Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Category: Customer Experience

Now share the work
February 8, 2023

Now share the work

Your second job as ‘composer’ of your Customer Experience Score is to enable your ‘orchestra’ to play your lovely music as well as they possibly can.

To help them surface all their habits, and consciously choose to keep the excellent ones, improve the ‘good-enough’ ones and ditch the bad ones.    To show them how you can all do even more for your clients, or do what you do 10 times or a 100 times better.    To help them make sure that your music truly reflects your Promise of Value.

Your Score is a great tool for helping you to achieve this.  But your team will also need plenty of practice and rehearsal before they will feel confident enough to do it by themselves.

And it’s in performance that you’ll find the flaws in your Score.

Nevertheless, have confidence that it will all come together and it will, sooner than you think.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

“Having the framework of Share Promise, Keep Promise in particular has helped me stay on target and be confident that there is a destination.”

It’s always been there
February 7, 2023

It’s always been there

When you’re composing your Customer Experience Score, it’s important to remember that your customer experience music has always been there.

If it wasn’t your business wouldn’t be doing as well as it is.   You have clients who love what you do for them.  You have employees and suppliers who love working with you.   The music is there and it appeals to others.  You’re an expert at playing it.

When we become experts, we turn things we used to have to think about into habits we unconsciously perform.   Some of those habits are excellent.   Some are not so good.   They’re simply the habit we got into that made things ‘good enough’ at the time.

Some habits are downright bad, but we keep using them because to do otherwise takes conscious effort, and when you’re busy looking after clients and teams, that’s hard to do.

Your first job as ‘composer’ of your Customer Experience Score is to make the music as good as it can possibly be.   To surface all your habits, and consciously choose to keep the excellent ones, improve the ‘good-enough’ ones and ditch the bad ones.

It’s an opportunity to deliberately assess whether you could do even more for your clients, or do what you do 10 times or a 100 times better.   To make sure that your music truly reflects your Promise of Value, and to re-shape it so that it does.

This is not straightforward.  Dredging stuff up from your subconscious is hard work.  So it helps to have a framework to build on, and a critical friend to encourage you, push you, suggest solutions and hold you to account.

That’s where I come in.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

“The changes and processes you recommended are coming together nicely. But it all takes so much time!   Slowly but surely I’m disappearing as a boss though :).“

Contribution
January 25, 2023

Contribution

As a musical instrument, the triangle is often regarded as a bit of a joke.  A bit ridiculous.  Not to be taken seriously.

Yet a composer includes it in their orchestration for a reason – because it’s unique sound contributes to the experience they wish to convey.  Without it the composer’s promise couldn’t be kept.

When times are hard, it’s tempting to strip back on our offer.  To cut down on the details of our customer experience.

Just remember, it’s your promise you’re really stripping back.  Eventually it will show.

Use your natural ingenuity to find a better way to keep it instead.

Reproduction
January 16, 2023

Reproduction

The reason why voter ID is such a bad idea, is that any physical object capable of serving as a ‘unique identifier’ can by definition be forged.  If the technology exists to create it, the technology exists to forge it.

The same is true of a physical product or service.   Almost anything about it that you can consider as ‘unique’ can be copied, reverse-engineered or reproduced by someone else.

And will be if you are successful.

The processes around your product are harder to copy, but not impossible.  Otherwise franchises wouldn’t exist.

But the values, emotional labour and personality you put into making and keeping the promises around your product or service are uncopiable.  Especially if you allow everyone in your team to bring their own self to bear too.

Consistency, not uniformity, is what you’re after.

That’s what makes scaling safe.

Ask me how.

What do you really want?
January 9, 2023

What do you really want?

What do you really want?

I’m willing to bet that it’s something like this:

  • Agency – to make your own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
  • Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new capabilities and skills.  So you can grow as a human being.
  • Autonomy – to be free to choose how you make your dent.  To do it your way.
  • Purpose – to do this for something bigger than yourself.  Otherwise it doesn’t feel like much of a dent.
  • Community – to do all this with ‘people like me’.
  • Status – to know (and for others to know) where you stand in your communities.   That doesn’t by any means have to be at the top.  What you really want is recognition.

 

You can build a successful business by delivering this for your clients through what you give them and the way you do it.

You can build a sustainable business by delivering this for your people through the way that you enable them to deliver to clients on your behalf.

Do both, and you’ve sorted yourself out too.

