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Business and Tapas

May 16, 2012 By 4 Comments

I just returned from Barcelona. It’s one of my favorite cities. There was a scientific meeting. I spent time talking business with researchers turned entrepreneurs. I also spent a lot of time touring the city and eating tapas, one of my favorite food groups.

I always head to Ciudad Condal Cerveceria in the Eixample district. It’s like heaven, with tapas.

The bar has wood-paneled, vaulted ceilings and a bar area full of marble and brass. It’s like entering a church for tapas. Then there are the people, and I mean all of the people inside the tapas bar. Of course, you can sit along the boulevard under the umbrella tables in the outdoor eating area. Or you can eat at the tables in the restaurant area of the tapas bar. But then you would miss all of the action.

The best spot in the place is to be seated or standing at the bar area. It's where the tapas art happens: the high intensity interface between the customers and staff.  All of the fresh, raw food is beautifully displayed. The waiters, waitresses and bar tenders have on elegant white coats. They know their stuff and they make and serve the tapas with pride. You marvel as they work together, as a team. They are engaged with their customers. Each plate of tapas is served, eye contact and a smile is made.

The food transaction doesn’t end there. Often conversation with your waiter follows. They make more suggestions about what you might like to eat, based on what you have been ordering, or even what their own favorite tapas are. They encourage you to experiment, if they think you are up for it. I’m always up for it and I’ve always been delighted about how these folks can pick up on signals and fine-tune my dining for me.

The locals go to this tapas bar, lots of them, and it’s constantly full all day long. And of course the tourists are at the tapas bar as well. Everyone takes a look at what everyone else is eating, smiles, rates the tapas by making a comment or giving a thumbs up – understood in any language. If someone sees you eating the tapas incorrectly – or thinks you should combine it with some other type of tapas you have in front of you – they suggest this to you, respectfully, with a smile.

That’s why I go to this particular tapas bar. It’s noisy, joyous, collaborative, delicious. It’s theater without pretense. Everyone is there to be together with everyone else. It’s like a party we all have been invited to. The comfort level of being in the same space, with hundreds of friends I never knew I had before I stepped inside, is palpable.

All of us come to this tapas bar to be with each other. Because when we are at the tapas bar, everyone is the same.

We’ve been drawn into this hallowed tapas space by a mutual love of that dish. We work together so everyone has a joyful customer experience. We are patient as we wait for a seat at the bar or decide to stand. No one becomes flustered at the wait. No one hovers over your table.

We respect the lovers in the corner, who are nibbling each other intermittently, and then remember their tapas. There is the priest seated next to the lovers, alone with his own thoughts, obviously a regular.  There is the man to the left of my husband, who is sits on a stool, who offers it to my husband when he sees I have a stool but my husband does not. My husband smiles and declines; he would have done the same thing for this man whom we have never met until tonight. The man's friends arrive to join him, and they stand. The man makes suggestions on how we should mix up a certain egg dish we’ve ordered. He's right; the food tastes so much better mixed this way.

Everyone at the bar is the same.

Once you enter this space, your job title, education, pretense and stress levels are left outside in the street. We are each others' company across time zones and countries and cultures and backgrounds.

We are here to enjoy the evening, together.

It is heaven.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Customer Experience, Entrepreneurship Tagged With: , , , ,

Everyone is a Customer of Everyone Else

January 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Everyone has customers, both in the workplace and in the marketplace. The concept that everyone is a customer of everyone else, just like “do unto others,” should be a second skin we wear effortlessly, naturally. It’s not a shallow phrase we pay lip service to. Or a flavor-of-the-month concept that we apply-as-needed. 

Serving our customers, and treating everyone we come into contact with as a potential customer, should be second-nature to the way we are hard-wired. It should become part of our personal core values.

Why is this such a difficult concept for so many of us to wrap our minds around?

