Info

Navigating the Customer Experience

Join host Yanique Grant as she takes you on a journey with global entrepreneurs and subject matter experts that can help you to navigate your customer experience. Learn what customers really want and how businesses can understand the psychology of each customer or business that they engage with. We will be looking at technology, leadership, customer service charters and strategies, training and development, complaint management, service recovery and so much more!
RSS Feed Subscribe in Apple Podcasts
Navigating the Customer Experience
2024
March
February
January


2023
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March


2022
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
January


2021
December
November
October
September
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2020
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
March
January


2019
December
November
October
August
June
May
April
March
February
January


2018
October
September
June
March
February
January


2017
December
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2016
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May


All Episodes
Archives
Now displaying: 2016
Dec 27, 2016

Joshua Latimer felt his job as a banker for JP Morgan Chase to start a cleaning business in Michigan which he eventually grew and sold to a California based cleaning conglomerate in 2015. Now he’s living in Costa Rica with his 4 kids and wife where he helps small business owners from all over the world understand the power of business systems and automation and the freedom that they can bring. Joshua is the founder of www.automategrowsell.com, an online training platform for small local service businesses as well as www.sendjim.com, a follow up automation tool for busy professionals.

 

Questions

  • What is your Zodiac sign?
  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • What prompted you to move to Costa Rica?
  • Why is it important in a business, especially if you’re going to deliver a quality customer experience one that’s exceptional, why is it important to have systems and how does those systems help to maximize on your customer experience?
  • Can you explain to us about what you do in automategrowsell.com, in terms of your online training platform?
  • On a global level, how do you feel about customer service/ customer experience?
  • How do you stay motivated every day?
  • What are some important considerations for an entrepreneur or an online business owner to be successful?
  • What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • If you were sitting across the table from another business owner and they said to you that they feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated human capital, what’s the one piece of advice would you give them to have a successful business?
  • What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
  • Where can our listeners find your information online?
  • What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

 

Highlights

  • Joshua Latimer stated that he thinks he is a Scorpio but he hasn’t put in a lot of time on that totally being true. He stated that he was born November 18th. Joshua shared he is not sure the traits of a Scorpio, however, a lot of pain and suffering has helped to mold him.
  • Joshua Latimer stated that he has always had an entrepreneurial spirit, he was the first one in his family to be an entrepreneur so when he started his first business he was 18 years old and his parents went on vacation and when they came home, he had used their Credit Card to buy 14 candy machines and their whole garage was full of candy machines. He had no discipline, he had no real focus or wisdom or knowledge in business, he just had the desire for it but he got a lot if push back from friends and family saying, “What are you doing?” “Go get a job” “This is crazy, just be a normal person” and he kind of cave to that pressure for many years like a lot of people have or is still doing, going to work and doing the thing that you’re not passionate about because it’s what you’re suppose to do. He did that for awhile but then his wife got pregnant with their first child, he had his “Come to Jesus” moment where he said, “Alright Josh, deep down you know you’re a square peg in a round hole and you know you want to start a business.” He felt like it was a now or never at that time, so he decided to start a cleaning business and his mother was so mad at him that she didn’t talk to him for a week, she was so freaked out that he was going to start a business rather than having a “safe and secure job.”

Yanique asked if was the same business that he sold to a California cleaning conglomerate in 2015. Joshua stated that yes, it was and that it’s a great business, it’s a repeat service, there’s a high margin and it’s a niche service, it’s a good business but it’s tricky to scale. One of the reasons it is so hard is because you’re inside peoples’ homes to have the right systems and protocols, when you have dozens of employees and you’re doing tens and thousands of dollars in revenue a week or a day sometimes, it’s very tricky to keep that thing tight enough to where it’s operating at a high level going in and out of peoples’ homes, it’s an intimate thing and that where the tricky part is to scale a cleaning business.

  • Joshua shared that he was born and raised in Michigan, never really been anywhere and then decided to move with his wife and kids to Central America. It was a couple year process and he wanted his kids to know that the world is a big place; he wanted his kids to be bilingual and to understand that the world doesn’t revolve around them. He wanted them to take intelligent risks and start businesses and do things and live a big life because that’s who he is and he wants to pass that on to them because the world is a big place. People all over the planet are getting up and doing stuff all day and starting companies and getting married and as an American, it is really easy to not even think of that, to not even realize that. Joshua shared we are only a small percentage of the worlds’ population, so he can only help his family to open their eyes and expand their horizons in terms of culture.

Joshua stated that he was so self-centered in a business perspective and in how smart he thought he was perspective, it’s almost embarrassing and he looked around with his colleagues and other Americans, they don’t do it on purpose but they slowly become like that over time, they live in a bubble a little bit and so going down to Costa Rica and engage with people who makes US $2.00 an hour and interact with people who are terrified to start a tiny business and to understand the cultural differences and to see what he can offer there and learn from them as well it has been an amazing thing and because his new business is web based, he has the ability to do that which is amazing and as long has he has Internet, he can work from wherever.

  • Joshua shared that systems are only important if you actually like your business and you don’t want to be a slave to it. If you want to make real money without you doing everything yourself, we have to take a hard look at that system and automation, it sounds fancy but it’s very simple and from the stand point of Customer Service, a lot of small businesses shoot from the hip and the founder or the owner or the person who is holding it all together, they’re the glue, they are smart. Persons who have a small business, they are very sharp, they are very talented and they are holding it together, the problem is you are exhausted, as your business scales, it gets harder and harder to hold it all together and things start dropping, you start dropping the ball, your Customer Experience goes down but you don’t even realize it’s down because you can’t possibly pay attention to 32 different areas in your business at the same time at a high level. So what a system is, it’s you taking a step back and being intentional in predefining the way that you do something in your business. For example, if someone’s really mad at you and they think your company stinks, there should be a process for that, they call, email or Facebook you, these days, probably Facebook so the whole world will see how much they hate you and once that happens, “What’s triggered inside of your business?” Most people today will just randomly see the message and then they’ll say, “Oh no!” and then they’ll do some stuff or they’ll email them back but it’s not standardized, it’s not systemized, it’s not thought through in advance, that’s what a system is. It’s going through all the little pieces in your business and being intentional about how you’re going to do this at a high level and then writing it down and then deploying it to your team and being consistent with it over time. Once you do that in all the parts of your business, the sky is the limit.

Joshua stated that his philosophy is that you run towards problem. One of his company core values that have already been established before they built the system is to have a way to know that Facebook and the customer service support email account and their customer support telephone number were checked really quickly and on going. Step 1 of your system might include using some software or assigning a low level administrative task person to constantly check these messages on a 15 minutes reoccurring basis as part of her workflow maybe she does other work and she is always refreshing that Facebook feed for example because you want to be present and you want to be very responsive in Customer Service. Step 2 would be, if something happens where someone is not happy that would trigger all of this other stuff, so you would give them a predefined script, not robotic, very human, very fun. Taking responsibility by creating a script for them to send back to the Facebook person and it would be in the 15-minute window because the system would be checking it all the time and would probably have the employees take responsibility, tell the customer, “I have the authority to make this right for you, we’re going to be on this, here’s my personal cell phone number, here’s my email address, we’re going to be reaching out to you, we are all over this. Thank you so much for telling us this happened, this is a huge help to us.” Step 3 would be for us to go find this person in real life so whether we review the orders from the time the message was sent, we try to find them and their phone number, whatever it is we will run and sprint towards that problem as a team. Step 4 might be to document the whole situation in our CRM or our support ticket software, whatever we are using so that we have a record of the complaint that was made and anybody that was involved in it. Step 5 might be, during your weekly team meetings, you review the previous week incidents and see if they were resolved satisfactorily or if we can tighten up or if the script needs to be changed or if we are doing our very best. That would be a simple word document that describes everything but the hard part of the system is getting your team to do it that way every single time. The way that you accomplish that is by being relentless in your pursuit of sticking to the system in your own life as a leader so when you constantly going back there an reiterating and reaffirming, it will work but people give up too quick sometimes with it.

Joshua stated that the meat of your leadership ability comes in the way you actually behave and execute in your own role. Everybody is watching you, your family and your kids so you have to be high level because everyone below you will do exactly what you do except a little bit less. If the bar is not high enough in step 1 by the time you are 12 layers deep and have all these staff members, the customers dealing with all the 12 layer employees at the bottom, you’re going to get a very low level experience because the bar wasn’t raise high enough by the leadership in the beginning.

                     

  • Joshua shared that what he does is in his niche of window cleaning and pressure cleaning is that over time people knew who he was in his industry. He would get a lot of requests to do business consulting or fly in somewhere and help them to systemize and automate and really dig in and rip the guts out and look how can we fix this business, where is it broken, how can we scale, how can we grow? He got a lot of requests to do that; he doesn’t have time to do that. His primary business his is software company, so what he did is create Automate, Grow, Sell, it’s for local service companies and it helps you go through basically 6 months of how do I go front to back, top to bottom, through the entire architecture of your company, how do I systemize it, it’s a private community that gets a couple coaching calls with him and there’s over 50 videos shot in Costa Rica with home work and documents and samples. It’s an educational product for service companies to help them stop being a slave to their small business.

 

Joshua stated that he tends to specialize with service companies but the customer life cycle and the way to engage enough to the sale and the way to get maximum profitability specifically to home service businesses like lawn care, landscaping, carpet cleaning, he has some other people in the boot camp but that’s kind of the core of who it is tailored to speak to if you decide to take it.

  • Joshua stated that people in Central America are a lot less stressed out than people in North America and that includes the employees of companies. He almost started a pest control company in Costa Rica a few months ago and he still might invest in something like that. The deal with the way Central America customer service works, everyone is really nice while they provide you with horrible customer service. In general, it’s a strong trend; the people are not entrepreneurial so they don’t look at things the same way. He didn’t realize how entrepreneurial North Americans were until he lived in Central America and so he thinks we have a lot of work to do in North America in terms of getting our service back to the way it was decades ago and really being high level with our enthusiasm and the way we take care of our customers but he feels that we are light years ahead of the businesses down there, they just don’t quite understand power in those type of things, they’re all commodity based businesses, they have a thing or a service, you give them money, they give you the thing or the service and that’s it. There’s very little attention paid to the way that I feel doing business with the company and what happens after I do business with the company. There’s very little attention paid to the perceived value, the branding, the marketing, and the uniform with the company. They just don’t quite get that and for somebody that does, it’s a huge advantage but he doesn’t see very often.
  • Joshua stated that it’s a cultural thing and that Costa Rica is an amazing place and he loves Costa Ricans, he learned a lot from them because the world is not about making more money but from a business perspective, there’s a lot of work to be done there and there’s a reason there’s no middle class, there’s rich Costa Ricans, there’s very poor Costa Ricans, the government takes care of everybody, it’s a socialized country, the Government pays for everything, does everything and so there’s not like people are destitute on the streets but they also have a very limited ceiling on what they can accomplish in their life. For example, if a young poor Costa Rican wants to start a business, the paperwork, the regulation, the process is a nightmare with all the government bureaucracy but on top of that, when they try to start the business, all of their friends and family are going to say, “No, no what are you doing? You’re going to loose your savings, don’t do that, that’s too risky.” Even if it’s the most simple business ever. So, there’s a lot of pulling you back down going on so the mentality there is that they love each other, they’re warm people but they live in fear in terms of entrepreneurism and they don’t know how to make money as a people, they just don’t get it. The very few people that do, exploit it, the government exploits it, there’s a huge corruption in all of Central America including Costa Rica and so the people building the roads are richer than you can ever imagine while everyone else goes to the grocery store and buy 2 eggs at a time because they can’t buy a whole dozen.
  • Joshua Latimer shared how he stays motivated everyday; he stated that he’s motivated because he’s blessed, because he’s thankful, because he’s happy that he wakes up everyday. He stated that he wakes up and it’s a big deal, he wakes up and he has more to accomplish, more people he can serve. He thinks that it is easier to be motivated if your base line personality is rooted in gratitude because there are so many people that he can serve including his staff, there are so many ideas that he wants to execute on and there are so many things he wants to build and he wants his children and family to participate. Motivation to him isn’t something you focus on, motivation is a by-product of correct thinking and correct thinking starts with getting your eyes off yourself every second and looking at everything you’re blessed with and all the people around you that you can serve.

He stated that in his office at the door, there is a white board in his office that says, “Today I’m thankful for” and there is a line and he has a dry erase marker and he writes something new on it everyday. It’s a silly, tiny thing but we have to remind ourselves how blessed, fortunate and lucky we are. It’s very easy to feel sorry for yourself even if you’re doing successful things, even if you’re in America, poor people in America are rich if you compare it to the world but it’s easy to sit around and say, “poor me, I only have this but everybody else have that” or “my job, I hate but it’s impossible because everybody is keeping me down” which is not true, you’re in a perspective the way you view the world, it’s true to you. If you have the correct thinking, you’re going to get more and more motivated over time.

  • Joshua shared some considerations for an entrepreneur. He stated that now he has a software company, so he did the local hometown business, started with nothing, eventually grew that to being very successful, almost doing US $200,000 a month in window cleaning and then he started this app and he’s going through that process right now, he has employees all over the world, they have raised money from investors. Some considerations, number 1. You have to count the cost, people love to underestimate what they are capable of achieving in a lifetime but they over estimate what they can achieve in a year. Almost everybody does this and with a small business, for it to work, you cannot quit, you have to stay in the game, it takes time, it does not happen by osmosis instantaneously 24 hours later, so people need to be very real with themselves on the pain that will be involved, the sacrifice that will be involved and the sacrifice required for them to win. The second thing is to get a mentor; you need to be around sharp people, like-minded people, people that are 3 levels above you. If you’re the smartest person out of all of your friends, you need to get some new friends, if you’re the smartest person in the room; you need to get a new room. You have to stay sharp, you have to surround yourself with people that add value to your life and not people that suck the life out of you. If you have negative family and friends and you’re going to start a business, you better seriously considering cutting that off like the Cancer that it is if you’re going to be serious about your business.
  • Joshua stated that the one online tool he uses everyday other than is own app is Trello. They use Trello every day and they have a lot of online tools that they use. Trello is kool and it’s free, it helps you organize tasks, to do’s and projects using little cards and boards and it’s a great app.
  • Joshua stated that the number 1 book that have had the biggest impact is the Bible in terms of business and life and relationship and systems, how to live your life, how do you want to get closer to God, how you want to be a better dad, you want to have a better business. There is another book that he read recently called The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller, he’s the founder of Keller Williams Realty. The book is very simple, it helps you to try and understand the importance of focusing on one high level important thing at a time while you’re moving through your business and trying to achieve success and a lot of us do seven things at the same time and we never really get anywhere but we go home exhausted everyday. The key is to prioritize things and to bite off one singular thing at a time until it’s complete, go to the next one, until that’s complete, you go to the next one, it’s really important, that’s what all the highest achievers in the world do and the book helps to explain that.

Yanique stated that she read in a book when she was in college that said, “It’s not humanly possible for you to do 2 things at the same time at 100%.” She could see the concept that Gary was trying to get across in terms of really being intentional in completing an activity to the best of your ability and by doing so just focusing on that activity for that period of time.

Joshua stated that the first page of the book says, “If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.”  Joshua shared this a Russian Proverb. The truth is that building a successful company is boring and it’s not always sexy and you’re not always on fire with motivation, it’s about setting and accomplishing goals period. One thing, then two things, then three things, then four things, then you get a set back and then you’ve got to be relentless and resilient and not quit and keep going and then you set and accomplish another goal, that’s the way that you do it if you want to really crush it but most of us are too concern with checking Facebook 300 times a day or checking our email 95 times a day. He stated that he heard a statistic that the average person checks their email 95 to 130 times a day. Our ability to focus is really bad, especially with technology now. He stated that it is something he is working on to get tighter into because it’s not about working hard, it’s about being productive and if you want to move quickly to success, you have to be highly productive and that means doing all the boring stuff no one wants to talk about, doing the right things when no one is looking, shutting down the distractions and getting crap done until it’s done one thing at a time.

  • Joshua stated that what he would say is that it is almost a guarantee that they are doing a very poor job as a leader laying out the vision. They have the vision but the people around them aren’t motivated, you having the vision is useless to you. The Bible says, “Without a vision, my people perish.” Your company is going to perish if you don’t have a vision in the same way. If your staff is disinterested, demotivated, not focused, not motivationally engaged, it’s always 100% fault of the leadership. You can have a bad apple once in awhile but if there is a trend, you have to take responsibility and fix the trend so you need to cast your vision more effectively, you need to help your staff understand what’s in it for them, “This is who we are, this is where we are going, this is why we are going there and this is what’s in it for you when we get there” continuously reiterating the same vision is what’s required, you don’t have one meeting a year to tell everybody to get fired up and then wonder why they are disinteresting 90 days later. You have to be driving the train, standing at the front of the crowd, pulling your troops with you, when you have real relationships with them, you understand who they are as humans and you’re coaching them and doing all that stuff, they will go to war for you but these types of issues really always fall on the shoulders of the leader, they just don’t like to admit that, they want the ominous ether of black nothingness to take the blame, they want to say, “Well, there are just no good help out there, there’s no good employees” because that’s an easy way out.
  • Joshua stated that the one thing that he is working on right now is sendjim.com, which is an app that lets you send postcards, emails, gifts and letters from your cellphone. He built this app with his business partner Chris for his own company before he sold it and they are going to use it internally. What it does is automate your follow-up process with your customers, when you are done doing business with a customer, you can push a button on the phone and it will automatically physically mail them a Thank You card and an appointment reminder card 6 months later and ask for referrals, letter or email 3 months later and it does all of that stuff without you touching it. Joshua is excited about it and he said it is growing really quickly. The app is available on App Store and Google Play Store. Great Relationship Marketing Tool. Joshua says your current customers are your biggest asset.
  • Joshua shared listeners can find him at –
    • com | He also has his own Podcast - The Quick Talk Podcast – podcast about systems, how to win and lean into the pain and be successful.

Links

Automate, Grow, Sell

Dec 20, 2016

Calvin Wayman is a bestselling Author, Keynote Speaker and Social Media Entrepreneur. The most inspiring thing about Calvin is what he has done in such a short time. He shows that where there is a will, there is a way. Seeing where he is now, it’s crazy that in just spring 2015 he was still working an employee job, feeling stuck at a job that he was not passionate about; he ultimately decided to give himself a chance. He suddenly quit his day job to pursue his dream of working for himself and went selling door to door; he’s a man on a mission. He owns Cobbes Media, a Social Media Management Agency designed for small businesses and entrepreneurs to stand out beyond 97% of everyone else on Social Media. He has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, Social Media Examiner, The Huffington Post and was even named one of the Top 30 entrepreneurs under the age of 30 by www.influensive.com. He recently ran in a 50 mile ultra marathon just to challenge himself and he just barely released his 1st book which debuted on the Amazon top 100 of all books in the success category. His book is called Fish Out of Water: The Guide to Achieving Breakthrough and Permanently Transforming Into the New You.

 

Questions

  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • What are some recommendations for starting your own business and do you think customer experience is something that they should be thinking about from the initial stage or is it something you take into consideration after you start the business?
  • How do you feel about customer experience as a customer and owning a Social Media Management Agency, how do you approach it online?
  • What are some every day solutions that you would recommend to a small business owner to help them improve their customer experience?
  • Can you share a little about your book and how can it really help persons listening to this show, what are the main take away, your purpose and intension was for this book?
  • How do you stay motivated every day?
  • What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
  • Where can our listeners find your information online?
  • What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

 

Highlights

  • Calvin Wayman stated that the thing that he tells most people right off the bat that is important to know is that he is a regular dude, he’s somebody who just wanted more out of life, wanted freedom and it’s important to know that because when he was getting started on his journey, he would look at people that he admired like Lewis Howes, Gary Vaynerchuk, Grant Cardone even Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen Degeneres - he would look at all these super successful business people and tend put them on a pedestal and say “Yea, these guys are great, it be awesome to be like them.” Knowing that there is no way in the world he could close to them or have whatever they have, so he put them on a pedestal or on a top of a mountain as a Guru that can’t ever be attained and what he learned over the last 1 ½ year since he quit his day job, being able to connect with so many amazing people is that they are just that, they are people and when that clicked for him he said, “Oh my gosh, here is this person in front of me that’s a multimillionaire or a billionaire having a conversation with them, seeing that they are just a regular human being” then it clicked for him that he can go after this and that excited him. It’s been a crazy 1 ½ year with things he has gone after and challenges he has put himself through and he just wanted people to always know where he came from like less than 2 years ago he was still working at his job, just going through the motion of what we all do, wanting to live a decent life, he has a wife and a 3 year old son. He wants people to realize that if someone like him coming from where he comes from can do it and he’s not come close to arriving where he wants to be but if he can do it, you can do it too.

 

  • As an Entrepreneur, Calvin shared that throughout his whole transition and even when he was in his day job, something that was always in his mind, a quote from Zig Ziglar, “Help enough people get what they want and you can have anything that you want.” So wherever you are at in any stage, whether you’re an employee working for somebody’s company or you’re looking for more freedom, it absolutely comes down to customer experience because it’s coming down to making people feel cared about, loved, taken care of, helping them get what they want because the truth is, if you really want to go after more the way to get it is going to be by giving them what they want so you can have what you want. So you’re thinking of it on whichever side of the isle you’re on, employee or entrepreneur.
  • As an Online Entrepreneur, Calvin stated that it’s more important in a lot of ways because customer experience is one of those things that is mandatory, you’ve got to have it and if you don’t have it then it’s horrible, that’s where stuff really get crazy when people don’t feel cared about, they feel betrayed and how he does it online is that part of the training he does on online Social Media often is something that he calls the 4 C’s to Social Media Success and the last C that everything comes down to is Connection, no matter what you do, whether you’re doing it online or in life, the way you’re going to build your business and have it grow and scale is by building those connections. He calls it “Doing the scaling by doing the unscalable.” He thinks that a lot of time what gets in peoples way when it comes to customer service experience or just the whole interacting and giving the customer something that is pleasant is a lot of times it feels like it’s taking time and it is and it feels like it’s taking a lot of investment and sometimes it is but they’re human beings and if you want to take it to the next level, then you have to have that foundation and there are so many great examples of it. A lot of people have iPhones and if he asks this question of “Who still have their iPhone box?” most people will raise their hand, it’s a box but they have it down to the detail of what you feel like when you open that thing, it’s a piece of cardboard but it’s designed so well, it has the phone right there on the top and it makes you feel special and you think you should be keeping the box and most people do, they don’t do anything with it, they just set it in their closet but they feel bad about throwing it away, it feels good so must be something worth keeping. So it touches everything, especially on the online space you have to scale by doing the unscalable, reaching out to your customers when they don’t expect it, even when you’re trying to grow your following and you think of your followers as “customers” - give them a good experience. Calvin stated that everyone that follows him on Facebook, he’ll go back to them and send them a voice memo so that it makes that touch more human because on line, it’s so easy to forget that there is another human being on the other line and so if you really want to stand out and give somebody a great experience, then just do something that makes it human, if they hear your voice instead of just seeing chat, then that’s such an easy way to stand out from everybody else. It’s super important no matter what your business is, certainly off line but also online as well and sometimes even more important because most people just forget about it.                                                                                                                                             
  • Calvin stated that some people just do the work and don’t really touch back and they try to get cell phone numbers of their customers and they’ll text them and they can text from their computer system but that’s something that’s more personal, it feels more real. He mentioned doing the voice memo; sometimes they’ll do a quick video for a specific customer and say their name just to give them the results. Anything that he feels that make it more human, that probably one of the biggest thing you can do because that’s what people want to have but at the same time, it’s not making the mistakes because when the experience is bad, that’s where things really get in the way.
  • He recently had an experience where he was at the other end of it, he got delayed at an airport for 26 hours and it was unnecessary. This is an example of companies that put policies over people and that is one of the biggest mistakes anybody can ever do when it comes to your customer experience, never put policy over people. He stated that a few weeks ago he went to the airport and everything he does is electronic, he’s a millennial so he doesn’t have printed out itineraries, he has them on his cell phone. He got in the line and he handed the Security his phone; he has the airline app on it, he goes to it and say, “Huh, I’m not seeing the barcode, I’m seeing the itinerary but I’m not seeing the barcode to scan” so he looked through the app he wasn’t seeing it either and his flight is in about 50 minutes so he needed to get things moving and after they can’t find it, they got several other security people over to come look at the boarding pass, to find the barcode, they can’t find it. After several minutes of several people looking through it, they then said he will have to go to a kiosk and print it out and he has never done that before. He went to the kiosk to print it out, the airline that he was flying had their portion of the kiosk turned off, so you couldn’t print it out. He went back to security and said, “Hey, the kiosk is off, so we just need to find it, here’s my itinerary showing my flight, showing my seat number and everything but we can’t find the barcode, what should we do?” And after having 5 different people look at his phone app, they couldn’t figure it out, so then they said, “You better go down to the airline’s customer service.” He went down to the airline’s customer service and said, “My barcode is not showing” and he says, “Yea, we have a little bit of issue, let me see if I can get it fixed” and then he says, “Oh, I actually can’t turn it on because you are within the 45 minutes before leaving” he says, “Even if I could, you’re gonna have to get another flight.” He said that his flight’s not for 40 minutes, that’s plenty of time. He said, “I’m sorry I can’t” and he asked him why and told him that he has a meeting tomorrow morning at 9:00 am, he can’t miss that meeting. The customer service representative said, “I can’t turn it on” and he just kept on saying it would make so that he might be late and it was literally 40 minutes before the plane leaves and he asked him, “How long does it takes for you to walk to the gate” and he said it takes him 7 minutes but he doesn’t have to go through security. Calvin asked him to give him 15 minutes, let him try but he kept giving him all the reasons he can’t and said that he didn’t want him to come back and have to reschedule he would rather me reschedule right now. So here’s someone that could have made one little switch and said, “Yeah, we have had issues, let me turn it on, I understand that you’re under the 45 minutes that me try to get people through but let me get you through.” He talked with him for 15 minutes and then even after he had it booked, several other people way later than him was going through security to get on that same flight. He had so much time and what makes it even worse, he had to sit out that airport for 26 hours missing an entire day, missing his important meeting that he had and when he got the flight the next day, he looked at his watch from the time he was at security to the time he got through and it only took him 9 minutes. Now here is someone putting policy over people and what he learnt from him after they booked it, he asked him, “What made you not want to do it?” and he said, “Well, there’s this manager lady that every time it’s under the 45 minutes, she gets mad at the gate when we turn it back on” and so, he was covering himself to not get in trouble with his own manager and it was enough to have him a customer not wanting to use that airline again because it was such a negative experience, he had never been delayed for so long for something and unnecessarily. That’s an example of having an experience gone bad because what it ultimately came down to a company that has a policy, and policies are important because they help a company function and run more smoothly but when you have policies that contradict the human experience and you put policies over people, that’s where you have a problem and there is a really amazing book that talks about this type of thing that puts it in a great way and it’s buy Dale Partridge, the book is called, People Over Profit: Break the System, Live with Purpose, Be More Successful , it’s such a good book and it shows how you need to be thinking about your business whether it’s online, if it’s an airline or if it’s a brick and mortar, businesses are about people fundamentally not just processes or policies. If you take care of your people, you’re going to take care of your business and where everybody gets in trouble. There’s this big thing happening with Wells Fargo over the last few months in hot water in the United States and the biggest issues that they are having is how they have been treating their people or their customers in not good way. The biggest take away is you got to put your people over your policies.

Calvin shared a great example of Morton's Steakhouse, there’s this guy jumping on an airline and he’s going to go on this long airline flight so he sends out a tweet and he tags Morton's in it and he says, “Man, this is going to be a long flight, I would love a Morton's Steak at the end of this.” He was just joking; he sends out the tweet completely joking almost like if it’s starting to snow, we’ll make a tweet that says, “Dear winter, please go away." He gets to the end of his airline flight, he comes off the plane and guess what he sees right there in the airport, a guy in a tuxedo, bow tie and all with a Morton's Steakhouse meal for the gentleman completely for free. Morton's saw that tweet and if you think of all the logistics that had to come in play for that to happen, for somebody at Morton's to see that tweet, to then get it approved in however long and say “Let’s do this stunt”, and to even find the guy’s airline and see when he was going to land and plan everything to get the food cooked right, to be right there in the airport when he landed, it’s crazy, so many resources were put into that but the question is “Do you think that made a connection with this guy? Do you think it gave him a good customer experience?” Absolutely! And that’s the point, it blew his mind so much that he was so excited about, so impressed, realizing what Morton's did, he ended up writing a blog - posting and sharing his story and it ended up being shared thousands and thousands of time and Morton's business blew up because of that and that’s just one little thing, taking care of one customer, doing one little thing and most people might look at that in the beginning or even the idea of it and say “Well, we can’t do that because that’s going to cost us time, money and resources” but it’s something that you can’t scale and do over and over but it’s when you do those human touches that your whole business will grow and Morton's has that story within their culture and so it just has this whole culture of taking care of people and people over processes, people over policies, people over procedure and that’s how any business continues to flourish is when they keep that in mind that it's the people that matter and give them the experience, they are the reason YOU are in business.

