Last Friday I realized I needed a projection screen for an event on Saturday night.  I checked the Internet before leaving the office to confirm Staples carried them and headed off to the nearest one to pick it up. I had exactly 20 minutes to execute this mission.  I quickly found the area in the store and located a display box meant to symbolize the actual item that is too bulky for retail shelves. I picked up a few more items for the office and headed to check out. This is where it got interesting. Apparently, a box on the shelf doesn’t indicate that Staples has the product. In fact, in this case they didn’t. No worries I was told by a confident young chap, we’ll order it over the Internet and you’ll have it tomorrow. I told him, it absolutely positively had to be there tomorrow and he, once again confidently, assured me it would. We even discussed sending it to a store nearer my home since it would come on Saturday. He advised me that deliveries to the store would be there before 11 but having it sent to my home might mean a delivery later in the day.  He painstakingly entered my info into the magic computer – typing skills are not required for this position – printed out a form and sent me off to check out. I trotted off to the front smugly thinking what a great power shopper I was.  But alas, my smugness was short lived. The gal at the front checking me out actually read the form, I merely assumed it matched the verbal information I had been given. She discovered upon closer inspection that the item wasn’t due to ship for three weeks. The nice chap now apologized and explained he wasn’t used to working on Fridays. He confidently shared, that normally things ship the next day unless it’s a weekend.  He had no idea how to help me since it was Friday and all. Oh really, your next business day equals three weeks later? The miracle of this is that anyone noticed at all. I had already gone back to reading my Blackberry in line. I certainly wouldn’t have noticed it until the next day when I showed up for the pick up, found it wasn’t there and then inspected the form. I would have been livid.
I then dashed off to a competitor, Office Max where I met a not-so-confident and not so young man. He wasn’t sure what the product was and expressed surprise that they even carried them. He needed me to show him where in the store I had found the tag.  He seemed to have no clue who to ask and wasn’t even familiar enough with the store to know where it might be. He told me to keep shopping while he tried to find out what to do. He had to launch a full out recognizance mission to locate it. A couple of times I saw him walking back and forth almost aimlessly trying to find someone else while talking into a microphone attached to his ear. I was so worried that I called my husband and sent him out to find a projector on the other side of town.  I had already started planning my next move which would be a post on Facebook looking to borrow a projector when low and behold, he reappeared with the screen. I happily went on my way having devoted a lot more than twenty minutes to this endeavor but successful none the less.
So what’s better someone who seems in control, who confidently assures you that your problem is taken care of and then completely fails or the not-so-confident guy who had me worried the whole time but in the end delivered?
It drives me crazy when a person in a place of business responds to a question with the words “I don’t know.” It drives me equally crazy when someone tells me something as if they know what they are talking about but it turns out, they don’t.   In any company, no matter how big, everyone who is customer facing should know where to get an answer. And they should confidently assure the customer that they know where to go and will set the wheels in motion so that the customer gets their question answered.  You can’t just go through the motions, you have to deliver which means you need to be familiar with the products, the processes, and the organization so you know where to go to get an answer.  Customers need to feel that they are dealing with a competent representative at all times.
Ask yourself if everyone in your business knows where to go to get any question answered. Watch or listen to how they handle customers in person or on the phone. Do you hear the words “I don’t know?” Do you hear inaccurate information being conveyed? Fix it.

I spoke with a company today who is in the process of providing training to their sales team.  Margins have been shrinking in this industry for years due the commoditization of the product and increased competition. This trend was exacerbated by the recession and many sales reps have seen their incomes drop anywhere from 30% to 50% in the last few years.   The management team decided to spend a bundle on training to help the sales team learn to position their products as value generation tools and not commodities. During the first weekly session one of the reps opted out of the rest of the training.

Management in relaying the story to me wasn’t surprised. They didn't want to expend resources on a person who wasn't receptive so they were glad to see him go. Leave the training I mean, not the company. The rep is on 100% commission so he is sleeping in the bed he made for himself. However, let’s examine this further.  Why isn’t he worried about his dwindling income? Why isn’t he afraid of losing his position?  Why isn’t he afraid of trying to find another job in the midst of record unemployment?
Why isn't his company worried about how this attitude will manifest itself with customers and other employees? What's the value of the lost opportunities he will fail to develop as he continues instead to sell the old fashion way by quoting and hoping?

Even if he didn’t plan to learn anything, why wasn’t it easier to just go with the flow? He certainly could have sat there during each session, feigning interest and day dreaming about his next yard project as millions of sales reps have done before him. Had he chosen this more frequented path, he would not have called attention to himself and at least maintained the illusion of a team player, a committed employee. He might have actually learned something too, albeit by accident. But he chose to renounce the training rather than participate apparently without fear of reprisal.
Is this just total disregard for his employer, his job, his family, himself? Or is this what happens when there are no conditions of employment?

