Be Different or be dead

January 21, 2019

8 excellent ways to get your retail business back to winning form

8 excellent ways to get your retail business back to winning form.

It’s shocking to see the number of retailer ‘deaths’ that have occurred over the last few years. These were once established businesses with a history of loyal customers and decent profitability.

But they simply ran out of steam and couldn’t keep pace with the changes taking place in the industry. Buyer demographics and buying behaviours quickly change and retailers incapable of keeping pace die a slow and agonizing death — store by store by store…

There is no single strategy that will save a retailer in the current chaotic and unpredictable business environment — particularly a pandemic — but there are some actions retailers can take to at least increase their chances of survival.

1. Renew your business strategy

It’s very tempting to take action and employ tactics that you think will help, but you need to start with redefining a strategy that you think will successfully meet the new dynamic.

The critical piece of thinking here is that you cannot assume what worked for you in the past will work in the future

I believe the main reason so many retailers fail is they hold on to their past business model, expecting it to work in an environment where literally every customer — competitor — technology variable has changed.

In addition don’t get sucked into believing that cost cutting will save you. The retail death spiral is not a cost issue, it’s a demand issue. Cutting costs with the hope of salvaging the company has a perilous and inescapable outcome.

Did you really think that by closing over 1,400 stores Radio Shack would survive? Not unless they change their business strategy and figure out how to do a better job at serving customers and providing unmatched value in the marketplace.

2. Deliver value; don’t sell products

Look at your business as an instrument to deliver unique value, not as an agent to sell products and services. Think about being in the ‘benefit creation’ business where what people want and desire drives the innovation process. The model of stacking the shelves — be it in a bricks and mortar environments or online — and having customers excitedly buy is wishful thinking.

And your retail value must be different that your competition because if you’re not different, you will fall victim to the commodity space where the value proposition for any retailer is reduced to price.

Commodity market players ‘race to the bottom’ with their prices much to the delight of the customers but to the detriment of the business as margins are squeezed and profits plummet.

As the telecommunications space was heating up with competition, we morphed our phone stores from outlets that offered telephones and accessories to residential customers to a solutions selling vehicle for both residential and small business customers. Product sales took care of themselves with this new focus.

3. Redefine who you want to serve

Change your target market. Demographics and psychographics are changing. Millennials are growing in number and will soon be the largest segment of the population. Continuing to target the older population, for example, because it has worked up to now is a choice with no long term future.

The question to ask is “Which customer group represents the greatest growth potential for our business?” Focus your energy on that group. Build capacity and competencies in your retail organization to satisfy the wants and desires of that group.

And say goodbye to customers who are no longer relevant to your renewed strategy. You can’t afford to hold on to your old base while pursuing a new one.

Deselecting customers is a difficult issue for most organizations as it means carefully shifting focus and investment away from customers who have traditionally been in the center of attention to a new breed who are unproven in terms of revenue generation.

4. Look for order of magnitude not incremental change

Minor changes to what you do and the way you do them won’t work; explore new completely different ways to completely morph your business. And consider outrageous ideas like the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas as well because the traditional tried and true approaches simply will not work anymore.

If your new retail idea doesn’t scare the hell out of you, chances are it’s too modest. 

We completely reengineered our phone store network by closing almost half of them and reconfiguring the survivors geographically through our operating territory. This was anything but a modest change for which we took considerable criticism. But it was necessary in order to place our new “customer serving centers” closer to the customers we decided to target.

5. Recruit a new team

if your current retail strategy won’t get you where you need to go, probably your existing team won’t as well. Be prepared to change the composition of your teams and recruit new blood with the skills and competencies necessary to deliver your new direction. Look for disrupters who hate the status quo; people who will push for change.

HR must constantly be on the lookout for the new breed; they should constantly be in the recruitment mode regardless of whether you have immediate opportunities available or not.
Sooner or later positions will open up, and you need a stream of people immediately at hand to draw on.

As the telecom business was changing from a monopoly to a highly competitive model, we had to purge much of the organization in terms of the skill sets and competencies in our people. We had to import a cadre of folks who had proven experience in the retail world and let go many who were effective order takers but not able to sell competitively.

6. Provide personalized service

As a critical element of your renewed strategy set your sights on providing more personalized service rather than the traditional one-size-fits-all doctrine. Retail success comes from engaging with and serving customers on THEIR terms, not on what the business deems appropriate given their internal constraints. If retail isn’t prepared to meet their customers on their turf, the game will be swiftly over.

We moved from a subscriber model in our phone stores to the strategy of creating more personal customer experiences for every person who came to our stores. One tactic we chose was to make the inside mirror the outside; in other words recruit employees that were integral to the mosaic of ethnic populations we served.

