Be Different or be dead

November 1, 2021

6 effective barriers to prevent your customers from leaving you

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6 effective barriers to prevent your customers from leaving you.

Why is there so much talk about the competition?

How to build a competitive strategy, tips for analyzing your competition, how to attain a cost leadership position against your competitors and how to out-sell your competitors pervade the thinking of most business people.

The underlying strategic intent is to build barriers to competitive entry; erect a massive wall to prevent the hordes from entering your markets and taking your customers.

I don’t get it.

You have little real control over what they do. If they want to launch a new product, reduce their prices, introduce a new disruptive technology or enter one of your markets to compete with you, they will. And (unless you intend to fight their actions on legal, regulatory or ant-competitive grounds), you will have no choice but to deal with the challenges their actions pose.

All you can do is try to anticipate their actions and go on the offensive, or respond to them defensively when they happen.

Rather than devote copious amounts of resources, time and energy to issues we have little control over, we should focus on what we have SOME degree of control over.

Rather than build barriers to competitive entry, we should be concentrating on building barriers to customer exit.

This you DO have a degree of control over; you stand a better chance of creating the outcome you want than basing your actions on what your competition does.

Spend your time making it extremely difficult for your customers to leave given a choice they might be offered by a competitor.

Barrier to exit profile

What do barriers to customer exit look like?

#1. Relationships

The emphasis is on building relationships and creating personalized experiences for customers as opposed to pushing products and services at them with a one size fits all mentality.

What customers personally need is given priority over what the common needs of the broader mass market appear to be.
In addition, attention shifts to concentrate more on how people feel when they are engaged with the organization and not solely on the right product or service fit.

#2. Chat

Every manager and executive ‘makes the call’—yes, a phone call!—to customers on a frequent basis to ensure they are being served with relevant and compelling solutions.
It’s an opportunity for the organization to get critiqued on their performance as well as receive suggestions for improvement.

The bottom line is the customer feels valued and respected and are less likely to be enamoured and attracted by a competitor’s value proposition.

#3. Deals

Special offers and price promotions are proactively offered to loyal customers; they are not used solely as a tool to attract new customers as is more often the case in most organizations.

The marketing and sales roles are to be proactive with the customer and present these opportunities before that are made available to the broader base.

People are more loyal when they feel that they are special; getting the deal first will go a long way to shutting the ‘bad guys’ out.

#4. Retention

Customer retention outranks new customer acquisition in terms of priority; the key success factor on the organization’s balanced scorecard is the rate of customer attrition.
It’s always incredibly satisfying to attract a new customer especially when it’s the result of a win from a competitor.

Teams love winning a competitive battle; it’s what makes their juices flow.
The issue is, however, that making your organization irresistible so that customers don’t want to leave can’t be done effectively when there is a strong push to get new customers.

The priority must be on retaining the existing customer base and trust that they will refer you and spread your word to others who will come over to your side — your loyal customers will drive new customers to you.

#5. Policies

The policy system of the organization is built to serve customers not control them. Dumb rules are eliminated in favour of those that facilitate customer engagement.

No one is likely to stay loyal to an organization that is difficult to business with; internal rules that put customers through hoops and policies that make no sense other than to control what customers do as opposed to enable them to get their needs and wants satisfied.

Every employee in an organization has a critical role to be an advocate for the customer and find and fix the internal roadblocks—rules and policies—that annoy customers and make the engagement experience negative for the customer.

And given the inertia that presides in most organizations, to make meaningful change that favours the customer, everyone must take on an advocate role to fight their internal bureaucracy and stand up for the rights of the customer.

#6. Screwups

A HUGE barrier—ironically—to customers leaving is what you do when a mistake has been made and the customer has been screwed over.

Most organizations spend all their time on how to prevent mistakes from occurring (and that’s ok) but few if any have a strategy in place to deal with the situation when prevention goes awry and a colossal blunder happens (and it will).

The fact of the matter is that service blunders that are handled right actually enhance customer loyalty because of the ’impress’ factor.

If an organization responds to a service OOPS! in a way that surprises the customer and dazzles them, they WILL be impressed and they WILL think of the organization in a more positive way (compared to the blunder never happening in the first place).