Your customer includes everyone you come in contact with during the course of your workday, including yourself. When you think about it, your interactions with your customers, both internal (coworkers and colleagues) and external (revenue-producing entities that purchase or rent your company’s products, goods, or services), represent a continuous business development process.

Perhaps some of your internal customers are the folks at your company with whom you do not want to be associated! (But you need to work with them in order to accomplish project objectives.)  Then there the internal customers, your colleagues, with whom you do your best work. The same holds true for your customer base: you enjoy creating deliverables for some of these folks while the relationship and process of working with other customers is right up there with root canal.

How can you create opportunities so your workday and responsibilities involve engaging more with those individuals and on those projects for which you produce your best output? And how can you gradually shift the balance of your workload away from the status quo order-taker colleagues and clients, so that you increase your level of innovation, collaboration and value?

How you define “customers” becomes your delivery of your vision and your professional expertise, and your ability to create value for your organization. It’s how you move from being perceived as an order-taker to serving your customers as an innovator and leader.

Think input, output and throughput. And for you sales professionals, think of a 4 x 100 meter relay race: from whom are you receiving the baton, what is the function of your particular leg of the race, and to whom are you handing off that baton?

Everyone is a customer of everyone else. It is just that simple.

Yet it is difficult to take this position with impending performance reviews, still more downsizing, and the tendency of some of our illustrious colleagues to treat the workplace with their own sense of entitlement (which translates into ‘do something unto someone else before they can do something unto you’). Not very professionally or ethically uplifting, I’d say.

If we perceive and treat our professional relationships as a matter of stewardship and paying forward to our colleagues and clients, our productivity and profitability might take a turn for the better.

We all are in this together. Think about how you can alter your role in the status quo so that your colleagues – even the ones you don’t care to work with – cannot help but have a positive outcome based on innovative collaboration.

Once you change your approach, the domino effect starts. It’s unavoidable. And you start to lead by example. The opportunities you start to create (or you perceive as “coming your way”) align more directly with your core values and capabilities.

You get on your customers’ A-list and they, in turn, are on yours.

It starts with moving yourself 1 millimeter outside of your comfort level and their status quo. It starts with your collaborating with your technical and non-technical colleagues, rather than competing with them (save that strategy for your marketplace competitors).

After all, the fulcrum for leveraging innovative business development is collaboration between technical and non-technical professionals.

What role will you choose to take?

Interested in reading more about technical/non-technical collaboration? Join the discussion at www.doyoumeanbusiness.com and receive updates and downloads about my book, set for publication in March, 2012!

Filed Under: Business Development, Collaboration, Customer Experience, Customer Focus, Do YOU Mean Business Tagged With: , , ,

Customer Experience is a Game Changer

January 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We are all consumers engaged in buying decisions.

So why take off our “consumer hat” when we walk into our place of work?

We shift gears in the workplace, delivering sales and engineering spiels to customers that sound traditional, stale and status-quo.

That’s not what delighted and engaged us when we went to the Apple® store over the weekend. Our customers were at that Apple store, too.

What would happen if we created transformative deliverables that we generated, collaboratively, with our clients? Through customer engagement? Just like at the Apple store?

I spoke with Maria Vedral and Bob Dean, experience economists, about how customer experience transforms the value of your customer offering in a post-recession economy.

To listen to the audio download of the complete interview, click on the buttons, below. To download, right click on this link. 

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Customer experience, or the transformative power of customer engagement based on the progression of economic value, was presented by Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore in their seminal 1999 book, The Experience Economy, re-released in 2011 by the Harvard Business Review Press. It’s one of the top 100 business books.

“Those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage a rich, compelling experience.” (p. 39, updated edition)

Dean explains that Progression of Economic Value (POEV) chronicles the transition of product and service delivery from commoditization (agriculture and manufacturing of goods) into customization (delivery of services, moving towards experiences) into transformation.

Think about where your company appears in this continuum.

Part of the problem, according to Vedral and Dean, is that client experience will never exceed employee experience.

