Note: This post has been sponsored by Zurich, but all narrative and opinion is my own.

Today I want to share with you a corporate video that stood out for me. It’s less than 4 mins long so do take a moment to watch it.

Watch it? I did and I really liked it.

Why?

Because it’s not about products or services or any special offers or schemes or any other thing.

It’s about people. Specifically, it’s about Jasvir and Blanca, and their lives, their stories, building a life together and the things they care about. It’s about love too.

The reason that it stood out for me and why I think it works is, I believe, because it’s not about Zurich, who made it (in association with The Guardian), but it’s about Jasvir and Blanca and the life they are building together.

It’s also about me and the similarity of my journey.

But, more broadly, it’s also about the lives of lots of their other customers that are like Jasvir and Blanca, can see themselves going through the same journey or have already made a similar journey.

It’s about building affinity with your customers. It’s about showing that you understand. It’s about them and it’s about making your customers the heroes of your story.

I think it’s very good and many businesses could learn a lot from this approach.

What do you think?

Note: This post has been sponsored by Zurich, but all narrative and opinion is my own.

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Today’s interview is with Josh Kaufman, the author of the #1 international bestseller “The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business”. However, today’s interview is about his new book: “The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything….FAST!” Thanks go to the folks at Penguin/Portfolio, particularly Richard Lennon, who facilitated the setting up of the interview.

This interview follows on the back of my last interview: Delivering Fanatical Levels of Customer Support – Interview with Fabio Torlini of Rackspace and is number sixty-one in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Here’s the highlights from the interview I did with Josh:

• Founded The Personal MBA – Master the Art of Business website, as a way of learning everything that an MBA had to offer but without the expense. It subsequently turned into an international best-selling book and other things.
• The website existed for years before the book deal. The reason that Josh did it was because it made sense to him and by developing it and sharing what we was learning other people got value out of it too.
• His new book: The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast is both an out-growth of The Personal MBA and a new project.
• The interesting thing about The Personal MBA as a book is that it treats business as a skill and something you can kern to do and get better at.
• Josh took this principle and wanted to apply it to anything to equip readers with a method to help them ‘Learn Anything Fast’.
• Josh makes a distinction in the book about learning and skill acquisition.
• The method helps people take a Minimal Viable Product type of approach to acquiring new skills i.e. what do I need to learn to get started doing something?
• This is a great method of getting started doing new things as it deconstructs the learning process.
• The biggest barriers to doing or learning new things are more emotional than intellectual.
• The book is quick to summarise the theory but backs it up with case studies of the application of the method to the following six areas: Programming, Yoga, Go (the Chinese board game), Ukelele, Windsurfing and Touch Typing. All of which are skills that Josh developed.
• The reason that he picked those areas was that he wanted a broad range of subjects and a combination of skills that covered both motor skills and thinking skills and things that you can do professionally and things that you do for fun.
• Josh says that one of the reasons that he used case studies was that as a ‘teacher’ he had to make sure that the ‘method’ works before he can teach it.
• Applying these principles to corporate executives, leaders and entrepreneurs: If you want to have a satisfying career then there are skills that you can learn that will help you perform better, do more things, grow your business, your team, develop your career etc to get to where you want to go in a quicker, more direct way.
• This method also helps with the ‘lack of time’ element that all of us suffer from.
• However, deconstruction of skills to allow for rapid skill acquisition is a skill in itself.
• Therefore, to help get started and access the ‘rapid skill acquisition hub’ that Josh is developing, learn from Josh and others sharing their stories on rapid skill acquisition in other areas that don’t appear in the book, purchase a print, ebook, or audio edition of The First 20 Hours, then email a copy of your receipt to extras@first20hours.com. You’ll then receive an email with further instructions.
• There are already lots of examples from people doing really cool things.

About Josh (taken from his bio on his personal website)

Josh Kaufman is the author of the #1 international bestseller The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business as well as the upcoming book The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast. Josh specializes in teaching professionals in all industries and disciplines how to master practical knowledge and skills.

Josh’s unique, multidisciplinary approach to business mastery has helped millions of readers around the world learn essential business concepts on their own terms. Josh’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Time, BusinessWeek, Wired, Fast Company, and HarvardBusiness.org. The widely-acclaimed Personal MBA manifesto and recommended reading list has been downloaded over 1.28 million times from ChangeThis.com.

The Personal MBA has sold over 130,000 copies worldwide to date, and has been in the top 0.1% of all business books sold on Amazon.com since its publication in January, 2011. On publication, the international edition of The Personal MBA was the the #1 bestselling business book in the United Kingdom, and remained #1 for two consecutive months. The Personal MBA has also been used as a textbook for business courses at Stanford University, New York University, Howard University, and Portland State University.

PersonalMBA.com hosts over 50,000 readers every month, and has been visited over 2 million times by readers all over the world since its founding in 2005. Josh’s work has directly saved prospective business students millions of dollars in unnecessary tuition, fees, and interest by providing an effective, affordable, and debt-free method of learning fundamental business principles.

Prior to developing the Personal MBA full-time, Josh worked in brand management for Procter & Gamble’s Home Care division, where he lead multi-million dollar projects that encompassed P&G’s entire value chain, from new product development to delivering in-store marketing campaigns for key customers like Walmart, Target, and Costco. Before leaving P&G, Josh spearheaded the development of P&G’s global online marketing measurement strategy.

Josh’s current projects involve online training programs, live training programs, ongoing research in business and skill acquisition, writing, and programming. His brain is insured by Lloyd’s of London.

Due to research projects in progress, Josh is currently unavailable for speaking, consulting, and corporate training engagements.

You can connect with Josh on LinkedIn here and Twitter @joshkaufman. Do check his books: The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything … Fast and The Personal MBA.

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“In practice, values are best defined by employees in the business itself rather than just the senior leadership team.”

Businesses have long recognized the importance of cultivating proud, motivated and loyal employees. In fact, organizations that still operate with the mentality that workers should do their jobs and keep their mouths shut are likely to flounder. These days, the old style of management has largely disappeared – but so has the trust that once existed between employer and employee. Layoffs and cutbacks in a difficult economic environment have generated fear and suspicion among employees. Companies recognize that their long term viability depends on finding, retaining and motivating good employees.

Organization can create sustainable businesses with top-down commitment and constant follow-through by senior managers.

The most important components of employee engagement, we believe, are:

1. Focused Engagement:

Employee engagement unquestionably yields multiple benefits. Research and statistical data show that organizations that embrace engagement are more productive and profitable, and have more satisfied customers. In addition to having an overall positive attitude about themselves and their organizations, engaged employees:

• Go out of their way to make customers happy.
• View change as challenging instead of distasteful and intimidating.
• Welcome opportunities to learn and grow.
• Always maintain a sense of perspective, and don’t allow setbacks or mistakes to discourage them.
• Are willing to try new things even though it may be uncomfortable.

Corporate executives who recognize the importance of engagement typically conduct employee surveys every year or two. They encourage their employees to offer candid assessments of the company, their divisions, their colleagues and their superiors. Organizations that have never formally attempted to measure employee engagement can begin by assessing readily available material, such as performance evaluations, turnover and absentee rates, and training and coaching initiatives.

2. Well-being

Well-being at work encompasses many things, but essentially it means that employees care about their company and it cares about them. Businesses often profess to having their employees’ best interests at heart, but their practices indicate otherwise. A state of well-being means employees take pride in their work and are proud of their organization. This is impossible to achieve without a motivated workforce. Most observers agree that motivation is self-sustaining.

Employers can offer short-term motivational tools such as pay raises, promotions and recognition, but over the long haul, employees must find the drive within to be productive. Employees typically are motivated when they:

• Feel that their jobs matter, and are not just tedious, mind numbing and repetitive.
• Have a sense of responsibility and the autonomy to make decisions.
• Feel connected to their co-workers and are part of a larger cause or mission.
• Believe that their company properly utilizes their knowledge, skill and experience.
• Gain recognition from their superiors and colleagues for worthy achievements.