Impress = Fix the blunder fast + surprise the customer with what they DON’T expect.

Build a barrier to customers leaving by admitting you’ll commit a blunder from time to time and have a plan to recover in an astonishing way when you do.

Going to war with the competition and focusing relentlessly on them may get the adrenalin flowing, but it does so at the expense of your loyalists who have been committed to you in the past and who need you to continue to give them good reasons to stay.

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

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 11.1.21 at 03:25 am by Roy Osing
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October 25, 2021

Why your customer service must absolutely NOT move to a higher level

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Why your customer service must absolutely NOT move to a higher level.

There’s one good reason you shouldn’t consider revamping your service strategy with the objective of taking your service to the next higher level.

It assumes you are consistently delivering your service promise today, and that is generally a false assumption.

This is my assessment of how organizations are delivering customer service today:

1. Good intentions — Rhetoric and false declarations rule the customer service airwaves.
Every organization aspires to provide amazing customer service experiences for their customers, that they want to exceed their expectations. They declare that serving their customers in an exemplary manner is their number one priority and they claim that they are delivering it.

2. Call centers — Call centers continue to proliferate around the world. Organizations are outsourcing their call centers more than ever before with lowest cost as the main criteria for determining which outsourcer gets their business.
Call wait times are skyrocketing with customers often waiting an hour or so to speak to a service representative.

3. Stupid rules — Customers continue to be frustrated with the Rules, procedures and policies organizations impose on them.
Internal rules and policies today are generally used to control the customer engagement process rather than to enable it.

4. The run-around — Silo teams within organizations result in customers being passed around when they are trying to get their issue resolved. ‘Let me transfer you to the right department to handle your concern’ pervades customer conversations with the customer having to repeat their ‘story’ several times before getting any action.

5. The push upstairs — Escalation of customer complaints is alive and well these days with frontline employees having to get their supervisor’s approval to deviate from established procedure and ‘say yes’ to what the customer wants. Customers wait for ‘the boss’ to decide on their request and they get angry with the way they are treated.

6. Human dislike — There continues to be many customer facing employees that really don’t like dealing with customers. Rudeness, indifference, unresponsiveness, and indifference are still practiced widely in almost all organizations.
Employees with no innate desire to serve others continue to be placed into customer service positions.

7. Attention to ME! — Organizations, for the most part, still treat all customers the same notwithstanding their claims of providing ’personalized service’.
Service continues to be delivered in a one-size-fits-all fashion with little or no room for the unique needs and wants of any particular person.

Mass market thinking continues to dominate customer service thinking.

8. Screwups — Recovery from service mistakes remains abysmal in most organizations. Most are stuck in trying to fix the mistake (many with no apology) and are nowhere close to understanding how to turn the service OOPS! into a loyalty-building WOW! event.

9. Technology interference— Humans available to help customers are a dying breed as most organizations are trying to adopt new AI technologies such as Chatbots to handle customer queries and resolve their concerns.

The Chat function has been introduced to many websites and is a valuable resource as long as there is a service employee there to engage in the chat. Unfortunately, as with the Call Center challenge, the lack of human availability aggravates the good intentions of trying to make it easier for customers to engage with the organization.

10. Customer trust — The customer is generally not given the benefit of the doubt when they have a problem or complaint and the needs of the organization are put in the driver’s seat. In many cases organizations believe that customers try to ‘manipulate the system’ for their own benefit and don’t engage with an open mind to listen to the customer’s story.

My perspective

Most organizations lauding the great level of customer service they provide actually believe their own advertising.

They think that since they declare their intention to ‘blow the customer away’ with breathtaking service, it happens.

In my experience leading customer service organizations, amazing service doesn’t ‘just happen’ because of an aspiration to do so. There is, for the most part, an overwhelming chasm in organizations between what is intended and what is actually happening in the level of customer service being provided today.

What’s the next level of customer service?

There is no ‘next level’.

The words and music must go together.

Organizations need to bear down and deliver on their existing customer service promises before trying to move to a ‘higher level’ of service.