What if it was never about the things?
November 29, 2022

What if it was never about the things?

First nation peoples and clever marketers have known for a long time that Sharing your Promise is never really about selling the thing.  It’s about how that thing affects our relationship with ourselves and with others.  So what you’re really selling is a change of relations.

Which means of course, that when it comes to Keeping your Promise, you’re not really delivering the thing.   You’re delivering the shift in relationships signified and caused by the thing.

Which means that’s what the Customer Experience should be all about.

Which means that’s what should be in your Customer Experience Score.

And why keeping it human matters.

After the complaint
November 16, 2022

After the complaint

After the complaint has been handled; once you’ve addressed the customer’s problem and left them more than happy with the result – so happy that they’ll tell their friends about what went wrong and how you put it right for them so well.   After all that, there is one more job to do.

Make sure you update the way you Keep your Promise so that you don’t get the same complaint again.

Amend your Customer Experience Score.

Why running a business is hard, and how to make it easier
November 15, 2022

Why running a business is hard, and how to make it easier

The people you want to serve – the clients you’d like to have – don’t know what you know.  They don’t believe what you believe. They look at the world through different eyes, a different experience and with a different mindset.

That’s what makes marketing hard.   Especially if you are offering something different from the norm.

It’s the same for the people you work with.   They don’t know what you know.  They don’t believe what you believe.   They bring their own experience and mindset to the way they see the world.

That’s what makes running a business – serving clients through other people – hard.

The difference is that the people you work have to do what you tell them, don’t they?  After all, you’re paying them.  They need a job.

Except that all too often what actually happens is that you spend more time on watching over them than on the business.  Micro-managing.   Because your unique definition of ‘customer experience‘ is entirely in your head.  Which is frustrating for everyone, and constraining for the business.

So you delegate the micro-management to someone else.  Who doesn’t know what you know, doesn’t necessarily believe what you believe.  Who sees the world through different eyes, with a different mindset.   Who tells your people what to do, based on what’s in their head.    Sure it takes a load off your back, but will your unique customer experience survive the change?

I believe there is a better way.   Which is to document the customer experience in your head and make it available for everyone in the business to follow.

Not ‘what to do‘, but ‘what has to happen‘.

Not ‘how to do it‘, but ‘how it needs to feel for the client‘.

Not just ‘this is how we do things round here’ but also ‘this is what we believe‘.

So that you are not just handing over the ‘donkey work’, but also the emotional labour of delivering the business’s unique customer experience – the part that really matters to the client, the part they pay extra for, the part they refer their friends to.

Then work out and document how that customer experience is maintained, how you make sure that everyone who works with you knows what you know and believes most of what you believe, so that you know you can trust them to use their own history and mindset to make that customer experience even better, in line with the beliefs you all share.

It’s quite a job to get all this in place*.  But once you have it running and growing your business gets easier and easier.  Because everyone working the business is standing in for you.  Everyone’s a boss.

And not a manager in sight.

 

*That’s what I do.  Talk to me.

Running repairs
November 7, 2022

Running repairs

One aspect of life you rarely see in on-screen dramatisations of Jane Austen and other period fiction, is mending.   Yet when you read the novels, it’s obvious that women of all ages and classes spent a lot of their time doing it.

Mending is necessary, but has never been sexy, so if we can get away with it, we’ll do a quick running repair, so we can get back to the interesting stuff.  Until suddenly our mending no longer resembles the elegant well-fitting garment we first created for ourselves.  We’d be ashamed to wear it anywhere in public.

It’s the same when it comes to our Customer Experience.   As a one-man band we create an elegant, well-fitting experience that closely reflects our vision and values – ‘the way we do things round here’.  But over time, we patch it up, let it out or take it in to suit a particular expediency – until suddenly we find it’s looking rather shabby.

Much better to embrace the need for repair.   Make sure all repairs enhance the original garment and you can proudly leave them visible.   Part of it’s history and evolution.

Not shabby.  Just the most comfortable thing you can wear.

Delegating care
November 1, 2022

Delegating care

Long, long ago, a young hominid female let her mother look after her baby while she went off and hunted, opening the evolutionary pathway to homo sapiens.

The ability to trust other people with our precious babies is literally what makes us human.  The result is big brains, grandmothers and a propensity to collaborate.

Delegating the care for your Customer Experience should come naturally.

So what’s holding you back?