We like to remind ourselves of what we have ‘to do’. But we all too easily forget the why behind them. It’s easy to get derailed by happenstance and other people’s agendas. This isn’t helped by systems that focus on tasks rather than outcomes.
True productivity (adding value) is driven by focusing on the why. What if you built a system that constantly reminds people of that?
Given the why, they can probably work out the best thing to do next.
… that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Mark Twain
Imagine reading something that turns everything you ‘know’ about how the world works upside-down, simply by ignoring centuries-old dogma and observing what actually happens from a different perspective. Copernicus, Darwin, Wegener.
Imagine then finding out that the model you’re reading about wasn’t new, but had actually been around for decades, even centuries, already?
We humans don’t like changing our minds that much. We actually try to avoid seeing things that might do it for us.
But, occasionally, we can’t help it. Something we read, see or hear changes how we look at the world forever.
This weekend’s reading did it for me:
Which book changed the way you see the world?
I must confess to having a bit of a thing about phone answering services. Not because I dislike them, but because I think they are one of those things that can really enhance the customer experience when done well.
You can always tell when someone is using an answering service, because you get asked more questions that you often would, and you can tell there’s a process going on. That’s a good thing, something more businesses that answer their own phones should learn to do. It would save a lot of miscommunication.
When someone providing this service does it really well, I have a genuine conversation. I am allowed to ramble a little about why I’m calling (the person I want to speak to knows I’m due to call and why), but they still get from me (not necessarily by asking me) the information they need to pass on the message – my name (including how to spell it), my business name, why I’m calling and who I want to speak to, and finally how they can get hold of me.
I can even have a separate conversation about the fact that they provide the service, which is how I found out who they were.
Its a pleasure to participate in someone doing their job with commitment intelligence and humanity. Its an enjoyable experience for me as customer, prospect or supplier as well as for the person doing it.
That’s why your Customer Experience ScoreTM needs to cover everything.
PS the company was Take My Calls. When my current credit runs out, I’ll be switching to them.
I’d heard of ‘The Method’ – a way of acting designed to help actors deliver more ‘authentic’ performances by mining their own emotions – “to plumb past trauma, joy, grief, euphoria, and relive those feeling states each night on the stage.”
Until yesterday, when I read this article by William Justice Bruehl, I hadn’t heard of the person who originally came up with it – Constantin Stanislavski – and certainly hadn’t heard that he revised his ideas in later life.
His new idea was much less emotionally draining for actors. Simply put, the idea is to “study the text and articulate what their character struggles to achieve – the character’s ‘objective’ – throughout the whole play, in every scene, and then to simply note what the character should feel along the way.” In other words, to put yourself in the character’s shoes, and follow the logic of the story they are telling themselves. Different interpretations of the character’s underlying objective will lead to different interpretations in performance – even though the words stay the same.
This seems to me to be a useful and doable approach for non-actors playing a customer-facing role too. A combination of discipline (the text) and freedom (to divine the ‘objective’ of the person in front of me right now), that makes for a more fulfilling experience for both sides.
You need a text though, otherwise nobody makes sense.
PS I recommend Psyche as a source of interesting things to read.
This was last weekend’s reading.
Strangely enough, they are related. I recommend reading them together.
The very best question I know for improving your process for making and keeping promises is this one:
“How can we make this 1% better today?”
1% seems like a pathetic target for improvement until you realise it compounds.
Compounding works in any direction of course, so it helps to frame the question in the direction you want without tying down the ‘how’. This takes some thinking about, but is well the effort.
Hiut Denim (who gave me the idea) has this one, for example:
“How can we reduce the environmental impact of our jeans today?”
Tiny, daily, incremental improvement are easy to start, easy to keep going as a habit, and add up sooner than you think to a ‘better’ that’s far bigger than you could ever have dreamt of.
What would your question be?
You’d think that Keeping your Promise is easy to do. That’s true when everything is going to plan, but when times are hard, or the unexpected happens, it may not be so easy. It may even be impossible.
It’s at these times that questions can help you hold yourself to account for what you do and the way you do it:
If you have more than one set of stakeholders (and it seems to me you’ll always have at least 5 – customers, employees, shareholders, suppliers, your community), then you can also ask:
When you know the answers to these questions, you can ask further, practically useful ones:
If everyone in your business is in the habit of asking these questions in the good times, you’ll be well able to do the right things, the right way, when things are bad.
We’ve already seen that motivation isn’t enough to lead to action. It needs to be combined with ability. But motivation plus ability alone is still not enough. We also need prompts, says B J Fogg, behaviour designer and author of ‘Tiny Habits‘ .
We need to be triggered into doing things we are motivated and able to do.
That means that Sharing your Promise is all about finding the motivated and able, and prompting them to take action.
So, some questions that might help here are:
Prompting someone to do what they already want to do feels much better than ‘selling’ doesn’t it? Especially if you’ve already worked out how to make it easier for them too.
We think often about the motivation of the people we wish to serve: ‘They must be ambitious to grow‘, ‘They must be seeking change‘, ‘They must be hungry’.
But according to B J Fogg, behaviour designer and author of ‘Tiny Habits‘ there are at least two more factors we need to consider.
The first is ability. Motivation means nothing without the ability to act on it, so when packaging up your Promise of Value for sale, it helps to think about what formats will work best for different clients’ abilities to act on their motivation.
These kinds of question might help:
The Promise is the same, but the format may make all the difference to whether someone buys.
A few good questions to ask of yourself and the people you wish to serve:
| You | Your ideal client |
| Who are you? | Who are they? |
| What skills do you have? | What skills are they missing? |
| What do you enjoy doing? | What do they need doing? |
| What dent are you trying to make? | What dent are they trying to make? |
| What transformation are you uniquely able to deliver? | What transformation are they seeking? |
| Why do you want to do that? | Why do they want to do that? |
Knowing that everyone really wants
will help you ask and answer these questions far more productively.