photo credit: colinwhite
Just under a couple of weeks ago, I posted a guest piece from Jon Gordon: The Greatest Customer Service Strategy The following post is the second of a series of two guest posts that I agreed with Jon. What I really like about his style and thinking is that it is very straightforward, practical and pragmatic, can be applied to smaller and large businesses and can be applied straightaway, especially in the areas of customer complaint handling, employee engagement, motivation and business culture. So, let me present to you a guest post from Jon Gordon, the Wall Street Journal and international bestselling author of a number of books. You can find out more about Jon via the links below.
The No Complaining Rule
……..and how this One Simple Rule is Having a Big Impact.
I didn’t invent the rule. I discovered it—at a small, fast growing, highly successful company that implements simple practices with extraordinary results.
One day I was having lunch with Dwight Cooper, a tall, thin, mild-mannered former basketball player and coach who had spent the last 10 years building and growing a company he co-founded into one of the leading nurse staffing companies in the world. Dwight’s company, PPR, was named one of Inc. Magazines Fastest Growing Companies several times but on this day it was named one of the best companies to work for in Florida and Dwight was sharing a few reasons why.
Dwight told me of a book he read about dealing with jerks and energy vampires in the work place. But after reading and reflecting on the book he realized that when it comes to building a positive, high performing work environment there was a much more subtle and far more dangerous problem than jerks. It was complaining and more subtle forms of negativity and he knew he needed a solution.
Dwight compared jerks to a kind of topical skin cancer. They don’t hide. They stand right in front of you and say, “here I am.” As a result you can easily and quickly remove them. Far more dangerous is the kind of cancer that is subtle and inside your body. It grows hidden beneath the surface, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but either way if not caught, it eventually spreads to the point where it can and will destroy the body. Complaining and negativity is this kind of cancer to an organization and Dwight had seen it ruin far too many. He was determined not to become another statistic and The No Complaining Rule was born.
The fact is every leader and business will face negativity, energy vampires and obstacles to define themselves and their team’s success. That is why one of the most important things we can do in business and life is to stay positive with strategies that turn negative energy into positive solutions. Thus the goal is not to eliminate all complaining; just mindless, chronic complaining. And the bigger goal is to turn justified complaints into positive solutions. After all, every complaint represents an opportunity to turn something negative into a positive. We can utilize customer complaints to improve our service. Employee complaints can serve as a catalyst for innovation and new processes. Our own complaints can serve as a signal letting us know what we don’t want so we can focus on what we do want. And we can use The No Complaining Rule to develop a positive culture at work.
About Jon Gordon:
This post is a guest post by Jon Gordon. Jon is the Wall Street Journal and international bestselling author of a number of books including The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work and Team with Positive Energy, and his latest, The Seed: Finding Purpose and Happiness in Life and Work. Learn more at www.JonGordon.com. Follow Jon on Twitter @JonGordon11 or Facebook www.facebook.com/jongordonpage .
photo credit: hunter.gatherer
A few days ago across at Marketing Pilgrim, Cynthia Boris wrote 70 Percent of Consumers Won’t Buy from a Company They Don’t Like.
The source of the statement was from a new report from Weber Shandwick, a global PR agency, called “The Company behind the Brand: In Reputation We Trust.”
According to Weber Shandwick:
“The research was conducted in October and November 2011 among 1,375 consumers (ages 18+) and 575 senior executives in companies with revenue of $500 million or more. Respondents were located in four key markets: two developed markets (the U.S. and U.K.) and two emerging markets (China and Brazil).”
Now, there are some interesting findings in this report about what drives reputation and these are applicable to both large and small companies. It is worth checking out.
However, if you dig into the report there are a couple of charts in there that made me think (What influences consumer perceptions about companies? on p.17 and What influences company reputation, according to executives? on p.20). If you want to see the whole report and check out what I am talking about the click on “The Company behind the Brand: In Reputation We Trust.”