     

  • Calvin stated that January is coming up and that’s when he thinks the book is really going to become heavy and super important because in January everybody sets New Year’s resolutions and they get super excited about it and then come February everyone flat lines or people quit. When he started the book, he was analyzing that and was like, “Why is that? What’s happening here?” and what he discovered is there is this thing that is not talked about in business or goal setting or aiming high in any part of your life and it’s this period where after you get excited, after you start taking action on a goal, you hit this point where it’s not very exciting anymore, you feel out of your element, you feel awkward, You feel like a fish out of water and that’s because you’re doing something that is out of your element jus t like a fish is out of its element when it’s out of water. The tragedy is when most people hit that point, like in February when they become fish out of water, because they are out of their element, they end up reverting back to their old fish bowl of mediocrity and so what his book is all about is recognizing that this is going to happen, so in any business that you’re in, if you’re a business owner that wants to completely change the culture of your business or develop a whole completely new customer experience, then you’re going to go through this growth stage where you’re going to feel like a fish out of water because it’s going to be completely new territory from where you’re at right now. That’s what the whole book is about is recognizing that you’re become a fish out of water but here are the principles that you can go through to not just revert back and flat line and become normal but completely break through and create an entirely new standard for your life or your business.

 

Yanique stated that there is a section in the book called, SWIM which is an acronym and it says swim like a shark. Shark and development and moving forward in your life, are they connected and can you share with us a little bit about why you would need to swim like a shark and what are the characteristics of a shark that we would need to be inculcating into our lives.

Calvin shared that shark in his book is a really positive thing; he uses the opposite like a "guppy" which your smaller average version of yourself and a shark is something completely different, something you transform into. He did that because when you breakthrough that fish out of water phase, you don’t just become a bigger fish, you become a completely different fish, something that’s confident, you literally transform. One of the main principles he talks about near the end of the book is swimming like a shark and SWIM is an acronym of four things that he noticed with successful people and when you start behaving like a shark then it pulls you in that direction to become a shark yourself and SWIM stands for Success, Words, Improve and Measure.

Success is defining success the right way and he has noticed has he talks to millionaires and billionaire, they think of success completely differently than a guppy does. For example, a guppy thinks that success is arriving at a destination or getting the result but what he noticed is that successful people are masters of the mundane, they are used to doing the same thing over and over and that is success. Said in a different way, they view success as something completely in their control, so they are focused inward on saying, “What can I do?” they take personal responsibility for it and it’s by doing those things and taking personal responsibility that makes the result happen as a buy product but they are not waiting for the result to come before they say, “I am successful” like you might as a guppy, “I’m not going to be successful until that day, until I achieve this.” You can wake up, be successful today, you can have your goal in the distance and say, “If that’s my goal, what action can I take today to get me closer.” That’s the main thing with the S in SWIM in that chapter, is recognizing what sharks think about success and realizing that it’s in your control and staying focus within your control.

Words is showing that people that are successful and they live by success principles are the people we admire whether they are a famous movie star, whether they are Oprah Winfrey, Ellen Degeneres, a millionaire, a billionaire or somebody with a big company, they speak differently than most people, they have a different language, the words they use and the topics they talk about is what Words is all about. A piece from the Words section and it’s something he learned from one of his mentors Michael Bernoff, he is known like the other Tony Robbins, he’s great with transforming people into a new version of themselves. One day he was getting coaching from him and he asked him a question and he said, “Sure” and he completely stopped the conversation and said, “What did you say?” and he said, “What?” and he asked again, “What did you say?” and he said sure. And he said, “Calvin, do you know what sure means?” He said sure means screw you and it shocked him, he said, “What you need to realize Calvin, is that sure and maybe and I don’t know and perhaps, those are all fluffy, uncertain words and if you want to be successful, what you’ll notice is successful people use words that are definite like yes, no, absolutely and they are certain in the things they say, they are absolute.” It was an amazing coaching lesson for him and he said, “Calvin, what you say matters, the words you use matter.” He looks at the word “sure” as a curse word for him because he went through the same process and he saw how he changed his language when he was on his way to becoming a millionaire. That was a major lesson for him, so that’s what Words is all about.

I stand for Improve, this is important if you’re looking to grow your business to always have a better customer experience. You will notice with Apple or any good company that has been around for awhile is that they don’t ever arrive, they’re always improving, and they’re always looking for the latest ways to develop the customer experience. A great example of somebody that finally got their act together was Nintendo. For years they were stuck to the console and in the day that was the thing to give the best customer experience but then these things came around called the cell phones and people were on mobile and it took them forever but finally this year they came out with PokemonGo. PokemonGo was a way of improving from where they were and it created such an amazing customer experience and it exploded and it had the biggest growth of any app in history when they made that switch. That’s what I is all about. It is always continuing to improving where you are because successful businesses, successful people never arrive.

The final thing that helps with everything is M. M stands for Measure and measuring the right things. He went to a mentor and was complaining because something wasn’t happening the way he thought it should or he wasn’t growing as much as he thought he should and he said, “Well, how are you measuring it?” and he replied, “I’m not measuring it.” And his mentor said, “That’s the problem, you don’t know if you’re winning, if you don’t keep score and you get more of what you measure.” Measure is super important it’s what he notices with so many successful people, it’s what sharks do, and they measure the key indicators of what they want to move. So keep score but measure the right things, measure the things you want to get more of. Examples of what you should measure and what you shouldn’t measure, according to his mentor, what most people do if they want to get in better shape or increase their finances and so they measure how heavy they are, if you think you’re going to get more of what you measure, you’re in resistance, you don’t want to measure how heavy you are because don’t want more pounds. People want to get out of debt and yet they are measuring their debt, so they are in resistance. So what do you measure? You measure what he explains as a lead measure, something that if you do more of it, it will change the result. So if you want to lose weight, instead of how much you weigh, you could do a couple of things, you could measure how much weight you lost, so you get more of it or even better, measure the thing 100% in your control like how many days you worked out or how many sets you did or how much you maxed out, how many perfect days you had with eating well. Do the things that if you do them that they are 100% in your control then it can predictively change the result. If you want to get out of debt, measure your income, measure ways to make money and that’s what going to get you closer to getting the actual result that you want. M is for measure, you don’t know if you’re winning if you don’t keep score and to take it one step further, measure the things that getting more of is going to help you win. This is what the sharks do, this what makes them successful and the cool thing is anyone can adopt it. That is how you SWIM LIKE A SHARK. calvinwayman.com/book

  • Calvin Wayman shared how he stays motivated everyday; he stated that he is motivated by the I in SWIM. HE believes in Tony Robbins when he says, “Progress Equals Happiness.” That’s what drives him, he wants freedom, he likes impacting peoples’ lives but more importantly, he likes to see where he is at and taking it to the next level and that makes him feel good. When he went from being completely in debt to becoming debt free that felt good, improving in that way. When he went from being an employee to having his own company, that felt good. When he was 30-40 pounds overweight and he lost the weight, it felt good. When he went from running a half marathon to an ultra that felt good. Just getting up every day and saying, “What can I do to improve myself?” just to stretch yourself a little bit because we are all where we are at and to get where it is that you want to go is not as crazy of a drastic change as we might think, it’s like 1% improvement a day but over time, in a hundred day, you are twice as good.
  • Calvin stated that the one online tool he uses everyday is Calendly. In an online world where you’re talking to people from all over the world and their different time zones, sometimes it’s hard to meet but when he got Calendly, that just fixed everything so people can go set time with you and it takes out all the guess work. People come to him all the time and say, “We should connect.” And then he can put it in their court instead of going back and forth and being stressed out, he can say, “Here’s my personal link feel free to pick a time and I’ll be there.”
  • Calvin stated that the one thing that he is working on right now is his first live event. It is something that he has never done before, stepping into new waters and that’s what he is nervous about but excited about it at the same time.

            Calvin Wayman Facbook

            Calvin Wayman Snapchat

            Calvin Wayman Twitter

 

  • Calvin stated that he has a quote but it is not tied to the customer experience but it’s tied to a business owner, an entrepreneur or somebody that’s leveling up. Sometimes when we are moving or we have a desire to move into a direction, we feel stuck and we feel like we are facing adversity and we don’t know how to get through it and something that has helped him is another thing that he learned from one of his mentors is “Done is better than perfect.” It means just move in any way that you can because often times as business owners or entrepreneurs we are our own worst critic and we want it to look perfect but progress doesn’t happen without movement. Movement requires action and when we are hitting adversity the biggest thing it does to us is the fear freezes us so to break that apart, just give yourself permission that it’s better to look sloppy and do something than nothing. So done is better than perfect and just take that next step.

Links

Dec 13, 2016

Jane Anderson is a Personal Branding and Presentation Skills expert. She is a communication expert with over 12 years in personal branding and LinkedIn in profile development. Jane works with experts in their field to grow their businesses and increase their leads, her clients include Virgin Australia, Cisco, Leggo, IKEA, Rio Tinto and Origin Energy. Jane has been featured in Business Insider, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Courier Mail and Marie Claire and is the host of the number 1 ranked iTunes Podcast, The Jane Anderson Brand You Show. Jane is a nominee for Telstar Business Awards for 2016 and a mentor on Thought Leaders Business School, helping clever people be commercially smart. Jane has been endorsed by LinkedIn as one of the top influences in Australia and New Zealand; she is also the author of 3 books including Connect: How to Leverage Your LinkedIn Profile for Business Growth and Lead Generation in Less Than 7 Minutes per Day.

 

Questions

  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • How do you feel about customer service/ customer experience on a global level?
  • From your book, what are some of the top things that will help business owners to grow their business, to leverage and understand their business and how customer service can help their business and get more leads and more customers and will they see results?
  • Yanique indicated that se read Jane’s website that Jane believes people should really be optimizing on their personal brand because people buy you.
  • How do you stay motivated every day?
  • What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
  • Where can our listeners find your information online?
  • What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

 

Highlights

  • Jane Anderson state that when she was growing up something that she has always been interesting in was the world of business but while she was in high school, her very first job was in retail and she worked for a company called Mavis Shoes in Australia and Mavis Shoes is a family type shoes store and they have branches all over Australia. She started working for the Mavis Shoes brand when was she was 14 years old but the keeping was that the Mavis family owned the Mavis brand and it was a big iconic family in Australia and they sold the company and moved on. She started in retail and remembered how the experience was with customers and how she was allowed to have a customer by herself for the first month. They had to have somebody with them the whole time, the standards of training was high but it lead her down the path of really starting to become interesting in personally branding businesses so the Mavis name is still known in Australia, they are 3rd and 4th generation retailers and she has since gone on to work with other industries like State Government, Roads and Transport but she kept coming back to retail, she spent about 15 years in retail, she was a manager. She did a marketing degree but have always loved customers, she loves being able to make them happy but she worked with the Mavis family for 12 years and one of the things she found while working with them is that what drew people to the business was because everybody had a story about the family, everybody knew something about them or they knew the daughters and what she notice was that the family had a strong reputation in the community and they were very well respected and her job was to make sure that their values of customer service that she adapted those and did things in the same way as if they were in the store, she went on to be a area manager for them. She then went on to work for a super retail group, Supercheap Auto in Australia, it is the fastest growing retail companies, they have just over 10,000 staff and she was the Learning and Development Officer for them. She always knew she would go out on her own, it’s something she has always been committed to is customer service. She grew up in a place called Lismore in Australia, which is laid back, she moved to the city when she finished University because she just wanted the jobs there and she has gone on to doing other things.
  • Jane Andersons stated that on a global level from what she see and talking clients is that she thinks there’s not one way to do things anymore, there are so many channels the way you access customers and particular now, what’s the digital platform that matches the face to face customer experience. She stated that she was talking to someone the other day and they said, “the only reason why I on Twitter is make a customer service complaint because if I can’t the answers, they’ll soon answer me if I’m on Twitter”, so the customer service experience she thinks is a lot more transparent than it use to be in the past. If somebody has a bad experience, it’s not that hard for us to go and find out, people make comments on Facebook pages and Twitter, so the digital foot print as part of your customer experience in your business is something she thinks people don’t always think is much. She stated that the other thing is about evolving and changing, so if you look at the retail industry, something that they have noticed in Australia and it’s been in the media, is that retail businesses are being extraordinary slow to adapt online shopping as part of their experience, so a lot of Australian shoppers have shopped overseas online because the can get it cheaper and so Australian retailers suffer because they are not offering the customer experience that people want, so people will shop overseas. Those 2 things, the impact of digital social media, businesses evolving and changing fast enough because it’s the ones that edge all, who can move quickly if they look at thing like Instagram or what people are able to sell and create the customer experience and integrate that, it’s just not walking pass the shop front anymore.

Jane stated that the challenge is that the customer is driving the direction of the experience, not the businesses and it depends on the kind of business you are in but she thinks that 1 of the challenge is being able to know when to listen to customers and when not to, she always thinks of that Henry Ford quote, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Sometimes it’s that balance, it’s not necessarily playing with the popularity contest. They’ll say, I need you to look at what’s trending and stop marketing around what customers or what people are talking about and what’s trending but the problem with that is that you’re just diluting your business because you’re focusing on what people are talking about what they want but sometimes it’s about being comfortable that what you’re talking about is actually about what people need and you have to be comfortable that you might not be popular, you might not be everybody’s favorite but if you’re following what everybody is interested in, you become commoditize, so you have to be very careful that you can still stand out even if customers are wanting it and everyone’s following what customers want. Sometime you have to actually go in the opposite direction.

  • Jane stated that when she first started her business, she is a sole entrepreneur and have a team of 1 staff member full-time and rest of her team are contractors but one of the things when she first started and she left corporate business life was that she had some money saved and she thought she was going to go out and start her business and the first year she lost about $30,000.00 in google advertisments and search engines optimization and it wasn’t that anything was wrong with those products, they are fantastic but she spent it on the wrong person and she was a little naïve and this person said that they were an expert but she might have well just given the money away. When that happened she had a choice, she had either go back to job or she had to find a way to make it work with zero budget, so it forced her to start to learn about LinkedIn a little more, it’s free and she can go and start reaching out to people and contacting them and that was in 2009. At the time she was also writing profiles for her clients, so they were getting jobs, and branding people and what happened was that she used LinkedIn to help grow her business and that was how, she learnt from someone in the United States of America about how the algorithms work. She is also productivity. The book was written for people who are time poor, who just really need it to work for them when they need it to, when they are trying to grow their business and what are the activities they need to work on that will get the growth. There are thought leaders, experts in their fields she has worked with and she generally says, “you can get your turn over up to the $300,000.00 mark just purely through LinkedIn before you start your website.” She stated that LinkedIn is extraordinary powerful and what it did for her at a time when she had no money and she had to try and work out how to grow her business, it puts you in the drivers’ seat as to hoping that you will get an enquiry on your website.

Jane stated that a client who is a sole entrepreneur, her name is Rachael Burke who lives in Australia and is a Sales Expert and she came to her and said, “I’m not really good at lead generation but I’m really good at selling, so I just need more customers.” So what she did with her was to show her the formula and how to get it to work and she increased her sales by over 66% in 3 months, so that’s in the hundred of thousands of dollars. She does LinkedIn for lead generation for large organizations as well as small ones and sole entrepreneurs. Jane stated that in Australia, they have a business which is a big superannuation and superannuation in Australia is like money you put away for your retirement and they built all the LinkedIn profiles for the staff and for the financial planners for the business and what she got them to do was, they have a change of legistration in Australia so it was a great time to educate the market on some of the changes because nobody was educating the market, she was out looking. She said to them that they need to run webinar, they need to got out and educate some of these clients and they got 500 new leads from that webinar. That was purely through leveraging the profiles and that was about 50 staff that got their profiles built. The opportunities that are in there but the thing is with LinkedIn is that, she find most people will come to her and say, “I’ve got a LinkedIn account but I have never achieve any results from it.” and then she’ll ask them what their profile say, there are often be no content in it at all or she’ll ask them how often they have reached out to people? What have you said to them? What have you invited them to? What’s your content plan? And they don’t have any of that, so LinkedIn doesn’t make clients magically appear, you have to go out and find them but you’ve got to have really good collateral and they make a decision about you in 3 seconds. You have to make sure that all your collateral and profile is so nice and polished and sharp and that it matches how amazing you are in person because we only have 3 seconds for them to go “wow, this person knows what they are doing, this person is amazing, I have to talk to you.” To have a profile that really works, like making sure it turns up in search results as well as having that impact when they see you. For just a simple 3 seconds, that’s how long they look at it before they move on and have a look at somebody else, so they have to make sure that they make their job really easy.

Jane stated that people need to shift their attention now onto the other person, so you’re looking for what’s the common ground or what the purpose because the other person is asking themselves “why are you offering to connect with me?” so you’ve got to be able to answer the “why”, so if you’re reaching out and for example, she was reaching out medical financial planner, if he just looked at her profile and say, “why is she offering to connect with me, I don’t understand.” She explained to him that she does a lot of work with doctors, she helps them with lead generation but she helps them who are going into specialist training programs and she said to him, “I would love to catch up with you, I think there’s an opportunity for me to perhaps add some value to your clients, if not, that’s totally fine but here are some links, you are welcome to check out what I do and I would love to catch up with you for coffee one day and see what I can do to help you as well.” And so he met with her, so it all started from there and you’ve got to focus, look at their profile, what is it that they do and you have to address, “I notice this on your profile or I notice that you do this type of work, I notice that you’re in the same industry, I do this type of work or I help people like you in this space, so I thought I’d connect.” Jane stated that what happens is that just because you are ready to sell, doesn’t mean that the customer is ready to buy. So when you reach out to people, people have got to get to know you so they are going, “hold on, I haven’t even met you” and it’s a little like dating. She recalled she went on a date with a guy once and he turned up with a bag pack and she said to him, “have you just coming from the gym?” and he said, “No, you never know, things might go alright” and she thought he was joking and he opened his bag and there was a tooth brush, he had a change of clothes, his undies. She stated that LinkedIn is a little like that, is that sometimes we turn up with a bag pack, we’re ready to move in together, start this relationship and go in whole but the customer is saying, “hold on, can we just have coffee first, who are you?” So we sort of scare people and that’s when you hear people say they just get harass by sales people. You have to connect, be liked, friendly but then you’ve got to let people get to know you through your content, Mark Port who wrote the book, Book Yourself Solid said, “you have got to earn the right to sell.” And the problem is that most people don’t earn the right and then they scare people away. You can then ask for the value, you can ask for what you want based on the value you delivered. So in other words, if you have given enough, you have done enough content, if you kept visible enough, if you build enough trust, now you’re ready to go and ask for what you want. One of the things she does with clients is that she will look at how much value they have given to their audience because what they do is done nothing, they have given no value and they will say to her, “I want to be able to grow my business on LinkedIn but it’s not working.” But are not giving their audience any value, so you can’t go and ask for what you want because you haven’t earn it yet. You can do that in less then 7 minutes a day.

  • Jane shared her concept of people buying you, her experience working with this family from she was 14 years old, people’s connections were so intertwined. Jane shared back then the only way people really knew who you were was if you were on TV or something or if you are in the newspaper. Now, Social Media has heavily leveled the playing field so if you leverage your name and identify your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) that you bring to your customer. Jane says thought leaders will at times come to her and say there is so much content out there already about for example productivity and Jane believes there is only one of you and so people deserve to hear your unique views on the subject – your experiences, your voice, you lens, your interpretation and your insights. Your Social Media profile, particularly something like Linked In offers great opportunities for a small business owner or soloproneur that is leveraging their own brand – you own your own profile, you can add agility, personality and so much more which is a threat to larger companies.
  • Jane shared how she stays motivated every single day – Jane thinks it is important to be really clear about your purpose and what you want. Jane shared she thinks that motivation really hits you when you have a choice at 2:00 am in the morning and you have the choice of going to bed or finishing that last bit of work because you really want to do it and get it done. Jane says she believes that it is in those moments that your motivation will either work for you or against you and it is in those moments that purpose is really important. Jane says some other factors that really keeps her motivated is that she is very particular about the people that she works with – she chooses to work with thought leaders and experts in their fields as they inspire her. She further stated that if they bring the best to her and inspire her then she can bring the best to others and inspire them. Jane also shared that it is important to find a group that you can belong to that are similar to you such as an industry association etc. and then Jane said there is also the basics such as eating well, get enough sleep as these activities help to make you more productive and efficient.
  • Jane shared the one website, online tool or app that she absolutely cannot live without in her business is LinkedIn as a Social Media platform but the one app she cannot live without is actually an app that she created. Jane spent some time as a Productivity Consultant working with some real large corporations, she did a lot of work helping CEO’s and EA’s how to work really well together and what she found working with the two set of persons was the speed of communication between going to meetings and being on the run. Jane said she was looking an Concur, which is an IT company that looks at the on-the-go economy and how there is this shift to doing things on the go. Jane said the app she has created is called “Memo-Mailer” and it can be accessed at memomailer.com and it is available on iTunes. Jane stated the way that it works is holding down the button in the app – say what you have to say and then the app will email the memo to your Inbox. Jane said sometimes ideas come along at really inconvenient times and this tool really captures those things. Jane stated that she built the app with her colleague Dermot Crowley, who is an expert in Productivity and he has written the book Smart Work, which was recently released and hit Best Seller in Australia. Jane said that’s the app she definitely cannot live without.
  • Jane shared the one thing that is going on in her life right now that she is really excited about is a piece of work that she is working on to further develop her Linked In engagements with clients which will be called the Lead Generation Indicator. The tool is specifically designed for people who are experts in their field and will help clients identify 12 activities that will grow your business even if it is from scratch with absolutely no clients. A complete package for business owners.
  • Jane shared a quote that she has on her wall and sees all the time during times of adversity – “If you are going through hell, keep going.” Winston Churchill ***Jane says she feels that this is a quote that she believes is in the trenches with her when she needs to hear something real and authentic.

 

Links

Dec 6, 2016

Daniel “ Dan” de Witte is a Business Coach, Digital Strategist and Entrepreneur dedicated to sharing his knowledge with small businesses who want to leverage the online market. As a business coach, Dan specializes in tailor business strategies, business development and automation. Working closely with businesses to identify their needs, Dan thinks outside the conventional box to develop easy to implement effective solutions. As the founder of the Outer Space Network, Dan has used his knowledge and experience in rapid growth and brand development to create an original mentoring and support platform. Although bright eyed and bushy tailed, Dan isn’t a stranger when it comes to starting and growing successful businesses, starting his professional career as an internationally published photographer. Daniel knows designs and presentation, his creative flare and instinct for presentation gives him a competitive edge in brand development.

 

Questions

  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • Could you explain to our listeners who are thinking of transitioning from brick and mortar to the online space, how it is that they can manage their customer experiences and do you think it’s different in managing that experience face to face versus online? What are some key indicators that need to be considered?
  • In your new product Active Relay, could you share with us what are some ways you try to humanize that experience even though it’s automated?
  • On a global level, how do you feel about customer service/ customer experience?
  • What are some every day solutions that you would recommend to a small business owner to help them improve their customer experience?
  • If you have a customer who wants to migrate from their existing email marketing plan with Aweber, Constant Contact etc, - would Active Campaign facilitate that migration?
  • Please give us an example of how Zapier works and what does it really mean for a small business?
  • How do you stay motivated everyday?
  • What are some books that you have read that contributed to your success along your journey?
  • What’s the one thing that’s going on in your life that you are really excited about that you are working on develop yourself or your people?
  • Where can our listeners find you online?
  • What is quote or saying that helps you stay on track and re-focus during times of adversity?

 

Highlights

  • Dan de Witte stated that he officially launched a brand new tech product called Active Relay. He has moved from his coaching base platform into another SAS (Software as a Service). He stated that he would be where he’s at if the internet didn’t exist and that the crakes of what he does and stated that that’s inspiring, for instance, we’re doing this podcast over Skype when I’m in Jamaica and he’s in Australia and there’s nothing more inspiring and powerful than that. He loves adventure spots and love getting out has much as he can from the computer, although of lately he hasn’t had enough time away from the computer because of the launch of the new product but that’s definitely one of the aspects he enjoys in life because that’s the ultimate goal, creating these digital businesses or businesses that are enabled by the Internet is to give us more time, more freedom so that we can do the things that we love and enjoy doing but also spend time with family and friends that are valuable in our life.
  • As an online Entrepreneur, Dan shared that branching into the online space can be overwhelming to start because there’s all the flashy whiz tool and everyone trying to tap the next best thing that you should jump on and use and he’s a big believer of simplicity, so starting with one platform and working your way up from there. To tie that in with the customer experience is humanizing that whole aspect. We can get caught up in creating automations and automated business processes that we end up automating ourselves or working ourselves out of the business which is a blessing and a curse at the same time, it’s a blessing because it gives us more time to and more freedom but a curse on the same token, we lose the one to one connectivity as you would if you were a traditional brick and mortar base business where you can actually build that relationship by a simple hand shake, exchange of a business card. When you go online, it becomes a lot of smoke and mirrors and one of the challenges a lot of businesses faces is making sure that they are messaging what they do in the offline space, the brick and mortar space is the same as what it would be in the online space and as humanizing as possible because at the end of the day, all we want to do is be a part of a community and what you are building in your brick and mortar businesses regardless if it’s Joe’s Tire Shop down the road, he’s got a community of people that come back to him time and time again because they built the relationship and what we want to do is to try and replicate that relationship in the online space.
  • Dan shared some background information on his new product Active Relay, it is a payment platform that is designed around a CRM called Active Campaign, so they are the payment platform element of an email marketing CRM. They are selling digital products and digital services and even physical base products online, it’s quite a challenge for you the user to sell something without having to do a lot of configurations, multiple third party tools and at the end of the day it stacks up and become expensive for you the user or the seller of whatever you sell. The whole goal of Active Relay was to simplify and enable people to sell online smarter, better, faster. The second element to that is bridging the customer experience and making that 10 times faster. In the online payment space, which is where Dan is heavily focusing his energy is in that ecommerce space and around how can he bridge the relationship that they have offline and taking that online to becoming what they call a lead in the online space as well or an email prospect is taking that person from being just an email prospect to actually giving you their credit card over the Internet because that’s the next step, getting that credit card information from them. He stated that he is not going to go up to someone random in the street and go, “Will you marry me?” because 9 times out of 10 they are going to say no. There are the people that first move or advantage are the opportunist but 9 times out of 10, if someone walked up to you and asked you to marry them, you more than likely would say no. It’s the exact same in the online space, so what they have done in Active Relay is, they are enabling people to sell things online faster and smarter and simpler but they are also shortening the checkout experience depending on the experiences of people who listen to the podcast, when you purchase things online, you generally have to go find the product, add the product to the cart, confirm that’s the product you want in the cart then go to checkout and go through 2 or 3 steps in the checkout before you get your product. What Active Relay is design to do is put all of that onto the one page, so you clink on the link to buy the product, the product is on the order form, the information you need to fill out is on the order form, you it buy, you then get funneled into the Active campaign CRM and away you go. That’s how they have shortened that experience and taking that journey from being a bit of a barrier. What people have been finding online is that multiple steps or doing more than one thing at once, it becomes a real blocker in the space and everyone’s lazy and if it seems too hard, then we are going to cut away from it. He stated that you can take people on a wild journey and that’s the most exciting thing for him in the online space. You get to control the whole journey, you can do that in the offline space as well but you have a lot more control in the online space because they don’t get to ask you anything back, you get to tell them what they are doing on the next step, you give them the options, “Do you want to do this? Yes or No” you’re not doing “Do you want to do this? Yes or No or Maybe” that “maybe” is a lot of hesitation. So they want to make it as simple as possible for people to purchase your product online or even just be in your community online.
  • Dan shared that he just got back from around the world trip and using the brick and mortar, the United States customer experience is phenomenal compared to Australia. He stated that Australia’s customer service is rubbish. He remembers walking into a classic American diner in New York, there was a lunch line waiting to get in and they put their names down on the list and waited to be seated and the head waiter /seater remembered their names and 45 minutes later after they had left and he was like “thanks Daniel and Lauren, I hope you enjoy the rest of your travels and safe travels back to Australia.” In the amount of time that he sat them down, sat 30 or 40 other people in the diner and he still remembers his name. They left the diner saying “that’s really cool”. That whole experience was amazing, just simply by remembering their name and you can do little things like that in the online space where you can send an automated sequence of emails and have someone’s first name in it because it feels more personal, the connection is more genuine and then you go to a café in Australia and it’s like “Good morning, what would you like?” that’s it, there’s no effort to build some form of relationship and then they deliver you the stuff and there’s no “enjoy”.  He stated that there are restaurants in Australia that are fantastic but the general consensus of the diners in Australia, the customer experience isn’t there from a personality stand point.

Yanique stated that something as simple as remembering the customer’s name is very important. It’s powerful because regardless of where we are from in the world or what language you speak or what culture we are from, we all have something that is unique to us and that’s what people call us by and so you give someone your name, it’s important to use it and use it properly because it differentiates the experience and it sets that whole experience a part. Looking at what Daniel remembers from his trip, the food could have been good but he didn’t mention that the food was great, he mentioned that the fact that waiter was serving 30 or 40 other tables and he remembered you and your guest names and that’s what stood out in his mind. It is always the little things that separate the really good companies from the ones that doing the bare minimum.