3. “Information”:

Disengaged employees complain that they don’t have a clear idea of their companies’ direction. Even organizations that have defined a so-called “vision” need to formalize strategies that lay out their corporate goals and the behavior they expect from their employees. Although it may take years to achieve, a vision leads your organization to where it wants to be. A vision demands that employees maximize their potential and imagine limitless possibilities. This mindset requires employee engagement. To turn a vision into reality, an organization’s leaders must clearly identify its strategic goals and aspirations, focus on a handful of realistic initiatives instead of many, create a culture which consistently reinforces strategic initiatives, and ensure that executives and managers express their strategic goals.

4. “Fairness”

Fairness means treating people properly throughout their entire employment experience – from recruitment and hiring to professional development to rewards and promotion. Southwest Airlines’ managers place a premium on attitude and values, hiring only people who seem likely to fit in well with the culture; an individual’s skills are secondary. Companies that carefully screen candidates have lower attrition rates and save thousands of dollars filling vacancies. Assessment tests should take into account a candidate’s potential behavior, and his or her ability to react to circumstances that may arise on the job. Good managers are careful not to throw new hires straight into the fire. A gradual transition allows employees to become acclimated to the corporate environment.

A new employee’s first weeks on the job can determine whether he or she will get a favorable impression, and may set the tone for years to come. Many employees complain about insufficient feedback about their performance. Part of the problem is that managers find performance reviews annoying and time-consuming. However, failure to provide regular and constructive feedback harms morale and adversely affects motivation. The policy at one large U.S. pharmaceutical company, for example, is to withhold merit pay from managers who do not complete performance reviews on time.

5. “Involvement”

Involvement means keeping lines of communication open throughout an organization. Managers and employees should interact constantly. Some managers choose not to engage with their staff, or refuse to delegate tasks because of their basic insecurities and control issues. They’re worried that their department’s performance will reflect negatively upon them, or are frightened that someone else will do the job just as well and expose their shortcomings.

At some point, executives should overrule such practices. Companies should strive to cultivate meaningful relationships between senior managers and employees. Managers who spend the majority of their time locked in their offices quickly lose touch with the basic needs and concerns of their staff. Leaders who spend time “in the trenches,” instead, send a positive message to their employees and generate engagement at the highest level.

-SAUROV KAKOTI

This was a guest post from Saurov Kakoti. He is a Manager at Headrush Outbound, a South Asia based outdoor experiential learning company.

Headrush aims to impart training to variety of different ends, by merging the engagement level of the outdoors, with the science of assessments.

For its more rigorous training oriented clients, Headrush also offers Headrush Insights, its rigorous Outdoor Education modules.

You can find out more about Headrush via their website: www.headrush.in and connect with them on Twitter: @HeadrushIndia.

Today’s interview is with Fabio Torlini, VP of Marketing, International with Rackspace, the open cloud company, who are famous for delivering Fanatical Support to their customers.

It was when they ranked No. 7 in the Sunday Times’ 100 Best Companies to work for in 2013 that I decided I’d like to find out more about what makes them tick and what makes them so successful.

This interview follows on the back of my last interview: Customers, customer service, customer experience and crystal balls – Interview with Dr Nicola Millard of BT and is number sixty in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Here’s the highlights from the interview I did with Fabio:

• Involvement with Best Companies is about two things: 1. Benchmarking themselves against other organisations; and 2. To provide demonstrable evidence to new prospects to about how good they are in terms of technical capability, employee engagement and the quality of their customer service and Fanatical Support.
• Preservation of their culture and their Fanatical Support levels that they and their customers pride themselves on has been challenging, particularly in the face of continued rapid growth of sales and headcount. The UK-based business has grown by around 25% over the last year or so.
• However, to do that they have done two things: 1. Put a lot of measures (recruitment, induction, training, meetings, activities etc) in place to ensure that staff understand and embrace their culture; and 2. They continuously measure how they are doing. They use NPS on a quarterly basis to see how they are doing on customer loyalty as well as benchmarking themselves against their industry. And, they use Racker Pulse, their employee engagement survey, on a quarterly basis to help them understand how they are doing with regards to their people.
• When they hire new Rackers the most important criteria is attitude and one of the things they look for is how happy the new hires will be talking to customers.
• Senior management get heavily involved with the week-long induction of new hires. In addition, the presentations given by senior management are all ranked for entertainment and quality of content.
• Their induction programme starts before someone has actually physically joined them and includes sending them ‘Welcome Home’ cards signed by members of their team before they have joined.
• They have recently moved from two buildings into a new building that houses their entire UK team. Development and design of their new offices (the home of Fanatical Support) has helped with building their employee engagement and supporting their culture and values, with a clear aim of wanting to create an environment that makes ‘Rackers’ feel at home and able to deliver their desired level of customer service.
• Things that they have also done that supports their values and culture include: the fanatical support jacket that is awarded to one person every month for going above and beyond the call of duty in delivering great service whether inside or outside of the company, all of the senior management don’t have offices and share the open floor space with all of their colleagues, flags above their desks to reflect where people have come from and the diversity that exists in their business, a monthly fun budget of £25 per person for people to spend on what they like (this is often saved up and combined with teams deciding to go off and do something together – it also creates a healthy level of internal competition to see who can spend the budget in the best way) etc etc
• Fanatical Support is hard to define what it actually means but is really all about going above and beyond to help a customer out, whether internal or external. This is reinforced through the telling of stories of what Rackers have done for customers.
• The benefits of all this are that despite being a young company and the demographic profile and ambition of their people, they have a staff turnover ratio that is half of the industry average.
• Fabio’s top tips for getting the best out of your teams: 1. Clarity of vision; 2. Clarity of what their role is; and 3. Enabling employees to deliver by giving them the right tools and resources.

About Fabio (taken from his Rackspace bio)

Fabio holds the honour of being of the longest-standing UK Racker, having joined the business back in 2003. He was one of a handful of Rackers who dreamed of greatness, and were prepared to demonstrate to the world just how different a hosting company could be when you added the magic ingredient of Fanatical Support. Nine years and a $1bn turnover later and the dream become reality.

Fabio’s Rackspace passions include brand development, on and offline advertising, customer and prospect communications, channel sales and ultimately attracting new customers to experience Fanatical Support.

He says he’d be hard pushed to pick the Rackspace value that most drives him, but ‘treating Rackers like Friends and Family’ holds a sacred spot in his heart – “having been here so long I do feel rather fatherly – but definitely the ‘cool Dad’ that gets to go to all his kids’ parties too!”

You can Join Fabio’s network on LinkedIn or find him and Rackspace on Twitter: @torlini and @rackspaceuk. Finally, do check out Rackspace’s blog, the awards they have won and their website: www.rackspace.co.uk to learn more about them.

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It’s no secret that I am a fan of Jessica Hagy, her books and her blog: Indexed. I was also lucky enough to interview her about her new book (How to be more interesting (and keep customers for longer) – Interview with Jessica Hagy) about 6 weeks ago.

Recently, she published one of her daily diagrams – A Simple Recipe (See above):

How to make friends and influence people = the intersection of empathy and generosity

It’s a great but simple diagram and insight. However, if we think about this the applications could be huge for customer engagement, employee engagement, leadership, customer service, marketing, change, culture etc etc.

Here’s where and why I think some firms are failing:

• Many firms have little or no empathy with their people or their customers and are, therefore, disconnected from them or struggling to understand why what they are doing is not working as well as it used to.

• Many firms are not generous with their time, effort, care or resources towards their people and their customers and, so, wonder why when they ask for their help they get little in return.

• Often firms have empathy with their customers and their people but they are not generous with their time, effort, care or resources and, therefore, they have insight but unless they show it or demonstrate it nothing happens or gets done.

• Often firms are generous with their customers and their people but they do not have the empathy needed to give the right sort of ‘things’. Therefore, little or nothing happens.

How much empathy do you have for your people or your customers?

How generous are you being and are you being generous with empathy?