The reason I found it interesting was that these two questions reminded me of a piece of research that RightNow Technologies conducted back in 2005 (The Loyalty Connection: Secrets To Customer Retention) that included some insights on the difference in perception between an executives view of the world and a customers view of the world and the reasons that customers leave.
Back to the Weber Shandwick research. If you take their data and stand it side by side then you get the following chart:
What did you notice?
For me, there are a few things that stand out:
- Executives placed more importance on every identified source of influence than customers.
- Executives place way too much importance compared to their customers on Company leader communications, Awards and rankings and advertising as influencers of their reputation. The first and, perhaps part of, the second I can understand from a market and shareholder perspective if you are a traded company. However, what it shows is that there are still many businesses and in business that are following and believing a ‘broadcast’ model of marketing and doing business.
- Whilst customers are coming to trust social networks increasingly, according to Edelman – another PR agency, executives seem to believing a lot of the hype that exists around social networks and are over stating their influence.
No wonder corporate executives are running around worrying about everything all of the time. Maybe they are worrying about a few too many things too much.
But, the thing that worries me the most is the perception gap that seems to exist. Why is that? Surely, executives are customers too. So, why is there a perception gap between the two groups on what influences brand, reputation and trust?
We are living in a changing world and are striving to build more customer centric businesses, get closer to our customers and better understand them. Seems like many still have some way to go.
photo credit: opensourceway
Earlier today Edelman, the global PR form, launched the results of it’s 2012 Trust Barometer. According to Edelman:
“This year’s survey is bigger than ever before, with 30,000 people questioned in 25 countries. The Barometer reveals the state of Trust in business and institutions.”
I’ve written about this survey before in Your Internal Brand is One of Your Most Important Marketing Tools and refer to Edelman’s survey results in my eBooks (You can check them out for free here and here).
However, reading through the survey results today there were three things that jumped out at me and have implications for building customer and employee engagement:
- Skepticism is rife and trust is not easily won. The majority of people need to see something 5 or 6 time before they start to believe and trust in it. Therefore, the need for consistency of message, to keep showing up with the same message and via a number of sources is key to building trust
- People trust people like them. The survey shows that, whilst academics and company technical experts continue to be broadly trusted, people are more likely to trust ‘People like them’ than the CEO. Given the flow of trust away from the boardroom businesses should work with their teams to give them the freedom, ability and tools to reach out, speak with and engage their customers. Doing this just might prove to be less controlling and more engaging for them too.
- Many business are failing to meet changing expectations. When asked what elements are important to building trust – listening to customers, high quality products or services, treating employees well and customers ahead of profits – topped the poll as being important to business. However, the survey results also show that the general population, whilst considering these things as important, say that most businesses are failing to meet their expectations and need to work harder. For many companies this will mean one of two things: 1. They need to start really doing what they say they are going to do and making sure their customers understand what they are doing; and 2. They need to start talking to customers to get a better understanding of their expectations and how they can meet them. Because if they don’t then someone else will.
Note: Whilst these are the results from the Global survey, I looked at the UK-specific results too and they follow the same trends.
If you want to read more, you head over to the Edelman site and download the Executive Summary here or view the presentation on Slideshare here.
Do take the opportunity to check out the survey results for yourself or share your thoughts on my conclusions in the comments below.
photo credit: elyse patten
Following on from my last post and the theme that it started to explore, I would like to present to you a guest post from Jon Gordon. I’m very excited and this is a bit of coup for me as Jon is a Wall Street Journal and international bestselling author of a number of books. You can find out more about Jon via the links below.
The Greatest Customer Service Strategy
Smiling is important. Eye contact matters. Patience is essential. Being warm and friendly is a must. And providing a positive emotional experience for your customers is a priority.
But these are not the greatest of customer service strategies. Ironically the greatest of all strategies has nothing to do with customers and everything to do with employees.
The Greatest Strategy is this: Great customer service begins with being employee focused first and customer focused second. If you treat your employees well, they will treat their customers well.
Too often businesses, hospitals, restaurants and organisations focus all their energy on the customer while ignoring the very employees that serve their customers. This may work in the short run but eventually employees become tired, burned out, negative and resentful.