  • Daniel shared some everyday solutions for small businesses online to improve their customer experience – being authentic on Facebook and authentically telling the story of you, if you are one that always wear make-up everywhere and you’re all about the make-up and the aesthetics, then you need to genuinely portray that online in Facebook videos and pictures but if you are a person who loves building the relationship around who you are and authentically portraying that, you win as well. It’s like picking your digital persona to resonate what you are in real life because people can smell fake from a mile away. When you look at portraying your image online, you want to make sure that it is as authentic as you are in real life. The way to do that is to test it with your audience, ask your audience, “What do you think of our new website or what do you think of our new eBook or guide that we just release in the market space?” the ones that care will tell you and the ones who don’t care aren’t customers you’re going to have long term.
  • He shared that in regards to tools that you must have – Active Campaign which is an email marketing CRM because you want to keep in contact with your people regardless if you own a brick and mortar business or not because at the end of the day we are all playing on out mobile phones, we’re all checking Facebook, so if you can be connected with them by simply sending them a email that is just touching base saying, “Hey, how is your day going?” that speaks wonders to building the relationship and you can do all of that with active campaign and it’s a really simply platform to start out, to get you online you looking at USD $9.00 a month. The other tool that he really loves is called Zapier which is a connectivity tool that connects anything that you can think of to anything you can think of in regards to online tools, it’s the junction box for PowerPoints so you can plug in to anything and it’s a great tool for increasing productivity and fast tracking a lot of internal stuff, for example, if a client does something, you want to be notified or if they email in some content, you want to upload it to something else, if someone schedules an appointment in your calendar and you want them to go into your email CRM to send them an email saying, “Thank you for booking in a time”, there’s so many things you can do with Zapier. WordPress, there are so many free platform out there to get you up and running like getting your website online but if you really want to increase your speed. He stated that why he recommend WordPress is that you can upload themes, you can connect it to any platform and what WordPress is, it’s essentially a CMS and that stands for Content Management System, so you would have a WordPress installation on your website and that would manage your whole system so that things like your homepage, your thank you page, your blogs and all of that gets managed in the WordPress element of your system. If you couple these 3 together and if they are done in the right way, you’re not only saving yourself time but also money in the process on developing your products and infrastructure but also, you’re improving your customer experience because all 3 applications are designed to make life easier and make life more efficient.
  • Active Campaign would assist in on boarding – customers would have to do the migration themselves but it’s a very simple process.
  • Dan stated he has a Zapier connection that connects an opt in form on his website and it connects to his CRM Active Campaign. He has a pop up on his website and this pop up doesn’t actually connect natively into Active Campaign – so he uses Zapier connection to send the data over. Dan also stated that he uses Slack, which is Facebook Chat for your staff. If a client certain number of actions over a particular time frame for example clicks on 3 emails, reads 4 blogs over the space of two weeks and has not purchased a product from me before. Dan de Witte says he wants Zapier to send a notification to his Slack Team to say, “Hey, can you personally follow up with John Smith because he has done x, y, and z in the last 2 weeks and not purchased a product.” This action shows we have someone on board that is paying attention what is happening and is reaching out to help them have a better experience.

 

  • Dan de Witte states that he’s burning the midnight oil as he’s up by 4:30 am most mornings and not in bed until 11:00 pm most nights just because of the launch of Active Relay. Dan states what motivates him is giving other people the opportunity to be more and do more in the online space. Giving others the flexibility, more time to do things that you really enjoy doing! Dan stated your staff in your business, if you are a Brick and Mortar, are your biggest brand ambassadors – if you are not inspiring and leading them then you are shooting yourself in the foot.
  • Dan de Witte stated that he’s not much of book reader as he learns through doing, however, he would recommend Start with Why by Simon Sinek, Dan says anyone who wants to learn who why what you do will sell – this is the best book to read. The Art of the Start by Guy Kiyosaki. Dan further stated he reads a lot online and he learns a lot online.

Yanique shared how learning for her online has been such a remarkable and great experience that she has learned so much from You Tube videos, reading articles, connecting with people in Facebook Groups and so she agreed with Dan that doing is definitely one of the best ways to learn quick.

  • Dan de Witte says short answer would be Active Relay. Dan says he is thoroughly enjoying the journey he has been on with Active Relay over the last 6-8 months. He says he’s learning everyday about his users are selling online and how they would want to sell. Dan shared he’s newly married and he is thoroughly enjoying that personally that he’s doing now!
  • Dan de Witte says listeners can find him on:

www.goactiverelay.com

www.activecampaign.com

Dan de Witte Facebook

Dan de Witte Twitter

  • Dan de Witte shared one quote or saying that really connects with him all the time is “Logic will get you from A to B but creativity will take you anywhere.” Dan says we are all creative in some aspect.

 

Links

Nov 29, 2016

Dr. Anissa Holmes is voted one of the top 25 women in Dentistry by Dental Products Report. She has effectively mastered the skill of the use of social media with a Facebook following of nearly 50,000 fans. As a Practicing Dentist, Social Media Strategist, Author, Podcaster and Speaker, Dr. Holmes shows dentists exactly how to create a profitable, thriving dental practice which has motivated, inspired team members and patients who are now raving fans. She does this by providing actionable steps to help dentists develop their business culture, their systems and their brand. Dr. Holmes is the host of the iTunes podcast, The Delivering Wow Dental Podcast and is also the author of the book Delivering WOW: How Dentists Can Build a Fascinating Brand & Achieve More While Working Less.

 

Questions

  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • Can you share with us how you use some of the strategies and actions to create that delivering wow experience in your practice?
  • In your book you say that there’s a myth that says “To be successful, we must be better than everyone else, we must try harder and work longer” but then further on you say it’s not about being better, it’s about being unique, can you speak a little more about that?
  • On a global level, how do feel about customer experience from the Jamaican perspective, what do you feel are some of the things that are limiting organization from really delivering that WOW experience?
  • Do you think that there is a direct correlation between poor leadership and poor customer experience in a lot of businesses?
  • How do you stay motivated every day?
  • What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • Do you offer programmes for persons who may want to take the step a little further, who may want to connect with you and learn how to use Facebook to build their business?
  • What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or your people?
  • Where can our listeners find your information online?
  • What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

 

Highlights

  • Anissa Holmes is originally from the United States of America and grew up in New Orleans and attended dental school in Alabama. After completing dental school, she met her husband who is an oral surgeon and he grew up in Jamaica. They decided about 10 years ago to move from the USA to Jamaica, he figured that that’s where he could make the biggest difference so she sold her practice she had in Birmingham and she started again in Jamaica. She worked a few years for another dentist who had a really great reputation and about 5 years ago she started a brand new practice in Kingston, Jamaica and the premise there was that the practice would eventually be the number 1 dental practice in the country known for delivering a wow experience to its patients.
  • Anissa Holmes shared the first step of creating an amazing practice; one that people talk about, one that has a fascinating brand is first creating that vision and saying, “What do I want to be known for? At the end of the day, what am I working for? What do I want to achieve?” Her vision was to create the number 1 dental practice in the country known for delivering an amazing wow experience and that was the vision that they would be there and that was the vision before anything was put in place and from there they said “What sort of practice would we need to be? What sort of team members would we have to have? What would have to be our core values?” Before they did anything, they actually thought about what they wanted to be and when she says “we”, it really is “we”. She feels like businesses that are super successful, if you look at Zappos, Amazon, Disney - it’s all about the team and for her when she was creating her core values for her company, she involved the team and they said “What do we want to be known for?” They did things like saying they wanted to be very unique, they wanted to make an impact on the community, they wanted to build strong teams, and they wanted to be known for delivering wow. So they set those core values out and so every decision they make had to be in align with those core values, so pursue growth and learning and so having those luncheon learn session where her team is constantly training and having book clubs where they are reading books together in terms of growing business and personal development with a kindle and that was something she did for her team, she thinks it’s really important, many people create this checklist and just put it down somewhere or hang it up but they don’t live it and once you have that, you know your vision then you have to say what sort of business do we need to be, what sort of team do we have to have and then you have to start creating amazing systems and really just designing how you are going to get there.

Anissa agreed that there were team members that weren’t agreeable in her vision. She stated that it’s very interesting because she really believes now that she is in a different realm and working with business owners and dentists and a lot of them have fear. Fear that the team is not going to buy into this whole creating an amazing experience culture and so what happens is that they do nothing. What she always says is that if you are a business owner, it’s your business, it’s your vision and her team is very aware for example if they have 100 things that have to happen to be able to create amazing experiences or to have consistency in the quality of work that they do or to make sure they are seeing people on time. These 100 things have to be done and if she could do them all by herself, she would have no reason to hire someone and she can keep that money in her pocket but she made a decision that all of these things need to be done, so there are different people that need to do it and the job has to be done and this is the vision of this company and it’s okay if you don’t feel like this is the right company for you but at the end of the day this is the company, these are the values, this is what we are working for. Anissa stated that when they first decided that they are going to be known for delivering an amazing experience, some people that was working at the practice said “okay, we are willing to try” they are still there and they are happy and they are making more money than they have ever made. This year January they had the entire team write down what it is that they are going to achieve, she put down her dream to go to Europe and have gone to Europe, 4 of her team members actually got cars this year which is a huge deal for people working in small businesses in Jamaica to be able afford a car. They have had amazing things happening and it’s because she aligned with her team members, she told them from the very beginning, if you they help her grow this business, you are going to develop personally, you are going to impact your family, achieve all your personal dreams and those that bought in with her, they are definitely living their dreams and some people it wasn’t for them and that was okay and she was okay to let them go.

Even along the road she has had different people and had to increase her team, just a few months ago they were testing someone for their new Dental Assistant, they needed to add a new Dental Assistant and someone came in, she was an assistant at another practice and she says “You mean I have to give a tour?” And that’s something when they look at their reviews, people constantly mention that – customers say “I can’t believe that I am getting a tour before my procedure”, and so this person was clearly not going to fit into the vision and the culture of the practice and so she just didn’t work out.

  • Anissa Holmes stated that it’s very interesting because when you look at businesses, a lot of time they are focusing on what’s the competition doing, what’s this person doing and in Jamaica for example, her practice has a social media presence that is now over 50,000 fans and they are doing some cool things and as a result of it they see other practices that are doing similar things or posting similar things of what they are doing and she says it’s okay because they are connecting with people and growing their businesses but she is not focused on that. What she’s focused on is really always being innovative, being different and really not looking at what any one else’s doing and every year trying to strive to do something different. For example, 2 years ago they said that their vision, their focus for that year would be to create KPI’s and systems so that everything would be written down and so they created the manuals, they did that to systemize the practice and the next year; they said how can they create customer experiences , so that was their whole focus for last year and that’s when all of their team members were trained in Hand and Arm Massage and now they offer complimentary Hand and Arm Massages, so everything in terms of their brain storming with their team building was, how can we create a better experience, they created a system that at the end of an appointment they were guaranteed that a patient would give them a video testimonial and it’s just creating that system, touch points of giving them a tour, offering them a Hand and Arm Massage, giving them the headphones and the iPads, giving them a warm towel at the end, the Doctor, the Hygienist, the Front Desk saying, “How was your experience?” Guaranteeing that the person is going to say it was great, so that was their focus, just focusing on that.
  • This year their focus now that their system is in place, they have an awesome team, their doing great experiences, this year they are like “How can we be different in our community impact?” So this year they say every month they are giving to different charity, they have done small make over competitions, they have given equipments to Children’s Hospital, their dental clinic, they have done all sort of things and it’s about being unique, not worried about what anyone else is doing, just trying be very innovative, be very different. In their practice they have a guarantee that you’ll be seen within 15 minutes of your appointment time or your next exam is free but you have to have the systems in place and that was done 2 years ago, she could have not given that guarantee then but they have it now and they guarantee that you will have an amazing experience and you get a great quality of work. Just focusing on what can you do that makes people become very drawn to your business. Anissa stated that in marketing, it’s not good for her to go out and say, “I’m a Dentist and I do fillings or I’m a Dentist and we do teeth whitening” doing an advertisement like that is not very effective because Dentists are supposed to do that but when you create an advertising campaign or creating promotional pieces about how you make people feel and how you have been able to change their lives by taking away the fear and giving them an amazing experience, what happens is that people are drawn to your business and you are able to grow.

Dr. Anissa Holmes stated that hiring for the right profile, they do that and they look at DISC testing behavioral style, for example, if their Hygienist is very outgoing in terms of her behavioral style, they want someone who has the profile of being a very sensitive, very compassionate type to be her Dental Assistant and so they kind of have that balance, the person who does their training of Dental Assistants has a different style and that’s part of it. The other part is that once you start to be knowing for having a certain type of business, those sort of people are going to be attracted to your business and so they are now finding that a lot of their new hires are actually coming to them saying that they know about their business already, they have been following us on Facebook or people are talking about them in the community and they want to work in their practice and so it’s that sort of the mindset of the people and again, once they come in having that training and so most people are not trained on understating that they way you connect with people is not by necessarily talking, it’s about listening and a huge part of their training with all of their team members is understanding the importance of listening, of asking questions, so you can get to the heart of the matter.

For example, in dentistry, a lot of people may say, “I don’t want a crown” some dental offices or dentists around the world will say in their mind, ”They don’t want it because they can’t afford it” or “They don’t want it because they are afraid” but you are not asking them why they don’t want it and you just move on and you miss out on that opportunity to help them. Dr. Anissa Holmes stated that what they do in her practice they will say “Why don’t you want that crown?” and they may say, “The reason why I don’t want it is because my daughter is getting married next month and so I just don’t have any money right now”, and you can say, “Will you be ready in a few months?” and then they say “Sure” and you say “Okay, great, just write it down and when you come back for your next cleaning then we’ll go ahead and have it sorted out then” or they’ll say “I don’t want it because I don’t think I need it” and then you can say “Okay, let’s talk about why or what happens if you don’t do it. In my experience of practicing for so long this is what happens and so if you don’t fix the tooth, what’s going to happen is that you’re going to be out one day and you’re going to bit down and it’s going to break, it’s going to split, you’re going to have to take it out, it’s going to be more procedures, more cost and based on the condition, you are in a 80% chance that that’s going to happen to you, are you okay with that?” The person is going to think and say, “You’re right, I need to do it.” It’s all about training your team, letting them understand how that happens and when they see it happening over and over again, in terms of people making decisions to have a purchase or do treatment because of asking questions, they buy into it.  

  • Anissa Holmes stated that she feels that a lot of organizations and businesses locally and internationally, the challenge is that they don’t understand how valuable it is to help you to grow your business and for her having business, her dental practice is set up on systems, it’s very profitable, it can run without her and a lot of people think that for you to have success, it’s going to take 20 years of you working, 80 hours a week and that is not the formula for her that she wanted to take and for her she said, “How is it that I can create a practice that can essentially run without me?” meaning that she is there because she wants to be there not because she has to be there, she has 2 other dentist that gives her freedom at this stage in practice which is over 17 years to now start teaching other dentist and do other things as well. That’s the key for saying, “What’s going to be the way for me to get there? Is it working for 20 years or is there a smarter way?” Once you start thinking of the smarter way, everything that she does, she likes to break it down and figure out how she’s going to do it. For her, the how of how she was going to get there was looking at creating a unique business, creating something that people would be talking about and it’s because she got it, because she understood the importance of putting in an amazing customer experience and there was an objective there. Also if we do this, this is what will happen to me personally, she can have a more balanced life, better things for her family, for her team as well. A lot of people just think that a business is all about having it for 30 years and you work in it until you can’t work anymore and that’s really what business is all about and people at a higher level realize that that’s really not what business is all about and it’s about serving your customers, being able to solve their problems and also create something that would give you that balance and be able to give you that profitability to do what you want to do for your family, people just don’t know that formula so they just work too hard.
  • Anissa Holmes agreed that there is a correlation between poor leadership and poor customer experience in a lot of businesses and it boils down to leadership and sometimes you have great team members or you have a great product or service but you have no one to really lead that team and a lot of times that vision does come from the leaders. In her practice for example, it was her coming and say, “This is the vision I have for my practice” and getting people inspired to take part and they knew that it would help them to achieve their dreams as well and so she finds that businesses that have the strongest leaders are the strongest businesses so it absolutely boils down to that. Sometimes as a leader, you have to make decisions that may make you uncomfortable, for example, there may be people who are on your team and you have to be the one to says, “Listen, this is not working” or training them again or saying “I’m sorry but we need to shift you to a different position because you’re not able to really give your fullest potential in this position” and being able to shift people around in a way that they understand and not get offended and leaders have to make those uncomfortable decisions but they also have to be there to inspire people to greatness.
  • Anissa Holmes stated that staying motivated it’s really about just creating a culture where you are having fun, where you are solving peoples’ problems. She hears from her team that it’s not like going to work, it’s like you have a family and you build that culture and you see the lives that are being changed, how you’re helping people and that’s really powerful. The other thing that’s interesting is that her team, they all know their strengths and they know their weaknesses and for her, she really great at coming up with strategy and design of different implementation plans that they are going to be doing, she’s really great with helping to inspiring but a lot of the “nitty gritty” details that have to happen and she can’t do everything herself. She is not great at following up with patients every single night for phone calls but that’s something her husband does every night and that’s great but for some reason she can’t do it but it’s important and it has to be done and so one of her team members who is really great at that, she’s one of the assistants, people love her, she’s the one that actually makes all the calls, she does it the next day so by then they have the time to settle and really assess but she calls every single day and she follows up with people and she’s consistent. So they all know their strengths in terms of their behavioral styles and weaknesses so what they do has a team is that they don’t judge, just take the best of everybody and put them in the right spot that way the business can continue to thrive and that boils down to leadership and because of the culture and everybody knows it, no one gets offended, it’s about everybody giving their best so that the business can grow and at the end of the day if the business grows, everybody wins because we are able to have a more profitable business and as a result, salaries can increase and benefits can increase and everybody wins.
  • Anissa Holmes shared that the one online tool she uses everyday is Facebook, she stated that she started using Facebook in 2010 when she first started her Dental Practice in Jamaica and that’s when Facebook was getting started with their business pages and when she first started using Facebook, she said she is going to use this tool because you can share your culture and you can share your practices’ story and it’s very difficult to do that in other forms of paid advertising. You can actually build a community of people that are helping each other that are not even patients, some are patients, people are asking questions and people are answering each other questions and it’s really cool. At that time they started to get 5 new patients a month because people were engaging with them and over the years, is that their audience has grown, they’ve understood what content works, what doesn’t work, they understand how to embrace Facebook Ads and targeting and creating audiences where they can retarget people, for example that have been to their website, people who are similar in their characteristics behavior to their existing patients. Now they are getting 40 or 50 new patients every month just from Facebook marketing and she’s spending only US $500.00 a month for their paid advertising and it’s very interesting because about 2 years ago she was testing the return investment on all of her paid advertising and she actually made a decision to drop every other form of paid advertising, they had a yellow pages ad and so she was spending US$800.00 a month, she’s getting 4 new patients, just speaking in USD and is she’s charging US $200.00 , then she is breaking even. Now she said let’s shift that money over so now she’s spending $500.00 a month and getting 50 new patients and the industry standard is 12-15 a month, they are getting 50 just from Facebook. She loves when people come in from Facebook because that means that they know them already, they know their culture, they’ve been following them, they see what they’ve been doing in the community, they see how they are changing lives, they’ve seen patients video testimonials, they’ve been to their website, they know about their team and to her there is no other form of paid advertising where you can just connect with people like Facebook.
  • Anissa Holmes stated that she currently has an online course and it teaches dental practices, she has students from all over the world; she has several hundred that are in the programme. It’s an online course, the first 3 or 4 modules is teaching you about how to grow your culture and the importance of that and how you have to have that part right before you start creating ads and copy writing, create calls to action and targeting and creating ads and that’s available on her website which is www.deliveringwow.com. It’s created specifically for Dentists but the principles are uniform and where she is now that her practice has grown to the point where she can cut back a little bit and the plan now is for to work 2 ½ days and spend the other time working on training small business owners/ entrepreneurs, so the next step for her is creating an online course which will help local businesses not online entrepreneurs, local businesses where you have a wine shop for example or if you are have a training centre promoted on Facebook so that’s the next step for her.
  • Anissa Holmes stated that there are a lot of books that she reads all the time and a few books for when you’re just getting started are: The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, Eat That Frog by Brain Tracey, those are some great books, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose by Tony Hsieh - book talking about the story of Zappos and creating an amazing customer experience. What she tells people too is that you have resources in terms of books but podcasts are really great and she use to spend her time with books and now she is also really hooked on podcasts because you are actually able to speak and hear from the authors of what’s going on in their mind and even for herself, strategies she spoke about in her book that was released earlier this year, they have already implemented additional strategies. Things are always evolving, you’re pivoting, you’re testing, you’re growing and so listening to podcasts is another way to get that fresh material as it comes out.
  • Anissa Holmes stated that she is excited about a few things, in her Dental Practice, they just added another Dentist and they are super excited about this and so are the customers. They are at a point now where there is no debt for the practice and that’s where they want it to be and they are now looking to taking the team out of Jamaica for training, getting into that international space with them. They are excited to start that next phase of just taking it to the next level in terms of being able to have other experiences and bringing additional things back to Jamaica to make the Practice even better. Personally, just growing her online business and blogging and as she creates one course, another opportunity opens for her and she is really excited about what’s going on the online space as well.
  • Anissa stated that listeners can find him on:

                                                              Twitter @deliveringwow

                                                              Facebook @delivering wow

                                                              Delivering WOW Website

  • Anissa Holmes stated that her motto, what she is known for is keep “Delivering Wow” “and it’s just two words but to her it means so much, it means always just get to one point, you say what’s next for me? How can I make a bigger impact? How can I inspire more people? How can I change more lives? And once you do that, your business is growing, you are profitable, how can you impact your family, how can you travel more, how can you achieve your dreams?

 

Links

Nov 22, 2016

Joseph Pine is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker and management advisor. Joseph has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, at Ted in California and today is a Lecturer in Columbia University’s Technology Management Programme. He is not an academic, however, having worked for IBM for 13 years, Joseph specializes in helping people see the world of business differently through his many ground breaking books beginning with the award winning, Mass Customization: The New Frontier In Business Competition, including Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want and most recently, Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier. He is most popularly well known for his bestselling book, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage which was recently name one of the 100 best business books of all time by 800-CEO-Read.

 

Questions

  • What is your Zodiac Sign?
  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • In terms of the book which says Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, can you expound on that a little?
  • If we are in the experience economy and we are on a stage, how do we find out what is our true character or is our character based on the persons we interact with?
  • What are some important considerations for an entrepreneur or an online business owner you to be successful?
  • In a government institution where they move slow, the employees seems like they don’t want to be at work, how can that be translated into a way that as a government, your citizens of the country are running to pay their taxes because the service experience is amazing and is there an economy that exist like that?
  • What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • How do you stay motivated every day?
  • What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • If you were sitting across the table from another business owner and they said to you that they feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated human capital, what’s the one piece of advice would you give them to have a successful business, specifically as it relates to constantly motivated human capital?
  • What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
  • Where can our listeners find your information online?
  • What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

 

Highlights

  • Joseph that his Zodiac Sign is a Libra if he remembers right on the cusp of Scorpio.

 

Yanique stated that one interesting fact about a Libran is that they are very free spirited and asked Joe if that’s a true characteristic of his personality and Joe disagreed and shared he believes he’s free spirited in being creative and innovative.

Joseph stated being free spirited is not a true characteristic of his personality, he is however sort of buttoned up and introvert and a free spirit is very much of extroverts, so he would not say that describes him. If you think of characteristics of a free spirit is being creative and being able to think of new things and do things differently and that part he would ascribe to. He feels like his purpose in life is to figure out what’s going on in the world of business and then to develop frame works that first describe what’s going on and then prescribe what companies can do about it. Joseph shared that his birthday is October 22.

  • Joseph stated that he was very much into computers very early in Elementary School and so he got an Applied Mathematics Degree; he joined IBM and worked there for 13 years. He started off in a very technical job and moved up into management and into a special project he did for a computer system called the AS/400, was to help run a group that helped customers bring customers in the business development process of the system and he discovered at that time that every customer was unique that they want to use the system in different ways and put together different hardware, different data, different software, just unique. He moved into strategic planning and that sent him on a discovery of how they would resolve that issue, how they could design systems for the uniqueness that he saw and that led him to the book “Future Perfect” by Stanley Davies it came out in 1987. In it he had a chapter on Mass Customization and when he read that chapter, it was like the heavens opened up and the angels sang, it explained everything that he saw going on and when IBM sent him to MIT for a year to get his Master’s Degree in Management of Technology, he decided that he was going to study that topic the whole, he was going do his thesis on mass customization and then he was going to turn his thesis into a book and that’s what he did. The book came out in 1993 and really defines that fact that we can give every customer exactly what they want but do it at a price they are willing to pay, so you have coequal imperatives of both mass and customization, the individual customized plus low cost efficient operations. He worked on that and he left IBM in late 1993 to see if he could do it on his own, 23 years later his wife is still not sure if it’s going to work out but so far so good. Early on he discovered that if you customize it good, you automatically turn it into a service and if you customize a service, you automatically turn it into an experience and if you design a service that is so appropriate for a particular person exactly the service that they need at this moment in time then you can’t help but make them go “wow” and turn it into a memorable event and that is an experience. That lead him to discover the experience of the economy, where they would have an economy based off of experiences where goods and services would no longer be enough and companies would need to do is to stages experiences for their customers, and so he took on Jim Gilemore as a partner in 1996, they started to develop ideas together and that resulted in their book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage in 1999 and that really laid it out and that set the stage for the entire movement towards customer experience and operation towards user experience and towards experience marketing and marketing all of that is fundamentally based on the fact that they are shifting into an economy where experiences have today become a predominant economic offering. When they first wrote the book in 1999, they talked about the nascent experience economy, the coming experience economy, they came out with an updated edition a few years ago and they changed all that language saying “no it’s here, it’s now, we are in worldwide, we are in an experienced economy” that’s what consumers are looking for. Since that time, they also discovered that in a world of paid for experiences people often question what is real and what is not and increasingly they don’t want the fake from the phony, they want the real from the genuine, and so they came out with the book in 2007 called Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, the new consumer sensibility describing how companies can get customers to perceive their offerings and by extension their places in their company as authentic. In 2011, he also came out with a book called Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier, so that goes originally to his technology background, looking at how digital technology is being used in experiences and recognizing that what it is about is fusing the real and the virtual and that’s what that book’s about. Joseph also mentioned that his partner Jim Gilemore has come out with a new book called “Look” about the observational skill, it’s a great book on how you can bring different kinds of observational skills into your personal practice and into your company.

 

Yanique commented that she recently read a study done by New Voice Era that said “up to $62 Billion a year is being lost by companies collectively on a global scale because of poor service.” She stated that assuming that the service is based on the experience they have had, so it’s no longer the price or sometimes the quality of the product, they will work with you if you are willing to make certain amends but how they manage that whole experience with the customer really depends on whether or not they stay with you.

Joseph agreed and stated that it is important to recognize that each of the offerings he’s talking about is distinct economic offerings. You grow an economy based off commodities, the things you pull out of the ground or raise in the ground, animal, mineral, vegetable and then we shifted in the industrial revolution hundreds of years ago into an industrial economy where goods, physical things became the predominant economic offering and in the latter part of the 21st century, we shifted into a service economy and that’s where quality became job one, that’s where services became important and the research that Yanique points to is about services which are the intangible activities that you perform on behalf of an individual and that’s why mass customizing a good turns it into a service because you’re doing it for an individual not inventorying it, doing it on demand. Now what we are shifting into is an experience based off experiences. Experiences are in fact a distinct economic offering as distinct from services and services from goods, they use goods as a prop and services as the stage to engage each and every person and by creating a memory which is the hallmark of the experience. It’s important to differentiate that, you don’t want to talk about the service experience and they are distinct things. You can have a service; you can surround that with an experience and the term you are using “Customer Experience” it’s important to understand what that should mean. Most people use the term they mean “let’s make it things nice and easy and convenient” and all of those are good characteristics but they are service characteristics, you’ve got to go beyond nice and easy and convenient if you want to create a true distinctive experience.

 

  • Yanique stated that in terms of the book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, she stated that she does a lot of customer service training and the why how the mind processes things and that’s based off what she hears from the participant. When you say to them, you have to pretend like you are on stage that contradicts the whole authenticity approach. They should come to work and pretend but at the same time you want them authentic, be true to who they are and be true to the quality and culture the company stands for.

 

Joseph stated that it’s a very common misconception of acting is that it is fake, that it is pretend, that’s not what real acting is about. You can have people that pretend when they are acting. The book they talk about the real fake makers and basically defines that people can perceive your offering as real – real or fake – fake but also as real – fake or fake – real and acting can be any one of those four as well, so a lot of people that are fake acting which really is pretending.