So in an area where we had a significant Asian community, we hired frontline people and leaders who were also Asian and who could relate better to this customer group and serve them better than people with other ethnic backgrounds.
Service levels increased with productivity and we quickly outpaced our competition.

7. Build a leadership team of servers

Hand in hand with establishing a service culture is the need to move leaders from a traditional command and control bias to a serve and coach paradigm where “How can I help?” supplants ‘Do this!’.

Critical to providing a personal experience for customers, retail operations must do the same for employees. An employee who experiences a servant leader who is there to help solve problems and eliminate job barriers will naturally apply the same behaviour to a customer. They learn to be helpful to customers because they receive the same treatment from their colleagues and bosses.

In the same way we had to move away from customers we had traditionally targeted, we had as well to exit traditional command and control style managers to make way for people who were natural servant leaders

8. Eliminate commission salespeople

Having commission salespeople is the anathema of the concept of serving customers and providing personalized solutions to their problems.
Employees who are paid to push retail product will flog their wares to, not serve, customers. They will push for the sale as opposed to taking whatever time it takes to problem solve with the customer.

They will have zero motivation to create memorable experiences for their customer because it takes too much time, requires too much energy, and because they’re not getting paid to do it. Be prepared for an exodus of salespeople when you do this; they will look for opportunities to continue their flogging ways with other retailers. So let them.

Retail businesses can survive; all is not lost. But it will require retailers to put the past to rest and take action to break away from ‘the way they have always done things’.

Those that have the guts to do it have a chance of surviving; those that don’t will die.

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

• Posted 1.21.19 at 04:05 am by Roy Osing
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January 7, 2019

7 reasons most call centers are absolutely shameful

Source: Unsplash

7 reasons most call centers are absolutely shameful.

Call centers generally don’t give good customer service.

Every organization that is big enough has a call center to handle primarily incoming calls from their customers.

There must be some redeeming value in having one if everyone has one, right? There is: it’s generally viewed as the most efficient operating solution for processing volumes of calls coming into an organization.

The dark side to call centers

But having led large customer service teams in a variety of business environments I have experienced a dark side to call centers.

In many cases I find that call centers represent the antithesis of miraculous service.

When an organization declares they intend to provide amazing service to their customers and then chooses an operating model with a call centre — particularly in a foreign country — as its nucleus, they are not only being disingenuous, they are fooling themselves (and probably driving their customers crazy) and assuming substantial competitive risk.

These are the aspects of call centers, particularly those that are outsourced, I find quite revolting.

They exist to manage cost

They choose to implement a call centre environment not to serve customers better, but to process volumes of calls at the lowest cost possible.

The question is rarely asked “Is this the best way to both serve our customers in an exemplary way while at the same time optimizing our cost position?”

It’s all about cost. That’s why most organizations outsource them around the world where labour costs are low. Current outsourcing destinations include India, Philippines, Thailand, China and Indonesia with many more planning to enter the fray.

This outsourcing trend has attracted a plethora of experts who define what it takes to have a successful call centre.

They are managed to improve productivity

Effectiveness of a call center is generally based on micro productivity measures such as:

▪️average holding time — the elapsed time it takes a call center rep to handle a customer query. Management tries to drive this number down in order to process as many calls as they can with the resources available.

The outcome of each call is rarely measured. Was the customer satisfied with the service they received? Did they enjoy the experience with the rep?

▪️average speed of answer — the average length of time it takes to answer an incoming call. When I ran call center operations in the telecom world, my target was to answer 80% of all calls within 6 seconds and our resource levels were set to achieve this result.

This was probably the best internal target we had that represented an attempt to deliver good customer service.
Can you imagine in today’s world reaching a call center rep of any organization within 2 or 3 rings of your phone? Rarely ever happens, with common wait times in the minutes rather than seconds.

Productivity and service miracles don’t easily coexist in most organizations; this measure needs attention if any organization wants to get out of the revolting category.

They don’t drive customer loyalty

Whether a call center serves incoming calls or is used to originate sales-type calls, the heavy traffic volumes involved generally work against the relationship building activity that leads to a loyal customer.

A call comes in > the rep answers (eventually) > the rep deals with the customer’s request > the rep terminates the call > the next call is fed to the rep.
And the cycle is repeated over and over again with a supervisor scrutinizing how long the rep is on each call.

The call center is essentially a production shop with no overt objective of creating an experience for the customer that could lead to brand loyalty.

Customer satisfaction may be measured along with productivity objectives, but a satisfied customer does not make a loyal one.

