Customer Experience – Page 16 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

July 22, 2021

Look behind

Queues are annoying, and rarely the fault of the individual dealing with the front of them.

Tutting because the person is serving someone else at the other end of the store may make you feel better, but it’s unfair.

Look behind your immediate experience to see what’s really going on – a single person is being expected to look after what is effectively 2 stores – the shop counter and the post office counter (3 if you count the coffee kiosk). Despite Schrödinger’s dicoveries, at the macro level of human bodies, they can’t be in two places at once.

Tutting again because they’re not happy about the situation is even more unfair.

If you don’t like the customer experience you’re getting, complain to the people who designed the system. And if it doesn’t improve things, vote with your feet.

The people behind these systems rely on us taking things out on the person in front of us. Because that way we keep everything running just fine – for them.

Consumption is a vital part of the system we all live under. Like everything else we do, we can do it mindfully, intentionally, and with the aim of making things better.

July 21, 2021

Double bubble

What could be more energising than knowing that every action you take contributes directly to a customer’s experience? Nothing superfluous, nothing bureaucratic, nothing but the relationship being created or maintained between you and the person you are serving.

So the perfect marriage of customer experience and operational efficiency, turns out to be the perfect marriage of employee engagement and operational efficiency too.

Double bubble.

What’s not to like?

July 20, 2021

What you do is what they get

Repoussé is a metalworking technique in which a malleable metal is ornamented or shaped by hammering from the reverse side to create a design in low relief. What appears on the front of the object is a direct and immediate result of what is done on the back. No more, no less.

It’s the ultimate LEAN process. There is nothing extraneous, nothing intermediate, nothing behind the scenes. Every action contributes directly to the result.

And as Wikimedia also says “There are few techniques that offer such diversity of expression while still being relatively economical.”

The perfect marriage of customer experience and operational efficiency.

Something to aim for in your business?

July 12, 2021

Cobbler’s children

At the end of my road there lives a builder. His house has been a mess for years.

I know commercial knitters who wear old jumpers out at elbow, and doctors who smoke, drink and eat junk food.

As a business owner, it’s helpful to ask yourself – regularly if possible – ‘If I was my client, what would I be telling myself to do?’

Then follow your own advice, the way you’d expect a client to.

If nothing else, you’ll find out what it feels like to be your client.

July 9, 2021

Concentrated learning

As aboriginal Australians know, the way to deepen learning is to make it immersive. They also know that practising scenarios before you encounter them speeds up the process.

We small businesses have our own form of immersive learning. We call it ‘throwing them in at the deep end’.

Somehow, we hope that through this experience, newbies will learn to make and keep promises on behalf of the business as well as we do. Of course, many don’t, and some just drown.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be happy if pilots learned by being ‘thrown in the deep end’. I prefer what actually happens. They learn in a simulator. A safe space – the paddling pool if you like – where they can be immersed in what if feels like to fly a plane, and systematically run through all the scenarios they may have to cope with – taking off, landing, turbulence, bid strikes, engine failures, and so on.

You and I can feel safe getting on a plane because pilots have literally been through all these experiences many times before they get anywhere near a real cockpit, at the head of a tubeful of passengers and crew.

Why not do the same for your prospects and clients? Build a simulator for your business, program it with likely scenarios and use it to train new people, or practise new services before you deliver them, or explore how you could do things differently. Make it a psychologically safe space and it will be fun, team-bonding and surprisingly productive. It will become a practise space people use regularly to improve your customer experience score.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

July 8, 2021

Goals

I’m not remotely into football, but inevitably I catch the odd England game – or at least snippets of them.

What’s struck even me this time round, has been the aim to win rather than merely not lose. There’s been a definite effort to actively score more goals than their opponents, rather than get away with letting fewer goals in, or relying on penalty shoot-outs.

This is not rocket science. If you try and score goals, while preventing the other side from scoring against you, you give yourself more chances to win, and win conclusively. It also makes for a much more exciting game to watch and to play – for both sides.

Delightful as it is to win, winning isn’t everything. How you win matters. The process matters. And speaks volumes about your priorities.

June 9, 2021

Selling up

Your business doesn’t have to get big. It should however, be capable of lasting longer than you do. Of continuing to make and keep its (your) promises long after you’ve gone.

Otherwise, all there is to sell when the time comes is your customer list.

How do you think your customers will feel about that?

The good news is that scalability equals saleability.

Which means you really can sell up, not out.

May 27, 2021

Markets

When Adam Smith wrote “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”, he wasn’t thinking of JBS S.A, or Anheuser-Busch InBev, or Grupo Bimbo, S.A.B. de C.V..

He was thinking of Mr Jameson, Mr Paterson and Mr McDermid – people his mother knew and spoke to regularly, trying to make a decent living. Who knew that if they tried to short-change customers or cheat their suppliers they’d be found out, word would spread and business would be lost.

But as Adam Smith also wrote “The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. Monopoly of one kind or another, indeed, seems to be the sole engine of the mercantile system.“

There’s a reason marketeers talk about ‘brands’. Brands aren’t people, or even companies, they’re more often monopolies masquerading as humans.

As consumers (and human beings) we should at least keep ourselves aware of that.

The invisible hand can’t work without a market.

May 21, 2021

Empathy comes before logic

When you’re on the receiving end of a complaint about your product or service, it’s tempting to rush into fixing the ‘problem’ through the use of logic. “Nobody else has complained about that.”; “That can’t have happened.”; “Ok, let’s replace it.”, or “Here’s your money back.”

What you’re missing when you do this is an amazing chance to create a stronger connection with the customer or client in front of you.

If you start with empathy, acknowledging how they feel, aiming to understand how their real needs have been let down by the perceived failure, you’ll show them that you truly care about them as a person.

That enables you both to collaborate constructively on how best to meet those needs, and address that failure in a way that is often less damaging or expensive for you business, and more positive for the customer.

In other words, empathy is more efficient than logic.

May 14, 2021

The monster in the office

There’s a monster in the office, and everyone’s afraid.

Everyone calls it ‘the Boss’.

The owner thinks it has many heads, eating the business out of house and home, and just not caring enough what they do and how they do it.

The team thinks they know exactly who it is – the control-freak micro-manager, constantly interfering, trying to do everyone’s job and never happy with the results.

Neither are right.

Every business owner I’ve met has a vision in their head for how their business makes promises to clients and keeps them. But there’s often a massive gap between that vision and what they’ve actually managed to communicate to the people whose help they need to achieve it.

That gap is the real monster.

Fortunately like most monsters, it disappears with daylight.