Customer Service – Page 6 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

October 25, 2019

Focus

With a deep understanding of what makes you tick, and what makes the people you serve tick, you can focus on where to find them.

That’s where demographics come in.

Empathy gives you the insight into what these people really want, and why they might like to come to you for help in getting it.

Demographics gives you an idea of where enough of these people might be. And ‘enough’ is a much smaller number than you think.

The trick is to find a demographic that is under-served by what else is out there. People who feel ignored or under-appreciated, will be happy that you focus on them.

Narrowing your focus enables you to make your message much clearer. “This is for you” is far more powerful than “This is for anyone”.

October 15, 2019

Missing You

For over 30 years I did almost all my shopping at my local big-name supermarket.

Recently, I stopped. The trigger was the self-checkouts – they finally brought it home to me that in spite of all the personal ‘offers’, I am not a person for them, I am merely a consumer. A number on a loyalty card.

Do they miss me? I doubt it.

Now I buy from street markets, WI markets, farm shops and sail cargo. I shop around. Not for the lowest price, but for the best price/experience combination.

I want to do business with people that will miss me when I’m gone.

Don’t we all?

September 4, 2019

Buying Customers

Acquisition is a common form of expansion. Especially where customers buy regularly and repeatedly. As the buyer, you add a whole bunch of new customers in one go, in bulk. As the seller you get to cash in on all those years of hard work.

So far, so good.

For employees, takeover or merger often leads to culture shock, as two distinct (and probably inarticulate) Promises of Value clash in the new business. This is a recognised issue that gets attention and effort from the buyer.

But what about customers?

Often, they don’t even know until after the event, when they call for support and find the rules have changed on them, or see the size of their next bill.

What do you think they feel when they find out?

Perhaps they don’t care, as long as there is no difference in the service they get or the fees they have to pay. They didn’t have a relationship with the previous company and they don’t with the new one either. These customers will stay until a significantly better offer comes along, as sooner or later it will.

Perhaps they are delighted – because the new rules make things easier for them, and efficiencies or economies of scale make their bills lower. These customers will stay, and tell everyone why.

Or perhaps they feel belittled, betrayed and angry. They had a relationship with the previous company. They had chosen it because of its values and ethos. They had bought in to its Promise of Value. This company and the way it worked had become part of their life, and now you’ve taken that away. Worse still, you’ve treated them as a commodity. These customers will leave, and tell everyone why.

What’s the answer?

Aim for delighted, every time.

July 11, 2019

It might not work

You’ve done your research, you’ve talked to people, you’ve tried to get inside the heads and hearts of the people you want to serve. You’ve come up with something you think they’ll want.

But no matter how much of that you do, you can never be sure that the product or service you’ve invented is going to take with its intended market, and no amount of fettling and polishing is going to tell you whether it will or not. The only way to find out is to go for it and put it out there, accepting that it might not work.

This can feel like you’re courting failure, but actually, you’re inviting information. Whatever happens to your product after launch, you can learn from it and work on something better.

The Pioneers launched yesterday. I wouldn’t say it was conclusive, but it’s looking promising, and I’m definitely learning.

July 9, 2019

Trust

There’s a visible gap between the hands of the free-falling trapeze artist and those of her companion coming up to catch her. A gap that makes my stomach lurch just looking at it.

That gap is filled with trust. Trust that a promise made is a promise kept.

What happens, when trust gets eroded? When we discover that institutions and corporates aren’t keeping the promises they made? That the ham we’ve just bought that doesn’t actually contain ham? The car we’ve just bought puts out more emissions than we were sold? The pension we were relying on has been appropriated by the firm we’ve worked for for 40 years? The news we read on social media and in the papers is fake?

When trust disappears, we stop taking risks. We narrow our perspective. We lower our expectations. We start accepting worse instead of expecting better. Cynicism starts to poison everything.

The only antidote is to make our own promises, the biggest we can, in spite of that stomach-lurching gap, and keep them every time.

June 18, 2019

Why do I need process if I have good people? Emotion.

Most modern businesses, large and small, involve interactions of some kind – with other employees, customers, and suppliers.

These interactions require emotional labour – listening; empathising, being present to the other person as well as intellectual labour – pattern-matching, imagining potential scenarios, reviewing possible solutions etc..

Without a process interactions become harder than they need to be, because every interaction is treated as unique, where in fact they fall into common patterns, with unique features.

Process captures what has to happen in the common patterns, giving your people a framework to work from that doesn’t need much thinking about.

Process frees up intellectual and emotional energy to be spent on the unique and personal aspects of regular interactions, and on the exceptions that either prove the rule, or highlight the start of a new pattern.

With their heads cleared of the routine, your good people can use their hearts to exceed your promises.