Have you ever had a poor experience and asked yourself whether the employee was happy working for that company? Your clients may be asking themselves the same question. Especially when dealing with lean post economic meltdown companies with too few people doing too many jobs with insufficient resources.

Dean spoke of how Apple provides great employee experience which, in turn, translates into great customer experience. Employees see, on a daily basis, that their implementing customer engagement is a critical part of the Apple corporate culture. And customers benefit from this employee epiphany.

While modeling your manufacturing company after Apple seems like a stretch, guess again. Are your internal customers happy, let alone engaged in collaborating with each other, in your traditional, siloed corporate infrastructure? I didn’t think so, either.

But what if your employees pay their cross-functional collaboration forward – towards your customers? And what if the solutions they provide to your customers are achieved in creative collaboration with your clients?   

You just may end up with a solution that is far greater than the sum of the parts. And loyal customers as well.

Customer loyalty isn’t about customer satisfaction. It’s about understanding customer sacrifice.

The status quo equates customer retention with customer satisfaction. Dean feels differently. Customer satisfaction has become an industry to itself. JD Power wouldn’t exist today if it weren’t for their coveted rankings. But what do these rankings really mean?

Dean asks you to consider whether your customer base feels they make sacrifices in order to do business with your company. While they tell you they are “satisfied”,  customers may only be satisfied with mediocrity.

Think about the airline industry. We pay our money, we take our chances and we sacrifice. All we get is a 5-point customer satisfaction survey after our flight about how well you felt the airline met their own expectations… not yours. They may pay you off in miles if you complain. But they don’t eliminate your sacrifice, do they?

According to Pine and Gilmore, when a business recognizes customer sacrifice and actually eliminates it, that customer will become loyal and resistant to price.

Elimination of customer sacrifice becomes your real differentiator.

In Vedral’s case as a provider of enterprise ERP solutions, she found a software application allowing her to facilitate client discovery across multiple geographic locations, simultaneously. In some cases, this was the first time her customers had worked collaboratively!

Dean perceives that this aspect, using this software, defined Vedral’s customer offering. The customer comes away impressed. They tell Vedral that she helped all the stakeholders buy in to this process. She’s now more proactive checking in on customers and tells clients that is just the first of many experiences during their working relationship with her company.

Over time experiences differentiate Vedral’s professional services firm, resulting in great referrals. She is communicating authentically that she and her team really care. You don’t get a lot of caring communicated in a customer satisfaction survey.

Customer experience and customer sacrifice change the way your customers want to work with you. And the way you work with them.

Vedral’s goal is to blaze a new trail so customers say to themselves: we want to do it like her company, SilverEdge.

Dean has created a Score Card where a business leaders can assess their current customer and employee experience and take the steps to move towards transformational experience. To get your copy, contact him at roberthdean@comcast.net .

Bob Dean and Maria Vedral’s recommended reading list:

The Experience Economy, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore

Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide, John Jantsch

All For One: 10 Strategies for Building Trust Client Partnerships, Andrew Sobel

Maria Vedral is President and Founder of SilverEdge Systems Software, Inc, an award-winning Deltek Premier Partner. Under her leadership, SliverEdge has successfully implemented more than 400 client systems across Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Bob Dean is a senior executive and catalyst in aligning learning and talent development with business strategy. He has held senior positions with Heidrick & Struggles, Grant Thornton, and Ernst & Young. Bob is now serving as a business innovation consultant to professional services organizations. In 2006, Bob became one of the first ten people in the world to be certified in the models and frameworks of “The Experience Economy”.

 

Filed Under: Business Development, Collaboration, Customer Experience Tagged With: , , , ,

Are your customers falling in love with you?

December 5, 2011 By 2 Comments

I know what you’re thinking. This is going to be another blog about client service, jumping through their hoops, the fact that they are always “right”, and how you should always put the customer first. You know all about that, don’t you?  I mean, you do know what your company’s client service policy is... 

