Be Different or be dead

June 28, 2021

Why customer loyalty is not determined by what the organization sells

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Why customer loyalty is not determined by what the organization sells.

Why do people buy from one organization over and over again?

Is it because they:
▪️‘love’ the business?
▪️love their commitment to sustainability and the environment?
▪️love the way they support the communities in which they operate?
▪️love the products and services they offer?
▪️deliver consistent high levels of financial return to investors?

In a generic sense, the question really is: “Are customers loyal to an organization because of what they deliver — i.e. output related— or because of the way they deliver it — i.e. process related?

Output or process: which is the determinant of customer loyalty?

I don’t see much differentiation among businesses in terms of what they produce. If you’re in the communications business, you’re going to have internet and home phone service in your product portfolio.

If you’re in the financial business you’re likely to offer essentially the same financial products such as basic savings, retirement savings, and education savings accounts as well as other products such as term deposits and investment vehicles.

I’ve written much about the fact that even though competition is fierce and growing relentlessly in global markets, differences among competitors that are both meaningful and compelling to customers are shrinking and are becoming less and less obvious.

Increasing competition is ironically resulting in less meaningful differences among combatants.

It’s a surprising result.

You would think that as competitive forces escalate, a business would get better at creating a sustainable competitive advantage in the markets they compete in.

But they’re not. My observation is that every participant basically looks the same and they all exist to produce something for the masses, using price to attempt to separate themselves from the crowded mob around them.

And generally, production-oriented, mass motivated and price focused organizations tend not to be a huge loyalty magnet; customers come and go based on short term satisfaction.

Sustainable loyalty actually has little to do with what is produced by a business; rather it is a process-based phenomenon with people as the nucleus.

People buy when they’re happy; when the engagement they have with an organization ‘feels good’ and they feel their cravings are being addressed.

And warm feelings are not likely to be continuously produced by a product or service which turns into old or used eventually when the lustre of ‘the new’ wears off.

These are the process and people things that, in my experience, create warm experiences for people and make them coming back:

1. Easy-to-do-business-with processes

There are two principles that are critical in terms of having ‘customer friendly’ processes.

First, build systems to enable customers to engage with the organization the way they want rather than force them to comply with processes designed with company efficiency as the main design criteria;

What percentage of customers that use a company’s website are ever asked if they like the navigation and buying experience? How many of them are asked to pass judgment on the artificial intelligence technologies used?

I doubt it ever happens.

Organizations build systems with scale and productivity in mind not with customer satisfaction as a key driving factor.
Furthermore, they serve as a factory to the ‘normal’ masses who are content to comply with whatever business processes they use and not the outlier ‘weird’ ones who require special handling — a group by the way growing larger and more powerful everyday and sometime soon will eclipse ‘the normal ones’.

Second, ensure that internal rules and policies serve the same customer purpose: to enable not restrict, to ‘say yes’ not ‘say no’, to empower not control and to please not disappoint.

Ever heard of a company asking their customers to participate in a panel to evaluate whether or not the policies of the company made any sense to customers? Whether they made it easy to engage with the company? Whether they were understandable or just plain dumb?

Unfortunately, I’ve never seen an organization enlightened enough to take such a risk and welcome their customers in to help manage their business.

2. People who like to serve

The majority of warm feelings that customers experience are induced by human beings. Technology might impress you, but people can delight you, blow you away, mesmerize you, dazzle you, surprise you, shock you and astonish you — all symptoms of loyalty building.

So it follows that organizations need to hire the type of person who can cause these types of feelings to exude from other people. Yes, they have to be intellectually competent to qualify for a customer server role,  but beyond that they must possess the innate hunger to care for another person and be driven to satisfy whatever craving the customer has at the moment.

Most businesses aspire to provide memorable experiences for their customers, but the quality of the engagement process doesn’t back up the claim. Their customer contact repair folks may be great at troubleshooting an internet problem sitting in a call Center in the Philippines, but the engagement moment with the customer falls short of being warm and caring. It’s often frustrating, cold and harsh.

