Be Different or be dead

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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March 24, 2012

Why customer complaints are an awesome way to grow your business

Source: Pexels

Why customer complaints are an awesome way to grow your business.

Do you have a service strategy?

Most organizations look at complaining customers as a necessary evil and part of the job that needs to be done, but which is not looked upon with a great deal of delight.

Customers complain, frontline employees try and explain the company’s position in hopes to appease the annoyed customer and the customer goes away either satisfied or even more angry.

Remarkable organizations treat a complaining customer as first — a source of customer learning — and second, as a potential opportunity to recover and actually build customer loyalty

Customer learning goes beyond traditional market research and is a continuous process of learning from customers what works and what doesn’t in your organization.

It focuses on every customer contact and seeks to drain as much information from the experience possible in order to enhance market performance.

A customer complaint is an excellent touch point from which to learn.

It may not always be pleasant for an employee but it can provide rich information for you. Some companies treat complaint getting as a key strategic imperative, and honour those who do a great job at it.

Great employees attract complaining customers

Some organizations measure the number of complaints each frontline person handles successfully and they recognize the best complaint getter. Interesting cultural philosophy.

A customer complaint could be a service recovery waiting to happen. If the complaint is the result of a company blunder, handling the complaint the right way might be the difference between you losing the customer forever and enhancing their loyalty to you.

The recovery practice is about fixing the problem and then doing the unexpected for the customer based on what you know about them.

If you give ‘em what they DON’T expect, they will be more impressed than if the problem never occurred in the first place. And they will give you an ‘A’ for your efforts.

Let’s stop talking about complaints and start calling them recovery opportunities

Develop the process to turn complaint handling into successful recoveries and train your people on how you want it done.

Measure their performance and communicate it far and wide internally.

Honor those that excel in doing it.

Who are your complaint handling heroes?

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

• Posted 3.24.12 at 10:25 am by Roy Osing
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March 10, 2012

How stories are an excellent way to execute your customer service strategy

Source: Pexels

How stories are an excellent way to execute your customer service strategy.

One of the best ways to make your customer service strategy come alive is storytelling.

Many companies use storytelling to breathe life into their vision of service and are effective in getting the message across.

Ask an employee to tell a story about how a customer was dazzled when they were served by someone in your organization.

If they can’t (and for most it is a challenging question) then you either haven’t defined your service strategy in enough detail to clearly understand what is to be expected by employees in delivering it, or there is not enough action around your strategy to be able to observe it and tell a story about it.

Remove the barriers to storytelling and treat telling stories as a fundamental responsibility of your leadership team.

If your leaders can’t describe in vivid terms what is expected of people in serving customers employee won’t get it. Or they will each have their own definition of what the strategy is and will deliver it accordingly with the resulting mosaic of service experiences being delivered to customers with little consistency with respect to the intended strategy.

Get storytelling on the performance plan of your managers and hold them accountable for doing it.

Develop and implement a storytelling development program to:
—  first, remind people what your service strategy is;
— second, what it looks like when it is being pristinely executed (i.e. what behaviors do you expect to see from your employees who are in customer serving roles?) and
— third, what storytelling objectives each manager is expected to achieve in their annual performance plan.

Remind your management team that compensation will have a storytelling component and make it matter!

Finally, provide the opportunity for managers to practice storytelling.

This is about effective communication around a critical part of your overall business strategy so it’s important. It’s about painting a picture for people to see what is expected of them and what the desired outcome is. It’s about providing a way for your leaders to be able to fulfil their fundamental leadership role.

Who are the storytelling champions in your organization?

Who do it well? Find them and ask them to help put together and run your storytelling development program. Use them to show others how it is done. Recognize them for the type of behavior expected. Reward them as an example to others.

Once you have storytelling established as a strategic tool to reinforce your service strategy you can use stories as an integral part of how you communicate your value proposition to the market.

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

• Posted 3.10.12 at 11:31 am by Roy Osing
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February 13, 2012

Why company rules should be to delight customers not please employees

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Why company rules should be to delight customers not please employees.

A local business school published an article based on the book Hacking Work, by Bill Jensen and Josh Klein. The article was titled: ‘School wants students to break dumb rules for smart results’ and it encouraged students to eliminate the ‘Corporate Rules’ that got in the way of job efficiency and effectiveness.

The message: eliminate the dumb rules in your organization that prevent you from doing your job in the most productive way possible.

This approach, recognized by the Harvard Business Review as one of the top 10 breakthrough ideas for 2010, does not go far enough.

It is focused internally. The benefits realized are improved productivity, lower costs and happier employees.

Nothing wrong with this, but…

Where is the customer in the discussion? — Roy, scratching my head

I have written extensively about the need to cleanse the internal customer service organizational environment of dumb rules and stupid things that don’t make any sense to your customers.

Look for a rule, policy or procedure that gets in the way of delighting your customers. Remove an obstacle that prevents them from providing WOW! service.

The internal cleansing priority must be on improving the experience for the customer, not increasing productivity. I’m not saying that killing rules that drive work dysfunction is not important. It is. But with limited resources and time available to any organization, we must do the really important things first.

What is more important that removing the stuff that annoys your customers and forces them to go elsewhere?

I suspect that you will achieve both goals by eliminating dumb rules with a customer focus. Destroying those little-BIG bureaucratic procedures that drive your customers crazy will also improve job productivity and employee satisfaction.

Form a Dumb Rules Committee in your organization and empower people to seek out this dysfunctional stuff.

And ACT on what they discover. If you do nothing with their findings your credibility and believability goes down to zero and your next attempt at engaging your employees will be met with (earned) skepticism and reluctance.

You will be surprised with the energy and passion that is released through this simple Dumb Rules exercise and the employee commitment and loyalty that is built.

People will have fun and spread the word that you really intend to be customer-obsessed.

Actions scream out your intent. Do it.

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

• Posted 2.13.12 at 11:57 am by Roy Osing
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