The former VP of Marketing for fastest growing community bank on the east coast discusses what she has learned and how marketing is changing.

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Terms pop up and are adopted in the business world and often there is not a clear understanding of what they mean. Join Kate Dunn for the final part in her DIG MiniView with Devin Voorsanger, VP of Agency Services and Business Development as her discusses the difference between agencies and businesses calling themselves marketing service providers.

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A new survey exploring attitudes and preferences toward customer service conducted in the U.S. and around the world found that 61% of those surveyed will spend an average of 9% more when they believe a company provides excellent service.
On the flip side, only 37% of those surveyed believe that companies have increased their focus on providing quality service. Another 27% feel businesses have not changed their attitude toward customer service in the current economic climate, and 28 % say that companies are now paying less attention to good service.

 

There is a real opportunity today to differentiate your business using customer service.  Here’s an example: A colleague of mine and I took the train to Philadelphia for a meeting on Monday. My experiences with Amtrak over the years have been far from satisfactory. From the crowded cars to rude passengers and surly staff to the peculiar smells, it has seemed much easier to drive or fly.

http://bit.ly/b22BKQ

Words of wisdom from writer David Handler.

What did you learn today from a mistake?

Last Thursday morning I had the privilege of opening the Mailing and Fulfillment Services Association’s Annual Conference in Charleston, SC. This year’s theme, Convergence, was embodied in this first session entitled Seizing Opportunities of a Converging Direct Marketing Landscape. The companies in attendance would be hoping to find ways to diversify their offering in order to minimize the impact of lower mail volumes, print on demand (which has cannibalized their print), warehouse and fulfillment business and the onslaught of digital communication in general. Many are looking to add integrated cross channel solutions incorporating email and personalized landing pages to increase the value of the direct mail they produce today. This too, is the goal of their counterparts in the printing industry, many of whom have already embarked on a similar path. What happens when this path gets more crowded?

When access to the same service is not scarce, the price comes down.  So I went back to some resources from which I have gathered inspiration for past speeches – Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim  & Renée Mauborgne and The Dip by Seth Godin. From Blue Ocean Strategy comes the concept of value innovation, which occurs when the competition is made irrelevant by creating of a leap in value for buyers, which opens up “new and uncontested market space.” Southwest Airlines established just such a leap by removing aspects of the then airline industry value proposition, not adding more to the mix. Using a contrarian approach, they took away meals, seating choices, lounges and hub connectivity, which allowed them to lower their price point. Then they added something from Seth Godin’s bible – they created something remarkable with a whole new brand of customer service and created an uncontested market, not with air travelers but with those traveling by car.

In The Dip, Mr. Godin proclaims that the mass market is dead, replaced by millions of micro markets, each one of which can have a clear market leader.  Instead of toiling away, trying to be all things to all customers, an opportunity exists to establish one’s company as a clear leader in a micro-niche. 

What aspects of your service offering can be eliminated from the mix, to provide certain segments of customers a unique value? The key to thoroughly examining any opportunities that exist is to create a leap of value like Southwest is to take the time to understand what customers in each niche need to be successful in their mission and to examine your offering for aspects where there is opportunity to be the best at something.  Instead of being mediocre at a large number of things, is there a market or an aspect of what you provide that could be truly remarkable? What we think of today as traditional market boundaries and industry structure don’t have to be fixed. They can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players according to the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy.  The complexities created by digital communication and a depressed economy may be fertile ground for creating quantum leaps in value for our customers and our businesses simply by examining what may no longer be necessary in our offering.

DIG Miniview with Devin Voorsanger, VP, Business Development & Agency Services at Easypurl.com. Mr. Voorsanger discussing the methods Easy Purl uses to grow their business and how he views the roles of agencies and marketing services providers.

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DIG Miniview with Katie Gilstrap, former Senior VP of Marketing for First Market Bank. Ms. Gilstrap discussing creative ways to maintain customer loyalty in the highly competitive world of banking.

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During this past week, I lost an opportunity partly because I had been trained how to sell at Xerox in the early 80s.

This opportunity included integrating their marketing strategy and execution with their sales process. To net this out, our plan included using PR, direct mail, email and social media to create awareness and uncover interested prospects. We would start by building a predictive model from their existing customer information and use that model to target the right people with relevant information and offers. To respond to the offer, the prospect would be asked to visit a landing page where we could measure what they were clicking on and actually ask them some questions, if they were game. Based on their activity, the interest could be scored, and folks exhibiting behaviors indicating a higher interest level would be prioritized and sent on to the sales force. The sales force would be trained in advance with an opening statement reflective of the prospect’s interest, some non-threatening talking points and a relevant offer to allow the prospect to investigate further. The verbal conversation would be reinforced by an email or direct mail with the same offer depending on the prospect’s preferences for communication.

I hear through the grapevine that one of the people on the committee thought this would be too pushy based on my Xerox experience. I learned a lot at Xerox but here it is in a nutshell: