Be Different or be dead

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 27, 2012

6 mind-blowing lessons to learn from The Grateful Dead

6 mind-blowing lessons to learn from The Grateful Dead.

The Grateful Dead were unbelievably focused on their fans. these are six valuable lessons we can learn from them.

1. Mix it up — Constantly innovate. Give your Fans a different look (value packages, promotions, events, fun) as often as you can. The Dead decided what songs to play when they began each concert - songs on the run. Risky? Yes. Original? Yes. Did their Fans love them for it? YES!

2. Enable your customers to fulfil themselves — Do what THEY want. The key here is the serving mentality. Find out what they want and desire and take them there. The Dead created a bubble for their Fans and allowed them to reach emotional highs.

3. Focus on the experience not the product — The Dead did not try to sell records. They wanted to create mind-blowing experiences for their Fans. And guess what? (They sold lots of records).

4. Save the best deals for your best customers — Using special promotional deals to entice people away from their supplier is a fool’s game in any event. What makes you think that if someone takes your Special Offer they won’t leave you in a heartbeat if someone else gives them one as well?

You can’t grow your business by catering to the promiscuous crowd of constant switchers. Furthermore, what will your loyal customers say when they find out that you are not offering the special deal to them? (I can see their taillights already).

The Dead always saved the best ticket prices, seats and deals for their Fans. The result? The most successful touring band in history.

5. Do the opposite of what your competitors are doing — Observe ‘em and do a 180. You can’t stand-out if you copy. The Dead allowed their Fans to record their music in concert. No other band did. The 180 strategy created uniqueness and remark-ability that made them unforgettable.

6. Communicate with your Fans incessantly—and figure out how to make it easier for them to communicate with one another.

The Dead were fanatics when it came to having conversations with their Fans before Social Media arrived. Their Fans responded by not only attending concerts and other Dead Events, but also by talking up The Dead to their friends. The Dead virus spread…

You can learn a great deal about business from the most interesting and surprising sources.

Check out The Dead.

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

• Posted 2.27.12 at 08:10 am by Roy Osing
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February 20, 2012

Awesome leaders always ask employees these 10 surprising questions

Source: Pexels

To build an organization that stand-out from others, leaders need to start asking different questions

Awesome leaders always ask employees these 10 surprising questions.

It’s not…

1. It’s not how do we compare to the competition, BUT… How are we different? What makes us stand-out from the crowd?

2. It’s not do we have products with feature-sets like the market leader, BUT… What is different about our offerings that will get us noticed?

3. It’s not how How our products appeal to the masses, BUT… How will it be relevant to the individual customer set we are trying to take care of?

4. It’s not what will make us #1 in the markets we serve, BUT… What will it make us the ONLY ones  that do what we do in the markets we serve?

5. It’s not what are we doing to match best in class, BUT… What are we doing to go the opposite way?

6. It’s it what new technology do we plan to introduce, BUT… What are we doing to leverage the latest technology available to create unique value for our customers?

7. It’s not how do we match the prices of our competitors, BUT… What value do we have to add to our basic offering to justify premium prices in the market?

8. It’s not what marketing programs are necessary to attract new customers, BUT… How can we show our loyal customers that we care for them and convince them to refer us to others?

9. It’s not how many products did we sell last quarter, BUT… What have we done to deepen the long term relationships we have with our customers?

10. It’s not how do we fix the mistakes we made when responding to our customer’s demand, BUT… How can we fix the mistake fast and then blow the customer away by doing something for them they don’t expect?

Leaders: write these questions down. Commit them to memory. Rehearse them. Ask them often.

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

• Posted 2.20.12 at 08:08 am by Roy Osing
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February 13, 2012

Why company rules should be to delight customers not please employees

Source: Pexels

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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