June 11, 2019

Spoiled

We bought a new sofa on Saturday. We visited the Soho showroom and spent a good hour or so trying various models out, measuring them, discussing how we would get them into the room, and then ordered one.

We were helped by a very pleasant assistant who took us through creating an account so we could track our order, then placing the order for the sofa we wanted. All this was done via a large tablet – so essentially, we could have been anywhere – except that we got to print a postcard of our sofa, so we could look at it while we waited the 14 weeks for delivery.

All good. We left the showroom and went off to have a celebratory pint and a proper sit-down in the pub across the road.

That’s when they spoiled it.

The first thing I saw when I looked at my phone was an email from the sofa company, triggered by creating the account: “£10 off your first purchase with this code.”, followed by another email “Thank you for your order.”

Now, I am very happy with the sofa I’ve ordered, I liked the showroom experience, and found every person we spoke to extremely helpful. And £10 is no big deal given the price of the sofa.

But still I felt cheated. Because the way ordering worked in the showroom meant I couldn’t see that discount offer until it was too late. Better then, not to have made it, or to have applied it automatically.

As the money being poured into emotional AI shows, companies are very aware that humans are feeling beings, who can easily shift and be shifted between emotions.

It would be a pity for all that money to be thrown into making promises, not at keeping them.

May 9, 2019

Systems and processes

Having a staff member sat idle at an empty checkout lane feels wasteful.

So the company policy is to train staff to do everything in the store, so when its quiet, they can be re-stocking, tidying up or whatever else needs to be done. When it gets busy, people jump back onto their checkouts to quickly get the queue down.

Not a bad policy, provided you have enough people.

But having a staff member sat idle at an empty checkout lane, or casting about for something to do still feels wasteful. So its tempting to the store manager to cut the total number of people. “We have a self-checkout people can use, so unless its really busy, we don’t need any other checkout open, and I can handle that – I can make more profit with a smaller team.”

Now you’ve introduced a bottleneck for customers, a bottleneck some of them are going to dislike so much they will stop shopping with you, despite all the changing stock you put in to encourage return visits, browsing and impluse buys.

Your shop gets less busy, so you cut down further on staffing levels. The queues at the self-checkout get longer, the queue at the manned checkout even longer.

Suddenly you’re hardly ever busy, and company management are wondering whether your store is viable.

3 points:

Checking out is merely one step in the customers’ cyclical process of shopping. Before optimising any step, consider its impact on the process as a whole.
A store is a system designed to enable that process for the people you serve locally. All systems need slack if they are to work efficiently.
A store is part of a larger company system designed to make and keep a particular promise to a particular set of people. Before optimising anything, consider whether it will reinforce that promise or undermine it.

It is of course perfectly OK to put some people off shopping with you – so long as you do it on purpose, and only to the right people.

May 8, 2019

What do small business owners want?

You’ve guessed it.

Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery – to learn and master new skills.
Autonomy – to be free to choose how they make their dent.
Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.

The question I, and business advisers like me, need to be asking ourselves is then:

What can I do to help them achieve these things?

The side-effect of delivering that is likely to be scalability.

April 23, 2019

Measuring what matters

Years ago, on my way to work, I’d call in to the Benjy’s sandwich bar next to Cannon Street Station to pick up breakfast. It was always full of other City workers doing the same thing.

In those days, the hot sandwiches and toast were freshly made, and there were only 2 kinds of coffee – with or without milk. You ordered at the counter, waited for your food, and paid at the till.

So far, the same as every other Benjy’s.

But here’s where it changed, because the manager of this Benjy’s had a system.

He took your hot food order, shouted it to the team in the kitchen behind him, wrote it on a paper bag and stacked that bag on top of the one before. That was it. You mooched around the shop (picking up an extra snack or two), until he called out your order. You picked it up along with a tea or coffee from the ready-made batch at the counter, then paid at lightning speed at the till.

The wait for food was never that long – he had clearly parallelised that, so that bacon, eggs and baguettes were always ready, and the stock of teas and coffees was constantly topped up, at least during the busiest times of breakfast and lunch.

All in all it probably took less time to happen than it’s taken me to write down.

What this manager had realised was that what mattered to his clients was not the wait for hot food, it was the wait to place an order. So he built his system around minimising that.

Once you saw that paper bag go down, you knew you were taken care of and could relax. Once you knew your order was in, you weren’t going to walk out without it. In fact you were likely to spend more, to fill in time while you waited.

I never visited another Benjy’s that worked like this one.

I’m guessing that central management assumed that the volume of business this manager handled was simply down to being next to a busy commuter railway station, so never thought to come and look at how he did it, so they could pass that system on to other franchisees.

I don’t know what they were measuring, but it wasn’t what mattered. Which may be why the chain failed.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Customer Service