His favorite example is Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, Fish Market You Tube Video he was just there leading an Experience Expedition with clients 2 months ago. Pike Place Fish Market is a fish market, it is moralizing the fish video, and the most best selling business video of all time and what they do is getting fish out of the sea and putting it on ice in an open market so they are commodity traders but how they sell that fish is with wonderful theatre, they have these different routines to engage guests, often 20 to 40 people around the fish market waiting for someone to buy because that’s when they have their signature moment, when you order a fish, they shout of the order like “7 flying to Minnesota” and all the others shout back “7 flying to Minnesota” and then they throw that salmon across the counter, 15 to 20 feet where somebody catches it and wraps it up for you and people love seeing that happen. These people understand that they are on stage, they understand that they are acting but they are very real, they go home smelling like fish, so the fish video goes through 4 different principles, they are all acting techniques. They talk about play, the notion that you are on stage, you are there to have fun and give a great experience for the audience. They talk about “be there” which is a standard acting technique that you need to be there in the moment, you need to forget about everything else and focus on the task at hand and that’s what actors have to do. The other is chose your attitude, acting is fundamentally about making choices, about choosing what parts of yourself to reveal to those in front of you, we all know we act differently in front of our boss than we do our subordinates, we know we act differently in front of our friends than we do strangers, in front of our parents then we do our children, it’s not that we are being fake or phony, it’s just choosing what part of ourselves to reveal and that’s what real-real acting is.

  • Joseph Pine stated that in general and this relates to authenticity which is you have to true to yourself is one of the 2 key standards of authenticity that create that real -fake matrix and the other is you have to be who you say you are. The character must come from within; the character that you are and that you bring that to life. Another great example of acting is the diner in Chicago called Ed Debevic’s, it’s very famous and it’s shut down for the moment. It’s a normal corner diner, it’s not a high end place, he and his partner Jim Gilemore went there once for lunch and the guy at the front who met them had a nametag that says “Smiley”. So smiley was his character, not sure if it was his real nick name or a character he subsumed but that was a guy that can be smiley and he was smiley. He met them with a big smile and he asked how many people was in their party and he picked out menus and he proceeded to walk them through the restaurant and every once in awhile he would stop and one time he stopped at a table and asked them how they were doing and they would cooled their heels behind him he interact with another customer, at one point he started to talk around the table, up the chairs, up the tables, back down the other side and they kept following him until he finally delivered them to their table right at the front of the restaurant. It’s a wonderful, engaging theatre and it is that character that he created call Smiley. Speaking of phone interactions, one of the companies that is famous for great customer service that he thinks rises to the level of an experience in Zappos in Las Vegas, where they sell shoes on line and they are famous for their call centres where people would call in. Joseph met their Chief Culture Officer, Jon Wolske and he came up from being a phone representative himself, contact centre employee and he said that what he would do as he played in a rock band when he was younger, he would take on that rock band persona, he had things around his cubicle that talks about being a rock star, whenever he gets a call, he would look at that image that says “you are a rock star” and that would be the character that he played but that was a character that was a part of himself, he wasn’t trying to be something that he’s not.

Yanique stated that she is a big fan of the movie “the Fast and the Furious” and Vin Diesel has a very jovial personality and she has been watching him offline in some of his snaps he puts up on Snapchat as well as Instagram and even on Facebook and he seems like a very relaxed, easy going and jovial person but he doesn’t play those characters in “the Fast and the Furious” he’s serious and person in the family who doesn’t smile too much. She said that is very interesting that if you get a role that epitomize your true character, it makes it that much easier and more believable for people to connect with you.  

  • Joseph shared that for online entrepreneurs, the key thing to understand is what business are you really in. So understand if you want to be in the goods/ services business or truly in the experience business and then you need to think about how do you create that experience. The number 1 thing is time, like Zappos said. Most companies with their contact centres, they measure how little time customers spend with their representatives. They want them off the phone very quickly, they think it’s costing them money, at Zappos, they don’t measure that. In fact, everyday they celebrate which customer representative got to spend the most time with a an actual, living, breathing customer and it’s usually in the hours and that doesn’t bother them a bit, they don’t think about the dollar signs clicking off about cost, they recognize that they are doing the right job for the customer and that customer is going to be one of their raving fans, they are going to tell other people about it, they are going to come back again because they gave that great experience over the phone and so that can be done online, that can be done in a small business, it’s again recognizing what is your stage, what is the theatre that you are going to put on there.
  • Joseph Pine II shared that an economy like that exists few and far between because being a government employees have so many differences than normal employees, you don’t have the profit motive that causes you to want to do a good job, you don’t have the fear of losing a job or the business if you’re not doing it well, the people you are interacting with aren’t “customers” cause they are not paying you, the government is and so all those things make it incrediblly hard for government employees to really do a great job. Every once in awhile you get what’s call a natural, you get someone who is just naturally vivacious or outgoing or having a service attitude that does want to do a great job and will turn into a great experience interacting with them but for a government entity to do that, that’s very few and far between. Joseph stated that the one that always come to mind is that he and his partner Jim gives out is “An Experience Stager of the Year Award” every year at their annual Think About event. It was be their 19th year September 21st and 22nd in New Orleans. One time they gave the award to a government entity and that was the Cerritos Public Library in Cerritos, California outside of Los Angeles. The Head Librarian Wayne Pearson, he got tired of people telling him that the internet was going to commoditize his business, people were saying “why are going to libraries in the future when you get over the internet every book that’s ever been published, every paper that has ever been written, every thought that has ever been thunk.” He wanted to create this reason for existence for libraries, so he created what he calls “World’s First Experience Library” Cerritos Public Library - Best Library Experience Video and architecturally it ‘s very distinct, it’s the first use of titanium in any architectural structure in the United States of America when it was built in 2002 and they have a basic theme, every great experience needs to have a theme it doesn’t have to be in your face like the Cerritos Public Library, doesn’t have to be fantasy like Disney, it’s simple “The Organizing Principle for the Experience” and the theme for the Cerritos Public Library is “Journey Through Time” that a visit to the library ought to be a journey through time, so they have different areas in the library that are themed after different points in time, a classic period, a modern period, an ordeca period and they have rituals based off of that like when it’s time to close the library, everybody starts to put away their books and gather up their stuff and they go down to the main lobby where this huge screen and every night at closing time they play the scene from the movie, The Sound of Music where the kids are singing, they all sing along and by time the last kid sings good bye, the library is closed and they go again another day. The town has over 3,500 of them are in the library every day. This is a government entity that understands that it’s in the experience business and that comes directly from Wayne Pearson and it’s continued on to this day.
  • Joseph shared that the one online tool that he couldn’t live without would be Google because he is constantly doing research, he is constantly trying to figure out what’s going on in the world, looking for new examples, seeing what people are doing and that always gives him new ideas which eventually lead to new frame works. Often his Google goes into Wikipedia to be able to research something in deep but he also has Google alert so anybody that’s in the praising experience economy or mass customization or authenticity business context and also chief experience officer, he’s a big promoter of the fact that companies should hire chief experience officers to lead their offerings and turn them into a true distinctive experiences. He is also on Twitter and he learns a ton just seeing what’s going on, a lot of example through that and connecting with people, he has gotten a lot of business through that.
  • Joseph shared that the biggest thing is to see the effect that they are having in the world. Sometimes it’s very direct in consulting with an organization, he helping them to create an experience plan for example. You can go and visit them when it’s fully implemented and you see the difference that you make and other cases when he’s giving a speech somewhere and you see the light bulbs go on in people’s head and they come up to you after and say “wow this really makes sense” and they talk about how they are going to make a difference in the world. One of the things they have is an Experience Economy Expert Certification Course, 4 and half day of emerging in the experience, publicly every year in August in the United States of America, privately in house around the world and they have over 200 certified experts and they see the difference they are making and sometimes they are the owner of the business so you see what they are doing differently, sometimes they are internal consultants helping the business and sometimes they are consultants to other clients and you see what a difference they are making there. On Twitter, he has people talking about what a difference his book makes, he may not be having any interaction but his books are out there, the ideas are out there and people are taking them on, he doesn’t hear of everyone that does but people are bracing the ideas and making a difference in their business which allows them to hire more people, which creates more jobs, which moves the economy on. So the fact that he knows that he is making a difference in the world is highly motivating.
  • Joseph shared some of the books and first one is “Future Perfect” by Stanley Davis it was written in 1987 and one chapter that inspire mass customization his book Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Values on the Digital Frontier was actually inspired by another chapter in Future Perfect. Another great book that had a tremendous effect on him is “The One to One Future” by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers and that book came out in 1993 and he read it and said “wow, this is talking about in marketing, what I was talking about in operations” if you could mass customize then you could also have a one to one dialogue with individual customers, what could you create. When he was done reading the book, he discovered that Don lived 2 towns over from him in Connecticut at the time. He then called him up, got together and they figured out what that would do is create a learning relationship with customers that would grow and deepen overtime and allows you to lock them in because you always knew more about them than anybody else and you see that come into fruition today with all the companies using AI today to predict what people want. Another great book is “Computers as Theatre” by Brenda Laurel and it really make the case that you need to think about computers not as a tool but as a medium for a stage. He learned a lot about theatre and dramatic structure from reading her book, it’s a great book and he had his class at Columbia University read a portion of it.
  • Joseph shared that understanding that work is theatre and so what you need to do is to come up with that play/drama that you want to create, that’s what your strategy is about, what is your drama that you want to create in the world. And then you need to direct your workers to action, give them roles to play and help them characterize those roles and give them the where it all to be able to perform them, actors rehearse, give them backstage time and then you need to create an employee experience that is as good as the experience you create for customers, so they have the where it all to perform your drama on your business stage.
  • Joseph shared that he doesn’t have people; their business they call “2 Gurus and a Marketer” Jim Gilmore and their partner Doug Parker. They had a partner meeting and came up with some things that they are excited about. One of them is that they are working with some companies to create some videos, to be able to take their ideas and bring them out there further than they can reach with their speeches and consulting and their books. They are working with a company that brings custom learning to individual people in businesses wherever they are and so they are going to work with them to create new modules that they can then help people in their jobs, frontline personnel create that great, wow experience for their customers, so over the next 6 months they are going to do that, increasing the reach to make more of a difference, helping many more people embrace The Experience Economy.
  • Joseph stated that there is a famous quote by Margaret Mead “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

 

Links

 

Nov 15, 2016

Kay Valenzuela is an international award winner, founder of CXchange Institute, business entrepreneur and a recognize strategist of Customer Experience Design. Kay has been revolutionizing the Spanish speaking market with her own programme that focuses on customer experience, mastering the strategic competitive advantage of customer experience and she has implemented this certification in a number of Spanish speaking countries and is looking for great opportunities to launch into the English speaking market as well.

 

Questions

  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • As a customer experience expert, how do you feel about customer service/ customer experience on a global level?
  • What are some every day solutions that you would recommend to a small business owner to help them improve their customer experience?
  • What are some important considerations to take into account for an entrepreneur or online business owner you believe to be successful?
  • In terms of sustaining a service culture, how do you translate that culture to be part of their DNA that it spills over into their customer experiences?
  • What are some critical qualities that a leader needs to have in order to run a business that is customer service driven?
  • How do you stay motivated every day?
  • What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • If you were sitting across the table from another business owner and they said to you that they feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated human capital, what’s the one piece of advice would you give them to have a successful business, specifically as it relates to constantly motivated human capital?
  • What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
  • Where can our listeners find your information online?
  • What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

 

Highlights

  • Kay Valenzuela stated that she thinks of herself as a very curious person and out of curiosity, after working with Service Quality Institute for some time and doing the interactions with the participants she had before she would always take notes on “Where did they want to go, what were the resolutions they were expecting to find?” And she started keeping track of all those questions and all the things they had on their minds and the challenges they were facing, she just wanted to find the solution for them and for herself because sometimes solutions in customer experience are not that simple, so at the end of a 4 year period, she summed it all up and started partnering with people around the world and experts in the field that started to help her out putting all the answers together and they ended up having a research on development institute and now they have the certification programme open worldwide.
  • As a Customer Experience Expert, Kay shared that with customer experience, we are facing a very interesting challenge and the message we taking across is the following, people have been trying to change people for a very long time and that hasn’t taken us very far, so what if we just start looking more inward into the organization instead of the people. That’s like a different approach to the whole customer experience issue because we keep on having these figures and we keep on having all these budgets that’s basically blowing out in the air, not knowing exactly what we are expecting from it, so now we have the opportunity to set in place a strategy that can be measured, that can be controlled and can be managed and then after we have fixed the story what we have inside then we can go ahead and talk to people.
  • As a Customer Experience Specialist, Kay shared some solutions she would give to a small business owner and it’s that the first thing we need to figure out is where we are and where do we want to go and then after we have that clear answer then maybe we can set up in place a strategy that we can follow, a strategy that we can put into a plan and make sure we take into account everything that is really important for accomplishing this strategy and the first thing would be is “Knowing the kind of service you want to deliver, how do you want to make your customers feel?” That would be the first question that you would like to answer very clearly, clearly enough so that it can also be answered and understood by all the people in your organization. Number (2) would be listen to your customers and your employees, listening is a basic must to figure out what is the strategy that you have to put in place, it doesn’t work anymore when you go from the organizational perspective, you have to listen to your customers and make sure that you are following the right path complying with three major aspects that customers have today and that is: (1) what is the level of effort they need to put in placein order to get what they want. (2) How do they feel while doing that effort and what is their success rate achieving what they want to achieve in your organization. (3) Is you have to define the journey; you have to be in touch of what happens with you or with your organization and your customers at every touch point. Make sure you track their emotions, make sure you really understand what it is they are trying to achieve at each point of contact and you have to train your people to make sure you deliver the experience you discern from them.

Yanique commented that this may be a whole lot for a small business owner to take all in – she asked how do you move the small business owner from the mindset of training being an expense and rather an investment.

Kay shared in getting business owners to understand that training is not an expense but more of an investment and is directly linked to their bottom line. Kay stated that from her point of view, what happens before is that they are absolutely right, they have been training people but on the wrong issues so they don’t see the outcome of that investment and that’s why everybody thinks it’s an expense but when you figure out that it’s a perspective issue everyone knows and does what they need to do in regardless of what they know, not only what they are trained on. So every time you hire somebody, that person comes with an experience and they will put that into place at your organization, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you’re a large or a small organization, you will face the same challenges if you don’t get that communication aligned. So what training does is align the vision and align the strategy you want to put in place. If you want to have a bakery and you have to hire chefs, if you don’t tell the chefs the recipe you want to deliver, then it’s impossible for them to figure out on their own, so training would be the first step but it definitely has to be in place within the strategy to deliver great service, it will not happen out of the loop. It’s impossible to have different kind of people with different experiences, ages and different generations to think alike and to deliver a consistent message if they are not trained on it.

  • Kay Valenzuela shared some of the considerations that an online entrepreneur should take into account is that the world is digital and the digital part of the strategy has to be in place whether you have a physical space or not, you have to take into consideration what is the journey your customers are going to follow and the trends are they will go to your webpage, they will go to your social media channels, they will probably get to know you so much better than you’ll ever get to know them by the time they reach you for the first time, in fact statistics say that 8% of the purchase decision has been made online before the customer reaches anyone for the first time. It’s about understating who is the person you are selling to, who is your customer, you have to have a profound understanding of the purpose of your business in their lives and what is it they are trying to achieve when they get in contact with you be it at a physical space or a digital space. You have to make sure you are managing the whole customer journey within the customer sales cycle and make sure that you are very fast at telling them what it is exactly that is so unique about you that they want to stay on your page and they really understand what it is that they are going to achieve by doing business with you. They say you have 6 to 8 seconds to catch the attention of anyone online, so with so much noise out there and so much competition worldwide and you have to come with a clear message across right off the bat when they go to your web page.

Kay Valenzuela stated that more important is what is different about you? Why are you unique? Why do you deserve their time and most likely their money along the way?

Kay also stated that value also comes from perspective, that’s why it’s so important to be able to draw your customer persona and make sure you have a profound understanding because if you don’t know who you’re selling to, it is very difficult that you are going to create that value right off the bat within 6 to 8 seconds, so you have to know who is your target audience, what is it that makes them feel comfortable with you. There are only 2 ways to stay in business today, it’s either you look like your customers or you only do business with the people that look like you, so you really have to define the personality of your business and you really have to define who is your target audience, not everybody that buys from you is a real customer.

  • Kay stated that from her point of view, it has to do with the owner of the business, it is that primary leader that already has a vision and a way to inspire in such a dramatic way that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a beginner. It will be sustainable if the leaders that manage it have a sustained vision and a sustained attitude towards their business. They are role models and the leadership line has to be in touch with that, they not only being listened to but also being watched every second of the day, so sometimes it’s very difficult to have a great experience culture if you have a leader that would say one thing when he’s in front of the customers and probably something else when the customer moves away, so the culture begins with the leadership and they have to have a sustained message that comes across really clear to what it is that they want to be for their customers and it will follow along. She stated that she has a lot of noise thinking that culture is something that you can create, culture is something that you already have depending on your behavior, so if you have an inconsistent message, you will have an unsustainable culture, if you have a clear message, you will have a sustained culture, whatever it is, whether it be of quality or not much of a quality. Whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re saying in a consistent way, it’s what becomes your culture.
  • Kay Valenzuela shared some leadership qualities a leader must have - the whole experience must be like a story, so they need to have a clear story, there’s a story that invites people to be either apart or move away from what ever you mean as an organization, so when leaders have a clear story and that story is compelling enough, it will definitely help them out not only to sustained the culture but to also have sustained message for their customers. They have to have a clear story, it’s like their identity seal and they have to find a way to create along the touch point, how are they going to tell that story on and on and on again with the same level of engagement. People say that initially, you need more engaged frontline employees and it has been her experience that what we need are more inspiring leaders.

Yanique stated that in a country, the leaders of a country are the one that inspires the citizens and that’s why the countries who their GDP’s is better and their ease of doing business are better because the leaders in the country understand, they put themselves in the customers’ shoes which are the citizens and they really understand the importance of transcending that message in a way that is tangible and you feel that it’s easy to do business.

Kay stated that when you think of other leaders that are not organizational driven and you say what is it that makes them different? How come you have such a few individuals along history to have had the power to transform the ages and the way society runs and it’s because they have something to say and they feel it’s important to them and it rubs on and she feels passionate when she thinks about this. You think about what is it that they do different? Why do you have organizations that are so successful? Why do you have departments within a failing organization that is successful? So it always comes back down to the message the leader is taking across, how much does he believe in his own dream? What does it mean to be apart of that organization? What does it mean to achieve a certain goal because it makes us better, because it inspires us? And then people follow along and it’s not business dreaming, it’s leadership dreaming, it’s the way they communicate.

  • Kay Valenzuela shared how she stays motivated everyday; she stated that she is trying to follow a very clear line. It’s has been her personal story, when she started working with customer service, she also had an entrepreneurial ambition towards training, towards what customer service meant and the minute she started getting in touch with people and feeling their concerns and all the things they have to face and the same time the big gap they had trying to find some balance into who they were when they are not working and who they were when they are working and it created a whole lot of noise. When she was able to understand customer experience in a different way, in a way that it touched her as a person and understanding how making a great impact in somebody’s life also meant that she was writing a chapter of her own story then it made a whole lot of difference and gives her so much because she sees customer experience now as her own developing story every day. She wants a great story to be told about her day, she wants to be a part of amazing stories, she wants to be a part of stories that will transcend her own leaving time and space and it can only be done through interactions we have with people, it’s the stories that we create together that makes us relevant and that sense of relevance is something that everybody wants and she found it through customer experience and the interactions with people.
  • Kay stated that the one online tool she uses everyday is Whatsapp, it’s her primary line of connection to the rest of the world now especially when she is traveling.

Whatsapp is an instant messaging app that you can connect with others through your telephone number and you can send them instant messages, you can send them files, you can send them voice notes, you can send them pictures and it’s really a great resource as a business owner.

  • Kay stated that the books that have had the biggest impact and the first one that comes to her mind is “What Got You Here Won’t Take You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful” by Marshall Goldsmith. The ways that he makes you work through the latter of life thinking how did you get to this place? And do you think you have enough to keep on the journey? And he actual makes you reflect a lot on what are the possibilities in front of you and you are able to make those choices for the better. She also mentioned that there is a book in Spanish from a Spanish writer and beautiful speaker, the book is called “Transformation” by Mario Pooch and it talks about your ability to transform at any moment in time of your life, trying to achieve happiness, whatever that means to you and how you can reinvent yourself everyday to become better, to be better for others, to leave a legacy on society and creating a great story for yourself, one that will be worth not only leaving but also talking about it.
  • Kay stated that she would ask what motivates them because if their employees are not motivated then there’s got to be something wrong with the message they are listening to. She would try to figure out what motivates that leader; does he feel that he has the same kind of connection with his business to where he started? Ask him about how he has met his expectations? Ask him how does he feel? Because if they are enthusiastic and they are really connected it simple shows and it rubs on.

Kay stated that when it comes down to leadership, embracing the possibility of being vulnerable and being transparent, it takes so much weight from the leaders’ back because sometimes they feel because they are in a leadership position, they need to have all the answers, they need to have all the strategies and they need to know everything that has to be put in place and that is actually not true. When you think of the characteristics of combining your leadership position also with the capability that your team has to flow in with you and increase your ideas, make them richer, make them profound, you will always get so much more than when you put all that weight on your back thinking that you have to have every answer, when you think about your teams, they’ll be more than happy to share into those ideas they have with you because if you really think about it, they are the ones that knows more about your business than you can because they are the ones facing the troubles and challenges every day, sometimes we are too way back or upstairs and we forget to have those interactions with the customers. Sharing those ideas and collaborative style of leadership will always give you a wider perspective of what are the right steps to take and how do you manage better, how do you lead better and how you interact with your customers better.

  • Kay stated that the one thing that she is working on right now that she is really excited about is CX Mastermind, that is a certification, it’s taken 4 years to put all the programmes together, it’s 5 different programmes, it’s an interaction certification and they are really enthusiastic. They are already down to 6 different countries and right now she is in Mexico in a great alliance with the University of Technológico, Monterey. She is very enthusiastic about the impact that the programme has made on the participants and the fact that it’s based on Science more than philosophical or business orientation, it’s taking the conversation to a whole different level. The first day they spent talking about how much do you know yourself? And people think that they are talking about how much do you know about what you like or what you don’t like? And what they are referring to is do you know how you are biologically built? There are so many answers within our brain, finding the answer to the question. Why do people do what they do? They have found that answer and they have been able to put it in a very simple communication line that people can relate to, understand and you can see in their faces when they see those “blind flashes of the obvious” just lighting up in their faces like “oh, that’s why this didn’t work” “oh, that’s why my employees didn’t listen to me” or “that’s why I couldn’t find the solution.” And it all comes down to, we all have been trying to change something that is dynamically changing on its self and we’ve stayed with a fixed pattern of doing business and that is the one thing that needs to be relocated or redesigned. It not the people, you can’t change people no matter how many hours of training you put people through, you just don’t have the power to change people, the only thing you can do is either inspire them or you can model for them, they will decide what they want.
  • Kay stated that she has a few quotes and one of her favorite is “The only thing that your competition cannot imitate is how your customers feel when they do business with you.” The other one which is more inspirational is “It’s never too late to have a new dream and work to follow it through.”

Links

 

 

Nov 8, 2016

Robert Ilijason is an IT Consultant specializing in databases and business intelligence, mainly working with automating processes and data flows. He has worked with customers such as Ericsson, TeliaSonera and mainly IKEA. He is also a writer. Since a few months ago, he is also a retailer and he’s opened an unmanned grocery store in the small village of Viken and now expanding in Sweden. How Robert came across our path was, in doing some research for our podcast interviews, we bucked upon this article and these videos that spoke about this gentleman in Sweden who created an automated store where there were no actual employees and all you needed was your smart phone app to basically navigate your entire experience.

 

Questions

  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • Can you share with us a little about the problem that you were experiencing why you created this app?
  • How would you rate customer experience in Sweden, do you find it’s different from other places in the world?
  • How do you stay motivated every day?
  • If another business owner came over to you and said they are looking to do something similar to what you’re doing in your business, creating an app, but are looking more to have an app to complement their existing store with employees, what is some advice you would give them in terms of developing something that would be customer oriented?
  • What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
  • Where can our listeners find your information online?
  • What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

 

Highlights

  • Robert Ilijason stated that he has always been a tech person for all his life; he started out with computers when he was 10 years old. He started to work with it professionally when he was 20 years old and now he is 40 years old and has been with it for 20 years. He has had a lot of different titles, he has been a Web Developer, a Database Administrator, a BI Consultant, which is his current title, but what he’s been doing all these years is solving problems using technology. People go to him with a problem and he uses the correct technology to solve the problem that they have.
  • As an avid problem solver - Robert shared that one day he had his son and he was home alone with him for the first time, he was about 6 months old back then. It was late at night, he was supposed to feed him baby food, his girlfriend had left him a note of what he was supposed to do and he managed to drop the last jar of baby food and it was too late for the stores in Viken which is a small city with about 4000 inhabitants. The stores were closed and he kind of panicked as it was his first time and he didn’t know what to do so he took his son, put him in the car and they drove to the closest city which was Helsingborg and that was a very bad experience because his son (Max) was screaming because he was both hungry and afraid and wondering what was happening and Robert was sweating all over because of the panic he had. During that trip he decided that he doesn’t want to live in a place where he can’t buy stuff all the time but his girlfriend told him that they need to stay in Viken, so he decided that if he can’t move to the store, he has to move the store to him. In Sweden it is very expensive to have personnel and in most countries, so having a 24/7 store in Viken was out of the question, at least if you have your ordinary store. Robert started thinking, what if they just remove the personnel and it proved to be quite simple because the people working in the cash register can be replaced by the customer, it’s not totally without employees because someone needs to fill up the goods and remove the old goods and clean out the store but you don’t need to have someone there all the time. You download the app, you can register online and it takes 15 seconds. You can use the app to enter the store, walk around, you scan what you take and when you’re done, you press the button and after a few weeks you get the invoice.

It is a way for him to count the transaction cost because he can add credit cards or different kinds of e-payments they have in Sweden but that cost him a few Swedish quarters which is about 20 or 30 cents per transaction and by bulking up all the purchases the customer does throughout the month, he can count the transaction cost quite a lot. The app was launched in mid January of 2016.

Robert stated that most people in Viken are happy that it exists. The biggest problems he has had is not with technology but with his lack of knowledge within retailing, he doesn’t understand that he needs parking spaces and he didn’t have the carts to put goods in, there were a lot of minor things that he missed and the goods on the shelves were the wrong kind but now that it’s turning around by fixing all the problems has they come along and now it’s looking well and he’s trying to expand into more villages in Sweden.

  • Robert stated that customer service is pretty well and he mostly have that experience in many countries in Europe and they are well in the customer experience, in the northern part more so, they are calm people and try to help everyone, it’s a very helpful mentality all over so it’s pretty good. That’s why companies such as IKEA has had such a success all over the world, they figured things out and tried to make things easier for their customers even if it’s their bottom line sometimes.

Robert stated that while working with IKEA, he can talk about business intelligence which is not customer service but basically collecting everything that’s happening in the stores. From the stores, from the suppliers, from the trains, boats, trucks to basically optimize the flow of goods to lower the prices to make it more available and cheaper for people, to maintain a good quality while lowering the price for customers. The data is used to provide a better experience. Most companies are using that data, if you are ever asked by a company if you are happy with an experience, you sometimes press a button or you’re answering a survey online, that’s always collected and he recommends that people do it because even if people don’t look at you’re specific answer, they look at it in an aggregate and they will identify problem points and they will be able to fix them if you help them out. If you’re not happy and don’t tell anyone, the problem won’t be fixed and that he sees in his own store because some people are very active in getting back to him and letting him know that “hey, you should really have this product or you should not sell this product and this a problem for whatever reason”, they can help him out to optimize what he has on his shelves. He has the statistics from the sales but they can also tell him “I didn’t buy cheese today because the cheese I want wasn’t there”, he would optimize it in the app so it’s very simple, you can press the button and you can either type or speak to send him information of what problems they’ve had. Robert stated that the app has everything; he tries to push everything in there so it’s easy for them and for him. 

If customers have a problem in the store like purchasing something and it spoils after a day and they want to return it, do they communicate that in the app? Robert stated there is a small box in the store where you put stuff that are bad for whatever reason or you just want to return it and it informs him of that in the app. What is the response time for getting back to the customer? Robert stated that there is a call centre so it depends on when, if you do it in the middle of the night, it will take a few hours but during working hours, it’s almost immediate response but they have very few customers so it’s easy to have a high service.