Your company's customer service credo has been articulated to you, hasn’t it? And you can see it put into play in the workplace every day, right? Your upper and mid- level management walk this talk constantly and consistently, providing a clear-cut example of applied leadership, right?

Of course you will take me over to the framed company mission statement on the lobby wall so I can (and so can you) read something articulate and tangible about their client service ethic that you, personally, can hang your hat on.  Correct?

Honestly, what does all that yada-yada-yada really mean in the grand cosmic scheme of things? Most of us operate freestyle when it comes to client service, service quality delivery, customer sacrifice and customer experience (if we even are familiar with those latter two concepts).

Whether you are an owner, sole proprietor or employee, it should be second nature to treat others as we want ourselves to be treated.  The Platinum Rule of Tony Alessandra tells us to treat our customers as they wish to be treated. And Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore tell us in The Experience Economy that we should give our clients a rich and compelling reason to do business with us. 

It’s hard to put theory into practice if we, as our company’s internal customers, aren’t treated very well in the first place. 

  • A sole proprietor? Client service delivery goes up and down upon the waves of our ability and energy to win business.  What a virtual economic and emotional roller coaster: win new business and then drop everything and deliver on the won business – ignoring the need to win more business. 
  • Filling a contractor function? Then you are shape-shifters morphing in and out of whatever is required. We never quite fit into these non-permanent positions.  We do busy work and don’t take the time to determine what is required to win a permanent position. 

Yet we have customer contact all the time: an amazing incubator in which to learn about customer service delivery, customer experience and customer sacrifice. So aside from a paycheck, what else are you taking the time to learn in order to build your skill sets for your next tour of employment duty?

A different way to think about things in a flat-world business model, huh?

Your attitude towards client service delivery is like your personal beacon on your personal horizon.  It basically boils down to defining your core personal values and integrating them into your professional actions, day in and day out.

Your personal core values are what you use to get your bearings, whether you are an owner, sole proprietor or employee.  And your personal core values are what your employers and clients can expect, no matter what.  And with that type of consistency, you will respect yourself and, yes, here it comes: love yourself.  And those are the optimal conditions for your clients to fall in love with you.  

  • And while your clients may love you, they may not like you. Because they can’t jerk your chains or push you around. They love what you stand for. They respect you. 
  • Your self-knowledge and consistency represents real value to your clients, and yourself.
  • Your clients become loyal to you.

At the end of the day, it’s all about whether your clients feel comfortable doing business with you. And whether or not they trust you. Because you know as well as I do that client relationships can become a real messy affair from time to time.

Base your client relationships on consistent core personal values.  Mine are ethics, honesty, integrity and respect.   And my clients know this from the git-go.  Because I tell them.  And they have confidence that I will challenge them to define their core personal values as we collaborate.

Think about how your client relationships – and retention rate - might benefit from their knowing your core personal values.  They may just fall in love with you.

I guest blog once a month for CivilEngineeringCentral.com Earlier this year, the original version of this post won in the Favorite Post category of  Top Civil Engineering Blogs.  And the Civil Engineering Central Blog won top overall honors as rated by CivilEngineeringSchools.org. I realized I hadn't shared it with all of you. Hope you enjoyed!

Filed Under: Core Personal Values, Customer Experience, Customer Focus, Job Functionality Tagged With: , , , ,

It’s Time To Give Thanks

November 9, 2009 By 1 Comment

Thanksgiving is my favorite US holiday. It’s a nearly 400 year old harvest festival at one of the most beautiful, dramatic and transitional times of the year. Mother Nature knew what She was doing with Autumn.

As of the latter half of the 20th century, however, the Thanksgiving Holiday is hard to recognize in the United States. It’s becoming the holiday squished in between Halloween and the green light signaling the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Blink twice and it’s gone. You have to get through Thanksgiving to hit the Christmas sales at the mall on the Friday after Thanksgiving, which I still suppose represents the annual People’s Economic Stimulus Package for this nation.

