Archive for the ‘Customer Service’ Category
E is for Empathy
Posted in Communication, Customer Service, Leadership, Vision on March 16th, 2009
The Northwest Airlines website would not let me complete the payment process for a flight I was booking. Frustrated, I picked up the phone to complete the transaction. Northwest added to the frustration by informing me there would be an additional $20 fee for the privilege of talking to a person.
This wasn’t my first poor customer service experience from Northwest or Delta or whatever it may evolve into next year. Cutbacks in services, staff reductions and just boneheaded management styles have left us awash in miserable to non -existent customer service.
I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the customer service team – hard workers who historically are one of the lowest paid. An article in the Boston Globe reminded me that some CEO’s get it.
Take Paul Levy for example. He is the guy who runs Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The moment had come when pink slips were inevitable. So he took time out and just watched some of the 8,000 people who work for Beth Israel.
As Kevin Cullen, a Globe Columnist noted, “He stood at the nurses’ stations, watching the transporters, the people who push the patients around in wheelchairs. He saw them talk to the patients, put them at ease, make them laugh. He saw that the people who push the wheelchairs were practicing medicine.
He noticed the same when he poked his head into the rooms and watched as the people who deliver the food and empty the trashcans chatted up the patients and their families.”
Paul Levy did something incredible. He did something right for his employees. He did something great for his hospital and the bottom line. Levy stood in front of an auditorium filled with anxious employees and said, “I want to run an idea by you that I think is important, and I’d like to get your reaction to it,” Levy began. “I’d like to do what we can to protect the lower-wage earners – the transporters, the housekeepers, the food service people. A lot of these people work really hard, and I don’t want to put an additional burden on them.
“Now, if we protect these workers, it means the rest of us will have to make a bigger sacrifice,” he continued. “It means that others will have to give up more of their salary or benefits.”
He had barely gotten the words out of his mouth when the auditorium erupted in applause. Thunderous, heartfelt, sustained applause.
The consensus was that the workers don’t want anyone to get laid off and are willing to give up pay and benefits to make sure no one does. A nurse said her floor voted unanimously to forgo a 3 percent raise. A guy in finance who got laid off from his last job at a hospital in Rhode Island suggested working one less day a week. Another nurse said she was willing to give up some vacation and sick time. A respiratory therapist suggested eliminating bonuses.
Levy did the right thing to help people in hard times. He also did the right thing in delivering great customer service. It is very often the front line that makes the biggest impression on customers. They are the ones who hear the problems first hand. And when given the tools and training they can be the ones to prevent a problem from becoming a lost customer.
Cullen writes this about Paul Levy, “he is trying something revolutionary, radical, maybe even impossible: He is trying to convince the people who work for him that the E in CEO can sometimes stand for empathy.”
Tripping In The Dark
Tags: Brand Evolutionary, Brand Promise, Internal Communication, Vendor Relations
Posted in Customer Service, Internal Communication on February 16th, 2009
I had an interesting discussion over coffee with an executive in the waste management industry. We were talking about brand promises. Specifically, how do we ensure our front line people faithfully deliver the brand promise everyday?
He shared with me a story about how his wife had tripped in dimly lit hallway of a local restaurant. Her fall resulted in broken bones and a period of unconsciousness. (Since her husband is a reader of Mind Share, I’ll take this moment to wish her a speedy recovery.)
The restaurant manager sprung into action, calling an ambulance and assisting in everyway he knew how. He gave the husband his business card and said the restaurant will take care of everything. If the story had ended here I would be writing to tell you how this restaurant manager epitomized customer service and ultimately the delivery of the brand promise.
Unfortunately, and perhaps unknowingly, the restaurant brand took a decided turn for the worse. After the trip to the emergency room, doctor visits and follow-up care, a representative of the restaurant’s corporate office/insurance company contacted the executive. The first words out of the representative’s mouth were, and I paraphrase here, “Sir you must have misunderstood the manager. He did not say that we would take care of everything.”
With one phone conversation the brand perception of this restaurant changed. This brand damaging event did not need to happen. Failure to provide brand education to everyone in your organization and your contract suppliers can wreak havoc on your reputation.
Training every employee in the proper way to treat a customer is essential. Training your vendors to deliver your brand promise is a completely different challenge. When we partner with a third party supplier it is critical that we have the brand promise discussion as a component of the overall deliverables. Here are few a thoughts that can help reduce the odds of getting that angry call from a loyal customer.
- Make sure project managers, supervisors and all front line people understand the brand promise.
- Empower your team to make decisions quickly and remedy mistakes before they escalate.
- Coach staff on how to be empathetic to a customer’s pain.
- Timely and regular communication, internally and externally, can actually turn a negative situation into a positive experience for your customer.
- Senior involvement tells your customer that they are important.
- Secret shopping your vendors is a great way to audit the delivery of your expected products and services.
