give you Goosebumps. NOW.

#5. Be easy.. — Have a ‘clean inside’. No Dumb Rules that customers hate, or grungy processes that customers resist following.

Make it easy for people to engage with you.

Remove the ‘pinch points’ in your engagement processes and let them flow with ease.

Enable people to deal with you, don’t control them and force them to comply with your internal systems and procedures.

And involve your customers in designing your rules, policies and procedures to get their input on what your ‘inside’ should look like to make it easy.

You can’t just declare that the Customer Experience is the Center of your universe. You have to put in place the actions to make it happen.

Make these 5 Moves, which successfully worked for me, and watch the gasping that results.

Cheers,
Roy
My 75+ Podcast Shows that will change your life.

My Podcast Show Audacious Moves to A BILLION.

My BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series.

‘Audacious’ is my latest.

• Posted 8.17.23 at 06:02 am by Roy Osing
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March 20, 2023

What’s the audacious (but simple) formula to take a startup to a BILLION in sales?

Is there a formula to take a startup to a BILLION in sales?

Yup. But it’s not just about sales. This is not a treatise on sales techniques; FAR FROM IT! In fact sales plays a minor role in what it takes to get a BILLION.

In my seventh book, “Audacious ’Unheard-of Ways’ I Took a Startup to A BILLION IN SALES”, (https://www.bedifferentorbedead.com/blog/item/1328) I share with you the formula I discovered over my four-decade career as an entrepreneur, CMO and president.

I hope you check out my book for the details, but here are 8 snippets I hope will tweak your interest:

1. Business plan — You won’t make a dent in the BILLION if you spend all your time trying to perfect your plan to get your strategic intent ‘perfect’. I will show you how to develop my BILLION business plan that gets your end game ‘just about right’ and focuses on execution as the source to learn and tweak it on the run.

2. Tailor-made solutions — BILLION dollars in sales doesn’t come from a mass market solution marketing machine, rather a healthy mix of mass customized and individual tailor-made solutions with ME-NOW as the primary focus.
I will give you a step-by-step method of doing it based on what worked for me as CMO.

3. Premium pricing — Pricing on the journey to a BILLION is about being a premium price business where the value provided to its customers commands higher prices than the competition. Discount pricing is for commodity players with mediocre sales and margins.
I will share my pricing secrets with you and show you how to play the high-price, high-sales game.

4. Elegant delivery — A key component of the BILLION sales stream is how solutions are delivered to customers. Delivery systems must be flawless.
This is basic stuff. Customers expect to get what they’ve bought in a straightforward way and when delivery systems don’t work their dissatisfaction is often expressed by complaining to their friends or moving to another supplier.
I will show you in simple terms how to flawlessly execute your plan and ensure your customers get what they want when they want it.

5. Caring service — A business that is capable of a BILLION in sales cares about its customers.
They actually have a culture that has moved beyond the normal strategy of providing excellent customer service to one where employees treat their colleagues and customers with the respect and empathy they deserve.
I will explain in detail how I created a service strategy for the organizations I led and the success that I had.

6. Serving leadership — A BILLION in sales comes from frontline functions supported by serving leaders.
They understand that superlative performance and unmatched results come from well trained employees working with the right tools and ‘100 % uptime’ systems and processes and minimal barriers and roadblocks to doing their jobs the way they need to be done.
Leadership plays a vital role in the effectiveness of delivering results by spending time with the frontline and other key delivery systems personnel asking the simple question: “How can I help?” and serving them in any way they can.
My success as a leader came from a blueprint I developed for myself and I’m going to take you through it so you can reap the same rewards as I did.

7. A win-your-business-everyday attitude — A BILLION in sales requires an attitude and culture that takes nothing for granted in terms of customer loyalty. These businesses know that, with so much competition and alternatives for their customers, they must earn the right to serve their customers everyday.
And that if they do much as lose focus on that purpose, they could lose business in a heartbeat.
Employees are coached to assume that their customer’s business is always up in the air and that they must fight for it with every customer engagement.
My approach to building strong teams is unique, and in my book you will learn to not only have a strong turned-on team, but also to do it in an unheard-of way.

8. Reaction DNA — You don’t earn a BILLION by having a strategy that successfully plays out the way it was originally intended; there are always unexpected ‘body blows’ that strike, which requires a business to react ‘in the moment’ to take it in a new direction.
These businesses have reaction as a basic element of their DNA. They absorb body blows effectively, re-vector their strategy and retain their sales momentum.
There’s a formula to create the organizational ability to respond to unforeseen events that shock you, and I will unveil it for you in specific detail.

These snippets only scratch the surface in terms of what I did to successfully take a startup business to a BILLION in sales.

For the full reveal, check out my new book,

Cheers,
Roy
My complete 7-book BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

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• Posted 3.20.23 at 07:27 am by Roy Osing
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