Satisfaction means that expectations were met; loyalty demands more — minds must be blown, expectations exceeded and marvellous experiences created if the loyalty dial is to be moved.

And this takes time. A WHAM! BAM! THANK YOU MA’M! process does nothing to encourage warm feelings and a desire to do more business with the brand involved.

They take control of your brand

The moment power is given to an outsourced call centre to engage with your customers, control is relinquished and your organization’s brand is put at risk.

Many organizations don’t even put in place a performance management contract with the 3rd party outsourcer to measure how customers perceive the service they receive from call center reps, so changes to brand position are unknown and can’t be responded to.

And with high turnover of employees, consistency in whatever customer treatment is given is almost impossible — at least I don’t experience it.

When your customer connects with the call center you have chosen to empower with your most valued asset, and the experience they have does not go well, it’s on YOU.
The call center rep is YOUR employee. The service outcome is YOUR responsibility.

YOU pay the price in the market.

Their words create the precious moment

Whether a customer has a miraculous service moment or not depends on communications with the call center rep. Miracles happen when the engagement is spirited, entertaining and responsive. When there is an easiness to the conversation that leaves the caller happy and fulfilled.

And for me, very often it is extremely difficult to fight through the accent of a foreign call center rep to have a meaningful and enjoyable conversation.
I simply can’t understand many (not all) of them, and that’s a BIG problem for the outsourcer.

If even the basic communications expectations of the call can be met, there is little chance that a service miracle will ever occur and in fact the opposite is the result with the caller being annoyed or angry with the encounter.

It’s not that the foreign reps are uneducated or don’t have some skills in the English language.
But it’s one thing to pass English 101 and have an understanding of sentence structure and grammar, and quite another to engage with someone else in a way that flows and is productive to the other party.

Are these reps tested by role playing to evaluate their conversational proficiency? Not from where I’m sitting.

Wait times are shameful

Outsources really don’t care about how long we wait on the phone to reach a rep; if they did, they wouldn’t tolerate wait times that often reach ridiculous levels — for me personally, I am blown away if I actually get a rep in 5 minutes and am not surprised to wait 45 minutes or longer. Business mediocrity in action.

It’s ironic that wait times take no priority at all; organizations are content to provide messages they feel assuage their shameful service: “Your call is important to us”; “We are experiencing unusual traffic volumes at the moment” unfortunately greet us more often than not when we call for help.

But wait! There is a silver lining to long wait times. Put your iPhone on speaker, slip it in your back pocket and get on with the job jar your wife has skillfully filled for you.

The reps have an impossible task

I totally get that even a highly competent and caring call center rep has a tough time being on 100% up time.
By the time a customer gets to them, they are often met with frustration, anger and sometimes abuse, with literally zero chance of turning a bad encounter into a pleasant experience.
The reps simply wants to get away from the pain they are engulfed in.

And the rep of course doesn’t own the problem — leadership does.

It’s a pipe dream and shameful leadership behaviour to create an impossible working environment and expect employees to perform impeccably. What planet are they on?

It’s quite simple, really.
If you want low costs, technology can do only so much and you will be saddled with the result. Under-resourcing is typically the result of cost cutting in the face of relentless demand and who pays the price? CUSTOMERS DO!

Call centers generally don’t focus on building intimate customer relationships and outsourcing them makes matters worse.

There are exceptions, however, but these rare organizations make the decision to establish their call center as an integral loyalty building instrument not as an efficient call processing center.

So if you decide to use call center technology to engage with your customers, please don’t preach your intent to deliver amazing service.

It’s intellectually dishonest and it fools no one.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 1.7.19 at 04:10 am by Roy Osing
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December 3, 2018

5 proven ways to create amazing customer service experiences

Source: Unsplash

5 proven ways to create amazing customer service experiences.

Most organizations have a customer service strategy.

The following are typical claims they make in terms of what they intend to deliver:
— “we provide the best customer service”
— “we were voted #1 in service”
— “our goal is to exceed our customers’ expectations”
— “we go the extra mile…”
— “we pride ourselves on providing high quality service”
— “we provide memorable experiences”

These are all laudable expressions in terms of the service experience outcome they want to provide.

Words vs music

The problem, however, isn’t in the words; it’s in the music

For example, they say “your call is important to us”, yet force us to wait 40 minutes to speak with a call center rep. How is this consistent with delighting anybody? I pity the frontline person every time they answer a call knowing how upset every customer will be for having to wait so long. Pain ensues…

Unfortunately most organizations fail to deliver on their customer service promise.