It’s absolutely true that delighting a customer time and time again will deepen the affection the customer has for the organization and will lead to sustaining loyalty. The catch though is to have the type of ’human being lovers’ in place to pull it off.

Let me crystallize the loyalty takeaways for you:

— Customer loyalty has more to do with HOW you conduct your business than it has to do with what your business produces.
— Loyalty is created when business processes are created in the image of making it easy for the customer to do business with an organization.
— Loyalty grows from customer affection which is earned by having caring customer servers who are the natural architects of warm moments customers experience.

Businesses don’t create customer loyalty; processes and people do.

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

• Posted 6.28.21 at 01:45 am by Roy Osing
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June 21, 2021

What is the best way to describe high performance?

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What is the best way to describe high performance?

When someone does a great job delivering results, how do you describe what they’ve done?

When the results of their efforts go beyond what is expected, what words do you use to capture the moment?

Performance appraisal is viewed as mainly an HR thing; a system developed by human resource professionals and used by organizations to rate how well an individual is fulfilling the role expected of them.

And in most cases the terms of reference — the context — for the evaluation is their position (job) description. Whatever is defined in the job description as key result areas gets appraised.

I’ve always had difficulty with the traditional appraisal system because it’s not particularly helpful identifying brilliant people who should be watched for the highest leadership opportunities.

Standard appraisal systems typically describe what the individual has achieved over the appraisal period — generally the previous year — then the appraisal moves from this narrative to choosing a performance category such as, for example, ‘excelling’, ‘exceeding’, ‘fully satisfactory’ and ‘unsatisfactory’ relative to the standards of their position as well as the specific objectives they were given.

A person given an ‘excelling’ rating will have demonstrated that they had consistently exceeded their role standards and delivered more on every objective given to them than was expected.

The problem is that the performance description is entirely based on the person and their accomplishments; it’s a very narrow perspective on their capabilities. By its very design, it provides little value in terms of comparing how this person performed relative to others.

The use of performance evaluation committees tries to provide a forum where individuals can be compared. I present the evaluations of my people to the committee and others do similarly and then we subjectively compare them to see if we can agree on who has demonstrated the better performance . Acrimonious debate always ensues over who the ‘winner’ is with no one wanting to admit another employee is better than their own.

And it’s this very perspective that is relevant when it comes to identifying the high potential people who should be in senior leadership positions.

It’s ALL about comparing people in terms of what they’ve achieved and the mark they leave on the organization.

To feed the need for leadership, a new performance dashboard is needed; one that moves away from excelling and exceeding performance to ‘stand out’, ‘unmatched’ and ‘incomparable’ performance

We need to identify people who stand heads and shoulders above everyone else; individuals who are the ONLY ones who do what they do. People who achieve results in a way that others don’t; who don’t rely on benchmarking and best practices as their guide.

THESE are the individuals who should be tagged for the future opportunities that come available and these 5 key results areas should be the anchors of how their performance is appraised.

Having a ‘go’

Incomparable performers try more than others. They understand that success rarely happens with a single shot but rather as a result of how many attempts they make at getting it right. So these people take risks and are a constant buzz of activity as they try this and try that, until they find the right formula.

There is no appraisal methodology that I know of that tracks and measures a person’s effectiveness in making tries, and yet it is a key ingredient that separates the amazing ones from the commoners.

Against the flow

Standout people look to go against the flow; they observe the most common approach others would likely employ and they go in the opposite direction and do a 180.

“What if we did the reverse?” is a question that pushes them against the momentum of the common solution and exposes opportunities others can’t see. They look at a best practise and ponder what would happen if it were turned on its head. They love inventing “outrageous” methods and concepts and apply them to their work.

The owner of The Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas went totally against the flow when he decided to open a restaurant that offered ‘deathly’ food — the Triple Bypass Burger has 20,000 calories. Outrageous indeed!