They need to display a consistency (as rated by their customers) that proves they are keeping their current level of service promises before planning to move on to anything that might be described as a higher level.

They should focus on:

▪️Building a customer service strategy that defines exactly what level of service they intend to provide and the implementation tactics to achieve it with accountabilities assigned to leadership.

▪️Defining a service strategy element that deals with how the organization intends to recover from mistakes that screw customers over. This element is essential to successfully deal with the loyalty in play when things go awry and the customer is left pissed off.
Figure out exactly how to fix mistakes fast (systems, processes and empowerment) and what the SURPRISE! element looks like.

Service recovery = fix the OOPS! within 24 hours and SURPRISE! the customer with something they don’t expect.

▪️Treating customer service as an investment with resources required and payback expected. Expunge the idea that customer service is a cost to be managed (controlled) and adopt the philosophy that customer service is an investment in customer loyalty.

▪️Maintaining control of the resources used to deliver customer service; insourcing the critical front end contact functions not outsourcing them.

▪️Recruiting people that like taking care of others. Amazing customer service rides on the backs of people who instinctively know how to deal with humans so hire as many as you can and pay them well. Treat them as being on the top tier of the organization structure rather than buried in it at the lower levels.

▪️Supporting frontline employees and frontline leaders to enable them to perform their role of delighting customers. Removing internal barriers, providing needed training and rewarding them for their performance are all critical in the service delivery chain.

▪️Carefully balancing the use of technology with people to perform service functions. There are appropriate functions that can effectively be done by technology and there are others that require a caring, understanding human. Don’t mix and match them to manage costs - you’ll fail.

Maybe, just maybe, if work is applied to the promise then we’ll earn the right someday to define what the next level of derive looks like.

But for now, organizations need to do the hard work to actually keep their ‘mind-blowing service’ promise.

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

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 10.25.21 at 05:22 am by Roy Osing
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October 23, 2021

Female tech entrepreneurs must take these 6 important actions for a successful startup

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Female tech entrepreneurs must take these 6 important actions for a successful startup.

Technology is one of the fastest-growing industries globally.

Unfortunately, it’s not that welcoming to women.

The latest data shows that the gender pay gap in tech is a global issue that needs to be addressed.

Women who work in Canadian tech jobs see a pay gap of about $20,000 per year.

Many women are dissatisfied with how they’re treated and eventually decide to quit their jobs and run their own startups.

If you’re faced with the same challenge, these 6 actions will help you build an amazing startup.

#1. Use the latest technologies for marketing

Any startup needs funding, and female tech startups are no different. This is where proper marketing and networking can do wonders and provide enough funds for the organization to develop.
Women who own tech startups need to go beyond the standard marketing methods and showcase their minimum viable product to the masses. To succeed in their endeavors, women entrepreneurs in tech should use the latest technology trends in marketing.

One example is a technology like VR, AR, or XR. This approach works great with all kinds of MVPs and can lead the user in and showcase an app or a platform user interface. In addition, it can help visualize complex data and allow the startup to connect with the audience differently.

#2. Be more flexible

Ever since the pandemic started, more businesses have shifted perspective and allowed working from home. However, female entrepreneurs may feel pressured to do more. Some may believe that letting people work from home won’t bring about satisfactory results.

In Australia, the largest pay gap is 24.4%in the science and technology industry.

Unfortunately, this kind of fixed mindset might prove to be detrimental to female tech startups. After all, many jobs can be managed online, and employees can be trusted that they’ll do what’s necessary.

Besides struggling with flexibility related to employees, female entrepreneurs might also be too harsh on themselves. This can cause more mistakes to happen and lead to more significant issues in the organization. Female entrepreneurs should know that their male colleagues make mistakes too.

#3. Achieve good work-life balance

Besides the gender pay gap, women in technology and startups often face another challenge—parenthood. Of course, the role of a mother is even more important than the role of an entrepreneur, but women know they need to juggle both.

When it comes to the UK, women earn up to 28% less than their male colleagues in the same tech roles.