There are two reasons for this:
— they don’t understand the essential elements that contribute to service miracles;
— they are unable to execute consistently on the service elements they choose to focus on.

The irony is that many organizations fail because they are inept at implementing flawed service elements. Not only do they suck at execution, they are trying to do the wrong thing.

So let’s start at the beginning. What are the things that must be done — the service elements — to deliver miraculous service experiences?

1. Hire miracle workers

Hire people who ’love humans’. Miracles are delivered by people who create moments, not technology that delivers according to an algorithm.

And if you don’t recruit people who love humans you’re dead from the beginning. Your current recruitment strategy must be blown up and reinvented. It’s mission must be to identify those people who are innately driven to serve others whatever it takes.

2. Attract servant leaders

The internal world of any organization must be cleansed if miracles are to be commonplace

Barriers to delivering astonishing moments must be expunged. Tools that enable conversation time with customers must be provided to everyone. And bureaucratic crap that prevents miracle workers from doing their job must be eliminated.

Leaders who serve ask “How can I help?” are the powerful force to enable this culture. Find ‘em. Grab ‘em. Never let ‘em go.

Morph your executive leadership program reward managers who serve others like an involuntary muscle. Command and control freaks have no place in creating miracles.

3. Let your people go

Empower people to serve people. It’s the loose vs tight dilemma.

Do you trust that your frontline miracle workers will do the right thing for the company if you empower them to take customers to a heightened service experience?

Many organizations believe that they will go too far left to satisfying the customer and sink company profits. RUBBISH! In my experience, if they are given the trust of leadership, they are amazing at balancing what it takes to dazzle someone while at the same time protecting the come.

Ok, say they go too far for a customer every once in a while. Are you telling me that there are no other occasions in the company’s world where margins may not be optimized?

The real issue is: do you want to dilute your margins for a customer miracle or do you want to do it for a sales conference in Maui?

4. Lose the cost phobia

“But we can’t provide all the resources needed to deliver miracles and still deliver the margins expected of us”. Hogwash.

Ever see a study that correlates customer face time with net income? No. and you never will. But you do see market share statistics explain a drop in revenue accompanied by stories of excommunicated customers who were unable to take crummy service.

The cost guys want cost to drive investment decisions and as a result really stupid service acts are taken like outsourcing call centres to a part of the world that has a difficult time with our language.

Yes these folks are well educated on IP technology but I am constantly fighting the language problem which gets in the way of a smooth conversation.

I love Tony Heish’s really simple view of call centers. They’re not cost centers, they’re ‘loyalty centers’ and should be managed as such. Invite someone to call. Spend as much time with them as you have to take care of them. Deliver a miracle and they will return.

5. Kill the stupid

There’s a lot of stupid stuff we do to that piss our customers off.

Rules, policies and procedures intended to maintain efficient operations fly right in the face of customer logic. So they may satisfy some internal perspective of sense, but are destructive — ineffective — in delivering service miracles.

The couple who wants a booth in a Vegas restaurant but is refused because booths are reserved for parties of 4 or more is really annoyed when there are only a few people there and all booths are vacant.

Miracles are simple to deliver when you realize that the customer’s desires supplant the internal world of an organization.

The real question is: do we have the guts to put the customer in control of the rules we operate under? If ‘yes’, miracles will come; if ‘no’, mediocrity will stay and DEMISE will most likely result.

A simple starting point. Purge “It’s not our policy” from your vocabulary and fire anyone who utters it (and tell the rest of the organization you did it).

Miracles are simple

Miracles are not complicated. In fact as customers ourselves, we find they are often created by simple moments that surprise us because we are not used to special treatment.

We are in a retail store (known for its lack of service) unable to find an open service counter to pay for our purchases. A young man dressing a mannequin spots us meandering; he offers his help and finds an open service position for us.

Complicated? No; caring, yes.

A bloody miracle? Absolutely!

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 12.3.18 at 03:19 am by Roy Osing
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November 12, 2018

Powerful ways to step away from the crowd in your life, career and job

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Powerful ways to step away from the crowd in your life, career and job.

It has been several years since I wrote the original book BE DiFFERENT or be dead;  since then, at the request of my readers, I have written a number of ebooks taking a deep dive on several of the specific topics in my original work with particular emphasis on how to implement my ideas.

Being different; standing out from the crowd has amazing long lasting value. It attracts attention — people are generally used to blandness where everyone and everything blends in and conforms to accepted norms.
And when attention is garnered, magic can happen if mixed with what is relevant to people and what they care about.

Being different in a relevant way is truly the way to achieve sustainable advantage in whatever theatre you are in — life, career or in an organization.