 

  • Robert shared that he tries to look at the possibilities and try to be around positive people, he gets support from his family and other entrepreneurs in the area and by talking altogether they can keep each other’s spirit high so when someone is down they can always help them out to make sure they see the possibilities because it is hard to start something new and you don’t know if you’ll succeed and the costs are sometimes much higher than the money coming in. If you just prevail, you’ll most likely succeed.
  • Robert shared that the most important advice is to start on paper and to talk to someone who actually understands user interfaces because one of the biggest challenges that he has seen when he downloads other apps is that they are very cumbersome to use, it’s confusing, they don’t always follow normal practice that most apps use and especially for bigger companies, they execute poorly. Start on paper and talk to someone that understands how the flow in the app works and do all this before you even talk to a technician. Most technicians, they think in a special way and for them things are obvious but not always obvious for the customer and an example is Apple’s Ipad, the first Ipad wasn’t better than the competition, it was worse in many regards but they managed to tell people instead of saying they have 5 gigabits, they could store 5,000 or 1,000 songs and that’s a huge difference because not everyone understands what is a gigabits it. For a technician a gigabit is obvious but for a normal person, it’s not. He sees it a lot where, you’re in the business and you understand the business and you expect everyone to understand what you’re doing but most people don’t, so you really need to start from the beginning and have someone who understands this and be a part of the app development from the very start.
  • Robert stated that if you have a lot of notes on a professional level, Evernote is also something he uses very much. He uses all different types of cloud services like for storage such as Dropbox and OneDrive and Google Drive.
  • Robert shared that there are many books that have had some impact on him but for this particular project, there is none. He has been influenced by a lot of American entrepreneurs and like everyone else, Steve Jobs is a person to look up to, he did a lot of good things and also Richard Branson. He also mentioned that he really appreciates Tony Fadell, he likes people who are simplifying things and if he had one topic in his life, it would be simplification, he wants to automate and simplify things so there is time for other stuff.
  • Robert stated his excitement and focus is the expansion. It is the main part right now but what he’s mostly focusing on right now is Version 2.0, so right now to shop in his store you need to have your mobile app, you need to go into the store with the app, you need to scan the goods, you need to press to pay and the next version, you just have to have the phone in your pocket. You will go to the store, the doors will automatically open, you go in, you take whatever you want and then you just leave, after a few minutes you get a preliminary invoice which you can accept or reject and after 24 hours you get the proper invoice. So basically, you don’t need to touch the phone, it will be much simpler for the people who don’t like to use technology, it might be more simplified for the elderly, it might be that they are just not into tech and they are afraid of his store today because it’s very tech focused, you have to understand technology. Even if the app is simple, there is a barrier but he can remove the barrier. He stated that it is looking promising right now.
  • Robert stated that one thing he is using from IKEA is a statement that their founder said and that is “Most things remain to be done.” It reminds him that even though he thinks something is as good as it can be, he can make it better and even though sometimes it feels like he’s stuck, there are so many things that can break it free for him. That is one quote that he is trying to think about a lot.
  • Here is a link to visually view this unmanned Grocery Store - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShNL3oU4Mi0

 

Links

www.narassar.se

Robert Ilijason LinkedIn

Robert Ilijason Twitter

Evernote

Dropbox

OneDrive

Google Drive.

Robert Ilijason Unmanned Grocery Store Video

Nov 1, 2016

Emilie Shoop is a Speaker and Coach, founder of Shoop Training and Consulting and the creator of the premier team building event Rally the Team as well as the popular program The Shoop Shift: Six Gears to Rev Up Your Culture, Team and Leadership. She is the go to Leadership Expert when you want to learn how to maximize the efforts of your team the right way, so you go from just being another manager or business owner to being an influential leader.

 

People are complex and Emilie helps you learn to make each employee shine; she is a pro at getting to the heart of an organization’s people challenges and helping you to turn problems into success. Shoop Training and Consultant was created because one of Emilie’s pet peeves is unhappy people in the workplace. People are either unhappy with the work they are doing, their bosses or their employers. It is her belief that everyone has an innate desire to do well and somehow people lose track of that along the way, it is this belief that drives her to reach out and impact others with her people focused leadership.

 

Questions

 

  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • Why do you think that leadership is important to customer experience and how you think what you are doing impacts on the external end of the business with the customers?
  • Dou you find that some people are place in leadership positions because of their years of service with an organization or sometimes what’s on paper in terms of their academic successes but not necessarily because they naturally have an ability to lead other people?
  • As a leadership expert, could you tell us three (3) things that you think every leader in any business needs to master in order to lead a very successful team with a culture that is built on service orientation?
  • What are some recommendations that you would give to a business owner in the online spectrum in terms of leading in a strong way and creating a culture where you can translate how you feel to your customers and employees on an online platform?
  • Can you tell us a little bit more about the Shoop Shift?
  • What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • If you where sitting across the table from another business owner and they said to you that they feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated human capital, what’s the one piece of advice would you give them to have a successful business?
  • What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
  • Where can our listeners find your information online?
  • What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

 

Highlights

 

  • Emilie Shoop stated that she started her career in IT, she spent a lot of time with highly technical people and was highly technical herself, she found over time that she really just liked the people side of organizations and when she became a manager she got to start impacting her team by using good leadership and it was very interesting how many people complained about going to work and they don’t like the environment that they are in and just a few tweaks of leadership could make a lot of teams and a lot of employees really happy. When Emilie started her business she didn’t want to fix peoples’ computers for a living, she wanted to help people be happier at work and that’s what she set out to do.

 

Yanique stated that most of the companies that she has done business with and IT is one of those departments where they are very hard to communicate with; they don’t like to talk very much and a lot of things that they think are normal or that everyone should get, they get annoyed when you don’t get it because they thinks it’s normal and you should do this to get the computer work, it’s just a basic behavior and you are looking at them because they do it every day and you don’t.

 

Emilie agreed that IT persons are not really people persons and that it’s easier to target the IT world because it’s highly technical but she has been in organizations where there’s a lot of nurses and they are highly technical and they struggle with the same thing and same with financial institutions where people are really good with numbers but not good with the people aspect of it and so there is a lot of work to be done to help people to come out and realize what they think is “common sense” and “how could you not know that this is what you need to do” to get that across to the person in a much gentler way.

 

  • Emilie stated that she sees it a lot where people will ask do you do customer service training and when she digs a little bit deeper and find out what’s going on in an organization, it usually comes down to some poor communication and poor training for the employees that are trying to give good customer service but they don’t have the tools, they are not equipped with the right information to do a better job and so they don’t realize that they are not doing a good job because they are doing the best they can with what they have and so she gets to work with people and help them figure out where the leadership break downs are coming from and a lot of times she sees that somebody has been put in a leadership position that doesn’t know how to let go of the daily activities and lead the team, they just keep taking over and doing it all themselves and team members are not able to grow and actually learn how to provide the best customer service.

 

  • Emilie stated that she sees where some people are place in leadership positions because of their years of service with an organization or sometimes what’s on paper in terms of their academic successes but not necessary because they naturally have an ability to lead other people. What she sees is that for example: “I really like Suzie and how she works on this and we want to reward her some way, and the only way we can think of is to promote her” and then that promotion comes with a leadership component, instead of finding a way to reward that person for doing well, it could be with a different type of job with a different type of responsibility but making sure that responsibility matches with their natural gifts or their abilities or even desires. A lot of times people are promoted into those positions and they have no desire to lead a team.

 

Emilie stated for recommendation on promoting someone like Suzie without putting her into a leadership role, you want to make sure that you know Suzie well and have the conversation with her so that you can say “what is it that will help you feel more fulfilled with the growth opportunity that you are looking for, here’s what we see as opportunities or needs of the organization. Are any of these a good fit for you?” And so, looking for a way that she could take on more responsibility in ways that makes the most sense for her. Sometimes they have that person will become the one that trains others and that’s a different responsibility but they don’t have to lead them, they are just good at explaining how to do what they do or she as seen them take on different escalations so you are not the first line, you’re the second or third line or you only handle the special cases and that’s a way to have a different type of promotion in that scenario but really getting down to individual and figuring out what’s best for them.

 

Yanique shared that the approach of the organization is to include the employee in the decision making process of how it is that they are rewarded and that way it’s a win-win situation for both people because the company wins because the employee is doing something that they actual enjoy and they appreciate that reward versus just giving someone something they’re not too pleased with and they may fail as a result because their strength is not in that area.

 

Emilie agreed that stated that we fall into that trap of thinking that we want that recognition and we get caught up thinking the only way to do that is to become a manager and lead a team and that’s not the only way to get there.

 

 

  • Emilie shared that the first thing is connecting, taking the time to connect with the individuals on your team, not just lumping everybody together but really getting to know the individuals. That will do so much for your business and how invested everybody is in your team. The second one is over communicate, the number one complaint she gets when she goes into any organization no matter how good they are at communicating, there is a lack of communication. She always tell people to start erring on the side of over communicating, look at it like marketing where you have to say the same thing ten (10) times for somebody to realize that they even heard the message, pretend you’re marketing your leadership message and you just keep repeating it and that will really start to help boost organization as well and then really just investing in your team and finding out where the weaknesses are, where they can use some extra help and focusing on the strengths and where you can boost there and just really having a pulse on the need of the team and making sure you take the time to fulfill those.

 

  • Emilie stated that it really comes down to being human and not trying to be over professional. When you try to make everything kind of textbook or this is a business and therefore I should talk like a business, it’s really hard for people to connect. If you work with people in an office, you tend to have those conversations about “what happened over the weekend?” or “how’s the family?” or “I have this going on in my life.” The more you can incorporate that human inside of things, the more people can connect with you because that’s really what people are looking for, that human connection.

 

Yanique shared that she purchased a book called “People Shock: The Path to Profits When Customers Rule” by Tema Frank. The theme of the book was in moving forward in the world today, even though things are becoming totally automated, the one thing that customers are constantly yearning for is some level of human interaction.  A lot of what she talks about is at the end of the we really have to get back down to the foundation of dealing with people and that simple human interaction. A lot of companies think that when they have an IVR system that says “press 1 for this and 2 for that or 3 for that” and after you have press 1,2 or 3 you have another set of buttons you need to press before you actual get to a human being.

 

Emilie stated that a few places where she called have the option for you to have them call you back, you can hang up and they will automatically call you back when it is your turn.

 

  • Emilie shared the history of the Shoop Shift, she stated that over the years of working with her clients, she started to notice some trends that if you take a little shift in those areas, your business, your leadership, your team and your culture, everything will just start run a lot smoother. When she started to work with a company, she listed out the different areas and then help them figure out where they are hurting the most and they can start with that but the different areas are clarity, having a clear mission and vision and where the business or team is heading so that people know what the point of their work is, is very important. The second one is connection and having that really good connection with your team and making sure that everybody feels that they are apart of something bigger and people care whether or not they show up is really important. The third one is the communication and that’s where we focus on where there might be areas of improvement for communication, a lot of time we spend time on what needs to be communicated because they might be sending out information that nobody needs but totally missing something that everybody needs so she works in that area. Then coaching, she is not a big fan of discipline in the workplace but how can you coach people to get better performance and really focus in on strengths of people and just brings out the best in everybody. The next one is conflict and this is one where people try to eliminate all conflict in the workplace and she is an advocate of having some conflict because other than the petty high school drama, if it’s not that, it’s usually two (2) people that really care about their job, that are really passionate and they really want to do something for the customer or the business and they just have a difference in opinion on how to get there and she thinks that’s a great situation to be in. Lastly, you put it all together in the culture and people see different cultures in organizations and they look at their own and if you’re not working on that intentional everyday, your culture is going to fall to the least common denominator, so she helps people put that in the forefront and focus on that on a daily basis.

 

  • Emilie shared that a unique app because it is really a time saver and a lifesaver and with every thing being online with pictures and visuals are so helpful, she loves PicMonkey. It’s a website where you can manipulate graphics in no time. You don’t have to be an expert and you can get cool graphics to put on your social media, on your website, in your PowerPoint and it’s super easy to use.

 

 

  • Emilie stated that the advice she would give is just stay focus on the people, if you focus on people as individuals, not trying to group them together or lump them into some way that you can make it easier for you to manage but if you focus on people as individuals, your business will be successful. The more you care about your employees, the more they care about your clients.

 

Emilie shared that the advice she would give an individual that is not a people person and is concerned about the bottom line as she has worked with persons like that and it’s a little bit of struggle because there is some convincing on her part for them but usually she has to break it down into the bottom line where if you connect more, you will have a lower turn over rate with your employees and that turn over rate is this much and it cost you this amount and that’s why it’s important. Getting a new client is much more expensive than taking care of an existing client and you can show that return on the investment and there are some people that you just cannot convince that that is important and they are not the right people to be with, then there are employees that are okay with that, it’s just picking and choosing the right combination than an employee to make it fit.

 

Emilie shared as consumers our expectations and standards are raising and how we all want to be treated overall.

 

  • Emilie stated that she is really excited about an awards program that she has, she realized that this whole people skills thing and being people focused is really hard and it’s hard to get good at it and it’s not something that people get recognized for very often. A few years ago she started a leadership awards program where she goes through and give people awards in the different areas and it’s been really exciting to see that grow and to see more out of her region but right now it’s more regional and it’s something where each of the leaders get to share their tips and their thoughts on the aspect of leaderships. If they are really good at dealing with conflict, they get to share a little bit about that. It’s just an exciting day. The leadership award for this year is November 2016 and she has nominations coming in now so this is like the nerve-racking part, where she has to get all the nominations in.
  • Emilie say listeners can find her on:

http://www.shooptc.com

Emilie Shoop Facebook

Emilie Shoop Twitter

 

  • Emilie stated that her go to quote is “You have not because you ask not.” She usually finds that when she is stuck or hitting a barrier, if there is no harm in asking, either for help or for the sale or whatever the case might be. She likes to remind herself, whom can she ask?

 

Links

 

Oct 25, 2016

Asa Leveaux is fiercely committed to guiding entrepreneurs to achieve result-based transformations; he activates the genius in their minds and in their money, he also trains them to know that they are the answer to someone’s prayers so they can possess an existence that is saturated in apossibilities.

If you are looking for a proven expert who can guide you to address what is blocking you from your true success, to locate where your genius can best be nurtured and how to reside out of the box, you have met the right person. Mr. Leveaux has over a decade of organizational experience working with amazing clients, customers, employees and decision makers while guiding them to achieve remarkable success. His mission and commitments are to take you from your level of bull and give you the tools and resources that will support you on your journey to blissful success.

 

Questions

  • Tell us a little bit about yourselves and your journey
  • What are some of the founding principles that helped you to be successful?
  • How do you feel as a customer in your everyday activities?
  • What are some of the things you help businesses work on to ensure that they can make even more than USD $10,000.00 after they’ve made their first USD $10,000.00 and what are some of the keys things they need to be doing differently than everybody else in their industry and market they are in?
  • From your book, can you share some information you are able to get across and who it is meant to help?
  • How do you stay motivated every day?
  • As an entrepreneur, what are some important considerations for an entrepreneur or online business owner you believe for them to be successful?
  • What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
  • If you were sitting across the table from another business owner and they said to you that they feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated human capital, what’s the one piece of advice would you give them to have a successful business, specifically as it relates to constantly motivated human capital?
  • Where can our listeners find your information online?
  • What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

 

Highlights

  • Asa Leveaux is the founder of Genius Academy; he created the Genius Prescription System, which is a seven step system for aspiring entrepreneurs to make their first USD $10,000.00 in business. And though Genius Academy is the Chief Strategy and Revenue Officer of the Leveaux Group and best selling author, those accolades and achievements just didn’t embody who he was all the time. There was a time that none of those things existed but what did exist was a level of frustration with himself, a level of frustration with no one allowing his cash register to ring as he became an entrepreneur, frustration with his family of not giving him the support that he thought he needed from them, even the frustration of not being able to provide for his little boy who he calls his “son” and his “sun”. Even though he was on state assistance for food, he still allowed him to go to school to second grade without a lunch and that was the last time he allowed himself to do that, he understood that he needed to take action to make that no longer a reality.
  • Asa Leveaux shared that some of the founding principles that have contributed to his success for him is one, understanding that your passion is your problem. What he means by that is we all have a passion, it may be a non-profit which helps battered women, it may be to make sure that children can read in our communities, it may be that we love to make clothes and love fashion and that’s our passion or even fixing cars is something that we know that we are born to do but whatever that passion may be for you, realizing that no one else in the world was given the passion that you have, the way you have it, so because of that don’t insist that support from friends or family should be as high as yours because it’s not their passion, it’s your passion. Don’t create this unreal contract between them as though they need to support you in a way that you support yourself because they have their own passion to work with. That has been the biggest step for him.
  • Asa stated that in his everyday activity as a customer he has come to a point in his life that he doesn’t create expectations for people, so when he enters a store or an atmosphere where he is about to make a transaction, he does his best to enter that space not expecting anyone to be nice to him but stated that’s an internal work he had to do with him being himself. He stated that if he was the person that is over that transactional environment or that retail store, then he is creating that expectation for those individuals that are providing customer service on his behalf to do the necessary things and making sure that those expectations are written down and are clear. So as a customer, doing his best to be mindful and conscious and loving of other people where they are, that’s how he operates. As far as a business person that may have individuals that is responsible for customer service in his organization, that expectation looks like a PWS (Priority Award Statement) and SOP’s as in you will treat the customer this way and being very specific about that to ensure that the customer experience is a good one.
  • Asa Leveaux shared that some things that he ensures that he tells them is that your result statement needs to be visible, clear and consistent. So often individuals are not clear about what they provide for people. If you are in the health care profession and you ensure that people are resilient, that by itself is not enough, he needs to understand that when he exchanges value for value which may look like money for your time, he needs to know what the results are so that he can be very clear of what to expect from you and the result statement has to be there and if the results statement is not there, now he’s a confused buyer and your sales conversation will be longer and harder because you did not set it in stone what it is that you do and how you do it and who you do that for. For instance, he started this interview by stating his name, stated the he ensures aspiring entrepreneurs make their first USD $10,000.00 as a result of creating a Genius Prescription System, he knows who he is meant to serve, he knows how he’s going to serve them and result that they are aiming for, if you don’t have those components, you are wasting your time and theirs.
  • Asa shared that the most recent book that he wrote was a book called “I am Woman Enough: 365 Affirmations for Women”. When he mentions that he wrote that book, he initially gets hit with flack and he understands that because his response to their request of him creating that book was that he was not going to work it, he was complete in his experience of writing books that were affirmation based at that time but women kept asking him for the book. His thing was that he is a man, he is void of ovaries, so that doesn’t make him an expert on being a woman and he was very clear on that. He saw all of the strife that women and men have sent to Steve Harvey, T.D Jakes for writing books catered to women, he didn’t want to be a part of that, he didn’t sign up for that but when a woman stopped him in Texas and said “If you don’t write the book, who will?” He had nothing to come back with, he had no rebuttal and so because of that, he wrote the book, however he had 22 other women to help him in that endeavor. 

Asa stated that I am Woman Enough book lead him to write his third book called “I am Man Enough: 365 Affirmation for Men” and the reason he wrote that because men sometimes, more often than not, get the bad end of the stick as far as blaming the world, so men are responsible for so much bad to the point that they are not seeing anyone taking a role their empowerment, just because you are the majority in certain spaces does not mean you do not need empowerment, just because you have a preconceived notion of power. That is the reason he wrote that book.

There was a time when he was involved with someone in a relationship with someone and they were coming up to their one year anniversary and he wanted to give her something from the heart, not because he was being cheap but because that’s something she valued and it’s important to understand what your partner values, just because the last person liked flowers doesn’t meant the new person likes flowers. He was writing out all the reasons why he loved her and he was placing them in a box to look like a treasure chest and people were passing his office and seeing the project and said I should write a book about that and I said “What do you want me to do? Make all these reasons for her and give it to every woman?” They said exactly and that’s what he did. He created a workbook for couples called “365 Erotic Reasons Why I Love You” He is meeting a need, when your customer is saying they have a potential need; meet the need, that’s called research and development.

The first book he created was based on his desire to hire more people that look like him, he was 23 years old with three different businesses and Oklahoma wanted to hire more black people and all of the black people that were showing up to him were usually very young, even younger than him and they didn’t have the necessary skills not just to get in his door but to get in any door. When he talked about this to other entrepreneurs in his community, they were experiencing the same thing. So he wrote a book to help them, the book is entitled “Why I Won’t Hire Black People: Racial Profiling for a Reason”. He stated that when you are writing books, it’s important to research your genre of book, he understood and was very specific, he was going for African Americans in the workplace and he started to look at books that were already doing that so he was reading books like “Black Faces in White Places” or “What It’s Like To Be Me” or “To Be Black In Corporate America.” “What could I do to ensure that people would react, create an emotion in people that would allow them to take action?” In his experience, the real true emotions that will …. are sexual and anger. When you are angry about a book or the content or even the person who wrote it, people tend to take more actions by obtaining more evidence of why they hate the person or why they hate the book, which is why he created it. Another thing he wanted to show them subconsciously is that a lot of times he is hit with “I shouldn’t be judged by what I look like if I am trying to be hired as a black person” and he would say “you are right, however, you are judging my book by its cover by not wanting you to be judged by yours”. It is a lesson within itself. The books are available on Amazon and his website – www.asaleveaux.com

  • Asa Leveaux stated that every day he doesn’t feel like being motivated and sometimes it comes at 7:00 am in the morning and sometimes it doesn’t come until 11:07 pm at night. Asa stated that even with entrepreneurs, sometimes we don’t answer the phone until noon because we haven’t got the motivation yet, sometimes we quit the business three times before noon because things become difficult and we don’t see a way out but in those moments and in those days that he does have a hold on motivation, how it comes is him caring about the individuals who are waiting for him to show up. He knows that he was called for people that are choking on frustration and if he is too concerned about what’s happening or not happening with himself rather than what they are going through, he will remain unmotivated.
  • Asa shared that if you are an online entrepreneur, the first thing he will want you to consider is your domain name. He stated that causes him a high level of anger when he sees a domain name that he knows is not converting anyone. For instance, if you have a book and you are saying that your book is available on Amazon and he asks where can he get it and you say go to Amazon and he asks what is the name of your book and you tell him but he doesn’t see it at all. How does he get there and you tell him that he needs to put in a search for your Amazon, he’s going to be angry, if you tell him to Amazon.com/selfhelp/Jamaica/yourname. He’s going to be angry again. It would be easier to go to a company such as GoDaddy.com and get a domain for your book and create something called a vanity URL which is just you’re pointing where your product is to the point that you want to bring them to. The Woman Enough book that he mentioned earlier, instead of saying go to Amazon and look for Asa Leveaux or look for Woman Enough book, he said go to WomanEnoughBook.com or ManEnoughBook.com and that just takes you to where he wants you to go. Asa stated that you should always direct people where you want them to go and make it easy for them.

Yanique mentioned that she did an interview with Jay Baer Author of “Hug Your Haters” and he said from research, one of the number one things that customers want is speed. The quicker and easier customers can access you online the better because nobody has time to be digging and going through different pages just to find one thing.

Asa mentioned that also with name, everybody’s name does not convert well in a podcast or any other auditory format. For instance, his name is Asa Leveaux, some people don’t know how to spell his last name, Asa is easy but why would he make that his potential customers’ problem of finding that out. Even though he has www.asaleveaux.com, he also has a www.lifewithasa.com. So he rarely says go to asaleveaux.com on auditory format but he will say it on a written but to say it out loud, he would usually say go to lifewithasa.com and they all point to the same website.

  • Asa Leveaux shared that he compartmentalizes his life, meaning when it’s time for business, it’s business and when it’s not, it’s not. So for him, his phone is real so he doesn’t want to be contacted at 11:00 pm at night from anyone unless something is happening or they are going out for drinks. There’s a company call Grasshopper that allows you to receive incoming calls and make outgoing calls through their app, he makes all his calls through the grasshopper app and the thing about it is when he calls, his business number shows up, so if they want to call him back, that’s the number they call him back on.
  • Asa shared that something he did this morning, he was thinking about the customer experience, as he was getting ready for this interview, he started thinking about what it means to “woo your customer” because you want to them to be wooed, you don’t just get married to them all of a sudden, there’s a wooing process that needs to happen. How can he woo them quicker, sooner, faster? Genius Academy has a main platform called the Entrepreneurial Playbook and the Playbook gives you the different plays for your entrepreneurial journey, it’s a monthly subscription. He then thought what can he do to woo his customers? He then created the opportunity for anyone to take advantage of experiencing that for 30 days for USD $1.00. There’s a link for Genius Academy at lifewithasa.com or they can go to www.geniusacademy.co and look for the Entrepreneur Playbook and he also listed the coupon code.

Asa stated that the Entrepreneurial Playbook has different course within it that they get to have access to so for instance, if you want to know how to publish your book, it’s there. If you want to sell your book on Amazon, it’s there and if want to sell period, it’s there. Marketing, how to operate your business, financing and speaking, it’s all there. There are eight courses that you get in the Playbook and you have access to all of them.

  • Asa shared that for him it’s two fold. He stated that if he has people that are working for him, he will ensure that one of his (KPI’s) Key Performance Indicators is that they show up motivated because he may be out putting out a fire (figuratively or literally) and he doesn’t have the capacity in that moment to motivate the person that is handling his customers. However, when they get hired on, they will sign the agreement that these are your Key Performance Indicators and if you do not show up well in these specific ways that are measureable and quantifiable, meaning that you have a positive customer comment cards and you can resolve or de-escalate issues, then you will no longer be an asset. Ensuring that motivation is embedded within the things that are measured to keep someone on the team. The next thing is from a leadership point of view because as a leader, you are responsible for everything that does and does not happen in that business. Because of that you just let people know that you care about them, not necessarily the customer but the person who is caring for the customer because that’s the issue a lot of people don’t get. When you are the manager or even business owner and you keep saying the customer is always right, what are you then saying is that you have no value as the employee. One of the things he learned from Richard Branson is that he doesn’t say, “the customers are always right”, he says, “I value my employees” who are then feeling valued now can give value. If you have a workforce that is happy, they can then give that happiness to someone else but if they are depleted, they have nothing to give.
  • Asa says listeners can find him on:

www.lifewithasa.com

www.asaleveaux.com

Asa Leveaux Facebook

Asa Leveaux Twitter

Asa Leveaux LinkedIn

Asa Leveaux Pinterest

Genius Academy Facebook

Genius Prescription System

 

  • Asa stated a quote that helps him by Albert Einstein “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.” He uses that to ensure that he is clear whenever he is talking. He understands that your ego can be wrapped into using words when you are talking about the problems of life, you could talk about the vicissitudes of life but he would rather not go that route because his main goal is not for anyone to see the intelligence but he would rather you understand so that you can spend the money. If you are not clear on what he is talking about, you are confused by it, which actually means someone who doesn’t buy. So if he can’t explain to a six year old and that’s with anything, his business plan, how he’s going to talk to his customers, how he’s pitching a new product or service, if they don’t get it, he needs to go back to the drawing board and start over. He stated that he used his son for awhile but he is now 10 years old so he asks his nieces and nephews if it make sense to them and if they can tell it you as far as what it is that you do, then you are clear now.

 

Links

Oct 18, 2016

Paul Brunson is a Mentor, Entrepreneur and Television Host. His goal in life is to help you live your best life in love and professionally. He’s the world’s most influential matchmaker, founded and exited three businesses, hosted two television shows and spent nearly a decade working directly for a billionaire. He’s now here to share many of his experiences by mentoring and coaching thousands of people.