To remain successful in the entrepreneurial world, female business owners should primarily quit blaming themselves for pursuing their careers while being mothers. Instead, they should look at it as something they’re doing for their children and their future.
In addition, to succeed in both raising children and scaling a company, they should discuss their plans and aspirations with their partner. Women shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help so they can focus on their careers.

#4. Ignore the imposter syndrome

Impostor syndrome is another issue that prevents female entrepreneurs from being successful. It’s related to the feelings of self-doubt and personal incompetence, regardless of the person’s education and experience.

Unfortunately, the imposter syndrome can make female entrepreneurs feel like they need to work harder to achieve their goals. Eventually, it might take a toll on their well-being and performance.

Here’s what female entrepreneurs should do to overcome the impostor syndrome:

▪️Avoid comparing themselves to others.
▪️Build a support network.
▪️Be honest about how they feel.

#5. Be open to receiving help

Women in tech businesses know they have a lot to prove to themselves and others. Therefore, female entrepreneurs often take on the jobs they shouldn’t be working in. They try to do it all and may often overlook the essentials.

However, women in business need to learn how to be open to receiving help. Regardless of the industry, all businesses require teams of people with different abilities and ideas. Only a business that has all hands on deck can thrive.

Female entrepreneurs should also work on surrounding themselves with like-minded people, not just in business. They should build a network of friends to lean on when things get rough. One of the best ways to do this is to find a community of other female tech entrepreneurs and brainstorm ideas.

#6. Find a remarkable mentor

The right mentor can mean a lot to a female entrepreneur, especially in the tech industry. They can help identify the growth opportunities and share their knowledge and expertise. Good mentors can also be consultants.
The most important thing a mentor can do is give feedback. This is crucial if the startup is new and needs a little push.

In the US, the gender pay gap is 3% for the same job, although the percentage differs based on location.

On the other hand, a role model serves as eternal motivation and inspiration. Role models show that the business can be developed, and success can be achieved. They’re there to help women entrepreneurs do more and dream bigger.

Summary

Women in tech are often facing issues with the gender pay gap. This is why many decide to start their own business. However, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Many female entrepreneurs feel like they don’t belong and are convinced their families suffer because of their careers.

Still, if they wish to be successful, they should work on promoting their MVP, show their knowledge, and not be afraid to ask for help when they need it. With the right community and a flexible mindset, female entrepreneurs in the tech industry have a higher chance of succeeding.

— Isaja Karadakovska is a pol-sci graduate, a former Junior Researcher, and currently TakeATumble AU’s Content Coordinator. She is driven to seek and create great content. Her free time is dedicated to her plant obsession. You can visit here on LinkedIn.

• Posted 10.23.21 at 03:25 am by Roy Osing
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October 18, 2021

Why a business plan for ‘cults’ can be an amazing success

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Why a business plan for ‘cults’ can be an amazing success.

There are a plethora of opinions on how to build a business plan, and I have written numerous pieces on my unheard-of Strategic Game Plan process which is unique and cannot be found elsewhere.

In fact I’ve dedicated one of my books to the topic and explained why a planning methodology geared to execution is critical for any organization to consistently achieve a high level of performance.

A practical element of my business planning process is to carefully choose the customer segments you decide to target and serve.

The fascinating criteria I advocate is quite simple: choose those customer segments that have the latent potential to deliver your growth goal.

The choice you make is absolutely critical to the plan’s success.

If the wrong customer segment is chosen, the organization’s resources are wasted and its growth goals are not realized.

And if a mass market is the choice, the same end result happens.

In fact in this scenario, the organization’s marketing message and resources are spread thinly across the entire market hoping for enough ‘hits’ to justify the investments made.
Flogging a value proposition to everyone is not likely to be very successful as the range of appeal is too broad to generate sufficient market momentum to deliver required sales.

So what’s the solution? How does an organization choose the right customers to serve?

One approach that should be given much more attention involves exploring the opportunities presented by polarization: examining clusters of people who are clustered at the extreme right end of the bell curve around a particular value set.
For example, if the value set to be explored were ‘concern for the environment’, a polarized view might be the belief that carbon dioxide emissions will destroy the earth’s atmosphere in 24 months.