]]> http://www.adrianswinscoe.com/blog/empathy-and-generosity-the-keys-to-engaging-your-customers-and-people/feed/ 5 http://www.adrianswinscoe.com/blog/5-tips-to-take-your-customer-service-from-reactive-to-proactive/ http://www.adrianswinscoe.com/blog/5-tips-to-take-your-customer-service-from-reactive-to-proactive/#comments Fri, 31 May 2013 15:11:30 +0000 Adrian Swinscoe http://www.adrianswinscoe.com/blog/?p=5976

I came to a revelation the other day after interviewing a customer service trainer about best practices for conducting mock calls. He had just described the various personas he uses to test new agents – Ivan the Irate, Annoyed Angie, Inpatient Irene and so on – when I noticed a common thread among all of these people. They were not happy. In fact, most of the time they were very unhappy.

While the scenarios he described were hypothetical, they were based on real events agents should expect to face during their normal work day. This is primarily because the default approach to customer service is to wait until there is a problem, then do what you can to solve it. But what if you could solve your customers’ problems before they have to call you (sit on hold, wade through a sea of transfers, and deal with agents trying to rush them off the phone)? It definitely increases your chances of satisfying the customer, which should be the whole goal of customer service in the first place.

This proactive approach is not impossible. Here are five tips you can use to implement this strategy in your own company.

1. Keep a Conversation Going

About three weeks ago, I had the headlights on my car replaced. On Friday, one of them inexplicably went out again. This was annoying to say the least. I’ve been meaning to call or stop in the shop and see what the deal is, but I just haven’t had the time. It’s becoming increasingly frustrating the longer I have to deal with it, and if I do go back there to get it fixed (again), it will probably be the last time.

One simple way the auto shop could have prevented this experience was by sending me an email (it could even be automated with feedback software), asking how everything was going with my car. Was I satisfied with the service I received? Was there anything they could have done (or could do) to make the experience better? This would have showed me that they really cared about the service they provide, and whether or not I was satisfied.

Businesses that regularly check in with customers can easily identify areas of weakness and correct them before customers become unhappy.

WePay, a company that helps small businesses accept credit card payments via an online platform, conducts regular surveys and telephone calls to solicit feedback. By making regular contact with customers, WePay can identify and address any issues a client has before they become problematic. This commitment pays off: they have a customer satisfaction rating of over 90 percent.

“We also have a goal of every person in the company going to physically visit both current, churned and prospective customers – this includes the executives, engineering, marketing, etc,” Vice President of Marketing Tina Hsaio said.

2. Tell Customers About Problems Before They Discover Them

I saw a pretty brilliant BuzzFeed post the other day about “People that are really nailing this parenting thing.” The No. 2 entry in the article called “These parents who know how to travel with kids” showed this image: (bag of candy)

These parents knew that they would very likely have a problem on this flight. Instead of letting it happen, they told their fellow travelers about it beforehand and took steps to correct it (earplugs).

It’s always better for customers to hear about a problem directly from you instead of realizing the product or service doesn’t do what they need it to when they need it. If your company identifies a problem, you can build customer trust and avoid damaging PR by taking one or all of the following actions:

• Alert customers to the issue and offer an apology.
• Offer a discount on a future purchase, or provide a refund if the action you take to fix the problem doesn’t satisfy their needs.
• Tell them what you’re doing to figure out a solution and ensure the problem doesn’t happen again.
• Make sure they know who to contact if they have further questions or feedback.
• According to one report, Barefoot Wines discovered a barcode error that led a shipment of wine to ring up for less than it should, which lost the distributor money.

3. Show Your Appreciation to Loyal Customers

I used to be obsessed with Fab.com (a daily deals site focused on Etsy-loving kind of people). I purchased more “deals” than I care to admit, but I kept getting really bad quality items. I never called them to complain, instead after six months, I just stopped buying.

Fab.com wasn’t giving up that easily. They sent five (seriously) gift cards in a beautiful black greeting card that just said “Thanks” with a printed note and signature from the CEO. Last week, I caved and bought a watch. Proactively reaching out to customers with offers in between purchases provides an additional opportunity for positive interaction with customers to strengthen their relationship with the company. It can also solve problems customers didn’t even know they had by alerting them to something they may be missing out on and offering a way to fix this.

You could, for example, email a customer a couple months before their two-year subscription renewal is due, offering a 5 percent discount to thank them for their business. A gesture like this is likely to seal their desire to renew. It also means the customer doesn’t have to call or email to renew themselves, which prevents any lapses in their subscription and ensures their continued satisfaction.

4. Keep an Eye Out for Online Conversations

If you’re not paying attention to what customers are saying about you online, you’re missing key opportunities. Reaching out to customers who mention your company, be it in a good or bad context, allows you to preemptively address their needs and increases customer satisfaction.

I ran an experiment last year where I sent 14 top consumer brands 280 tweets over 26 days. I wanted to see how often they would respond and how quickly. Shockingly, they only returned my messages about 14 percent of the time on average. These companies missed messages like this: (tweet screenshot)

If this were a real scenario, I doubt I ever would have contacted McDonalds directly, but it’s very possible I would never visit that store again. This would have been a great opportunity for their team to reach out and find out what they could have done to improve the experience. They could also have found out which location it was and reached out to the manager to see what was going on. Maybe their cashiers could use some extra training.

For complaints, it’s always best to respond with an apology, a description of what the company is doing to correct the issue and a gift certificate or discount to make up for any inconvenience. Here’s a video with more tips for responding to customer service complaints on Twitter:

5. Keep Your FAQs Page Up-to-Date

Many customers prefer to find answers to their problems themselves rather than having to call or email a company. Which means if you make helpful information difficult or impossible to find, you’re cheating yourself out of a valuable opportunity to satisfy customers.

A Forrester survey even revealed that 57 percent of customers will give up on an online purchase altogether if finding the answer to their question proves too difficult.

One of the easiest ways to please customers in search of a solution is to make answers to common questions easy to find. You can identify these questions by talking to customer service representatives, identifying the most frequent searches performed on your website and reviewing customer service call and email logs.

Group answers in one place, such as an easy-to-find and read FAQ section on your site. To provide more detailed information about common issues, create articles, blog posts and webinars that provide a more extensive guide to addressing the issue.

Proactive customer service doesn’t just help you keep the customers you have happy. By turning your customers into advocates for your brand, it becomes a marketing tool that drives new business. Investing a little extra in a proactive customer service approach now is a valuable strategy that can result in considerable dividends down the line.

Ashley Verrill

This is a guest post from Ashley Verrill, a CRM Analyst at Software Advice and Managing Editor for the Customer Service Investigator.

Ashley has spent the last six years reporting and writing business news and strategy features. Her work has appeared in myriad publications including Inc., Upstart Business Journal, the Austin Business Journal and the North Bay Business Journal. Before joining Software Advice in 2012, she worked in sales management and advertising. Currently, her research focuses on various topics related to CRM software, sales, customer service and marketing strategy.

When Ashley isn’t writing about software, you can find her hiking, floating Central Texas rivers or hanging out with her two perfect puppies. She is a University of Texas graduate with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.

Connect with Ashley Verrill via LinkedIn, Twitter and Google +.

Kristen Hicks contributed to this report.

About Software Advice

Software Advice helps buyers find the right software for their business. Our experts constantly publish product profiles, comparisons, best practices guides and other research to this site. These experts are also available by phone to provide free consultations for software buyers.

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I was reading a post the other day about Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, and how he introduces himself as the company’s customer service representative. It reminded me of a friend Stefan Topfer, CEO of Winweb, and what he does everyday. I’ve written about him before in this post: Does your CEO deal with customers directly?. Suffice it to say, he’s ‘on the tools’ every day dealing with customer queries and problems.

Seeing such examples, I find myself asking: Why do CEOs like Craig and Stefan do that? Why do they spend time with their customers and personally handling their questions and queries every day? I think that it’s got a lot to do with the fact that in doing so they:

• Keep in touch with their customers;
• Gain a huge level of insight that no amount of market research or feedback from their team could give them;
• Become more aligned with their employees and understand their their daily work more; and
• Gain insight into how the ‘nuts and bolts’ of their business works on a daily basis.