Thanksgiving is the only Holiday where people are not focused – obsessed - on giving lots and lots of STUFF to each other. It’s about sharing a meal together and catching up with each other. Taking some time to breathe and enjoy each other’s company. Not rushing through dinner to get to Presents. Maybe that’s why Thanksgiving gets overlooked so much.

After all, you only give GRATITUDE and THANKS on Thanksgiving. To others and for others.

I mean, what’s that all about?

Recently, I was discussing this topic with Beth, one of my sales colleagues. She couldn’t have agreed more with my “take” on the situation. We were both so not looking forward to running around like madwomen in December, delivering client gifts and closing out our sales year while cleaning our homes for December holiday celebrations and keeping track of the sales at the malls. Sounded like a definition of perpetuation of insanity to us.

We like our clients. We enjoy working with them. This year has been a real time in the trenches for them. We are thankful to have been given the opportunity to be in the trenches with them. We didn’t want them to get lost in the midst of our – and their – end of year, well, “stuff.”

So we both decided to make the Thanksgiving holiday the emphasis, from here on out, for our customers. Why? Because it once again makes sense, particularly in this most challenging economy.

Thanksgiving is a way of giving thanks and gratitude to family, friends, colleagues and clients. It comes at a time of year – especially this year - when it makes sense to take pause and reflect. The original Thanksgiving was a celebration of survival of harsh times. Well, I can’t think of a holiday that makes more sense for all of us to celebrate right now.

When is the last time that you have given thanks? Folks in sales are already in the midst of frenzied Q4 churning and burning towards the “close” of their sales year trying to make those numbers. By December 1st they are also delivering client gifts and sending out holiday cards. Engineers are trying to finish out projects so clients can be invoiced to bring cash into already strained revenue streams.

Let’s face it. Folks are thankful to have jobs right now. So Thanksgiving might just have a whole lot more meaning than it has in the past. And perhaps the significance of Thanksgiving will be rediscovered so the holiday doesn’t once again fade away into the tsunami of purchasing frenzy about the December holidays.

I’m asking you to take a step back. Rather than checking one more thing off a long list of stuff you have to do before “the close” or year end, why don’t you review what you have achieved this year, not so much in dollars, but in creating value for yourself and your organization?

We have weathered a long and harsh economic lesson, and it is not yet over. We are not quite sure where we are headed, but we have steered a firm course this year towards an uncertain horizon. And we are still afloat, surviving, thriving, doing some things very differently than we would have a year ago.

This year, instead of December Holiday cards and client gifts, why don’t you send your customers Thanksgiving cards like my colleague and I decided to do? We will deliver small gifts and send out cards of thanks the week prior to Thanksgiving. We will have the time to enjoy what we are doing. Our actions will have symbolic significance for us. This expression of our thanks and gratitude to our customers will not be mixed up in the frenzy of the close of the annual sales year or fiscal accounting exercises. Just as we are taking time to prepare a feast for our friends and family, we are taking some time to enjoy our client relationships. We work hard for them. We earn them. We enjoy them.

It’s not all about the sale. It’s about how everyone arrives at a decision. My thanks to my clients.

Filed Under: Customer Experience, Customer Focus, Personal Branding, Weblogs Tagged With: , , ,

Is it finally time to move forward and do business?

September 28, 2009 By Leave a Comment

My industrial manufacturing clients tell me they are beginning to receive some positive signals from their customers.And just as they start to regain confidence to move ahead with planning and ordering, a big customer will slash volume in half over what was projected.It’s like manufacturers are taking two steps forward and one step back.

It’s hard to assess the risk-reward ratio of your business relationships when the dynamics of manufacturing are on a bit of a roller coaster ride. Do you move forward or stay put?