Just the other day I was speaking at a hospital and was told that they were doing patient satisfaction surveys as a way to improve nurse performance. “What about nurse satisfaction surveys,” I asked. “No we’re not doing that,” they said. The problem was clear. Measuring patient satisfaction will not make nurses more energised, positive and attentive.
Patient satisfaction will go up when nurse satisfaction goes up.
I have found that organisations who deliver the best service also have the best culture where employees are valued, listened to and cared for and in turn these employees value, care for and serve their customers.
Best Buy, for example, started to measure the engagement of their employees and in the process saw service and profits improve. T-Mobile dramatically improved and transformed their customer service when they improved the culture in their call centres by listening to their employees. Southwest Airlines has built their success on the foundation of an employee-first culture.
Of course we need to train our employees to do all the things that make for a great customer experience.
There are great books on the essentials of creating a great customer experience.
But most of all remember if you model great service, your people will share it.
So, if you want your team to serve, serve them.
If you want your people to care, care about them.
If you want your team to love their work, love them.
If you want your employees to be their best, give them your best.
If you take care of your people they will take care of your customers.
About Jon Gordon:
This post is a guest post by Jon Gordon. Jon is the Wall Street Journal and international bestselling author of a number of books including The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work and Team with Positive Energy, and his latest, The Seed: Finding Purpose and Happiness in Life and Work. Learn more at www.JonGordon.com. Follow Jon on Twitter @JonGordon11 or Facebook www.facebook.com/jongordonpage .
photo credit: canonsnapper
A couple of days ago I was asked to go and speak to a large financial services firm about engagement, both customer engagement and employee engagement and the link between the two of them.
What was and is interesting is the rising consciousness amongst many firms of how connected employee engagement is to delivering a great customer experience, customer service, retention, loyalty and, thus sustainable business performance.
Moreover, Bruce Temkin in a recent blog post (Discussing 13 Customer Experience Megatrends), puts ‘Employee engagement enlightenment’ at the top of his draft list of 13 Customer Experience Megatrends, which his research tells him “will have a significant effect on customer experience over the next few years.”
Isn’t all of this self-evident?
I mean, how can we expect employees to take care of customers if the business does not trust, recognise, support and treat them well too?
Or, is it more complicated than that?
Many businesses will look for process, system and technology fixes and assume that more and better internal communications or more surveys will increase engagement. It might. But, I don’t think there will be any guarantees with those type of initiatives.
Why? Well, if we look at different sources of what drives engagement:
- Wikipedia’s entry on The Drivers of Engagement
- Scarlett Surveys: 15 Engagement Drivers & their Effect on Employee Engagement Levels or
- The Drivers of Employee Engagement from the Institute for Employment Studies
The Institute for Employment Studies goes onto to advocate that if you don’t get the basics right then any other initiatives are destined to fail.
What basics? These include:
- Good immediate management
- Two-way communication that is listened to, responded to and acted upon
- Effective team work and cooperation
- A focus on developing people and giving them the tools and the skills that they need to do the job that they are being asked to do
- Commitment to employee wellbeing and looking after the person not just performance; and
- Clear, understood and agreed policies, practices and ways of working that are accepted and committed to by all eliminating the one rule for us and another for them syndrome.
There is a lot of ‘science’ in that list of basics but there is a lot more ‘art’ than we would normally acknowledge.
From Wikipedia’s definition of Employee Engagement:
“An “engaged employee” is one who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about their work, and thus will act in a way that furthers their organisation’s interests.
According to Scarlett Surveys:
“Employee Engagement is a measurable degree of an employee’s positive or negative emotional attachment to their job, colleagues and organisation which profoundly influences their willingness to learn and perform at work”.
Thus, engagement is distinctively different from employee satisfaction, motivation and organisational culture.”
Much of employee engagement is about relationships. The relationship an employee has with their job, their colleagues, their customers and their organisation. And, relationships are all art and very little science.
So, let’s not sweep the art under the carpet and start getting better at it.
What do you think?