Thinking about this a bit more, I found myself thinking about the programme: Undercover Boss. It first appeared on Channel 4 here in the UK in 2009 but has since been franchised to seven more countries, including the US and Canada.

Now, I like this programme. I love some of the stories that it uncovers and the fact that it makes many of the employees the real heroes of the stories. But, it always concerns me that, in many cases, it seems like such a transformative experience for many of the CEOs and senior managers that get involved.

As a result, I often wonder how that level of ‘distance’ has been created between CEOs, senior management and their front-line employees. Is it to do with culture? Is it to do with how we organise our work and our organisations? Is it to do with a perceived ‘best use of my time’ idea?

In a world that is increasingly being driven by customer service and customer engagement, isn’t it about time that we re-evaluate the question ‘what’s the best use of my time’?

I believe that spending more time directly with and helping your customers should be right at the top, or near the top, of every boss’ list.

If it’s not then are you just paying lip service to being more customer centric and wanting to deliver more and better service to your customers?

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Today’s interview is with Dr Nicola Millard, a customer experience futurologist with BT, who does have a crystal ball but says it doesn’t work! However, she spared me some time to shares with us insights around the work that she does, the research that BT is doing and helps us look just over the horizon, or round the corner, in terms of what’s coming up in the ever changing world of the customer, customer service and customer experience.

This interview follows on the back of last week’s interview: Customer engagement, social CRM and cool tools for professional services firms – Interview with Mark Bower and is number fifty-nine in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Here’s the highlights from the interview I did with Nicola:

• Nicola is interested is looking at how technology is changing us and how we behave as customers and businesses.
• As customers we’ve always regarded customer service as important.
• Recently, completed some research looking at emerging customer behaviour called The Autonomous Customer.
• 50% of customers in the UK say that they are not loyal anymore but the counterfact to that is that 76% customers are also saying that they will come back if you make it ‘easy’ for them to buy from you and to get service from you.
• There is a danger that businesses get lead by technology and forget the basics where The Autonomous Customer research found that the phone is still the preferred method to reach out to a company.
• ‘If my money was on any channel growing in the next few years it would be on WebChat’
• WebChat is a lovely bridging mechanism from the very public element of social media into a much more private conversation.
• However, it is posing challenges for businesses as it is having a real impact on traditional sales processes.
• BT’s research is showing that social media is typically secondary customer service channel rather than a primary channel and one that customers turn to if they have failed to achieve their goals using other primary methods like face to face, phone and email.
• Despite being in straitened times, the wrong thing to cut is customer service costs. Better things to cut are the waste, the proliferation of tools, the things that confuse customers, the things that are making it difficult for customers to do business with you etc.
• 94% of all customers will return to you if you make it easy for them – Harvard Business Review study on Customer Effort.
• BT commissioned Henley Management School to look into this and found that: Satisfy your customers where they value it. Otherwise, just make it easy for them. The headline being: Get the basics right before you do anything else.
• Don’t spend money on things that your customers don’t value.
• ‘Showrooming‘ is a classic example of omni-channel customer behaviour.
• However, while some retailers may bemoan this type of customer behaviour Nicola believes it is an advantage to have a physical retail space and an opportunity to engage with customers rather than the converse.
• Given the changing behaviour of customers, research shows that almost one in two of us when we get to the stage where we want to speak to someone in a contact centre then we have complex questions and need expert help.
• That sort of enquiry is not what most contact centres were built to deal with and, so, is raising questions about the future nature and viability of many contact centres. Particularly those that use people that are often reading from a script, are the least-qualified and some of the lowest paid people in the company.
• Some call centres should be considering implementing something like the Networked Expert model, like the one discussed in a previous interview with Vala Afshar of Enterasys.
• Businesses are built to last not to change.
• Big data has the power to drive proactive customer service.
• From a customers perspective, customers are saying that they are happy to give companies their data as long as they do something of value to me.
• Smartphones are changing the behaviour of the under 34s. However, they use their phones and technology in very different ways to those that are 55+.
• There is a possibility that there is a generational split emerging in terms of how customers from different age groups want to contact companies that is posing problems for companies.
• More great stuff like this from Nicola and her colleagues, including lot’s of research and White Papers, on BT’s Let’s Talk blog.

About Nicola (taken from her LinkedIn bio)

Dr Nicola Millard is a customer experience futurologist with BT. Despite working for a technology company, Nicola isn’t actually a technologist and combines psychology with futurology to try and anticipate what might be lying around the corner for both customers and organisations (sadly, her crystal ball is currently broken).

Nicola has now worked for BT for 22 years. She has done a number of jobs around the BT business, including research, user interface design, customer service and business consulting.

Nicola likes nothing better than to challenge conventional business thinking; from how call centres are managed to the ways in which people work.

She got her PhD from Lancaster University in 2005 on the psychology of motivation and technology acceptance in call centres, published her first book in 2009 and now spends most of her time doing research, writing blogs, articles and white papers. She has also appeared on the BBC (Radio and TV) and Channel 4 TV in the UK, has recently done a TED talk and is a judge on a number of award panels, including the Institute of Customer Service awards.

When she’s not doing all that, Nicola travels around the world presenting at conferences and running workshops with an assortment of organisations including banks, travel companies and retailers, to name but a few.

In the little spare time she has she is writing a novel, enjoys going to the cinema and theatre and does a number of martial arts.

You connect with Nicola on Twitter @DocNicola and visit her blog here.

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When talking about measuring employee engagement, happiness or satisfaction at work many people resort to quarterly, biannual or annual surveys. Don’t get me wrong. These type of surveys can be great and very insightful when done well.

However, one of the key weaknesses many of them suffer from is that they lack follow up and fail to relate to staff what has been found out and what is going to be done with the results etc etc. This is not so different to what happens when many firms survey their customers.

Other firms take a different approach, eschewing large surveys for something more akin to a ongoing ‘temperature’ check. Some efforts are low-tech like the tennis balls used by Nixon McInnes and some are more hi-tech and rely on the smart use of technology.

One such smart use of technology comes from Indonesian-based digital agency XM Gravity, which I first heard about over on PSFK. The agency has recently launched an in-house mobile app that aims to gauge and improve their staff’s mood and, at the same time, strengthen their bond with the firm. Check out the short video below:

What’s very smart about this app, I think, are the rules and thinking that sit behind it and how they have made it much more than just an employee engagement and morale measurement app. For example:

• They have rules built into the app that allows supervisors and managers to be ‘nudged’ into action when someone is struggling or is consistently logging negative emotions.
• Employees are given incentives for participation and can win monthly prizes.
• It’s a company address book and news channel too, simplifying company-wide networking and communication.
• Finally, the app is integrated into the work they do for their clients and the Task feature is designed so that users can use their own social media profiles and networks to support the agency’s clients ongoing campaigns.

Wonder if it’s available for sale?

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Today’s interview is with Mark Bower, co-founder and CTO of CubeSocial, who are developing and have launched some cool products in the social CRM and customer engagement space, particularly for professional service firms.