With so much hesitancy and second-guessing going on, it seems like industrial manufacturers are waiting for a signal that lets them know it’s OK to move forward and do business. Should manufacturers keep checking their Blackberries as though someone is going to issue you the code message that it’s officially the right time? Is someone going to give the official Tweet that you are free to do business?

And if you do move forward, do you have a robust plan of your own design? Or are you going back to relying on the same old wheel you’ve been rolling along on? Or are you simply rolling the dice and going after any and every opportunity to respond to an RFQ?

 

When’s the last time you built a robust business development strategy that’s based on Voice of the Customer methodology?

Yes, I know that this methodology was popular in the 1990’s. However, it’s time to rethink how these principles can be retrofitted and refurbished to complement current thinking on innovation and change management.What can we take from what we’ve learned over time and redeploy? Just as we are asking our best customers to redevelop their relationships with us, in some new directions, why not do a bit of remanufacturing on your approach to business development?

If you could design the perfect customer against a set of specifications, what would those specifications look like from your perspective? A Voice of the Customer Hierarchy defines, in outline form and in the words of the customer, the prioritization of those attributes and specifications which create the ideal customer for your business.

There are two types of customers you need to develop for your business: external customers and internal customers. External customers are companies with whom you currently do business or prospects with whom you’d like to cultivate a business relationship. The mirror image is internal customers.Your internal customers are members of your organization: your employees.

When is the last time you spoke to each type of customer and compared and contrasted their perspectives on business development? And no, this methodology isn’t about complaining about the way things are or should be or complaining about co-workers or the weather. It’s about figuring out how to align your organization’s structure and output with the types of customers – internal and external - who are ideal for your organization.

If you are a small to mid-sized industrial manufacturer, taking a high level look at the Voice of the Customer hierarchy for your internal and external customers is an important means of developing a perspective that can positively impact your business development strategy.Voice of the Customer methodology allows you to see your company from the outside looking in – as your external customers see you – as well as from the inside looking out, which is the way your internal customers see your organization.

This VOC hierarchy can address customer attributes such as:

  1. Type of product needed from the customer or type of performance required from personnel
  2. Amount of engineering required from the customer vs. amount of engineering provided to your company by the customer
  3. Lead times
  4. Raw material and machinery requirements
  5. Certification requirements
  6. Quality requirements
  7. Size of company , which is a function of number of employees, personnel requirements, manufacturing capacity requirements, and fiscal and financial health, among other factors
  8. Historical relationship with that customer, including rework required per past project, time to win that project, profitability of that project
  9. Assessment of risk in doing business with this type of customer OR the type of risk that customer assumes in doing business with you
  10. Target markets for your products and services: from which markets have you acquired customers in the past and whether new market development makes sense for your business development strategy

Gathering these data by talking to your current customers gives your company the opportunity to make a strong statement to past customers that you are moving forward - and will be there for them when they return as your customers. These companies are the cornerstones upon which you built your business. Understand the value of their relationship with you and the value that you bring to their table.

Gathering these data by talking to prospective customers gives your company the opportunity to communicate your business philosophy to them.Why will developing a relationship with your company provide value to both you and to your customers? Tell your prospective customers you are basing your relationships on your understanding of how your customers fit into your Voice of the Customer hierarchy. That’s news.

Gathering these data gives your company the opportunity to target specific types of companies for new business development – based on your understanding of how current customers fit into your Voice of the Customer hierarchy. Business development shouldn’t be like rolling the dice or foraging for food. Business development strategies should be focused and methodical based on your knowledge of the types of customers which are the cornerstone of past successes and the amount of risk you want to assume in developing these relationships with new customers.

The new business paradigm will favor those companies who have taken the time to examine business relationships and risk management from their current customer base and apply this knowledge to developing new customers. You can take a good customer relationship and make it better based on your understanding of your requirements from customers – and theirs from your company.