Polarized groups—cult movements—are not only unique and distinct from the crowd in some way, their differences are quantum and order of magnitude in nature rather than incrementally distinct.

They are groups of individuals who have an obsession with, fixation on, mania for, passion for, idolization of, and reverence for an idea, thing or cause, for example, such as:
— the environment
— black lives matter
— LGBTQ
— #MeToo
— anti- globalization
— feminism
— veganism
— indigenous rights

People in these segments choose to express themselves in a way that others don’t.

I’m not referring to extremist right wing religious cults, but rather groups of people who share a passionately held view around a particular cause or movement and who express their opinions within acceptable societal and legal limits.

These polarized clusters of people represent relatively narrow slices—slivers—in the market that can have demand characteristics worthy of study.
They may represent a significant source of economic opportunity for the business because their beliefs are precise, well defined and the cluster is growing in number as an expression of society’s changing views.

And, if the business can use ideologies and beliefs to attract cult interest and cult member passion to engage them, perhaps relationships can be established and sales made.

We should start thinking about finding ‘cults’—who have excessive admiration for a particular thing—that express desires and cravings at the poles of the demand curve.

ME! segments are different from the mass crowd; cults are REALLY different.

The challenge, of course, is to find a cult or two whose members represent good potential for you to chase.

Here are five steps you can take to see if a cult has a future in your business plan.

#1. Keep your eyes open for trends

Cults typically follow social trends, so stay alert to the issues of the day because they could lead to the formation of a cult.
For example, there are many climate change cults—The Extinction Rebellion is one—that have been formed over the past few years which could represent a growth opportunity for some businesses because, for example, the cult is growing in membership and you have a solution that would easily allow them to collaborate among themselves very easily.

As a way of getting traction on this activity, assign someone to a cult follower role to identify, track and evaluate them as they are discovered and evolve.

#2. Talk to existing cult leaders

This is a good way to not only get a better understanding of cult values, but also to get insights on what the profile of the cult member looks like.

Even if a particular cult isn’t on your radar, it’s worthwhile engaging with a leader to deepen your understanding of cult dynamics which will provide ideas on how to engage with its members and form relationships with them.

#3. Check traditional and social media

Media headlines are a good source to explore which movements are currently attracting the most attention and therefore might be an attractive target for your organization.

And check out the nature of the conversation on social media to get a feel for the main themes of the conversation—the ‘triggers’—which would provide a window on not only what’s important to the cult members, but also whether your organization would even want to be associated with their cause.

This information is critical in terms of what it might take to successfully market your products, services and solutions to them.

#4. Pick a cult that seems to be a fit for you and give it a try

First of all, you’ll never know if a cult target will work for you until you give it a go.
I don’t think many (if any) organizations actually study cults to determine if they possess any potential so you would be breaking new ground here.

If trailblazing appeals to you, experimenting around the cult phenom is for you.

There are, however, a few considerations that you might use in selecting a high potential cult to chase:
— what does your current business plan say in terms of the customers you’re looking for? Is there some similarity between your current marketing efforts and the potential cult you could target?
— do a bit of back-of-the-envelope calculating in terms of the sales potential. Is there a good growth prospect if things work out for this cult?
— what are the possibilities of partnering with the cult to explore longer term mutual benefits?
— how divergent are the cult’s values from any element of yours? Although improbable, it might just be possible to find a hint of commonality with what the cult stands for and what your organization values. Any common denominator could help to define a workable marketing platform.

#5. Use experience and results to attract another

If your experiment works out, you may want to use it to attract the interest of other cults; you might be The ONLY organization that looks to social movements for joint opportunities.

So, track the results of your ’cult try’ in detail so you can use them in negotiating other arrangements if and when the time comes.

Social movements house untapped opportunities to grow your business and gain a competitive advantage as others are unlikely to pursue a similar strategy.
Exploiting customer groups at the edges of the demand curve—beyond ME!—can be risky, but can also be rewarding.

BE DiFFERENT.

You’ll never know until you give it a try.

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

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 10.18.21 at 05:17 am by Roy Osing
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