This interview follows on the back of last week’s interview: Employee engagement is a commitment not a campaign – Interview with Stan Phelps and is number fifty-eight in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Here’s the highlights from the interview I did with Mark:

• Mark is a co-founder of a technology start-up that is developing social and customer engagement software and apps, specifically for professional services firms.
• The reason behind this is because they believe that this area has not really developed at the same pace as other industries and is ripe for change.
• CubeSocial is their first product and is a social CRM product for professional services firms like accountants, lawyers or management consultancies.
• Mark explains that like Outlook is the gateway and gatekeeper for emails in corporates, CubeSocial is the equivalent for those firms when it comes to social media.
• The difference between CRM systems and social CRM systems is that old CRM systems deal with static data and social CRM systems deal with dynamic data.
• The locus of control in business has shifted away from business to customers and clients and many firms are still realising, catching up and amending how they do things, deal with and treat customers.
• Where we are going with social CRM is that products will be able to alert us of changes that happen in our clients and/or employees profiles etc. An intelligent ‘tap’ on the shoulder as it were. Some of this type of functionality is already being built into CubeSocial.
• Their vision is that CubeSocial, or something like it, should sit on the desktop of every person in a professional services firm so everyone is involved in the development of the client relationship.
• Working with professional services firms has shown, and is showing increasingly, that customer service and the customer experience is not just about a firms technical ability but is about the whole experience and that is a big challenge for many firms.
• HonestyBoxx is the latest addition to their portfolio that helps professionals and professional service firms (i.e. anyone who sells their expertise) offer bite sized chunks of advice to potential clients. Nb. You can see it below this post as I’m trialling it on my blog. By the way, it’s free too.
• It works on the honesty box principle where potential clients offer to pay what they think something is worth and it is for the professional or firm to agree to that fee for that small piece of advice.
• Helps firms avoid a lot of free advice seekers and can help generate more income, build new relationships and credibility with clients that may be put off getting in touch with a firm by the expectation of high fees and long contracts.
• Grab a copy of CubeSocial’s “Brilliant at the Basics of Social Media” E-book here.

About Mark (taken and adapted from his CubeSocial bio)

Mark is the co-founder and CTO of CubeSocial. He is a social software veteran, having spent the last 10 years working with pioneering companies in social media and social networking.

As a former Lead Program Manager at Microsoft, Mark has worked with a host of FTSE-100 clients, and has a proven track record in designing and developing social media strategies and solutions for business that deliver enormous efficiency and financial benefits.

You can find out more about CubeSocial at their website (cubesocial.com), connect with Mark @markbower and CubeSocial @CubeSocial on Twitter and check out HonestyBoxx at their website (honestyboxx.com) and on Twitter @HonestyBoxxApp too.

Finally, do grab a copy of CubeSocial’s “Brilliant at the Basics of Social Media” E-book here.

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Today I want to share something different with you. It’s a video that I came across about customer service in Japan that I found on Gadling that was originally posted on LiveLeak earlier this year. The video is only 51 secs long but is definitely worth a watch.

If you can’t see the video then click here.

Did you watch the video? Surprised? Funny?

In a country that uses a lot of technology, I think it is fascinating and insightful to see a very personal approach to solving a customer’s problem.

Is it a spoof? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.

I’d like to think it is real and genuine. However, whether it is or not is irrelevant because I think it illustrates a real lesson for businesses that are trying to deliver better service to their customers.

That lesson, for me, is this: faced with a problem with how to achieve something or use technology to find something out some customers don’t want to have to use, or figure out how to use, another piece of technology to solve their problem. Sometimes, they just want someone to help them directly.

I know that this may not be the most cost-effective and efficient solution and we all can’t hide in consoles ready to jump out and help. But, we can think about the problems that our customers have and how we help them solve their problems. in doing that, we should consider how we can make it quick and easy for someone to get hold of us when they need to whether that is in person, on the phone, via email or via social media.

Technology can be great but it can also be a barrier. It’s useful to remember that often the best way to surprise and delight and serve our customers better is to just be easy to contact and ready to help.

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Today’s interview is with Stan Phelps an “experience architect”, author, professor and popular keynote speaker. Hat tip for the idea for this interview goes to James Lawther who recently hosted a guest post (5 Easy Ways to Increase Employee Engagement) from Stan on his blog.

Stan recently published a new book: What’s Your Green Goldfish?: Beyond Dollars: 15 Ways to Drive Employee Engagement and Reinforce Culture and joins us today to share some insight into the book and the lessons that businesses can draw from it.

This interview follows on the back of last week’s interview: How to be more interesting (and keep customers for longer) – Interview with Jessica Hagy and is number fifty-seven in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Here’s the highlights from the interview I did with Stan:

• The longest and hardest nine inches in marketing is the distance between the brain and the heart of your customer.



• This current book is the second in a trilogy. They follow a colour pattern: Purple Goldfish is all about the customer, Green Goldfish is all to do with your employees and the last one (Gold Goldfish – which is still to be written) will deal with what do you do with your top 20% of customers and employees in order to power loyalty, engagement, advocacy and retention.
• Marketing needs to shift. Marketing needs to become more about employees and customers and how to connect more and less about quarterly reporting and campaigns.
• Companies that have engaged employees grow up to three times faster than others with a company with less engaged employees.
• Up to 70% of employees in the US are not engaged or actively disengaged
• There is a simple premise that happy employees lead to happy customers
• The colours in the trilogy (purple, green and gold) are the colours of Mardi Gras.
• The underlying premise that drives a lot of what’s in the books is a concept called: lagniappe, which is a chiefly Southern Louisiana & Mississippi (Creole) term meaning a small gift presented by a storeowner to a customer with the customer’s purchase OR an extra or unexpected gift or benefit.
• The biggest myth in marketing is trying to meet someone’s expectations. In reality, you will exceed or fall short of expectations but rarely meet expectations.
• Using lagniappe, in this context, is a way of thinking about the little things that you can do to ‘plus’ up the employee and customer experience.
• Stan uses goldfish and how they grow as being analogous to business how they grow. It turns out that the growth of a goldfish is determined by five factors: 1. Size of the Environment = The Market; 2. Number of Goldfish = Competition; 3. The Quality of the Water = The Culture; 4. How they’re treated the first 120 days of life = Onboarding; and5. Genetic Make-up = Differentiation.
• The Purple Goldfish book project crowdsourced 1,001 examples of companies doing the little extras for their customers.
• Following on from that, The Green Goldfishbook project crowdsourced 1,001 examples of companies doing the little extras for their employees.
• Stan splits his examples into 15 different types of Green Goldfish initiatives covering everything from the basics like what your building is like or on boarding right through to how much flexibility you give your employees and how you empower their dreams.
• Stan’s research finds that the best companies do things in all 15 of the areas and continue to add and innovate.
• However, he also finds that they started small with one or two initiatives and built on those steadily over time to get to where they are now.
• These types of initiatives don’t have to start with or come from leadership but leadership is required to help initiatives stick and spread.
• If you are thinking of getting started with your own Green Goldfish initiative then a good place to start would be with recognition, which if done the right way can be a fantastic driver of performance and engagement.
• Let us not forget that business is done by people for people.
• One of the takeaways from the book is that there is not enough emphasis placed on leadership development as 70% of people who leave jobs in the US don’t leave because of the jobs but leave because of their boss.
• Employee engagement is a commitment not a campaign. It takes time to make change happen.

About Stan (adapted from his website and LinkedIn profile)

Stan Phelps is an “experience architect”, author, professor and popular keynote speaker. He believes that marketing must focus on meaningful differentiation to win the hearts of both employees and customers. Stan is a dynamic, top performing marketing executive with more the 20 years of experience in experiential marketing, customer experience, sponsorship activation, business development and relationship management. He’s the author of “What’s Your Purple Goldfish? 12 Ways to Win Customers and Influence Word of Mouth” and “What’s Your Green Goldfish? Beyond Dollars: 15 Ways to Drive Employee Engagement and Reinforce Culture.“

He’s also the Chief Measurement Officer of, which was founded to focus on both customer and employee experience. Their goal is to help to make brands remark-able. Creating the little extras that give customers and employees something to talk, tweet, blog and post to Facebook about.

Their founding belief is that: “The longest and hardest nine inches in marketing is the distance between the brain and the heart of your customer.”

You can check out 9 INCH marketing here, connect with Stan via LinkedIn here, via Twitter @9INCHmarketing and grab a copy of his books via these links: “What’s Your Purple Goldfish? 12 Ways to Win Customers and Influence Word of Mouth” and “What’s Your Green Goldfish? Beyond Dollars: 15 Ways to Drive Employee Engagement and Reinforce Culture.“

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Before I start, I warn you this is more of a thinking out loud piece rather than anything else.

Anyway, as i was browsing my store of articles and notes for future blog posts i came across a scanned article from my friend Paul Robertson of On-Up that he sent me a while ago.

The article was written by Steve McClure, a professional climber, for Climbing Magazine in late 2011. Reading the article there was a passage (below) that struck me as particularly interesting and applicable to the world of business.