 

Questions

 

  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • What are some things you would recommend to a business owner to build stronger relationships to really come over as being authentic and true in what they are selling?
  • As a small business owner, how do you find your mentor? How do you know that this person is someone you can connect with?
  • What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
  • Where can our listeners find your information online?
  • What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

 

Highlights

 

  • Paul Brunson shared that the last 7 years of his career where he left financing and became a Match Maker. It was really interesting as people would ask him “Are you really a match maker, is there such a thing as a Match Maker?” It was a career that he was passionate about and it allowed him to do so many things, so the biography, in terms of hosting television shows and launching other businesses, he was able to do that as a result of becoming a Match Maker. Most recently he has hosted a few television shows, “Love Town: with Oprah Winfrey” and “Preachers of the L.A” where he did the after show. He stated that he is preparing to launch a new show on ABC Primetime which is his own show where he is Executive Producing, he also launched a Match Making Agency and he also launched several other projects that he is proud of and so he stays really busy. He stated that for his entire life, he joked about doing many things and often times we all say that we hustle and have 3 or 4 jobs but what he most recently discovered over the last year and a half is a book called “The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results” by Gary Keller that really changed his life. If we want to be good at things in life, we can do multiple things and be good but if you want to be great, it requires a singleness of purpose and that is what he is trying, get focused and divest out of all of his projects and just really focus on one.
  • Yanique stated that it is important that whatever you are doing, you put 100% of yourself in it. She was reading a book that says, “You can’t effectively do things 100% at the same time,” in other words, if you are watching the television and reading a book, you are following the gist of the movie and you’re reading the book but you’re not doing both activities at 100% because it is just not humanly possible.
  • Paul agreed with the phrase and stated that on top of that there’s a switching cost that not a lot of us realize, so you’re watching the television and at the same time you think you are working and responding to an email, technically you can’t do both at the same time so you’re only doing one but what you’re really doing is you’re going from the television to the email and when you go to the email there’s a switching cost, your mind now has to re calibrate to the email and because it is re calibrating that’s a cost and energy involved and so it re calibrates to the email then you go back to the television and has to re calibrate back to the television so there’s a cost and time allocated to that. It just goes to show that there is really no such thing as multitasking.
  • Paul stated that for business owners to build stronger relationships they have to start with themselves, they have to start with a true examination of who they are. You can’t begin to outline what your mission is, your brand position mission statement is, you can’t come up with your marketing concepts, you can’t do any of that until you are first not only deciding of who you are but also be comfortable with who you are. There are a lot of small business owners attempt to replicate what they see other people in their industry doing and you can’t do that; you have to grasp your uniqueness. Paul Brunson says he always says your uniqueness is where your power is, that’s what differentiates you and you want to embrace that. First, know who you are and the second is to understand that effective marketing is about content marketing and a key component to content marketing is relevant, value added, consistent information so you want to always be making sure that the content you are distributing is not just relevant to you but it ties you with your customers and the experiences that your customers are going through. You want it to be value added and essentially moving them forward towards whatever they’re goal is, so if you’re helping someone get close to their goal, you are a value add to them. Consistence is tricky because if you’re leveraging Social Media, you have to be extraordinarily active and consistent in your content and not just daily content. We’re at a point now where you need multiple pieces of content to be distributed on a daily basis. So to really engage the customers for them to really know authentically who you are, doing some soul searching, you have to know who you are and you have to embrace that and you have to articulate that or convey that through consistent value added content.
  • Yanique made reference to a video Paul Brunson posted on his Facebook Page with his mentee about “How do you know who you really are?” Paul stated that the importance of knowing who you are is critical because ultimately if you’re a small business owner or micro business owner, people are not necessarily buying you, they are buying your brand and your brand is never what you say it is, it is what everyone else says it is and so the trick is you have to figure out how do you break through the noise. He stated that he has a memorable brand and the trick to that memorable brand is being unique and a lot of people said, “Paul how can I be unique?” There are a lot of people that look like me or maybe from Jamaica but the bottom line is that every single person on this planet, everyone listening to this show, there is no one that has ever walked this earth that has had the same set of experiences like you’ve had and if you really think about that, it’s powerful because what it shows is that you have a unique perspective on life and so the key is how do you translate that unique perspective to your brand. Part of identifying and being comfortable with all of your uniqueness is in identifying that you truly do love yourself and connecting with yourself. People define self love in many different ways but he always looks at it as if you think about your optimal life in all the different facets of your life, think about your career….what’s the best career you can imagine, how much money are you making? What kind of flexibility do you have? What’s your title? Think about the best romantic relationship you could ever have, think about best spiritual relationship you could ever have, think about all those aspects of life and after you have identified the best of the best, then you ask yourself one simple question. That is simply, “Do I feel like I can reach that? Do I feel like I can get there?” Not to say there won’t be hurdles or challenges along the way or maybe you feel like you can get there but you are 20 years from it, that’s fine but the big question is “Do you feel like you can get there?” If you don’t feel like you can’t get there, if you don’t feel like it’s possible, that means you don’t feel like you can ever become your optimal self and that means you have a problem with self love. Self love is really each aspect of your life, all those categories, business, social, health, romantic and then collectively saying in all of these categories “I feel like I can become my best self” that is self love. High self esteem is just simply saying in each one of those categories “I can get there” so there’s a big difference in self esteem and self love but ultimately that’s what self love is.
  • Paul agreed that in connecting with your mentor, it’s hard to put something on paper and match 2 people together. “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” by Sheryl Sandberg COO of Facebook wrote this book and in it she wrote something that really moved him was that, “If you have to ask someone to be your mentor, it’s too late” in other words, you can’t someone to be a real mentor to you, it jus t happens. We know that nothing just happens, so you have to put the work in, so what is the work. He stated that he wrote a blog post specifically about this, about how he was able to acquire certain mentors and that he believes that what Sheryl said was absolutely right. He never had to outright ask, the first thing is you have to make yourself mentor material. “Are you mentor material?” That’s the first question, whenever there is a problem; the first place you want to point the finger is inward and ask, “What can I do to change the situation?” Are you mentor material? Are you someone that someone else would want to give advice to? Are you someone that someone else would want to surround themselves with? Are you someone that exhibiting that you are ambitious? Are you mentor material? That is the first step. The second step is to then identify the people that you would love to be mentored by and that in itself takes time because a lot of people will select possible mentors based on awards or accolades that they’ve acquired but that’s not how you select a mentor, you select someone that shares your values and you select someone that you personally witness walks their talk, that’s really what you want to do. It’s not a long distant relationship, this isn’t someone that you’ve just observed on social media but this is someone that’s in your life somehow, somehow connected that you know that they actually walk their talk. The third part is then you add value to that person continuously over a long period of time. Paul then gave us a scenario, as he was mentor material, super ambitious, wanted to learn, the second part was that his mentor was his boss so he had a personal experience with him and was able to see how he was delivering on what he was talking about, he was walking his talk. The third part is that after he stopped working for him in about 2004, he then continued to add value to him even though he stopped working for him. He lives in Turkey and he would visit the United States of America, he would continue to help him, helped to arrange meetings, when he launched a new business in the United States and ask him to sit on the Board and help launch those programs, he wasn’t being compensated, he continued to add value to him over the years and how he found out that he was his mentor, Paul posted on Instagram about 3 years ago a story “2o Habits I Learned Working for Two Billionaires” and the second part of the article he said “And he continues to be a mentor to me to this today.” And he read that post and reposted, he was really proud of it and even had it translated into Turkish, at the end he said that he didn’t realize that Paul Brunson looked at him in that way and thanked him. In other words, at no point did he ask him, when you have a true mentoring relationship, you will just realize at a certain point that that’s your mentor and not only will you realize as your mentee but your mentor will realize that and that’s the most effective mentor relationship.
  • Paul shared that he is a reader and he is traveling now and the books that he has with him is a oldy but a goody, “Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing” by Harry Beckwith which is one of the modern marketing books, “The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results” by Gary Keller, a book he read in the last few years that changed his life, he just finished a book call “Contagious: Why Things Catch On” by Jonah Berger which is great for people focusing on their personal brand because it’s about how words spread and ideas spread especially in the day and age of social media. Another book is “Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion” by Gary Vaynerchuk that had a big impact on him. Some of the classics too that have been very helpful is “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu and his favorite is Sun Tzu and Sun Pin who was his grandson. It’s really fascinating because Paul has witnessed how over the years even in business school his teachers would reference Art of War all the time and in actuality, that book is probably one of the most influential books not just on war strategy but business strategy that was ever written. A wild card book that influence business is a book that was written about Abraham Lincoln but what’s fascinating about the study of Abraham Lincoln is that it is a very refreshing read, any of his biographies because what it does is that it illustrates how if you feel like you are too old, his story will help to sway you differently, if you don’t think you’re smart enough, his story will sway you differently, if you don’t feel like you’re connected enough, if you don’t feel like you’re in the right social class, or you came from the right family, his story will help to sway you differently, here is someone who came from meager beginnings with no connections and was one of the oldest elected president at the time he was elected and he rose to greatness and stands as one of the most influential presidents in US history and there is a lot of inspiration that can be pulled from his story.
  • Paul stated that the app that he cannot live without in his business is Instagram as it is allowing him to connect to a degree that he was not able to connect with people before. He stated that over that last 10 days, he has received 2 speaking offers specifically from Instagram. He was able to build a rapport with certain people via Instagram and it’s one of those platforms that when it first came out he didn’t think it was going to be effective for him but it has really turned into something that’s special. He shares the he can’t live without it right now, it is one of the first apps he opens in the morning and one of the last one he closes at night.
  • Paul stated that he is that there is so much that he is excited for but he just started a daily video blog, it doesn’t have a title, it’s a daily video blog that allows him every day to speak to his community about a subject that he believe is important to him and typically he talking about business or relationships and it’s something that he’s really excited about because he has a Primetime television show and so many people come and say “Paul, I want to be on TV, I can’t believe it, this is wonderful.” But when he pushes them and he asks why do you want to be on TV, typically he would get the response that they want to help people, he would say “if you want to help people, do it now, don’t wait/” He stated that he has fallen victim to that as he is hosting a show in the US called “Our World” and it’s a weekly show that covers news impacting African Americans so in particular around business, entertainment and Arts but it’s not on the major networks and he remembers saying, “I love doing this show, I hope it’s picked up on a larger network” and he said to himself, why doesn’t he continue doing it himself because ultimately it’s not about popularity, it’s about the influence. He reiterated that he is most excited about the daily video blog and can’t stop thinking about the different things he’s wants to do with it.
  • Paul stated that he has committed to 100 episodes, so every day from Monday to Friday he is committed to that. He wants to show that given all the things that he is doing in his life that he can still drop a quality video blog every day and he can do it, many people should be able to do it and he also want to be able to point back and show what has resulted because of the deployment of it and even on metrics alone and not that number of followers is critical, since he has started doing frequent videos, not only has his audience increased, but more important to him is that it has become more homogenise and with it becoming more homogenise, the fastest growing demographic of his audience is Jamaican, it is the number Jamaica followers has dramatically increased and also Nigeria, they are out pacing the United States and he is planning on sharing all of that at the end of the 100 video to show what has been the result.
  • Paul says listeners can find him on:

Paul Brunson Website

Paul Brunson Facebook

Paul Brunson Twitter

Paul Brunson Instagram

Paul Brunson YouTube

Paul Brunson LinkedIn

 

  • Paul stated that he has a lot but one that is very simple when you see a Nike sign you think of “Just do it” he thinks of that quote whenever he has an idea and he is thinking if he should or shouldn’t, he always says “Just do it”

 

Links

Oct 11, 2016

Stephanie Calahan is the Business Vision Catalyst who is known for the fast transformation that she facilitates with her clients through working at the intersection of heart and head. She works with busy, purpose-driven entrepreneurs to own their brilliance, leverage their business and get their message out with power, ease and joy so they can make a powerfully positive difference in the world, exponentially up their level profits, shift their mindsets towards possibility and take a no-excuses approach to boldly creating a highly successful and meaningful business built around who they are. With her unique combination of right brained and left brained thinking, intuitive incite, passion, results based coaching, powerful questioning and strategic systemizing magic. In record time, her clients dance with joy as their visions become reality in their business. After risking personal health and happiness as a high achieving executive and former jet-lagged consultant in corporate America, Stephanie vowed not only to create a life of real freedom for herself and her family but also to teach fellow entrepreneurs how to do the same.

Questions

  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • How do you feel about customer service as a business owner on a global level and do you think there’s room for improvement?
  •  What are some everyday solutions that you believe can help improve customer experience?
  • How do you stay motivated everyday?
  • What are some important considerations for an entrepreneur or an online business owner would need to take into account in order to be successful?
  • What is one online resource, website, tool or app you cannot live without in your business?
  • What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • If you were sitting across the table from another business owner and they said to you that they feel they have great products and services but lack the consistently motivated human capital, what advice would you give that person to have a successful business?
  • What is one thing that is going on in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are either working on to develop yourself or your people?
  • Where can our listeners find you online?
  • What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

  • Stephanie started by stating that she worked a little over a decade consulting for Fortune Fifty/ Fortune One Hundred clients and leading a team of 250 to 300 people. She stated that there was a lot of activity and stress involved with that world of work. When she started working there, she thought she was going to retire from where she started as she was a true blue employee that really believed in the work that she was doing and was going to continue that until her retirement. Into her experience with that career, the company went from a privately held LLC to a publicly traded company, and when they made that shift in corporate organization, there was a drastic shift in the corporate culture, there was a drastic shift in the treatment of their clients, there was a drastic shift in the treatment of their employees and that no longer matched who she was. The company moved from being people-focused to being bottom-line focused. A lot of the things they did in support of their clients as well as a lot of things that they had done culturally in support of their own associates were disappearing. She was being asked a lot of times to do different things on many occasions that was right on her ethical borders so much so that there were days late into that experience where she was getting physically ill at work because the people that Stephanie reported to were just asking her to do things that were not right for a myriad of reasons, they weren’t illegal but they were just not right. Fortunately, her husband who is very supportive had a conversation and they decided that it was time for her to walk away, it took her about 2 years to be brave enough to talk to her husband but she was nervous because that meant she was walking away from a high 6 figure income and they decided that it was the absolute right choice and she did that and decided to start Calahan Solutions rather than getting another job. When she went to decide what she was going to do within Calahan Solutions, she looked at the work that she did that she wanted to bring with her, the parts of that corporate experience she wanted to bring with her that were positive, the things that she enjoyed doing, the things that she was good at doing. She looked at her peer reviews and reviews from the leadership team that she reported to and looked at the things she did really well and just combined all of that into a business. Her business has morphed and changed quite a bit over the years because one of the things that she didn’t let go of was over working, she was a workaholic and almost worked herself to death. In 2009 she was told she would not see 2010 because she was so ill and so in the course of getting well, she had to rethink her business and that rethinking of her business and how she wanted to deliver services allowed her to become fully her and not hold back because there was this workaholic part of her and there was a part of her that thinks that people are not interested in that aspect of her and so she blocked a lot of who she was too. While that health experience was a scary one, she was actually really grateful because it brought her to where she is today. It has also allowed her to recognize that life is really short and if it’s going to be short, if we aren’t guaranteed tomorrow, then she needs to be the best she can be everyday and so it has given her motivation to really go for those things in her business that are important rather than letting fear hold her back.
  • Stephanie shared that Customer Service/Client Service is one of the most integral parts of what she does. The work that she does, all the way from the conversations that she is having now, the blog post that she writes, the interactions that she has with her clients, the interactions that she has with her prospects are all about service. The work that she does is transformational and if people don’t feel well cared for, they can’t take part in that transformation in a really significant way and then the work that they do is the same thing. The more you can think about the experiences that you are providing whether it is through the conversations that you are having, whether it is through the on-boarding processes that you have when you have new clients but even if you have products that you sell in a store, products that you sell online, think all the way through that experience to make sure that it’s something that’s going to be really positive and enjoyable for the people that are doing business with you.
  • Stephanie shared that one solution she thinks can apply to a lot of people listening is to think through the experience your customers are having when they are interacting with you online and that can be a lot of different things. Stephanie shared an experience that she had (a bad customer experience), that she also wrote a blog post about it. She stated that there was someone she was following online that she really respected and she decided to purchase a product online from this person, she made the purchase on a Friday night and all of a sudden she got 7 different receipts for that same purchase and the purchase was not a low price purchase. Her credit card got impacted by over US $4,000.00 from that one purchase because it wasn’t a US $4,000.00 purchase; it was 7 different purchases of the exact same product. She then franticly started making phone calls to the company trying to get a hold of anybody because that wasn’t her intent to spend that amount of money and she didn’t want to buy 7 versions of the digital product. After 4 hours of calling different numbers, she eventually got someone who had absolutely nothing to do with her purchase, she told the person that she needed their help to escalate the problem, she needed the money to be put back on her card immediately. With all said and done, everything got resolved but it was 4 hours of her time in panic, stress and also unnecessary because if when they had put the product up on their shopping cart they had ensured someone to test it and actually pretend to make a purchase, they would have seen what happens from the customers’ perspective. Stephanie Calahan further stated just because you have stuff set up correctly in the first place for product A doesn’t mean that product B is going to be set up correctly. Test every single one of them, look at the landing pages you’re going to have, look at the thank you pages you’re going to have, look at the emails going out, look at the impact it has on a credit card and what the credit card receipts have because the more smooth you can make that process, the happier a customer you are going to have.

Stephanie advised in her own business - she has a few family members that are not that technically inclined that she would ask to run through the process for her and she will refund it right away. Just for them to go through it and let her know if there is anything confusing or if the process was clunky in any way and give her that feedback. She stated that there are a lot of big corporations; the amazons of the world who have teams of people that they call usability testing but smaller businesses don’t have teams of people to do usability testing but you can do something really simple like that which doesn’t take a lot of time that can really save your reputation and relationships by investing in time to do that.

  • In reference to the question of recommendations that Stephanie has for a company that has a physical storefront with items for sale (brick and mortar). The solution she suggests is to be present. In our world of ever changing attention spans where we could have an iPad going, the cash register going, our phone ringing and someone at the counter, just pay attention. Whoever you are interacting with whether it’s on the phone or at the counter, give them your full attention for the time frame that you’re having an interaction with them and let them know they are important to you because they are, they are your customers. Give them the respect that they deserve as they are doing an exchange with you, whether it’s asking a question or making a purchase. Some people look at customer service only from the perspective as people that are giving you money and that they become the customer when they have made a purchase from you. However, the truth is they are your customer the minute they’re in your sphere of influence because the conversations and relationships that you build with people even before they have made a purchase influence how they feel about you.
  • After asking Stephanie Calahan how she stays motivated everyday - she believes in having a big Why? Simon Sinek has a TED talk video on YouTube Start With Why. It’s about getting that piece that’s deep inside of you that you tap into that allows you to do all the things that you absolutely adore about your business and to also do the things that you are less excited about. She stated that her “Why” ties back to her personal experiences. She mentioned that in 2009 she was really ill almost lost her life and the reason she is here today is because a really good friend introduced her to a holistic health coach that helped her figure out the complex mess that she was in and helped her so that she could be here today. She realized that after she got well and learned more about his business, that there is no way she would have found him if she hadn’t been personally introduced to him by a friend and there are so many different world changers that are out there and he would not consider himself a world changer but he changed her world because she’s here today because of the work she did with him. She stated that there are so many world changers like him that are so amazing like him but people don’t know they exist. So her “Why” is to help change the world in a very positive way by helping those world changers get found and be aligned with clients and do what they do best.
  • Stephanie stated one of the most important things that entrepreneurs and businesses should take in account is to build a business that is in alignment with who you really are. There are a lot of people that build businesses based off of what one guru or another says and it’s like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and it doesn’t work and then they’re always pushing rather than letting the beauty of life and the beauty of their ideal clients find them and just flow. She shared that the first thing she would suggest a business owner do is look at what they have going on in their life right now and identify those spots that are really feeling off and get honest about it and adjust. The more you can build a business aligned around who you are then the more comfortable you are and not comfortable in a bad way as she is a believer in stepping out of your comfort zone, “comfortable” meaning it matches who you are from an energy level, from a spiritual level, from a business strategy level and from a learning and personality values level. The more your business is in alignment with who you are and the less you’re pushing, the more energy you have to be focused on somebody else namely your customers or your clients. When you have a business model that is always making you stressed, you don’t have the mental capacity to be thinking of other people in the same way as you do when you are truly joyous about the work you do.

Stephanie also stated that one of her programs is called “Money, Mindset and Magnetism”, the clients that align and sign up to be a part of that program are typically having challenges with their sales in one way or another and what she finds is the case with every single private client that comes into that program is that initially they are more focused on themselves, they are not selfish people but they are more focused on themselves than on the people that they are meant to serve, so their sales conversations just implode. They don’t work as well as they could and there’s so many things when we are solid within who we are and our mindset is clean and confident then we are in a different mental space to be able to truly think about the person on the other side of the counter, on the other side of the phone, over Skype, over Google Hangout, whichever way you connect with your ideal customer or client that it allows you to think from their perspective and get much more creative with how you can make their experience a positive one. When customers | clients | patients have a more positive experience, they’re more likely to continue to want to work with you.

  • When asked what is the one app, website, resource or tool that she absolutely cannot live without in her business - Stephanie shared that she adores Infusionsoft (https://www.infusionsoft.com) which is an all in one marketing tool that allows you to make your customer experience very personalized and build relationships with the people you are interacting with rather than it being transaction based. There are different components and there is one component called “Customer Relationship Management Section” and that’s where you can gather all kinds of information about your clients and customers and give yourself good information in order to interact with them. If you do online sales or brick and mortar sales then this tool will allow you to identify who signed up for what giveaway you have, who purchases a product and it allows you to have a more intelligent conversation with them. If you are in a business where it is more one on one interaction, it allows you to note the important things you learned about those people that you are working with. She calls it her memory in a box, she can go back to that person’s record anytime and know what they talked about, what they are interested in and it helps her refresh her memory so that she can treat the people that she is working with, with great respect and honor. She further stated it is more than a CRM as there is also an Auto Responder portion where you can do newsletters, you can do automated communication based off of the types of interactions the customers and clients are having with you or your site. There’s a Shopping Cart portion, there’s a number of different elements that can be used to allow you to know what your customer is interested in and then be able to serve them with that.

Stephanie mentioned that the tool – Infusionsoft (https://www.infusionsoft.com) was built specifically for small businesses and they have customers that are in service coaching industries but they have people that run all kinds of different brick and mortar stores whether it’s retail stores and they have customers all over the globe doing all different types of businesses but it specifically for the small business.

Stephanie mentioned that she has been doing business with them (Infusionsoft) for a number of years and like a lot of businesses, they have some growing pains, at one point they were getting customers so fast that their customer service wasn’t so good for a while but they addressed that. They recognized where their growing pains were starting to cause them problems and they made adjustments. So Stephanie suggests as another tip - as your business grows, the way that you interact with your customers will need to change and so be open for that and look at those spots where maybe things are falling through the cracks that didn’t use to fall through the cracks and those are customer improvement opportunities too.

  • Stephanie shared that when she thinks about Customer Service, one book that is really fantastic is “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t” by Jim Collins. You can be a good company and make a lot of money or you can be a great company that makes a lot of money and makes an impact too. In Jim’s book, he did a study of a number of different organizations just understanding why were some companies merely really good and others great and what did the great ones have in common? And one of those things that all the great ones have in common was really good customer service.

Stephanie mentioned that when she framed her business, she had to decide if she wanted to be mass numbers or did she want to be high touch and by high touch, she means how well did she know the people she was working with and how involved did she get with them in relation to the work they are doing together. Stephanie Calahan decided that high touch was really where she wanted to sit in that coaching space and so she has a unique rule that she wants to be able to love her customers unconditionally in order to work with them because when you can accept your customers and clients unconditionally in the coaching space, then you have the ability to really help empower them to make fantastic changes in the direction they want to go in their business so customer service is one of the ways that she is able to do that.

She also stated that another great book is “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions” by Guy Kawasaki which is about relationships and talking about how you engage with your community, with your tribe, and with your audience. She also mentioned “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini which is a different form of engagement but understanding how the words that you use impact the people you are working with so to make sure that you’re conscious about that and how you interact with people.

  • Yanique asked Stephanie…..we have a lot of listeners who are business owners and managers who feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated Human Capital.  If you were sitting across the table from that person, what’s the one piece of advice that you would give them to have a successful business? Stephanie Calahan shared that one advice that she would give is if you are lacking the human capital, systemize. There are so many different technologies out there that allow you to be fantastic at what you do. She then gave an example, when she first started her business; she was going back and forth in email with people anytime she wanted to schedule anything and she could have a lot of people going back and forth with at any given point trying to schedule a conversation on the phone or face to face and sometimes she dropped the ball because she would miss an email or her phone wouldn’t sync to her computer. That is a relationship gap when you don’t reply when you should and so one way that she automated that piece of it was to set up an online availability calendar that syncs with her calendar that is outlining when she’s available for different types of conversations. Let’s say she meets someone on a Facebook group and goes back and forth on messenger. Now, if she wants to schedule a conversation, she can say go to this URL and pick any time that works for you, you can trust that any time that’s on that calendar that shows available that she is also available and it eliminates that back and forth, it eliminates that unproductive time and allows her to have more time for the important things of the conversation and there is a lot of different things you can do within your business to automate different administrative functions and different operational functions so that you are freeing up more time to do the things that you really love to do.

When you talk about those businesses that don’t have a lot of human capital, there are some things where people interaction is critical and there are some things like scheduling a meeting that is really administrative and the technology is there that makes it so easy and so streamlined that it is a happier customer experience than the aggravation of all the back and forth. So it ultimately ends up being a better customer experience by automating that piece and frees you up to have more time to be able to do those pieces that are more important face to face or voice to voice.

  • One thing that is going on in Stephanie’s life right now that she is working on to develop herself and her people – she stated that the thing she has been working on for the last couple of months that she is the most excited about is something that came from a love of wanting to combine the concerns of people who are Podcast hosts, Radio Show hosts and the concerns of people that are guest on these shows. She is writing a book right now that is called Guest Appearance Gold: Sky Rocket Your Reach, Grow Your Influence and Attract Great Clients by Leveraging Your Guest Appearances and Expert Interviews and she was hearing from hosts that they have all of these guests on their shows and they don’t do anything to help promote the show, they just come on and do their thing and then they get off and that’s a frustration from the hosts perspective. She was also hearing from the guest expert side of going on these shows that it isn’t really doing a whole lot for their business and that’s largely because there’s this whole piece in the middle that’s missing that wasn’t being leveraged by the guest experts and so she has written that book and it started out as a simple check list and after 60 pages, she said it’s not really a simple check list anymore because she was giving a lot of why’s behind different things that people could do and so her intention when the book is done is to give it away because she would like more people to be able to really get the biggest return on investment and in this case it is a time investment that will benefit hosts of shows as well as benefit the people that are experts on those shows.

Stephanie stated that what is interesting about when you go on shows; it’s a two way customer service experience because the host is the customer of the guest but the guest is also the customer of the host, when you’re really working together then you can get amazing exposure for the conversation you had together which benefits everybody.

Links

 

Oct 4, 2016

Adam Toperek is an internationally recognized Customer Service Expert, Key Note Speaker, and Workshop Leader. He is the Author of “Be Your Customers’ Hero: Real-World Tips & Techniques for the Service Front Lines” as well as the founder of Customers that Stick Blog. When he is not speaking or delivering high energy Customer Service Key Notes or Workshops, he can be found co-hosting the “Crack the Customer Code Podcast” and writing extensively on customer experience. Adam has an MBA and a Certificate in Customer Experience; he is also a Net Promoter Certified Associate.

 

Questions

  • What is your Zodiac Sign?
  • Would you say being people oriented, outgoing and very sociable are true characteristics of your personality?
  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • On a global level, do you think there has been any improvement in customer experience or do you think it is getting worse?
  • How do you get people to develop a culture of service, a mindset where everything is in alignment with the customers in mind?
  • Have you found that sometimes empathy is lacking in terms of the organizations’ connection with their customers and do you think it’s driven by how people are brought up so they are not able to connect with the customer when they are venting?
  • In your book, you speak about 7 service triggers; can you share a little about that and explain what that means?
  • Do you think it’s important for the entire organization to be exposed to emotional intelligence so that they can be better able to manage their own emotions?
  • From a customer experience perspective, what are some considerations for entrepreneurs online to consider as it relates to customer experience and having a successful business?
  • What are your thoughts on training and does it have a different connotation in the mind?
  • How do you stay motivated everyday?
  • What is the one online resource, website, tool or app you cannot live without in your business?
  • Can you share what are some of that books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or your people?
  • Where can our listeners find your information?
  • What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

 

Highlights

 

  • Adam shared that his sign is Sagittarius which is the early part of December. One unique fact about a Sagittarius is that they are extremely out going, and they are very people oriented and very sociable. Adam stated that he was not sure of the characteristics of a Sagittarius but that he believes those are definitely true of a person who is very good at customer experience and customer service.
  • Adam stated that he is a 3rd generation entrepreneur, so business is in his blood. His grandfather owned a main street shoe store, his father started a wholesale business in the back of his mother’s retail children’s clothing store, so he grew up around business and doing sale tags and that has always been a part of who he is. As he opened his own businesses and went further along in his career, he eventually owned his retail business and got involved in franchising, one of the things he found was that in your own business, you could be the Chief Operating Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Plumbing Officer; you’re everything but the part he always gravitated towards was customer experience and customer interaction. And the more he interacted with his customers, he realized how important the idea of customer experience was. Over time he started talking about it and then writing about it publicly on blogs, it then developed a following, it developed into a book, then into speaking and into key notes. But what he finds fascinating is that the journey that lead him there comes from having to be face to face with customers and having to work with employees that are face to face with customers and seeing the challenges and the struggles they had to deliver good customer experiences even when they wanted to.
  • Adam stated that globally, expectations have changed; they are different from what they use to be and customers understand what good customer service is supposed to look like and then he also thinks customers sometimes have unrealistic expectations based on viral stories of customer service and that the customer is always right. These days customer service is the biggest source of competitive advantage for almost any organization. If you are not competing on experience, and you are in a competitive industry, you are in trouble.

Adam shared that to get business owners to focus on customer experience and develop their team members to translate that experience they deliver to the customers on a face to face basis, over the telephone or on social media, can only start with the numbers; there are many statistics that tends to open eyes. If you can use an organization’s own numbers that is helpful, you could use their survey data their ranking or their NPS. He stated 85% of customers are willing to pay more for a superior customer experience, your retention equals profit. There are 3 different studies that show acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5-10 times more expensive than retaining an existing one, yet most people put their time and energy into marketing instead of retention and customer experience efforts. Customer experience also affects moral and how their culture and employees feel and how they interact. Customer experience permeates the entire organization and you have to start with the numbers and the economic argument especially persons in the C-Suite, business owners or people higher up in their organization, they tend to be run by numbers.