We all spend a great deal of time, thought and resources to ensure that our brand is communicated. Sometimes we forget customer touch points extend far beyond the sales, marketing and project managers. The last thing we need is for one of our customers to trip over failed communication because we kept a department or vendor in the dark about our brand promise.
Relationship Selling in a Down Economy
Tags: brand affinity, facebook, leveraging, linkedin, referral, releationship marketing, twitter
Posted in Branding, Business Development, Customer Service, Relationship Marketing on October 27th, 2008
When the economy slows, where do many companies begin slashing budgets and people? Marketing, the primary vehicle companies use to generate growth. Please explain that logic to me? I know that cutting marketing is partially a result of fear. However, once fear permeates the senior level, it becomes a virus that will spread and negatively impact employee performance and company profits.
Bad economic times are a catalyst for the laws of natural selection to play out. Are you going to eat or be eaten? Most of us prefer to stay higher up on the food chain. It’s easy to point a finger at poor business development planning or, failure to get the marketing plan out of your head and on to paper. If you’re in either category, recognize it and move forward.
It’s time to get strategic.
Let’s assume that you have won and kept the business because it was based on trust, knowledge and respect. Now, how do you leverage that trust, knowledge and respect differentiator to markets that don’t know your brand?
Leveraging Your Existing Customer Relationships
Have you sat down with your customers and asked them to think about industry peers that might be a good fit for you? People enjoy recommending quality partners. Ask them about trends within their industries. What are the hot topics at their industry conferences? Besides picking up leads, you also become a more informed partner.
Leveraging Your Employee’s Relationships
LinkedIn. Facebook. MySpace. Twitter. Need I say more? Personal relationships are the key in business development. Educate, encourage and teach your employees to use the power of their social networks to develop introductions into new markets and companies.
Spreading the Word
You’ve built the business through the cultivation of authentic relationships. The challenge is replicating that strategy into new markets.
Public relations is a key component. Developing thought leadership papers, webinars, and writing for various trade publications are the first steps in establishing prospect trust. And without trust, you have no shot at a relationship. Here’s an example from Mike Schultz, a service-marketing consultant.
A company sales developer sets up a meeting for Dave with Joyce, the vice president of operations at a large commercial shipping company. After introductions, here’s how the meeting went:
Joyce: Nice to have you here. Over the last several years it’s been great getting to know about you and your firm as a result of being included in your communication program. I’ve read your white paper on emerging supply chain management technologies as well as listened to you deliver webinars on strategies for global sourcing in my industry.
For one reason or another, some of the events either didn’t work with my schedule or they didn’t fit into what was on my plate at the time. But I’ve been getting the event invitations and brochures in the mail along with the research briefs you send out. So I’ve followed along.
Dealing with supply chain technology is now in the middle of my plate. So when your marketing department sent me the email to view your on-demand presentation on your capabilities in this area, I put it on my to-do list to call your firm. Of course, your team called me first so I was more than happy to set up this conversation. I’m ready to dive in with you to see how you might help.
That exchange is carried out regularly as a result of executing a disciplined approach to marketing and business development. Because Joyce received the company’s regular multi-channel communication, she:
- Knew about the company.
- Already had assigned the knowledge and respect to the brand (2/3′s of your brand differentiator).
- Could likely articulate how the company helped people like her solve problems.
- Remembered the company during her elusive time of need and planned to call.
- Felt an affinity and preference for the company before ever interacting with an individual from the company personally due to the education she received from the company’s marketing efforts.
Client referrals, employee social networks and consistent end user focused communication are key drivers in building brand awareness in new markets and categories. If customers have already assigned the respect and knowledge attributes to your brand, then all that is left is for you to build trust. And that, as Humphrey Bogart said in the closing scene of Casablanca, “Is the beginning of a beautiful relationship”.
What’s Your Brand Promise?
Tags: american marketing association, Brand Promise, corporate culture, customers, execution, expectation, greatness, Internal Communication, promise, vendor communication
Posted in Branding, Communication, Copy/Content, Creative, Customer Service, Employer Branding, Internal Communication, Marketing, Recruitment on October 20th, 2008
The American Marketing Association describes a brand as a ”name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competition.”
I like to simplify that by saying that a brand is a promise. And since it is a promise, then it must also be an expectation.
It is critical that your brand promise is clearly defined and articulated to internal and external stakeholders. Stanford professor and author Jim Collins, speaking on how to develop the brand said, “First figure out your partners, then figure out what ideas to pursue. The most important thing isn’t the market you target, the product you develop or the financing, but the founding team.”