“A basic theory of life, the universe and everything states that if an animal or human is tired, it needs to have a rest. Try anything continuously and you’ll have to stop and rest. Even nearly zero physical activity – like lying down in front of the TV – eventually becomes too much. If you try a little harder and you’ve actually broken some muscle down, it needs a rest to recover again. The intriguing principle behind this is that we only get stronger at a given exercise whilst not actually doing it.”

Resting is a hugely important part of performance improvement in sport.

Train. Rest. Train. Rest. Compete. Results. Review. Reflect. Repeat.

That seems to be the process of performance improvement in sport.

In business, the process can seem more like:

Compete (Train in downtime or on the job). Results. Review. Reflect. Repeat.

Not much rest in there, is there?

So, is there something that we can learn from this to help us improve our businesses?

Thinking about that kicked up a lot of additional questions for me including:

• Is the comparison of sport and business, with respect to performance improvement, a valid one?
• Does it fall down in this case because sport is an inherently inwardly focused activity and isn’t always competing whilst business is externally focused and always competing?

I think that it may be a poor comparison but I still wonder if we can apply the training and resting process better in our businesses to improve our performance.

My question(s) are as follows:

• In an ever accelerating business world where everything is always on could we include ‘rest’ somehow and improve our performance?
• Are we trying too hard sometimes? All of the time? Like the sportsman that trains all of the time and doesn’t incorporate ‘rest’ into their programme resulting in their actual performance going down.

So, why don’t we ‘rest’ in business?

Is it due to our impatience for results? And, the idea that we don’t give new initiatives enough time to settle in and start producing results that we can properly evaluate before we move onto something else?

Could patience be our ‘rest’? Can we go slower in order to go faster?

Could there be truth in the old saying: “More speed, less haste”, implying that if we try to do things too quickly, it will take us longer in the end?

What do you think?

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Today’s interview is with Jessica Hagy, who is widely known for her award winning blog: Indexed (I’ve been a subscriber for years!). Recently, she wrote an article for Forbes magazine on How To Be More Interesting (In 10 Simple Steps). That article was incredibly popular. So much so that she has turned it into a book: How to Be Interesting: An Instruction Manual.

Apart from being a fan of Jessica’s work, I thought the interview and subject matter was apt and appropriate for some of the issues that I explore here on the blog. I hope you enjoy it.

This interview follows on the back of last week’s interview: Word of mouth marketing starts with proper listening – Interview with Molly Flatt of 1000 Heads and is number fifty-six in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Here’s the highlights from the interview I did with Jessica:

• Jessica’s new book: How to Be Interesting: An Instruction Manual came about after she write a piece for Forbes along the same lines. The piece in Forbes has now been viewed more than 1.5 million times.
• The genesis of the book and article came about when Jessica was thinking about writing about business virtues and kept coming back to the idea that if you are interesting in life and business then you’ll get talked about, get shared and, are more likely to, get the sale and repeat sales.
• Jessica’s ten simple steps to become more interesting are more habits and behaviours than anything else.

• Here ten habits and behaviours are: 1.Go exploring. 2. Share what you discover. 3. Do something. Anything. 4. Embrace your innate weirdness. 5. Have a cause. 6. Minimize the swagger. 7. Give it a shot. 8. Hop off the bandwagon. 9. Grow a pair. 10. Ignore the scolds.
• Whilst the book follows the article in structure it goes into a lot more detail in each area such that there are 10-12 sub ideas within each of the ten bigger ideas.
• All of the ideas are accessible and positive that anyone could do regardless of income and stature.
• Exploration, or being curious, is probably the key idea or driving factor that makes people, things and business more interesting.
• Be curious, go exploring, and find different ideas to help you develop new ways of doing things and thinking about the way we do things.
• If you find that hard, then just start. Put some time aside to do this. But, develop the habit and you will reap the benefits.
• Why is this important when it comes to customers, employees and leaders? Well, we are bombarded by more and more stuff everyday that being interesting can be a unique differentiator and can be the difference between making that sale, getting the repeat purchase, driving word of mouth, delivering great service, keeping your customers and engaging with your employees etc etc.
• Interesting stands out.
• People don’t talk about stuff that’s not interesting.
• No. 11 is Keep at it and give your permission to explore and connect with interesting people and things.

About Jessica (taken and adapted from her new book’s website)

“I was pondering personal assets in business, modern virtues if you will. I thought that being interesting was the greatest one. It’s more vital than hustle or education, more important than good networking. It’s a core attribute that draws people toward each other, and greases the wheels of love and commerce and politics. From that point, I noodled out what it meant to be interesting: and that’s this book.”

Jessica Hagy is an illustrator currently working in the Pacific Northwest.

Her work has been featured on the BBC Magazine Online, in Good Magazine, Reader’s Digest Canada, The National Post of Canada, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Redbook, Golf Digest, The New York Times, CNN.com, and her blog, Indexed, was named on of Time Magazine’s best blogs of 2008 and was a Webby Award winning site in 2010. She’s also a contributor to Forbes.

Her illustrations have been previously published by Random House/Europe, Penguin Books, Chronicle Books, and O’Reilly Publishing.

Check out her daily blog: Indexed, her website jessicahagy.info, say Hi on Twitter @jessicahagy and do pick up her new book: How to Be Interesting: An Instruction Manual here.

• Customers chasing information about deliveries, how to apply for a particular business service, or being unsure as to what is due to happen next in the purchase cycle, and when.
• Customers calling to clarify complicated pricing and other terms and conditions issues.
• Customers feeling they had to repeat their call as the call center failed to take action, or the appropriate action.

While some of these problems must be addressed personally and on a case-by-case basis, many also pose a great opportunity to offer solutions to the problems … before they even become a problem. Through better initial education, you could save your customer service team a huge amount of time and effort, and by extension, deliver better customer service.

In particular, I believe that the inbound marketing tenet of creating quality, educational content could go a long way to helping solve some of these customer questions and problems as they arise. There are plenty of ways to do it, and there are already several leading companies in the US and UK demonstrating content’s ability to alleviate customer service issues. Here are some examples of how real companies are taking advantage of marketing content to provide better customer service.

How Real Companies Use Content to Improve Their Customer Service

Zendesk Uses Content to Explain Product Updates

Product-based companies typically have customer service teams that are flooded with questions whenever new updates or features are released. That’s why cloud-based customer service software and support ticket software provider Zendesk is wise to use their company support site to communicate their product and software update announcements. The site not only explains what the updates are — it allows customers to post questions, read training guides so they can self-educate, and watch instructional videos for those that prefer to learn by watching instead of reading. This vibrant user community helps answer many questions before they ever reach a Zendesk customer support representative.

first direct Leverages Non-Written Content to Educate Customers

This UK phone and internet only bank doesn’t just write white papers and ebook. They’ve invested in content like videos, interactive calculators, and detailed visual guides to both educate and support their customers. They particularly excel at educating their new customers that are just getting started with direct banking.

Taking the route of making your customers better at not just using your product or service, but being generally better educated about the problem your product or service sets out to solve, helps alleviate those long consulting-based customer service calls that occur when customers “don’t know what they don’t know.”

Debenhams Creates Buying Guides to Reduce Returns and Exchanges

Debenhams, one of the leading department stores in the UK and a customer service champion, uses their site to provide detailed buying and sizing guides for every product they carry. Just look at the variety:

That’s a serious investment in content creation. What’s it all for? To help mitigate the need for returns and exchanges, the types of calls and inquiries that can quickly overburden a customer service department, particularly during busy shopping seasons. If your business sells products that boom during the holiday seasons, now’s the time to start investing in similar types of content to help prepare your customer service department for this coming December.

Riverview Law Provides Templates to Get In Front of Common Requests

If someone asked you how to do something over and over, it’s only logical to create a templated answer to that question for future reference. That’s what UK based law firm Riverview Law did when they launched their Myview site, which provides answers to common legal questions, many which come in the form of legal templates. All of these, by the way, are free documents that most lawyers would normally charge for. And keep in mind these templates require registration, so the opportunity for upselling and cross-selling is ripe, indeed.