  • Adam shared that one of the things is that you’ve got to do is walk the talk as a leader. If you don’t have a customer centric culture, if you’re not leading from the top, if what they see from you as a leader is that customers are numbers and customers aren’t people then they are not going to treat them like people. There is nothing you can do for employees if you don’t first start doing yourself. You have to help people understand that they are dealing with human beings and that what they do matters. Adam stated that he has a chapter in his book, “Be Your Customers’ Hero” called “Everybody’s Rushed, Everybody’s Stressed”, because nowadays nobody has enough time and those are our customers, they don’t want to be hassled, they want to have easy experiences. A lot of the time employees will say this is just another retail job and this doesn’t mean anything and this doesn’t matter and the thing is to have a purpose and a mission to make them understand that purpose and mission centers around making peoples day better whether you are selling t-shirts, selling medicine or online software, whatever the services are around that, you are making a difference in peoples’ lives, you are impacting peoples’ lives. When you help them connect and if you help them understand the human on the other side of the phone, desk or email; that is one of the first steps in getting them to have a customer centric attitude and to act on it.
  • Adam stated that there are a lot of factors at work like organizational and upbringing. He shared that one of the things he often teaches is that we are not biologically designed to be good at customer service. That is one of the reasons he focuses on training and why training is important. We have all of these things referred to as Cognitive Biases, there is negativity bias, human beings tend to look for negative information over positive information, we tend to give more weight and power to negative information instead of positive information and that makes sense, the brain’s job is to keep us alive. We have defense mechanisms, so when someone yells or screams at us, it is not natural for us to go, “Thank you for telling me sir, how can I help you better?” It is not a natural reaction, you have to train yourself to depersonalize, you have to train yourself to look at the other persons perspective not what they’re saying about you, not how you’re feeling. It is easy to empathize with somebody who is not being negative or who is not attacking you or your organization and it comes from caring and anybody that is built for caring or has been trained that the customer is important can find that empathy. It still is a trainable skill and it is still something you need to filter for because not every person should be in a customer facing role, there are some people that simply just should not have customer facing jobs but assuming that you have the right team, you have the right people on the bus, you can train empathy for easy situations but then you have to really train for them to not only empathize but depersonalize and to be able to be calm when the storm is coming and the communication skills and the techniques you need to help take that situation and move it down the road to a positive resolution.
  • Adam stated that what is really interesting about the service triggers is that they are a preventative tool. When you talk about customer service, everybody wants to solve the problem that they already have, “How do I deal with a difficult customer? How do I this?” The service triggers are designed to create fewer problems to deal with, so the idea of the trigger is based on our psychological mechanism and we all have those triggers that could have been from when a song comes on the radio and you start to feel emotional, you look back and say that was the song your grandmother used to sing to you when you were little because that’s a trigger for you. We all have these personal triggers whether they be positive or negative and there are certain triggers throughout the population that are service triggers that are hot buttons for people in customer service situations where they tend to get really upset. Adam identified (7) triggers and not everybody has them equally and not everybody has them but when you’re looking at it at an organizational level, what you do, is try to approach it by “How could we prevent these from being pulled?” The first two triggers are “Being ignored” and “Being abandoned.” You’ve walked into a restaurant and watched the hostess walk back and forth and not even make eye contact. Being abandoned, they say they can’t handle that for you and will have the manager call you back tomorrow and what happens tomorrow? Nobody calls you, and what happens when you call them? You’ve been abandoned; you’ve been left on hold for 30 minutes. And these are triggers, so this happens at a restaurant and it’s your favorite restaurant, you might say it was a bad night, a new hostess and you’ll give them a break. But if you go in a second time and the hostess ignores you, you’re not going to wait 3 minutes, you’re going to wait 30 seconds and what happens is that we have these triggers that we carry from organization to organization cause once you’ve been sent from department to department, and wasted hours trying to get answers to your questions, you can get quick on the trigger. So if you ever experience this in your customer experience life, the customer gets an employee and they are saying “I have to send you to a different department or have my manager call you” and they say “What’s the manager’s name? What time will they call? Who do I call if I don’t hear from them?” and then they start going through a list of things. That’s a trigger, they know they have been burned before, they’ve been shuffled (another trigger), they’ve been abandoned. So what we do is look at the customer journey, we look at each touch point in the journey, particularly the major ones and say, “How could a customer feel ignored here? Are they not greeted in time? Is the phone not picked up fast enough? How could a customer feel abandoned?” And when you go through all seven (7) service triggers, if you can prevent these seven service triggers, you can revolutionize your customer experience by starting there.
  • Adam shared that emotional intelligence has a frame work with it. It has to have the idea of being in touch with who you are and not only who you are but how you relate to customers. Adam Toporek in his book, stated that the first 3 sections are really about mindset because that’s how important it is. The first section is about the mindset of the customer service representative: how do we feel.

Everybody not only needs to come to grips with themselves and their own triggers and their own cognitive biases and their own ways of approaching customers and customer experience but also how they interact with each other, with their team, all of that mixes together to kind of create the perfect culture. Those are the things you strive for in creating a culture that is mixed with empathy across and throughout the organization and by looking inside yourself.

  • Adam shared that the first thing to do is to map your customer journey because small businesses never do that, solo entrepreneurs and consultants rarely ever sit down and say, “What is my customer’s journey?” “Where do people come in, what marketing are they seeing?” “Where are they finding me, my twitter, my blog, this podcast?” And then what happens “What expectations am I setting? What is my response time? What is the next thing that happens?” You then look at the journey and look at what you think it is now and what you want it to be, what do you want your customers to experience? What do you want your response time to be? And how often do you want to monitor your channels? How do you want to communicate with your customers? Where do you want your business to live, is it on Skype, on email? If you look at your journey and go through from beginning to end, every piece of your brand that a customer or prospective customer can touch and then you take the approach of looking at each touch point and saying, “How can I make this touch point great? How can I make sure I don’t mess it up?” Adam stated that one of the concepts he teaches is that he breaks up the touch points and pressure points because there is not enough time if you try to focus on everything, nothing is going to get done, he says we all say everything is important in customer experience and it is. You have to start with the big rocks, you look at the pressure points, what are the 3-5 big moments when you interact with the customer and it may be to close the sale, when they sign up for your programme, when they buy your speech, when they buy your product or when there is a customer service issue, look at those big pressure points first. Get those as tight and prefect and then work on as many touch points as you can.
  • Adam stated that he agrees with the concept of development rather than training as there have been a lot of bad training and there have been a lot of training when people sit in a class for a day or a half day or 3 days and then everything went back to normal but what is particularly harmful is when you have training and you don’t have the culture to support what they learn in the training. He stated that if a company brings him in and he gets the team jazzed up and ready to help customers and they have the skills and they are feeling more confident now on how to handle difficult customers, providing them with communication tricks, helping them to work on their mindset and then they go back to a culture where there is nothing but just rules and policies and managers that are yelling about numbers and nobody seemingly cares about customers, then you wasted your money because it won’t be effective.

Being customer centric and wanting to help the customers has to be in the DNA of the organization. And that resistance to training is because it is not part of the whole package, it’s just like “customer service is down, let’s get a trainer.” They are really not getting the whole suite and to fit a square peg into round hole – just will not work.

  • When asked how he stays motivated every single day - Adam shared that he just does as he has always been doing….staying goal oriented; he looks at his goals regularly. One of the things he does is try to stay healthy and fit as it makes all the difference. He has a treadmill desk, so staying healthy helps the mechanics of the internal motivation and also he loves what he does, he trains and teaches and he has always enjoyed teaching and he likes helping people solve problems and teaching people new things. When he can teach somebody how to deal with customer service, it’s not easy but some of what they are dealing with is easy and he can help, so it is really rewarding and that’s the biggest thing to teach people and to help people make their lives better and be more successful in their jobs.
  • One tool, website, resource or app that Adam shared he cannot live without because of all his travelling is TripIt. Trip It manages all his trips and he said it is insanely cool, so you get your email from your airline, you get your email from your hotel, just forward it to TripIt and it puts it in an itinerary with all of your codes and your confirmation numbers and the phone numbers and it puts everything in order, so it will do your flights, the hotel check in, then the flight and your hotel check out, it puts in the rental car. It also does alerts if your flights are running late, so instead of signing up with each different airline, you just send everything to TripIt and it alerts you. This app is available on App Store and Google Play Store.
  • When asked what are some books that have had the greatest impact on him - Adam shared “How To Win Friends & Influence People” by Dale Carnegie this book is about how you interact with people, how to treat people and how you communicate with people. Another book Adam shared that has had the greatest impact is called “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” by Cal Newport and his thesis is essential. Today one of the greatest things you can do if you are in a knowledge field, is take time to do deep work, to really focus on getting rid of the noise. The author really dives deeply into the idea and shows people how they have done it and different modules for doing it, that idea of really having focus time to work on projects and to think and create great things. He stated that it is a valuable book for him because it is what he believes in intuitively.
  • When asked what is one thing he is working on to develop himself or his people that he is really excited about - Adam shared that he is hitting a long-term goal as it is something that he always wanted to do but it never made the cut which is to create an online training because it is truly the future and it’s getting more virtual everyday and he is launching his first online customer service training course coming out the first week of September and he has a couple other concepts that he’s working on, so hopefully there will be 2 or 3 online training courses out by the end of 2016. The first one being released is based on the 7 service triggers.
  • Adam says listeners can find him online on any of the below links:

Customers That Stick Website

Adam Toporek Twitter

Adam Toporek LinkedIn

 

  • Adam shared his quote that he refers to in times of adversity and challenges and really contributes to his very own success - “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

 

  • The other is a poem called “If” by Rudyard Kipling.

 

Links

 

Sep 27, 2016

Chloë Thomas is an Author, International Speaker and Host of her own podcast, eCommerce MasterPlan Podcast. Chloë has been working in eCommerce since 2003, learning how to increase orders, up customer retention and recruit new customers cost effectively. Working with businesses from the High Street right down to start ups, eCommerce MasterPlan is the result of Chloë’s years of experience, the books, blogs and courses have all been created to help eCommerce business owners and Marketers to make the right decisions as they build their own path to eCommerce success. The eCommerce MasterPlan Podcast exists to bring a weekly dose of inspiration direct to the desk of eCommerce business people all over the globe. Power Retail Australia named Chloë as one of the 10 top eCommerce Commentators in the world and within 6 months of launch, the podcast was already the top eCommerce podcast in the UK. Chloë is also the Author of “Customer Manipulation: How to Influence your Customers to Buy More and why an Ethical Approach will Always Win.”

 

Questions

  • Tell us a little bit about yourselves and your journey
  • How do you feel about Customer Service in the UK?
  • Give 2 companies that you really admire in terms of they are doing customer service and doing it well
  • What are some everyday solutions you believe can help improve customer experience?
  • Can you share a little more about the book, what inspired you to write it and who the book is targeted to and how can it help them?
  • Do you find that companies are moving towards marrying the relationship between marketing and customer service? Or is there still a divide in terms of there is a marketing department separate from a customer service department?
  • How do you stay motivated every day?
  • What is the one online resource, website, tool or app you cannot live without in your business?
  • What are some books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • If you where sitting across the table from another business owner and they said to you that they feel they have great products and services but they lack the consistently motivated human capital, what advice would you give them to turn their team members and turn their business around to create more success?
  • In doing your research for your book Customer Manipulation, do you find that if the company has poor leadership, that it translates into a poor customer experience?
  • What is one thing you are working on right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or your people?
  • Where can our listeners find your information online?
  • What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

 

Highlights

  • Chloë grew up in the United Kingdom (UK) in a rural area called Cornwall (located right down the far South West of the UK), she stated the she was lucky to get into Oxford University and from there was lucky enough to get a job at Barclay’s Bank working in Marketing and quickly realized that smaller businesses is where she wanted to go. She left the very large bank and started to work in retail for a High Street Retailer in the UK and that sparked her love for data and marketing, and how you can improve results and optimize. Over the last 13 years she has been honing that skill until 4 years ago she launched eCommerce MasterPlan and so now 4 years and 4 books later here we are!
  • Chloë stated that she thinks that the UK is okay at Customer Service but is nowhere as amazing as it is in America. She said one of her favourite things to do in America is to go to the mall and find a nice Department store and wander around until someone goes “Can I help you?” It is just amazing how they care about you. There’s more customer service ethics in America, it is more valued as a job in the Hospitality and Retail Sector but in the UK, eCommerce Sector, it has been heartening over the last 12-18 months to hear everyone from the smallest to the largest businesses talking about how important it is to listen to the customer and to deliver what the customer needs and that’s a real turning point because up until then the conferences were just full of bright, shiny, exciting new pieces of tech and clever marketing campaigns but now, everyone’s talking about the customer and that’s a real benefit. Chloë stated that there is a paradigm shift in terms of how people are being more adjusted to customer experience. It’s because the industries have come of age, they are no longer in that early adaptor stage and now moved into an early majority at which point people have got to stop trying to be bright and shiny, you’ve got to say, “We are great at what we do, this is who we are, this is why you should buy from us and why you should buy our products.” Which is more powerful and interesting and quite a relief for her as a consumer as well.
  • After asking Chloë if she could share with us one or two companies that she would recommend as offering great customer service – she lightly shared that she will share some unconventional companies as possibly everyone is expecting her to share Zappos and Amazon. Chloë shared that the companies that she admires are Project Repat (https://www.projectrepat.com), an American company who turns t-shits into blankets, so they’ll take all your old college t-shirts, cut them up and sew them up into a blanket and send them back to you. They really nailed one of the most powerful ways in eCommerce of helping customers, which is to gather the email addresses as quickly as you can and then build a phenomenal welcome sequence. What they are doing is absolutely fascinating on that clear focus and their welcome emails are beautiful. They listen and respond to what the customer is worried about. The other is a UK company called Miso Tasty (https://misotasty.com/#) which sells Miso Soup which Chloë says she thinks is a brilliant business name. They spend a lot of time getting their product right and they realize they’re going to be bringing new flavor sensation to the UK, it is an Asian flavoring that they are not used to. She stated that what she loves about Miso Tasty is the way the products are structured; they reduced the risk to a customer buying, not wanting to spend £20 (which is difficult) on buying this thing to try it out. What they have created is a 2 soup pack that only costs £2 and they can do free postage and packaging. So for customers to try out their products on their website, it only costs them £2 and that’s less than the cost of a pint of beer and it’s just amazing how they thought of the customer’s journey.
  • Chloë shared that often people think Customer Service and they immediately think of the Call Centre down the corridor but real Customer Service embodies the entire process and experience with your business – it is everyone’s responsibility to do true customer service and that is why she truly appreciates the 2 businesses mentioned above Project Repat ad Miso Tasty. For example - It is not about waiting for someone to pick up the phone and say, “How long do I have before getting those T-Shirts to you before I have to buy again?” – they have listened and placed it in the welcoming email so they provide that knowledge to the customer without them having to call up. Chloë says of course there is a financial benefit to the fact you will get more conversions and less people having to answer the phone but there is the whole embracing of that experience through your marketing, strategies and products which is really important.
  • Chloë shared some everyday solutions that she believes can help improve Customer Experience is everything really. She shared that she thinks a couple of really simple tools would be User Testing usertesting.com which is a fantastic site where you can go and just put up almost a job where someone from a certain segment of the population takes a look at your website and answers some questions. For example – you could put your website up there and say buy a lawnmower and then you get a video of that person trying to buy a lawnmower on your website and talking you through it and it is such a great way because sometimes we all sit around with great ideas saying, “Oh I think we should do this website, or oh I think we should do this with the website…” but to actually get some real human data on how someone who has never seen your business before is struggling with it is a great way of improving your user experience. It is great because if you have been looking at your analytics and you find people are dropping off somewhere or they are not going to that page and you can’t figure out why…..User Testing is a great fast track to solving that problem!
  • Chloë then shares the other everyday solutions she would recommend for a business is Web Chat Services – that service that pops up on a website and says, “May I help you?” She shares this one in the UK is getting a lot of big players in eCommerce, they are playing around and working out how best to use it, rather than thinking of it as a customer service tool, think of it as a sales tool as well. When they notice places where people are getting stuck, they’ll activate it and say, “Can we help you?” or “What’s happening?” Usually found on product pages or elsewhere so they are creating a very tailored service for the customer and that is something which is a really easy solution, it doesn’t cost much to put in place and it’s something that even a small business can do and can make a massive difference to customer service and therefore the sales.
  • Chloë shared that the reason she called the book “Customer Manipulation” is because as it all gets more competitive online and consumers are able to voice their opinions so much more easily and as marketers we want to be successful. We need to embrace the fact that every email sent is aiming to manipulate someone to buy from us, every tweet we send is aiming to manipulate someone to think better about us. If we can embrace that then we can get under the skin of the science of manipulation and the way of using manipulation but it is our choice whether we manipulate for good or for evil. If you choose to manipulate for evil then you are very quickly going get found out and it will be the end of your business. Chloë also shared the inspiration for her book and she says it had been a few years since she has done a big book and she had this model that she sometimes refers to as the “Customer Journey” or the “Customer MasterPlan” lurking around in her head and making its way onto slides, chats with clients and networking and then finally it was ready to be turned into a book. The role of the model is to help people, rather than thinking they need to do Social Media or to think they have a problem turning visitors from their website into enquirers to people who have given their email address and what is the best way of solving that problem. Can Social Media have an impact on it and which part of Social Media might it be? It’s kind of another way of the industry growing up rather than thinking oh email, oh Social Media, oh pop ups, it’s about thinking this is our current problem and the problem is turning visitors into enquirers, it’s getting people to the website, it’s getting enquirers to become first time buyers, it’s getting first time buyers to become repeat buyers and what are the ways for doing that. The book is structured into the 5 stages of getting people from those different customer relationship levels to the next one and filled with changes you can make to your website, improvements you can make to customer services, improvements you can make to marketing and also to your products where relevant to take you up and to encourage your customers to move between those customer relationship levels.
  • Chloë says everything that she writes is for the small business owner, so someone with a team of less than 10 and usually for a team less than 5. It is very much for an owner/ head of marketing to help them work out where they should be deploying their resources and lots of ideas of what they can do. However, she knows bigger businesses and other persons have used the book to improve relations in heir B2B’s.
  • Chloë thinks the businesses that are doing customer service well and who will do well in the future are seeing it as one group (Marketing and Customer Service), you may have different departments but they are finding ways to make sure they are working together because there are so many over laps and if you want to do customer service well, it’s got to be through everything you do in the business. Chloë shared that on her podcast a couple episodes back (Episode 55) – she had the head of Brand from Tesco, one of the five largest retailers in the world (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/055-tescos-tamara-duschl-talks/id1005744797?i=1000371058713&mt=2) - she asked her guest just out of interest on the eCommerce side what does the eCommerce team do and what does the Marketing team do as per getting people to the website. The guest stated the eCommerce team sits in one building and they look after the website and Marketing team looks after the promotions and the traffic and they are in a different building. So Chloë shares Tesco does have a way to go as you can’t mothball the conversation – everyone needs to be integrated for a seamless Customer Experience.
  • In asking Chloë how she stays motivated everyday she stated that she is just very lucky to be doing something that she loves and has spent some time over the last few years working out how to structure her days and her work load so that they suit her and having to do the things she likes and not having to do the things she doesn’t. She stated that motivation is something that comes naturally and wished she understood it as she reckons she could write that book but she can’t explain it.
  • Chloë shared that the app that she use frequently is Asana (asana.com) , which is a team and task management tool for organizing. She uses it to organize herself and part-time/out-source people in her business. She further stated in her business that it is her and a lot of part time people so it does keep it all together. There is a web version and also available as an App.
  • Chloë shares that 2 books that have had the biggest impact on her are: “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less” by Greg McKeown which is all about prioritization and working out what you should be focused on in your business and your life. It helps you on the journey to becoming a person who knows how to prioritize as well as giving you tricks and tips along the way. The other book she loves is “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” by Susan Cain which is all about introvertism. She stated that this book helped her to embrace who she is and to learn how to make the most out of it. Chloë shared she is an extremely introverted person and that book helped her tremendously.
  • In answering our question on what’s the one piece of advice she would give a business owner who lacks the constantly motivated human capital – Chloë lightly shared she would just change the people as often times it is easier to motivate new people than old ones but that’s not very possible at times due to legislation and other things. Therefore, Chloë shared that is starts at the core, what is the vision of the business, what is the mission, and what are the values. Often times when businesses take a leap forward or an about turn from a bad pathway, it’s because they got really clear about what their vision and mission is and they have reintegrated that into the business and got that back to the heart of what they do. If you can get your people embracing that and believing that and understanding this is what they do then it becomes a lot more straight forward.
  • Our trigger question for Chloë was how did she feel leadership and the lack there of translates into a poor customer experience – she shared she thinks that a business with poor leadership will struggle with delivering good customer services. She made reference to Tesco, stating the problems they have had with falling profits and sales was because the leadership got lost and they lost track of where their mission was and the vision and what they brought to the world. They quickly realized unless they go back to their roots, they are finding they are getting the success back again. That would be an example of where bad leadership led to a decline in customer experience and now they are turning it around.
  • When we asked Chloë what’s the one thing she is excited about that is going on in her life right now - she stated this is her favourite time of the year when this podcast is being recorded (August) that she is not traveling for conferences for a few weeks so she is excited about analyzing lots of data, doing reports and surveys to work out what is the next thing she should do. She is weighing some options as to what her customers need her to produce next in terms of should it be an online course, should it be a Master Mind group, should it be a Membership Site or maybe even another book. She’s super excited about all that probably for launch in January 2017.
  • Chloë says listeners can find her on her website eCommerce MasterPlan Website , she also shared the best way to get in touch with her is through Linked In and Twitter (@chloe_ecmp).
  • Chloë shared that the quote that she always uses to keep her focused during times of adversity and challenges is “Keep Optimizing” (a quote she came up with) which reminds her that if something hasn’t worked, then that’s okay because we’re just going to optimize it, we’re going to learn and move forward, or if she is trying to make something too perfect before putting it live, she’ll remember this quote.

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!

 

Links

Sep 20, 2016

Brian is the founder of Brian K. Wright International whose mission is to motivate and inspire others to discover their unique talents and follow their dreams in life. With extensive experience teaching and training in academics and corporate environments, he understands that many people live far beneath their potential, primarily because they don’t believe they deserve success. Through his experience and research, Brian has learnt and practiced the principles he teaches in his book Student Leadership Strategies: 21 Easy Ways to Become a Center of Influence in Your Group. Brian is also the host of the Internet Radio Talk Show Success Profile Radio on the Rock Star Radio Network. Brian holds a Degree in Communication Studies and holds a Master’s Degree in Adult Education from the University of Nebraska in London. He discovered a passion for speaking and influencing audiences by speaking competitively in High School and College and by being heavily involved on campus while in school.

 

Questions

  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • Can you give an overview of some of the topics in your book?
  • How do you feel about customer service as a customer yourself?
  • What are two (2) everyday solutions that you believe that can help improve customer experience on a global level?
  • How do you stay motivated everyday?
  • What is the one online resource, website, tool or app you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • In helping to write books, do you help clients from conceptuality throughout the writing process?
  • What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or your people?
  • Where can our listeners find you?
  • What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

 

Highlights

  • Brian stated that he got his Degree in Adult Education at the University of Nebraska and taught at a Business College for almost 5 years where he taught Public Speaking, English Composition, and Business Mathematics (a really fun combination of classes). He expressed when someone is taking a class that is required – you have to make it fun. He further expressed that he taught at this college and even though it was a private college they ran it as a business. He also shared that most of the students that attended the school were non-traditional aged students. He stated that he wrote resumes to help people find jobs which was fun. Fast forward a few years later, he moved to Phoenix, Arizona and is now hosting a personal development radio show entitled “Success Profiles Radio” where he interviews world class achievers and learns how they succeeded and what they overcame and what lessons we can learned from that. A few of the persons he has interviewed includes Darren Hardy, Jack Canfield, Dr. John Demartini from “The Secret”, Laura Longmire, Sharon Lechter and James Malinchak – ABC Secret Millionaire.
  • Brian stated that “Student Leadership Strategies: 21 Easy Ways to Become a Center of Influence in Your Group” is his first book and has been out for a little while. He stated that when writing the book, he wanted it to appeal to young people. Brian says that he thinks leadership is absent in a lot of arenas and the types of people that are in leadership positions maybe can do a better job or they are very self serving and that is not leadership and he wanted to write a book about that. At the beginning, he started to ask himself what makes a great leader?  And his goal was to come up with 21 answers to the question. He ended up with 30 and as he started writing, he realized that some of the topics were similar and those 30 topics turned into 21, so he was thankful that he still made his goal. The number one thing that he wrote about was that excellent leaders have a vision for the future.
  • Brian stated when you think of Gene Roddenberry, creator of the Star Trek series, he just created this whole entire vision for what he thought the future should be like, an opportunity for people to explore space, somewhat Utopian! Brian even gave mention to the Wright Brothers who created the first airplane and Elon Musk as a modern day example who created PayPal and changed the platform and functions of eCommerce completely and even created Tesla and SpaceX.
  • When you can have people buy into your vision, you’re going to be much more successful because no great leader can accomplish anything by themselves. Just like politicians, they have to sell their vision of what they want to do in order to get elected and get enough people to believe in that vision and that’s an amazing accomplishment, which leads to another thing that is important to being a successful leader and that is the idea of networking. And going back to the political example, you have to have a huge rolodex of people you can count on in order to accomplish anything. The key is not just getting them to do what you want to do but getting them to believe that what you want them to do is something that they also want to do. He also stated that excellent leaders make people feel welcome in their presence. If you’re a leader and you don’t feel comfortable following someone or you don’t feel comfortable with way that the leader is acting, you are not going to stick around for long so helping people feel comfortable in your presence means creating a culture and that is something you help people buy into. Brian shared most people like certain companies better based on the Culture they have created. In his examples he shared if you have a company that has theme days, a vending machine or foosball table in the break room – these small components help to set your company culture apart. Creating an environment of fun and that is welcoming where people want to continue coming and that’s what excellence leaders do.
  • Brian shared as a customer he has had some good and bad experiences. He stated that what really gets to him is when people don’t listen which is one of his biggest pet peeves. A question is being asked and they are not answering the question being asked or they are answering the question they feel like answering. This mostly is because they have a script, they don’t really know, so they just fall back to a script that they are comfortable with. A customer may request to speak with a supervisor and sometimes people are happy to pass the call over and other people may get a little upset because they want to help but they are not being helpful, people want to speak with someone that can answer a specific question. He shares that what irritates him the most is when he would have to be calling over and over for an on-going issue and no one bothered to take notes about the first call. He mentioned a situation that happened and he had spent 45 minutes on the call with a representative, when he called back a few months later for a follow up on the issue that he spoke about before, he asked about the company fee’s for what they were doing for him and the answer he got from the first representative was great but then when he called back the second time and asked the same question, that representative stated that there are no notes about that, he was not happy that he had spoken about that issue for 30 minutes out of the 45 minutes conversation that he had with the representative. He felt annoyed the representative didn’t think to make notes. Brian also mentioned that if you say that you will follow up with a phone call or an email about a resolution, do what you can to make that happen and follow up. Making proper notes and listening are absolutely critical in customer service.
  • Brian recommend that business owners should spend a day in the trenches with their team so that they can see and hear exactly what is going happening on a daily basis. You get to meet the people on your team; you get to learn what they are going through every single day. Let them train you as to what they are doing and why they are doing it and if you sit with enough people in one day where you take some calls, you will get a much better sense of what’s going on with your team and then you can make training recommendations. That will be outstanding because you be able to feel and experience what your team is feeling and experience or even better you could be a mystery shopper, call your company, call your customer service departments and see how they treat you, see how they handle things. Mystery shop your company to see the kind of experience you are receiving to see if it is aligned with your mission and use it as a training opportunity for your company to do better. Brian shared if your company is interested in doing better and performing at a world-class level – you will engage and do some mystery shopping on your business and then move into some well-needed training.
  • Brian stated that staying motivated has to do with hanging around persons who have similar goals and missions. He mentioned a quote by Jim Rohn “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” If you are not experiencing financial success, look at the 5 people you are hanging around, chances are they aren’t either. If you’re 30 pounds overweight and you wish you have a better body, look at the 5 people you are hanging around, they are probably eating oreos on the couch after work too. If you want to lose weight…..find 5 people who look great, feel great, have a handle on they’re eating pattern and ask them what they are doing, ask them for advise even get a personal trainer if you need to. People who want to help you become a better sales person, people who want to help you with online marketing, so if you want to learn those things, know who you can tap into and get some help with.

Brian also mentioned that he enjoys walking and running out in nature but in Arizona it is too hot so he is a member at a gym. He says he is able to enjoy his own thoughts when he walks and runs. He further believes that if you take care of yourself and who you are; you will have much to give to others very much like when you travel and the Flight Attendant states in her safety briefing place the mask on yourself first and then help the passenger next to you – you must be able to help yourself first before you can help others.

  • Brian shared that the one app that he frequently uses and cannot live without in his business is Facebook. He stated that the guests that he gets for his Podcast show is mostly through Facebook and people that he admires and he also receives guest referrals. He stated that he also helps people write their books, so there is a lot of dialogue through Facebook as well. Brian said that he hasn’t done any ads via Facebook as yet; he has been talking with persons and will be starting that soon. Brian says he believes everyone has a book inside him or her; he helps them find their story within and helps them connect and find a way to connect with the world.
  • Brian stated that he does help with the conceptuality of writing books, as he believes that everyone has a book inside them somewhere, somehow. He talks with them about their topic and what makes their topic unique. So if they want to write a book on customer service as an example, there are many books about that, it’s a very common topic. So he would ask, what spin would they place on that topic that would make their book interesting to read and would not be like the other books out there? And that would be an exploration of their background and what they’ve gone through. He coaches them on what topics that can be talked about in the book, create on outline together and the life stories that they would share because people relate to stories kind of how Jesus taught through his parables. He also stated that he helps with the self-publishing aspects as well, he has resources for format and layout of the book, designing the book cover and also printing of the book.
  • When we asked Brian what’s the one thing that he is excited about and working on in his life to develop himself or his people right now, he happily shared that he is currently working on a book called “Conversations with High Achievers.” He has some of the interviews transcribed and he is doing some editing as well as he has some extra writing to do and hoping to release the eBook version before December 2016. Just the idea that the book could be a huge springboard for more speaking opportunities and for an opportunity to do a live event someday and having some of these great speakers come to speak at his event is exciting and also providing opportunity for people to learn and develop themselves. He says as he re-visits all of these great interviews that he has been reviewing – he has learned so much and it has been a huge blessing for him. Brian shares listening to interviews with successful people is one major thing people can do to develop themselves.
  • Brian says listeners can find him on

Facebook - www.facebook.com/Success-Profiles-Radio-166132613536941/

Twitter - www.twitter.com/MrBriankwright

Radio Show Page - toginet.com/shows/successprofilesradio

Personal Website - www.briankwright.com

Email - brian@briankwright.com

 

  • We asked Brian for one quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge helps him to re-focus and re-engage - Brian said he had a moment earlier this week where he was feeling overwhelmed by things and he recalls a verse from the Bible Isaiah 43:19, as he frequently reads the Bible – “Behold, I will do anything for you. He stated that it is a promise that is given and means that you are not going to stay where you are forever, something new is on the horizon for you, something wonderful, something great, something fantastic that will change your life.