In a down economy, buyers of products and services can’t afford to take a risk. They will stick to the brands that have kept their promise. Although noted here previously, it is worthy of repeating. A well-executed branding campaign delivers a myriad of dividends including:
Giving people permission to buy
Reinforcing preconceived notions
Establishing your promise deep in the subconscious of your audience
Helping you recruit and keep the best and brightest talent
Enabling you to charge premium pricing
Thriving during economic downturns
Easily extending into new markets
Branding is too important to leave solely to the marketing department. Branding is the delivery of your promise. It is why you worked those long hours in a garage before bringing your product to the market place. It is your vision. It is your passion. It is what gets you out of bed every morning. Whether you are the founder, partner or captain of the ship, it is critical that the team understand your vision of the brand promise.
Getting your organization to embrace, proselytize and consistently deliver your brand promise, starts at the top.
Define Your Brand Promise – According to Derrick Daye, managing partner at Brand Strategy, “the brand promise must meet three criteria in order to be effective. The promise must be unique, compelling and believable.”
Identity Must Support the Promise – Your logo, colors, tag lines, sell sheets, press releases, all must reinforce your promise.
Do Your Customers Connect - Assuming that you are targeting the correct customers and prospects, how does your promise affect them? Market research and your employees can help determine the relevance of the promise.
Internal Communication – Can your employees fully articulate the brand promise and the value to your customers? Have your new hires been fully educated on the brand promise?
Partner Communication – Do your channels understand your brand promise? And better yet, have you chosen channel partners that are aligned with your promise?
Corporate Culture - Does your corporate culture support the promise? Critical to success is that all members of an organization live the promise in thought, actions and deeds.
Measure Your Efforts - Peter Drucker said, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Internal surveys, customer benchmarking metrics and peer review, will tell you if you are moving the needle in the right direction
Top Down Execution - It’s your promise. Be sure that you align your communication and activities around your brand promise. Champion your promise with unbridled enthusiasm. You’ll find that it is a highly contagious way to ensure adoption and execution by your team
According to Collins, “focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.” If you stay true to your brand promise, which is uniquely you, then you are not guaranteed success but you will be on the right path to earning success.
Cold Calls Create Warm Relationships
Tags: cold calling, relationships, sales, thought leader
Posted in Business Development, Communication, Customer Service, Marketing on October 6th, 2008
On those occasions when I can roust myself out of bed early enough, I enjoy a pedal through the park. A recent ride was a bit cooler than expected. I suppose that’s what started me thinking about cold calling.
It occurred to me that everyday we cold call. Whether it is a brief conversation with a stranger on the elevator, waiting for the bus, or at a conference breakout session. In each case we reach out and create a relationship.
So why is it so difficult for us to do it when charged with developing new business opportunities? Perhaps it is because we have been inundated with so many poorly executed sales calls that we feel like we’ll be viewed as just one more.
Breaking out of the pack requires an approach that is WIIFM (What’s in it for me?) focused. When you reach your prospect try keeping the following in mind.
- Before you call, have research or best practices relevant to their industry or business.
- Introduce yourself in one sentence.
- Tell them you want to schedule a 10 to 20 minute presentation regarding your research. Ask them to have their colleagues participate in the conversation. You’ll be viewed as the Thought Leader, the expert resource.
- Close the conversation by asking what date on their calendar works best for them. This approach gets you a “when” answer instead of a “no”.
- When you present, be sure you actually deliver the best practices promised in the cold call conversation. Sharing your knowledge is the first step in the relationship process and the only way you can move a prospect from cold to warm.
Erica Stritch, a business development consultant, offers these cold calling scripts in her blog. I’m passing them along to you. Thanks Erica.
Script #1
My name is John Smith and I am with Smith & Smith, we’re a (insert type of firm). We’ve been scheduling brief phone calls to introduce ourselves and share best practice information. We’d like to tell you how other (industry) companies are…
- Protecting their global shipping operations and ensuring continuous cash flow
- Achieving the best possible efficiencies by connecting all (blank) disciplines
- Using (our client’s special expertise) to create competitive differentiation and capture market share
The information will give you a framework for assessing your situation at (company name). I’m wondering if you’d like to talk with me and one of the partners here at Smith & Smith on October 23.
Script #2
My name is Jane Smith and I am with Smith & Smith – we’re a (insert type of firm). As a part of that work, we have just completed a benchmark study where (industry) firms rate over 350 major suppliers in those areas critical in deciding who they will do business with.
What we’ve been doing as a way of introducing ourselves is to share with some select suppliers survey details specific to you:
- How (company name) rates on six critical success factors
- Where your competition stands in relation to you
- What areas you can focus on that will have the greatest impact on increasing your share of wallet
That’s it. Even if you decide not to pursue this any further than this first meeting, at least you’ll have valuable intelligence as a result. What does your calendar look like next Wednesday or Thursday?
Whether it’s a chat across the fence or across the boardroom, it’s all about relationship building. Becoming a valuable partner instead of a vendor in these very competitive times will ensure that your business will prosper and endure.
I have additional research on how Thought Leadership can help meet your 2009 sales forecast. Is next Monday open on your calendar?
