Be Different or be dead

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
• Permalink

March 19, 2012

Why having strong feelings are better than having deep knowledge

Source: Pexels

Why having strong feelings are better than having deep knowledge.

There are lots of smart people out there these days. MBA’s. Doctors in this. Doctors in that.

Our world is robust in well educated people. And that’s a good thing.

And businesses are always in the hunt for the cream of the crop when it comes to recruiting capable individuals. Aggressive competition for the best of the best.

Which usually comes down to who has the better marks and which college or university did they graduate from.

The recruitment process is severely flawed.

Focusing primarily on academic outcomes is not necessarily the determining factor in whether someone will be successful or not in your organization.

It is an important decision making element but it is not the be-all and end-all consideration.

Knowledge is a given. It’s table stakes for an individual applying for an opportunity in any organization. It’s expected that the applicant has achieved proficiency in their chosen field of study.

But academic achievement doesn’t necessarily make a person special. Remarkable. Stand-out. Visible.

Its not what you know, but how you feel that places you in these categories.

Special people feel.

They care.

They exude trust.

They are respected by and have currency with their colleagues.

They earn respect.

Knowledge isn’t enough.

Seek out feelers and hire them.

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

• Posted 3.19.12 at 10:48 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

March 15, 2012

Why a wishful dream without a purpose isn’t terribly useful

Source: Unsplash

Why a wishful dream without a purpose isn’t terribly useful.

Dreams without purpose are really useless

Some people (and organizations) dream a lot. Individuals dream of getting that promotion or of going on a trip to Paris; organizations dream of being the market leader or of providing the best customer service.

A dream is aspirational. It is nebulous and lacks the precision necessary to execute the specific actions necessary to fulfil it.

It’s ill defined. It’s a cloud. A helium filled balloon. A wish.

A kluge of possibilities.

Hardly something that will guide you to realizing it without a ton of work. Translating what it requires you to do on ground zero. In the trenches where things get messy.

But if you must dream, dream fierce.

Dream in excruciating detail so you can see what you have to do to achieve it.

Dream with the precision necessary to see an implementation path.

Dream with the passion that you will need to stay your course through set-backs and disappointment.

Dream with the adrenalin rush that will make so tenacious in driving to results you will surprise yourself.

Dream with purpose.

Dream to execute.

Dream to get it done.

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

• Posted 3.15.12 at 10:31 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

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
• Permalink