The most common question I’m asked is “How do I get started?”

A basic precept: accept that there are no silver bullets in the journey to be distinctive and unique; no one single action that will carve you out of the herd and confer upon you the specialness that will last forever.

It’s a journey; a series of acts that collectively over time will slowly give you the centrifugal force needed to move you away from others who find comfort in compliance and plurality.

DiFFERENT in your life

If you want to be different in your life, your challenge is to pick something you value — your life brand — and separate yourself from everyone else.

It starts with an intimate understanding of who you are and what you value the most in your personal life.
— Are you a lover of animals?
— A passionate advocate of protecting the environment?
— A fiscally prudent aficionado who insists that budgets must be balanced?
— A grandparent who wants themselves to be indelibly etched into the memories of their grandkids?
— A world traveler who thinks about their foreign-place bucket list more than anything else?
— An immigration zealot who believes further influxes of people should be curtailed?

Being different in life doesn’t necessarily mean that you take an extreme or “pole” position on your life view; that you choose a contrarian 180-degree view to the commonly held perspective.

The pole position on any topic is often a difficult place to be as your personal ideals and beliefs can easily be seen to be extremely negative to many. The risk of being in this position is that, in your attempt or be different in a valued way, you are seen as a crusader of a minority cause which attracts only extremist attention.

And so you get people who advocate radical immigration or environmental policies viewed as a bit out of touch and insensitive by a large portion of the population.
It’s not likely that if you chose to be different as a ‘save the environment at any expense’ person you would be seen as someone special to look closely at — as a matter of fact you would only identify yourself with the left environmental herd.

Rather than picking a pole position, being different means that you address your passion in a way no one else does; your angle is like no other so it is noticed by those around you.

Your different narrative is the result of having a broad and deep understanding of your life topic; you have studied and thought about it extensively and therefore have a unique perspective on the matter — your views on what it takes to be an amazing grandparent, for example, are based on years of practical experience creating memories for your treasures.

Decide what’s important to you. Create a compelling narrative that stands out because it is skillfully crafted from a deep understanding of your topic. Have a unique perspective. Don’t get sucked into the poles but avoid complying with the blandness of the herd.

DiFFERENT in your career

If you want to be different in your career, the first thing you have to do is have a career game plan that is highly tuned to execution in the short term.

Aspiring to be a sales executive — full stop! — doesn’t really provide a call to action that will move you relentlessly towards your goal. With this type of objective you can meander for years without knowing whether or not you are taking the actions that will (might) yield success.

Your game plan must be much more precise if it is to define the steps you need to take to move in the right direction.
“I intend to be the sales VP of XYZ company in 36 months” is a declaration that is much more meaningful; it will open up the specific steps that you need to take to achieve your goal.

It is targeted — the VP position in the XYZ organization — and it is time bound — a 36 month window. These three variables provide the focus necessary to create an action plan that can me measured and tweaked along the way.

The final element of your game plan is to decide on what your personal brand should be — and it must be unique to make any difference.

Without defining how you are unique and incomparable in the crowd, your career path will be an uphill climb

“Why should you be given the opportunities for the VP sales position over everyone else who want the same opportunity?” is the question your brand must answer and if you can’t define your persona so that you separate yourself you won’t be able to answer the question.

Have a short term game plan that defines your distinctiveness and is granular enough to drive you to execute. Don’t get sucked in to lofty helium-filled goal setting.

DiFFERENT in your job

If you want to be different in the role you have been assigned, challenge yourself every moment of every day to be different — you must look at everything in front of you through a BE DiFFERENT lens.

“How can I do this differently?” must dominate your mindset and guide your actions, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. Stopping to ask yourself this question is a great way to start applying the concept. It keeps the desire to be different first and foremost in your mind and deeds and will become automatic once you get into the rhythm.

This approach REALLY worked for me! Every project I did, every presentation I gave and every leadership act I took was premeditated; I designed everything I did to be different than the way the herd approached things.

It’s not difficult to do; most people tend to adopt a common approach employed by the masses — a best practise or a principle espoused by academia or a subject matter expert.  And, people tend to do the minimum amount required to get the job done.

Knowing this, I first, focused on the practise I thought others would use and then decide on another way to do it with overkill as my guide.

Ask your self the ‘different’ question every moment of your day to embed it in your thinking and actions. Don’t get sucked into copying best practices or a herd mentality.

There’s no end point in this journey; it’s a process of doing stuff; learning from the actions you took and adjusting your way forward.

But it won’t happen unless you take steps now to start.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 11.12.18 at 04:43 am by Roy Osing
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