It’s definitely time to move forward and start doing business. Business development shouldn’t just “happen.” Regardless of the size of your business – or the role you play in your organization – you can implement Voice of the Customer methods to assist your company in moving forward. The American Society for Quality, as well as other resources, has many reference materials to assist you.

The only code message on your Blackberry or Tweet you need to be waiting for is from yourself.Talk to your customers. Validate yourself to yourself. And give yourself permission to move forward and do business.

It’s time.

Filed Under: Business Development, Core Capabilities, Customer Experience, Manufacturing, Sales-Engineering Interface™, Weblogs Tagged With: , , , ,

Are you an Advocate for your customers?

June 15, 2009 By Leave a Comment

 

 

How do you serve your customers? Are you an order taker or an innovator? Are you a trusted partner or someone who provides service without the service quality delivery? No, this blog isn’t about the meaning of life. However, it is a consideration of whether you serve your customers in their best interests or not. Do you go to bat for them? Within your own corporate environment? Do you challenge your company to do their best on behalf of your customers?

If a customer is merely a means to an end, a commission, meeting a sales quota, then completing a job is the way you keep your own job.  Well, that’s probably the status quo in your corporation.  Sounds like slinging burgers in a fastfood chain.   

Ask yourself: am I being paid to be mediocre? Can I really hide behind merely completing a job? Compared with doing a job “right”? Compared with bringing a job in on time, under budget, with modifications that positively impact your customer’s productivity and therefore their bottom line? Which is equated with their repeat business and loyalty?

If you are satisfied with being mediocre, or are functioning in a corporate culture that reinforces mediocrity – and you’re OK with that – you can stop reading this blog right now. Except I can’t see how any company that reinforces mediocre return on investment can expect to survive in this economy.

If you are talking with your customers, really discussing the full scope of their needs and deliverables in terms of their bottom line, then you are ENGAGED in service quality delivery. Which means if you encounter resistance within your own corporate culture that might negatively impact service quality delivery for your customer, you are prepared to defend their needs against your corporate culture.  Because you understand that in serving the needs of your customer, your corporation will improve themselves as well. Which means you will advocate for your customer’s best interests.  And you know what? Your CEO likes that.  It takes guts, confidence, a plan for your customer, knowledge of your own corporate plan and leadership to stick your neck out on behalf of your customers.  Especially in this economy.

Advocacy as defined by Wikipedia, is the art of influencing outcomes.  To me, that sounds like manipulation. So I don’t buy that definition. Advocacy, in my mind, means taking on the challenges of others because you believe in their system of belief, their perspective, their worth. You believe that your time is worth spending in fostering their ideas within your own sphere of influence. You believe that you can improve yourself by working on their behalf.

Advocacy is gutsy service quality delivery. Advocacy is leadership moderated by common sense, experience and confidence.

Something to think about. The next time you serve your customers.  Today? or Tomorrow?

 

Filed Under: Business Development, Customer Experience, Customer Focus, Weblogs Tagged With: , , , ,

The value of service quality delivery

April 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

As we move well into 2009, relationships between suppliers and customers are going to be more valuable than ever. Customers will be looking for suppliers who are in it for the long haul. The long haul may involve longer time-to-decision to partner with a supplier.  The long haul also may incorporate customer expectations of shorter time to payback or return-on-investment from this partnership.

As you develop new business, your ability to leverage your company's knowledge of existing customer relationships translates into a high level of service quality delivery for the long haul. Every customer touchpoint is critical to service quality delivery, throughout your entire company and supply chain. The value you place on your relationships with your internal customers / employees will be apparent to your external customer base.

Where do you fit in the supplier/customer equation? What opportunities do you have to provide value to upstream and downstream relationships? Learning the needs of "incoming" and "outgoing" relative to your function can make all the difference in the world for retaining customers and developing new ones.

Why do anything less than exemplify high service quality delivery?

Filed Under: Customer Experience, Customer Focus, Job Functionality, Weblogs Tagged With: ,