Zappos Uses Blog Posts to Create Power Users of Their Products

US online shoe and apparel shop Zappos is often lauded for its online and phone based customer service. However, they also go the extra mile for their customers by writing blogs and creating instructional videos on all things from how to pack using a certain product, to how to use a hairdryer properly.

What does this do for their customer service team? It helps customers envision more ways to use the products they’ve purchased, increasing the likelihood they’re happy with their buy. A “power user” of that Eagle Creek suitcase would know all the nooks and crannies of the luggage and all the creative ways to use it, and as such would never want to give it up.

One thing all of these companies have in common is that they believe by better understanding their customers and their common questions, they can build and develop their content accordingly. This allows them to make their customer support more proactive, and much of it self-service focused. This also allows them to send their customers links to resources they have developed based on an understanding of their maturity and needs. Take Zappos, for example — I could imagine speaking to one of their agents, and upon completing an order, receiving a link to a post or a video that they think I might find interesting and useful based on my purchase.

So, where to get started?

I would suggest that you start by asking a series of questions:

• Who are your customers, what are their personas?
• What do they like, and what are they interested in? (Remember, people buy from people they like, share interests with, and feel comfortable with.)
• What questions will each persona have?
• What will be each persona’s top concerns?
• What will each persona want to know in each stage of your buying process?

If you generate content — in whatever form is most appropriate — to answer all of these questions, you’ll be well on your way to amassing a significant resource base that will be of great use to your customer service representatives, and your existing and future customers.

The net result of all of this, of course, is that it allows you as a business to develop trust and loyalty with your existing customers. Further, by optimizing your content for search so that it gets found and shared by an organic audience, it can demonstrate your helpfulness and customer focus to new leads and potential future customers.

This post originally appeared on the Hubspot blog in September of last year and is reposted here for your delight and delectation.
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Today’s interview is with Molly Flatt, Word of Mouth Evangelist for global marketing agency 1000heads, to get some insight into how to get the most out of your word of mouth marketing.

This interview follows on the back of last week’s interview: Blogger outreach and building trust with your customers – Interview with Hugh Anderson and is number fifty-five in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Here’s the highlights from the interview I did with Molly:

• Word of mouth has suffered from a confusion with the emergence of social media.
• Social media has been integral to the development of word or mouth marketing as an accelerator as that is where we can see it, monitor it and measure it.
• But, research shows that 90% of word of mouth still happens offline.
• Word of mouth is challenging for businesses as it cuts across lots of boundaries that we erect in business. For example, between marketing and the rest of business, online and offline etc etc.
• Word of mouth is all about what the customer thinks and has a glorious disregard for the business boundaries that exist.
• Word of mouth isn’t really just about marketing. Everything that a company does powers it’s word of mouth.
• However, businesses have latched onto things to help them promote or further their word of mouth that they find safe.
• Word of mouth is other peoples content. Content on a firm’s twitter page is still their content and is still advertising. We, as customers, know this.
• True word of mouth is not about you talking to or with your customers it’s about your customers talking with each other, independently, about you.
• That may seem obvious but it can present a very difficult shift, both mentally and logistically, for many businesses as it’s all about giving up control and letting other people take control of your message.
• Word of mouth has to be tied to business objectives.
• Word of mouth is just an indicator of how someone feels about you.
• The question then is how does that feeling turn into more recommendations and more sales.
• Therefore, word of mouth should be geared towards some sort of behaviour change and build of emotion that drives more and repeated sales.
• If you are thinking about growing your word of mouth, start with listening.
• Use tools like Google Alerts and Social Mention to help.
• Proper listening. Listening like a real human being, not just monitoring.
• The aim being to get to know what gets your customers talking.
• Rather than change or join the conversation, do the thing that makes people talk. Do that and your word of mouth will grow.
• The skills that are involved with good word of mouth are the same as those that are involved with being a pretty awesome person.
• Brands shouldn’t try and be our friends. They can be friendly but they should focus instead on helping and facilitating us to do the things that we enjoy doing and that we want to talk about.
• Want to get better at this? Find the people in your business that are inherently social, are your natural advocates and personify your brand. Those are the people you should start with and start something.
• Try new things and do, do, do. Make mistakes and try again. As Samuel Beckett said “Fail better”.
• Your internal advocates could be anyone: your CEO, your star customer service agent or a retail store assistant….
• Molly’s plug: check out a charity that she loves – First Story – which arranges and pays for acclaimed writers to run creative-writing workshops for students in state schools across the country. You can check out their website here and find them on Twitter @FirstStory.

About Molly (adapted (slightly) from the bio on her personal site)

Molly is a writer, journalist, editor and Word of Mouth Evangelist for global marketing agency 1000heads. By day, she help brands such as Nokia, Mars and P&G use the latest social tools and psychology to become conversational from the inside-out; by night, she writes about books, technology and culture for the likes of The Guardian, Bookdiva and Delayed Gratification Quarterly, and is Features Editor for PHOENIX, a luxury fashion magazine.

She loves London, forests, unicorns and negronis, and is currently writing her first novel.

If you’d like to talk to her about any of these things, do get in touch via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. Or, if you really want to get personal, you can email her at mollyflatt [at] gmail.com. She bites (her words!), but only in the best possible way.

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Today, I was thinking about writing a piece about customer service and the process of performance improvement. As part of my writing process I was looking through a bunch of materials when I found a store of quotes that I had once made.

As many people that know me will attest, I am a lover and collector of quotes. So much so, that I was given a big book of them by my father for Christmas one year.

Thinking about the piece that I wanted to write and what I wanted to reflect, it struck me that it might be just as useful to share a few of the quotes with you. I may, at some point, write the piece that I was going to. In the meantime, here are the quotes and I’ll leave you to take inspiration from them as I did and see if you can figure out the point I was going to make:

1. People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them. - George Bernard Shaw, Playwright
2. In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm… in the real world all rests on perseverance. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Author
3. Opportunities are not offered. They must be wrested and worked for. And this calls for perseverance..and courage. – Indira Gandhi, Indian prime minister
4. Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work. – Stephen King, author
5. The one thing that matters is the effort. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery, French pilot, author
6. It’s much harder to provide a great customer service than I would have ever realised. It’s much more art than science in some of these other areas and not just about the facts but about how you are conveying them. - David Yu, Chief Operating Officer, Betfair
7. You cannot improve one thing by 1000% but you can improve 1000 little things by 1%. – Jan Carlzon
8. Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change. – Tom Peters
9. Effort, not ability, makes the biggest difference in achievement. – Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States
10. The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself. – Anna Quindlen

Any ideas?

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UNDERSTAND TODAY’S CUSTOMER

Today’s customers are more empowered than ever—and they’re shaping the success or failure of companies everywhere.

With social media and smartphones in nearly everyone’s hands, all it takes is one customer, one complaint, one good or bad experience to influence a company’s reputation. The voice of one individual has the power to sway millions.

Look at the scandal that hit United Airlines in 2009 when one unhappy customer, whose guitar was broken in transit, took his frustrations to YouTube. His song, “United Breaks Guitars” has now been viewed almost 13 million times. That’s a lot of negative impressions spawned by a single experience. United is not alone. Twitter is littered with the comments of frustrated customers from every industry.

AIM ACTIONS AT INDIVIDUALS

That’s why it is so important for companies to focus on the individual: the sample size of one. Companies should no longer be asking, “What are customers saying about us?” but rather, “What did John say about his experience?” “Did we answer Jane’s questions to her satisfaction?” Companies have to seek out individual feedback and do more than just listen; they have to use it to drive proactive decision-making throughout the organization.

It starts with honesty. When customers show up at your store to ask a question, don’t talk from a script. Be genuine. Ask questions of your own and admit mistakes when they are made. With online customers, offer candid responses, do your best to help, and hold back that overly defensive gut response when someone types out a temper tantrum on Facebook or Twitter. Customers come back for the right price or the right product, but they stay loyal to the companies who care—and increasingly disloyal to those who don’t. Harris Interactive released a study in 2011 showing that 85 percent of customers call it quits with a company after one bad experience.