A picture with words

The ONLY ones tell stories to bring their work to life and capture the imagination and support of those around them. They add emotional appeal to what they do. They know if others are only intellectually aligned with their work it’s insufficient to garner their unwavering support; they need to be emotionally hooked.

So they tell a story of what it would look like when their solution is implemented. For example, if it’s in customer service, marketing or sales, their story could describe the enhanced experience the customer will realize. There is no better way of defining the benefits of the solution being worked on than painting a picture of the outcome through a story.

Helpers

‘Unmatchables’ perform at nosebleed levels because they ask ‘How can I help?’ constantly, when engaging others to help resolve an issue

The only way teams can deliver is if they are able to do their work unencumbered by the internal grunge that typically gets in the way — policies, rules, procedures that are barriers to their progress.

Unmatchable performers make it their number one priority to cleanse the working environment of noise and clutter for their team mates, greasing the skids for people to deliver more than what is expected.

Looking through a different lens

‘Like-no-others’ look at opportunities in a way others don’t; they are constantly looking for different ways to achieve a task.

Every time they are presented with a challenge no matter how big or small, they ask themselves “How can I do this differently?”.
The need for these people to put their own twist on what they are doing pervades their thinking so that it is automatic; they don’t even think about it.

Let’s change the way we search for people who are truly remarkable; who are distinct from the common herd.

Measure how well individuals stand out from one another in performing their roles.

For it is this tribe we need leading our organizations.

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

• Posted 6.21.21 at 01:00 am by Roy Osing
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May 17, 2021

Why marketers should try to make people emotional rather than buy products

Source: Pexels

Why marketers should try to make people emotional rather than buy products.

Marketers should refocus their attention to building solutions for the heart; customer offers that stir their feelings and emotions.

We live in a product flogging world.

Products are pushed at us. Technology rains down on us through mass communications.

What businesses supply (as opposed to what we want) is jammed down our throats with the hope that we will bite-and-buy what they offer.

People buy what they want, desire and crave, not what they need

People buy on the basis of what they yearn, crave and ache for; to achieve happiness in a world with pressure and stress on their lives.

Product flogging is intrusive and completely out of sync with this reality, and is a recipe to fail.

Happiness is driven by what we experience rather than what we consume in material goods. Fond memories of a family vacation are long-lasting. The new car is fun for a while but soon feels no different than just the one we just traded in.

This is a game-changer for product floggers. Rather than push features, technology and price, the challenge is to create broad-based appeals to the full spectrum of feelings that an individual has.

The marketer’s goal is to illicit a warm feeling rather than to satisfy a need

The marketer’s objective in this sense is to elicit a positive emotional response from the customer, rather than satisfy a consumer need.

“When people were asked to recall their most significant material purchase and their most significant experiential purchase over the past five years, they reported the experiential purchase brought them more joy and enduring satisfaction, and it was clearly ‘money well spent’ compared with the material purchase,” wrote Thomas Gilovich, Professor of Psychology, Cornell University in Determinants of Happiness.

Furthermore, experiences create more happiness than material goods because they are a personal expression of what we desire. They belong to us alone and no one else.

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel — Maya Angelou

The payback is long-term customer loyalty; the better they feel, the longer they stay.

These 3 steps will get you started.

1. Establish the ‘Experience Creator’ position in marketing to augment in the standard product management role.
These are the experience packagers; the folks that integrate, brand and price the value elements necessary to deliver the complete experience that customers covet.

This position is a synthesizer who brings together the appropriate combination of the organization’s products and services to create an emotional response that bonds the customer’s loyalty.

2. Include feelings as a key element of marketing and customer research. What experience would make someone happy, special and fulfilled? What does the person crave?
Develop feelings objectives for the offer you bring to market. What feeling do you intend to cause by the offer: contentment, trust, joy,...? If you’re serious about stirring emotion then you need to have a target that embodies the marketing intent.

3. Measure the emotions evoked by the experience packages you create; “How did it make you feel?” not just “Did it do what we said it would and does it meet your needs?”

Memo to marketers: forsake your flogging ways and start creating personal experiences for your customers.

The world is full of floggers.

If you want to make a difference and stand-out from the flogging herd let experiences guide you that produce an emotional response that keeps a customer with you forever.

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

• Posted 5.17.21 at 05:08 am by Roy Osing
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May 3, 2021

Why great brands are not made by the organization’s leaders

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Why great brands are not made by the organization’s leaders.

I’ve sat in board meetings as the EVP of marketing listening to board members pronounce their views on the company’s brand and how it should change to meet changing market conditions.
From the 21st floor, they declare what brand position best serves the organization in terms of the current business plan and the environment as they see it.

Yes, board members should have influence on brand positioning, as should people further down the line in marketing, advertising and public relations — not to mention a plethora of others in the organization who want to join the brand party because it’s fun to be involved.

But let’s be clear: the brand work done by these folks is at best aspirational and bears little resemblance to the impact felt by the brand when implemented and experienced by customers and other stakeholders.

The brand developed by marketing, for example, represents the value proposition that they want communicated in order to meet the marketing objectives involving competitive differentiation and customer value considerations. 

Whether it’s declared by the board or marketing, it’s a paper brand position at this stage — a brave brand only.

Because at the end of the day, if an organization can’t deliver on its brand promise, the promise is useless and and is seen as a lie by all who witness it.

The brand stays in the ‘dream’ stage until it’s edited, filtered and tested by all of the practical, operational factors that impact the brand’s efficacy.

In my experience, these are the factors that either reinforce the brand dream or kill it.

▪️The frontline of the organization who engage with demanding customers day-in and day-out with aggressive competitors must believe the brand promise.
They must feel that they can deliver on the promise 24X7, because if they don’t believe, the dream dies.

▪️Operating processes that impact the way customers engage with the organization must support the brand promise. If, for example, the brand promises a friendly future but the internal policies make it cumbersome and difficult for customers to transact with the organization, the promise and delivery collide and the brand lie is borne over and over again. And the dream dies.

▪️Internal rules and policies affecting the customer experience must be in harmony with the brand promise. If the brand promises amazing customer experiences but internal rules force the customer through hoops they don’t like, customers are pissed off, they tell their friends what horrific service is being delivered and the dream dies.

▪️Frontline people must have the personal attitude, life experience and competence to deliver the brand promise day-in and day-out. Rude and uncaring treatment of a customer renders an organization as self-serving and narcissistic with utter disregard for the needs and wants of the people they serve. And the dream dies.

▪️The organization must be cleansed if the grunge and CRAP that gets in the way of employees delivering the brand promise. If frontline people are constantly fighting unnecessary internal roadblocks that get in the way of delivering what customers crave, again, the customer experience suffers and once loyal customers leave for a more friendly environment. And the dream dies.

▪️Frontline emotion and proclivity to serve others must be a huge component in the engagement process if the organization is to maximize the value of the customer experience, and this requires that people with a high EQ - emotional quotient - are recruited into frontline positions. If frontliners don’t illicit goosebumps during the interview process then the wrong person is being hired. And the dream dies.

▪️There are many organizations that decide to rebrand themselves without addressing the alignment factors discussed in the previous points — and nothing changes. They create a new identity with a flashy new logo and tag line but the essence of the organization carries on the way it always has. For these organizations, leadership seems to believe that the new logo will miraculously change their performance, but it doesn’t.

They overhaul their web sites with a new look and feel. Advertising messages change stressing an aspect of the organization they feel is now important and nothing changes.

The same operations problems persist; the same employee morale issues remain and competitive vulnerabilities continue despite the fact that how the organization is visually presented to the market has been morphed into something different. And the dream dies.

You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.

A brand begins as a dream, conjured up by people intent on finding the best solution to the market challenge they face in a crazy changing environment. And it stays as a dream until leadership creates the infrastructure — the support systems — that makes the brand real.

If they’re not up to the task, the dream dies.

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

• Posted 5.3.21 at 04:36 am by Roy Osing
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