EQUIP YOUR PEOPLE TO SUCCEED

Companies also have to concentrate on taking care of their own. Frontline employees need the right tools to support positive customer experiences. That could mean tablets for your sales department so they can close a lead or follow up with clients more quickly. Or, it could mean paper notebooks for a restaurant training its new wait staff. Putting the right tools in employees’ hands will translate into individual customer experiences that matter.

Get the most from your frontline employees by conveying the right message. If a boss walks into a store with no mind for the customer, that disinterest permeates down through the ranks. Motivate your employees with a mission they can get behind. Show them the importance of satisfying each customer. This doesn’t mean talking about the sales bump they might see. It means talking about the value behind the product and its delivery.

For a coffee shop, maybe that’s getting a rushed customer in and out and off to work within a minute. For a bank, that could be helping a local business make payroll by staying open until 6. Make your product benefits real, not simply a list of things that look good on paper. Employees who see the value in customer satisfaction will make the effort to retain and support customers at the individual level.

And remember, your employees will only understand the value of customer satisfaction if they can confirm it through the comments of individual customers and the examples of managers and executives.

I’m currently away taking a few days off Bryan Phelps from Mindshare Technologies – an enterprise feedback and customer experience management software company – kindly offered to write a guest post for me. You can check out their blog here and follow them on Twitter @MindshareVoice.

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Today’s interview is with Hugh Anderson of Forth Metrics, a software company that is creating new, simple marketing analytics tools. Their first tool, Inkybee, aims to help small businesses and PR agencies to get more out of their blogger outreach by helping discovering blogs, manage the outreach process and measure the results.

This interview follows on the back of last week’s interview: Being Likeable, leadership, customer and employee engagement – Interview with Dave Kerpen and is number fifty-four in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

I’ve written about the work that Hugh is doing before in Word of mouth marketing and how to get bloggers talking about your business.

Here’s the highlights from the interview I did with Hugh:

• There are a lot of tools out there that monitoring chatter or buzz on the web but little that measures real and tangible results that come out of that. That is what Forth Metrics new tool: Inkybee is aiming to do in a simple and affordable way.
• However, in developing the tool they found an additional hurdle that PR professionals and small businesses were facing and that was where they should be targeting on the web and, in particular, the blogosphere to help build advocacy and word of mouth.
• Therefore, they built a front end to Inkybee that helps PR professionals and small businesses discover bloggers based on relevance and influence.
• So, Inkybee, which has now just launched in public beta, aims to do two things: 1. help businesses identify which bloggers they should be talking to; and 2. How they can measure the impact of any campaigns they undertake with those bloggers in a very simple and easy to understand way.
• Given the rising influence of digital media, it is almost guaranteed that someone somewhere (a blogger) is talking, not necessarily about your brand, but definitely about the market you are interested in.
• Blogs are becoming the hub of authority in social media, word of mouth and influence based marketing.
• Google’s algorithm updates increases the influence of blogs and blogging.
• In the first instance their tool could be seen as a business development tool to help businesses build their reach to new customers.
• Blogger relations is not a one off exercise. it is a relationship building exercise that takes time and patience where the ultimate aim is to build ambassadors, advocates for your brand and communities around those.
• This becomes ever more important in the world that we live in as we seem to be suffering from a break down in trust between consumers/customers and business and many other organisations.
• This is supported by the fact that most people when they go and buy something that has material value looks for third-party word of mouth recommendations and endorsements.
• This offers a great opportunity for smaller businesses as it can, with a bit of effort, allow them to compete with bigger businesses where big businesses will often muscle through relying on the size of their advertising budgets.
• This is all about earned media, where you have to build relationships with people/bloggers with influence rather than just buying attention.
• To start an outreach or a blogger relations programme, here’s Hugh top tips: 1. First, go and read their ebook (The Best Practice Guide for Effective Blogger Outreach); 2. Set your objectives; 3. Do your research; and 4. Be patient and work at it consistently.
• When reaching out to bloggers, do the research and make sure that your outreach efforts are relevant, educate, interest or amuse them if you want to be successful.
• Many businesses don’t do this as they fear the rejection.
• Bloggers are human so treat them as such. Do this and you will stand out. In fact, if you want to stand out and make it really personal, send them something and then call them up.
• This is all about building meaningful relationships, advocacy and trust with people that can influence your customers and market place.

About Hugh (adapted from his Forth Metrics bio)

Hugh Anderson is a Scottish entrepreneur. He co-founded Forth Metrics Limited to create new, simple marketing analytics tools. The first tool, Inkybee, helps anyone doing blogger outreach by discovering blogs, managing the outreach process and measuring the results. It is currently in public beta.

Prior to Forth Metrics, Hugh was, and still is, a qualified chartered accountant with 20 years of experience in a variety of senior commercial and strategic roles in both small and large businesses. His most recent experience is as Finance Director for Searchbolt Limited, a technology company with new expertise in the field of internet search.

To start figuring out how you can start getting bloggers to talk about your business or brand and advocating on your behalf, download a copy of the report here: The Best Practice Guide for Effective Blogger Outreach and check out the public beta version of their new tool, Inkybee, too.

You can connect with Hugh on Twitter @hughforth and LinkedIn here and follow Forth Metrics on Twitter @ForthMetrics.

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This is a guest post from Megan Webb-Morgan who writes about business communications and sales for a variety of business blogs across the web, including Resource Nation, B2B lead generation resource.

The attitude your sales team takes towards customer experience can have significant impacts on your sales, revenue, and long-term customer value. Customer experience encompasses every point of contact between customers and your company, including: purchases, customer service requests, call center communications and emerging communication channels like social media. To manage the customer experience, companies need to create a strategy that encompasses all customer touch points across the organization.

A sales team that places emphasis on creating a positive customer experience prioritizes the long-term value of a customer over short-term ROI. They tailor their interactions to complement the customer’s perspective on your communications, products, and service – providing the customer with a respectful, informative, and valuable experience.

When your sales team has a focus on the customer, the customer experience is:

Strategic

The experience your customers have with your company is an amalgamation of multiple different contact points that coalesces in each individual’s experience. Your sales team should take the view that customer experience isn’t a varied collection of unrelated interactions. These interactions form lasting impressions and perceptions that can either inspire growing trust or disillusion the customer with your company brand.

Customers may interact with your business numerous times, and speak with several different sales associates before making a purchase. Are those interactions consistent? Do they bring value to the customer before any sale is made?

Creating a strategy for managing the multiple customer contact points is important for providing customers with a consistent, positive experience. Your sales team, product team, and customer service team are all integral elements in that strategy.

Well-defined

Product, sales, and customer service all have a tendency to silo their knowledge, keeping it solely within the department for use. For example, data generated from your call center software will become a valuable tool for the sales team.

A well-defined plan for creating the right customer experience combines product, sales, and service data in order to generate a full picture of what the customer expects and desires from your company. That picture should be the basis for creating a well-defined plan to make the preferred customer experience a reality.

Intentional

When your sales team is united in their attitude towards creating a consistent customer experience, their relations with customers shift. Each individual interaction is specific to the particular situation at hand; however, the sales team approaches the interaction with the goal of orchestrating a positive customer experience, augmented by the pre-defined customer experience strategy.

Reciprocal

In order for your strategy to be successful, it cannot simply lay out a one-sided plan of action – it needs to account for customer feedback. Interactions between the sales team and the customer are most successful when they are reciprocal. The customer listens to the salesperson’s pitch, and the salesperson in turn listens to the customer’s responses and makes changes to their approach based on the individual customer’s specific needs.

A high-quality employee-customer dynamic is important to creating the experience that customers want – one that is informative, respectful, and valuable for any customer in any situation. When your sales team places value on the overall customer experience, then your customers’ satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term value increases exponentially.

Bio: Megan Webb-Morgan writes about business communications and sales for a variety of business blogs across the web, including Resource Nation, B2B lead generation resource.

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