 

Links

 

Sep 13, 2016

Tony Bodoh is a #1 best selling author and he’s the founder and co-founder of 5 companies ranging from Customer Experience Consulting to Small Business Training to Television, he easily navigates the International stage, speaking at both personal growth seminars as well as the Uber Nerdy Technology conferences. Tony writes his business blogs, personal growth essays and children’s stories. While he now coaches executives, he has taught High School for 1 year and in the Business Department of Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee for 7 years. As a passion believer in the power and possibility that is contained in each moment of the human experience to alter the course of history; Tony financially supports the building of sustainable villages in Africa and Haiti.

 Tony learned at an early age the power of listening and letting people know they have been heard. He started a lawn care business at 11 years old, while his friends had 1 or 2 lawns to cut; Tony kept busy all summer with 16 clients including the local Post Office and Post Master’s lawn. He learned that while quality lawn care mattered, most people just wanted to connect and be acknowledged for who they are.

Questions

  • Tell us a little about yourself and your journey
  • As a Customer Service Consultant, what do you think are 3 challenges that people face why their customer experience is not consistent in their business?
  • What are some everyday solutions that you believe that can help improve customer experience on a global level?
  • How do you stay motivated?
  • What is one online resource, website, tool or app you cannot live without in your personal life or business?
  • Do you think that customer experience is linked to a company’s bottom line?
  • What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or your people?
  • Where can our listeners find your information?
  • What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

 

Highlights

  • Tony started by sharing that he grew up in Central Wisconsin, it was a place where there was not much exposure to the outside world. When he went off to college in Virginia, he began to see the world that he didn’t know existed and it lead him to start asking questions and really looking deeper into what he wanted to do with his life. He then got a Liberal Arts Degree as that was the path he was on. He shortly realizes that he wanted to run multiple businesses and went and got his MBA. He worked several corporate jobs for large companies where he built analytical systems. While on that journey building those systems, he learned things that he could do to look at data and understand behaviour from data. Tony was given the opportunity to take over the customer experience world in the hospitality company he worked for to do surveys and understand what the guests and meeting planners were saying. Tony started a consulting company in 2009, which focuses on customer experience and was able to bring growth to other businesses that he started. It has spread from the customer experience consulting to small business training and consulting and now building businesses in the television industry.
  • Tony stated the challenges people face why their customer experience is not consistent in their businesses is the human connection – the shared experience that an employee has with a customer or a leader has with an employee is what drives the value for the customer. We talked about the customer’s side and that it starts with the leader and employee and the engagement they have with each other and how they are connecting. Also, the ability to listen, often times we are caught up in our own lives and our minds are distracted. The employee may come to work and because of the challenges in their life they get distracted and are not playing at the top of their game. They are not able to connect in the same way. He also mentioned that there is a disconnection if you don’t believe in the products or services you’re offering and you don’t have the confidence to speak boldly about it. If you don’t believe that you can solve a problem that a customer has, that is a huge disconnection as well. If you’re not unreasonable in your commitment to the product and services that you offer and commitment to solve a problem, you are not going to have a consistent experience over time.

 

  • On a global level, he believes that people need to experience the product that they are working with, the company that they are working for needs to be willing to invest in their people. Anywhere from 50% to 85% of a customer’s experience is based on the connection they make with the person. Connection is #1 and you have to hire the right people who know how to connect and you have to train them up from there. So you want to keep that skill set growing, keep finding ways for them to connect with challenging people, with people in different scenarios or even if they are having a bad day, how do they build up their emotional ability to connect and to take control. Mindset training is one of the biggest things a company can do.

 

Tony also stated that as a company, we should be asking what is it that our customers are feeling? What do we want them to feel? If we want them to feel this way, what benefit will move them there and what features create those benefits. Do that and we will end up with an amazing product that people will say, how did you do that? It’s because you started with the end in mind.

 

  • Tony shared that he keeps motivated by running multiple businesses; there is a lot of stuff going on, so one of the things he does every morning is visualization and meditation.

 

“Visualization is geared towards what is it that I am grateful for and what is it I want to achieve today, what are my intentions for the day. And a part of that is to always focus on the abundance around me. Sometimes we get easily caught up with everything, instead just allowing the abundance to flow.”

 

  • Tony shared that the one app/tool that he frequently uses is Evernote. He is a huge fan as he is able to put every idea, blogs, emails and anything he can in Evernote. It also enables him to upload video and pictures as well. He uses Evernote because he has a lot of ideas to pull from whilst dealing with his clients.

 

  • He mentions that customer experience is not about statistics, we can use it to measure but it is about a particular experience in the moment. As it is only in the moment that we have the power to change our trajectory whether it’s our personal life, as a leader or as a business. We can’t change it in the past, we can’t change it in the future, and we only have this moment.

 

Tony stated that Customer Experience is the opportunity to turn this world around in so many ways because when people have good experiences just even a smile or a connection with the person behind the counter, if we were all a little more empathetic, it would change the world. When someone experiences an act of kindness or another person sees an act of kindness or someone does an act of kindness all of this leads to a better world.

 

 

  • Tony shares that he is currently working on a project called Beast Mode Live. He is working with one of the leading mental performance coaches in professional athletics, who has worked with Olympians and they are taking the principles that he has taught for years to professional athletes and bringing it to corporate life and using it with team members in his company. They are now bringing it into the US military on a global scale. They are doing it where it is not funded by the Federal Government or the Politicians but by corporate sponsors so that they can help the military. Tony says, “We are really passionate about it because we have found that 35 - 40% of the military that have completed the service, end up leaving the service and they don’t have a job and many times end up homeless. The sponsorship will help them to touch every member of the military, so that they are at a higher level of performances and when they leave the service they will have control over the money and their emotions and can go out there and do something great because they have done such great service already. Most of them have never had a job outside of the military because they went in right after high school and college and so they don’t understand how their skill sets translate into the corporate life and they want to help them with that. They don’t understand how their skill sets translate into the corporate world. He says this is definitely a passion project and they are putting a ton of effort into it. Tony Bodoh believes that mindset is where everything starts at because that is how he changed his own life.

 

www.twitter.com/TonyBodoh

www.linkedin.com/in/tonybodoh

 

  • Tony shares that this is a quote he has been using lately and it’s from his mentor. She shared it with him in a time where he wasn’t seeing the results he wanted to see in a particular area of his life, he sometimes go back to it as he has it is on his desk.

“If the thinking and actions you’ve been doing produced what you were in love with, I’d say keep at it but clearly it’s time to wire a new set of thoughts and then grow them through reputation into new and more expansive results.”

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!

New Online Course - Mastering Customer Experience and Increasing Your Revenue - 50% off for all who sign up in September.....A Must Have Course for all Business Owners, Entrepreneurs - http://bit.ly/50OFFMCXIR

LINKS:

www.tonybodoh.com

www.twitter.com/TonyBodoh

“Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics” by Richard Thaler

  “The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be” by Jack Canfield

Sep 6, 2016

Jenny Green Powers is the CEO of Running With Heels. Running With Heels is a New York Invitation Only Society for the “On-th-Go” “In-the-Know” Women Executives and Entrepreneurs. It is a members-only event series designed to elevate your personal and professional life through curated connections and inspiring conversations.

Jenny is a lifelong New Yorker and she is a graduate of the New York University and she doesn’t believe in strangers only people she hasn’t met as yet. In 2012, she became extremely tired of and exhausted in attending a series of awkward and just plain awful networking events and so she set out to create a different kind of Networking Event, one where women were excited to attend and left feeling educated, entertained, empowered and eager to attend future events.

As a first step she hosted a focus group and the criteria to participate was that YOU had to be a workingwoman who hated networking and networking events! These women were not hard to find, they were everywhere and they were all too happy to share why networking made them cringe. Armed with their plentiful feedback, Jenny took their advice and re-created the traditional networking event and Running with Heels was born. Today she hosts Women Networking events for women who hate networking and they love them. She is also mom to a lovely little girl who says she is going to be the President of the United States when she grows up whereupon she intends to move The White House to Brooklyn Heights.

  • Jenny Powers started by sharing that she was the Vice President of a non-profit organization for a decade and she was going to networking events to just meet colleagues of other non-profits, potential donors and she realized the networking events just had this “salesy” feeling to them, everyone was just pressing business cards into your palm, everyone felt uneasy like they were being sold to. Jenny shared even though as consumers we all like to buy, no one likes to be sold to. Jenny shared that it was at this point she realized “Networking needed a Facelift.” Jenny shared that there are so many different industries that have dynamic changes from year-to-year and she said networking is not one of them. She further emphasized that networking has been the same forever and that she was sick of the “old boys club” and she was sick of the women events that she was going to that felt like sororities and that is when she brought the focus group together to find out what women wanted to see in a networking event and what they did not like. She then explained that is exactly how she built the first platform for Running with Heels based on the feedback she collected.
  • Jenny shared the top 3 main reasons coming out of the feedback why the women hated the networking events. They hated because they felt as if they were being sold to, they did not feel as if it was authentic, they felt like people were coming to simply fill their quota. There was no time for that Know, Like and Trust Factor. It was just like everyone was being looked at like a cheque book. Jenny also shared there wasn’t any agenda and you go in and get a name tag and you move around aimlessly, there was no programme and so you just wait to be spoken to and if you went alone it can feel very uncomfortable and awkward. So that is when she created a format for Running with Heels and so all of her events has speakers which allows you to come and get educated but it also serves as an ice breaker for when seated together to all hear the same conversation and discuss the topic afterwards. Jenny said the final reason for women hating the networking events was there is either no food or bad food. Jenny then said as a result most of their events now are dinner parties. What she identified was most women would come along and be standing holding their briefcase, coat, gym bag, umbrella in their heels extremely uncomfortable. Now you can check everything in when you arrive and sit down at a table. Jenny says that she pre-matches all of her guests with different dinner companions. The example she gave was if I attended one of her events - I would be seated with five (5) different women that Jenny thought I should know based on my profile, however, at each course during the meal I would sit with another five women. She believes the awkwardness would be minimized because I would be already seated with people matched for me.
  • Yanique shared that she does not really enjoy attending networking events and she feels there is usually never a direct strategy to actively engage the participants/attendees to engage in conversation with each other. Jenny agreed and added that is one of the reasons why she has a strict agenda that focuses on the guests being strategically seated in order to eliminate that awkwardness.
  • Jenny shared that if you are in business, regardless of what business it is - you are always in Customer Service. Jenny says that she thinks Customer Service can always be improved upon. Jenny says that for her whether as a client or for her own clients - she wanted to treat everyone like a VIP. She says it is indeed true when someone is happy they will tell someone but they are unhappy they tell everyone.
  • Jenny shared that curating the guest list and paying such attention to detail for the pairings has been critical to the success of Running with Heels. Jenny shared when she just started one of her clients who was at the time her business coach said, “This is first event I have ever gone to that I don’t want to leave.” Jenny said in a 2-hour dinner - her client shared that she ended up calculating that she brought in over US $16,000.00 worth of business. Jenny shared that she wasn’t handing out business cards, writing down names etc. but instead having these authentic conversations with people that followed up with her, hired her for coaching and then referred her. So in one event she saw US $16,000.00 of revenue and has been coming to Running With Heels events for four (4) years now.
  • Jenny shared that right now - she's running the business as a “One Woman Show” with her assistant but she has plans to have pop up events in other major cities around the United States and see if the Running with Heels brand will be a success there. Jenny is very committed to spreading the word on more people knowing that Networking is all about building relationships.
  • Jenny’s first tip for business owners to be a success with Customer Experience is to ask and ask often. Jenny shared that she believes women in particular believe that asking may appear as if they don’t know how to do something or make them seem vulnerable. Jenny says that for her asking actually shows a sign of strength. Jenny says many times women are told to just do everything yourself, or fake it until you make it but asking for something is actually okay. Jenny says her #2 tip is about accountability, being a soloproneur - it can be hard as you do not have a board of directors or mentors…so who do you have? Jenny says for her having a Mastermind is critical - she said Masterminds are not new as explained in “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. Jenny said her mastermind is her brain trust. Jenny says she has a mastermind comprising of four (4) persons who meet monthly and they do deep diving and it allows you to talk about things in your business and get into the weeds. Jenny’s #3 tip is try it….you only fail if you quit! She said her favourite quote in the world is “Never be afraid of something new remember amateurs built the arc, professionals build the Titanic.” Author Unknown 
  • Jenny said that she reached out to her network of persons, not necessarily her clients or persons that she was close to but someone who had a podcast that she loved and another person that had a book she really liked - people who were doing things that she wanted to do. She reached out to them and explained that she wanted to start a group so she could have an accountability partner and it was a great match. One of the two ladies that Jenny reached out to brought someone else into the group - when they all sat down and looked at their strengths; they realized they were lacking a member that had a strong financial background and that’s when they found their final partner - Farnoosh Torabi of the So Money Podcast. Farnoosh has written five (5) books on finance - many of them for millennials and even one for women breadwinners. So Jenny recommends just going into your network and finding people you admire and people who have done something already that you want to do. Jenny suggests no more than five persons for a Mastermind group. She shared that she loves doing her Mastermind in person but it can also be done via Skype, Zoom or just a conference call. She says there is just something about those monthly in person meetings that just cannot be replaced.
  • Jenny says that she loves to read and she is always in hand or have a book in her handbag. Jenny says that she is always reading self - improvement books as they confirm things she already knows or she has the opportunity to learn new things. Jenny says another big motivation for her is self-care - she says she sees so many women entrepreneurs with families who always put themselves on the back burner. Her example was when you travel and the chief flight attendant/purser announces place the mask over yourself first and then help the person seated next to you is a key example of placing yourself first. Jenny says, “Every morning when I wake up I ask myself what oxygen mask am I going to put on today and what is going to take care of me so that I can be a better wife, mother and business owner?” It could be meditation, reading one of these self-improvement books but self-care is very important.
  • Jenny shared that the one app/website that she absolutely cannot live without is LinkedIn - Jenny says that she is a huge evangelist of LinkedIn and it is how she has gotten most of her clients as it is an invitation only society - you can profile the persons that you will be connecting with. She has secured almost all of her speakers through LinkedIn. Jenny has her own podcast “Broadcast: Broads Building Businesses” for the past year and she has gotten most of her guests through LinkedIn.
  • Jenny shares one tip she would recommend for entrepreneurs using LinkedIn - she shared there is that default message that goes out when you send a request - “I would like to add you to my LinkedIn network” - but Jenny says that is just the lazy way out as you could be sitting there clicking on 100 people. Jenny says if she is sending a request for someone to be a speaker she will explain in her request that she came across their profile and they seem like great fits for one another’s business and she would love to have them as a speaker and that she wants to connect with them and share some more information. This way her message is not perceived as this random arbitrary thing that seems it is just another standard message sent to everyone else. She further shared it is the same approach she takes when someone reaches out to her with some specific details as to why they are connecting.
  • Jenny says the best advice that she could give to a 9-5er looking to launch on the entrepreneur road is surround yourself with people who have done what you want to do.
  • Jenny shares one thing she is super excited about is that she already runs Live Masterminds in New York called Running with Circles and it is framed after the Mastermind that she developed for her own personal group but what she is even more excited about is that she is going to start doing Virtual Masterminds Online as a way to connect with people around the globe. Jenny says the Virtual Masterminds Online will start in October 2016 and promotions for this programme will start in September 2016.
  • Jenny explains what inspired the name of her company - “Running With Heels” - she says as women we all know that we are running everywhere and usually running in high heels. She said it all started when she was in this high end shoe store in New York City, Bergdorf Goodman and she was trying on these expensive heels and it is a very sophisticated, serene and quiet atmosphere and she was in there all of a sudden and she stood up in the shoes and she thought to herself….”the only way I am going to buy these shoes is if I am able to run in them because I run everywhere - to the subway, to pick up her daughter from school” and so she did a bit of a sprint around the sofa in the store and everyone was looking at her as if she was nuts and the salesman looked at her like she was running off with the shoes. The salesman then asked her, “Are you okay? What are you doing?” Jenny said she responded by saying, “In order to know if I should spend this kind of money on these shoes, I need to know if I can use them?” She said she observed all the women just looking up and their expressions were like I totally get that. She further shares that is where her inspired name came from because she knows it resonated with so many women.
  • Jenny shares a quote that she lives by so much - she actually has it tattooed on her right inner wrist - “Choose Your Own Adventure” - Jenny says don’t live by how someone else thinks you should be living, what your guidance counselor says, your boss, your mother…..choose your own adventure!

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!

LINKS:

Aug 30, 2016

Dr. Fader is the Professor of Marketing at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Fader's expertise centers around the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer shopping/purchasing activities. He works with firms from a wide range of industries, such as consumer packaged goods, interactive media, financial services, and pharmaceuticals. Managerial applications focus on topics such as customer relationship management, lifetime value of the customer, and sales forecasting for new products. Much of his research highlights the consistent (but often surprising) behavioral patterns that exist across these industries and other seemingly different domains.


Many of these cross-industry experiences have led to the development of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/wcai/), a new research center that serves as a “matchmaker” between leading-edge academic researchers and top companies that depend on granular, customer-level data for key strategic decisions.

Professor Fader believes that marketing should not be viewed as a “soft” discipline, and he frequently works with different companies and industry associations to improve managerial perspectives in this regard. His work has been published in (and he serves on the editorial boards of) a number of leading journals in marketing, statistics, and the management sciences. He has won many awards for his teaching and research accomplishments.

 

Dr. Fader is the author of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantages.

 

Questions:

 

  • Tell us a bit of your journey
  • How do you feel about Customer Service on a global level?
  • What is Customer Lifetime Value? Why is it important for a business to understand what that means?
  • Whats the difference between Customer Friendly vs. Customer Centric? (as described in the book “Customer Centricity”)
  • Traditional Segmentations vs. True Segmentation
  • How can companies adjust with customers who want Instant Gratification specifically the Millennials?
  • Leadership and getting them understand there is a great connection between Customer Experience and their bottom line?
  • What is really Customer Relationship Management?
  • How do you stay motivated?
  • What is the online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • Are there any books that have had the greatest impact on you?
  • What’s the one things that is going on in your life that you are really excited about, something that you are either working on to develop yourself or your people?

 

 

Highlights

 

  • Dr. Fader expresses how fulfilling his journey has been from being an IT Major at  MIT. He further states this journey is one that he would have never imagined as he never thought he would ever wake up saying “I wanna be a Marketing Professor” and quite to the contrary - he says that he’s a Math Geek - he enjoys predicting things in particular granular things. He says it is rather fun to predict….which customer is going to buy, when, what and for how much and how often are they going to come back!

 

  • Dr. Fader says that during his undergraduate programme at MIT, one of his professors just observing how he loved predicting stuff in sports and music…suggested “You ought to throw some of that predicting stuff in Marketing.” He says 30 plus years later, he has never been happier because it is such a natural domain for someone who loves math, predictions. He further says the field is just waking up to appreciate the needs for these kinds of technical skills and equally important strategic implications that arise from that.

 

  • Dr. Fader states he is in two minds on Customer Service - he says that he believes that it is way better than it was decades ago and it has improved. He says companies genuinely care more, as a consumer it is more fun and interesting. On the other hand he believes that some companies are going a little bit too far. They are not going to get a good ROI on the investments of customer service as they are rolling out the red carpet too broadly, too eagerly without being very careful to understand what impact these customer service activities are having on the value of their customers. They are taking a “one size fits all”, “Customer is Always Right” approach. 

 

  • Dr. Fader states frankly that he believes that is irresponsible as the companies should really not be doing all different kinds of customer experience activities without understanding in a precise manner the impact that it is having on the value of the customer they are serving.

 

  • Dr. Fader says that while everyone should know the ins and out of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), however, he states there are a couple of problems with that as he believes it is like “Cheap Talk” it seems companies are checking a box instead of really, truly, building the business in a formal, strategic manner around CLV. He further stated the way companies are doing the calculations if they are doing it at all…..tends to be pretty poor. He further explains, for instance the companies will find proxies for CLV, they might look at historic profitability, Net Promoter Score (NPS), even credit scores, FICO score and just use that as a proxy for CLV! Dr. Fader says, “I’m not saying that those are bad metrics, but they are not CLV and if you are going to be building strategies around it then you had better be calculating it the right way.” Dr. Fader says, “Once you calculate it the right way, validate it, understand the underlying components of it…..then that will drive so many strategic decisions not only when it comes to Customer Service but even when it comes to deciding which products to launch, which regions to go into, which competitors to worry about etc.” Dr. Fader says it has far reaching strategic implications.

 

  • Dr. Fader in explaining the difference between being Customer Friendly vs. Customer Centricity states that part of it he believes is his own fault as he should have come up with something more unique for his book title because he thinks Customer Centricity makes it sound more like…”Let’s just be nice to The Customer, The Faceless/Nameless Entity who happens to buy our products and services..…that’s the Customer Friendliness part.” Dr. Fader says he looks at all of these great stories of world class customer service such as Nordstrom giving a customer money back for tires that he did not buy there and wonders..… There are lots of companies that put Customer Service as Job #1 and reinforcing what he said earlier, Dr. Fader says that is often a mistake! Dr. Fader says that you have to understand which customers you are being friendly with and what impact that’s going to have on them and what other kinds of customers that is going to attract. A specific example, Dr. Fader says he looks a lot of companies that are hiring an army of people to monitor Twitter and everytime they see someone tweet about their company, if they are having some problem, they will get the SWAT team out there to fix whatever the problem is for the customer and it sounds so nice! Dr. Fader says in many, many cases - it is a complete waste of money! Dr. Fader says what companies need to do is when someone is tweeting about them for better or worse - companies need to understand the value of that customer and use that; kind of as a way of doing Triage…..making sure that the really valuable customers if they are having a problem - we are going to handle it first and the lower value customers…..(don’t ignore them or chase them away) but if they have to wait, even if they have to suffer a little bit….that’s okay! Dr. Fader says companies should be always on call for those high value customers. So it is essential for companies to sort out this generic, one size fits all, we will be nice to everyone kind of Customer Service vs. Service Activities that are closely tied to the value they are going to create.

 

  • Dr. Fader states that customer segmentation is not the same as we learnt in our Marketing 101 classes as Dr. Fader says in most cases companies are segmenting their customers on the basis of observable variables such as demographics, where they live, media habits or other observable traits. Dr. Fader plainly states, “I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that….but it’s ineffective.” Dr. Fader says the best way to segment is on the basis of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). “So let’s pull out our magic wand and figure out the forward looking value of each of our customers and then break them up into groups/percentiles, top 10 percent, 20 percent and all the way down to the bottom 10 percent and then let’s understand how these customers are different from each other. Then after doing that we can layer on the demographics and the media habits after we have done the segmentation as way to profile to the different value tiers as opposed to the original way of creating segments in the first place. Once we see these differences among our customers - this new data will guide a lot of the activities that we will be doing in Customer Service.”

 

  • Dr. Fader in response to Millennials being the bulk of the work force and wanting instant gratification stated he would respond in two parts. He firstly stated that he does not like this whole Millennial thing as he does not like or agree with that kind of stereotyping as he believes that it is wrong and ineffective! Dr. Fader says to paint with the same brush on people who are born between a certain set of years is a terrible, terrible mistake and companies need to stop doing it which goes back into what Dr. Fader said earlier - companies should not be segmenting customers based on when they were born and instead segment them based on what they will be worth in the future. With reference to answering the group of persons between the ages of 19 and 35 years old, Dr. Fader says there will be tremendous heterogeneity within that group, there will be some who absolutely follow that stereotype, there will be some who resemble the “Baby Boomers” like Dr. Fader (as he jokingly refers) and other people within that same group who aren’t so lazy and spoilt. 

 

  • Dr. Fader says there are some customers out there who are going to be needier, who are never going to be happy, some customers that when you give them one thing they are going to want more and more! Dr. Fader says that’s where CLV comes in as the CLV will help companies understand the value of these customers and the cost of delivering on that value as well as acquiring and maintaining customers like that. Dr. Fader reiterates that’s one of the reasons why the second part of his book is  titled “Focus on the Right Customer for Strategic Advantage.”

 

  • Dr. Fader says focus on the right customers for Strategic Advantage - as a business you have to pick and choose as some customers will be more valuable than others and as a business you really need to invest to figure that out and if you don’t - you will be wasting a lot of money on some low value customers. Dr. Fader says there a lot of people out there that are kind of afraid of CLV as they think it’s kind of “scary” and “mathy” and they are not sure what they would do with it, it’s kind of this great unknown - so they just throw themselves into Customer Service and Customer Experience and Customer Journey and believe if they do all of that really good then it absolves them of really doing CLV. Dr. Fader says there is a beautiful interplay between the two because companies cannot do Customer Service, Customer Experience and Customer Journey unless they are comfortable with and cognizant of CLV.

 

  • In response to our question on Leadership and getting the company owners and leaders to understand the great importance of Customer Experience to the bottom line - Dr. Fader responded that is why he wrote his book “Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage.” Dr. Fader says he has been developing these CLV models for years and years and years going around to companies preaching how this can really help their business and the company would respond saying, “We have all these geeks and nerds over in analytics….go and talk to them because we have a business to run here, I’m the CMO….I’m too busy for that kind of non-sense.” Dr. Fader said he found all of that rather frustrating. He further stated that a lot of companies are truly missing the mark. Dr. Fader said he wrote his book Customer Centricity as a call to action, as a wake-up call to get get C-Level people to really appreciate the strategic importance, the competitive imperative of really understanding Lifetime Value and all of the different ways that it can be leveraged.

 

  • Dr. Fader says that he is a number cruncher but a number cruncher that’s on a mission to get the C-level people to wake up and smell the CLV!

 

  • Dr. Fader says that it is pleasing to know that companies such as Starbucks have wised up and made a 180 saying that we get it now and we have to focus on the CLV, not all our customers are the same.

 

  • Dr. Fader said CRM was out there too early when it was originally released in the MarketPlace and many businesses did not know what to do with it. He says now because of the stagnation of product centricity, globalization, the millennials and all these different reasons….Customer Centricity is more understood and much more necessary and now it’s finally time for the CRM Revolution.

 

  • Dr. Fader speaks about a book that was very influential for him when writing his own book “Angel Customers and Demon Customers” by Larry Selden and Geoffrey Colvin. The book makes reference to a bank that had a customer that applied for Mortgage services and the experience was as if the bank and the mortgage section were two separate entities! There was no integration with the teams that dealt with regular day to day banking. The truly  Customer Centric companies truly understand the 360 approach of viewing customers not just from one activity but all activities. Dr. Fader says banking has been one of the more impressive sectors that have woken up to really try new and innovative ways to understand their customers. 

 

  • Dr. Fader further states that he wants everyone in the company thinking of the customer and the customer value regardless of where they are in the business  productions, sales or customer service.

 

  • Dr. Fader states another popular thing in business now is “Customer Based Corporate Valuation”, because if you are a company where the vast majority of your revenue comes from customers and you can figure out the CLV from the present customers as well as the customers that you are likely to acquire in the future and you add all that stuff up - that’s the value of the firm! Dr. Fader says he has been doing that with companies - checking the CLV and matching it back with Wall Street’s value of the company and matching them up and the reason he is doing it because he wants the CFO to really look at it and see the direct co-relation between CLV and the bottom line! Dr. Fader said this is actually more accurate, more timely, more actionable, more valuable than the top down methods of valuation. Dr. Fader says he wants CLV to be this Gold Standard Metric that everyone in the organization can appreciate so there will be less battles in a company over these different kinds of metrics.

 

  • Dr. Fader says he really loves what he does and he’s building all of these predictive models and he knows in a small way he’s changing the world and that brings him great joy! Dr. Fader says he loves the teaching, research and the companies that he deals with for research. He really believes that he has been very fortunate and he works across every sector imaginable!

 

  • Dr. Fader says his number one app is Twitter - he further says it is very much where he gets all of his updates and connections. He really loves Twitter. Dr. Fader further states on a side note of apps and websites he loves - he created a website called coolnumbers.com a website dedicated to the world’s greatest collection of dollar bills with interesting serial numbers. He says if you have too much time on your hands you can head on over to that website and put in any 8 digit number and it will tell you how cool it is on a 0-100 scale! Dr. Fader says that it is utterly pointless and there is no redeeming social value and it’s completely stupid but a simply nice outlet for someone who likes to crunch numbers. He comically says this is where he let’s his true geek hang out!

 

  • Dr. Fader says he has a whole bunch of  books he would recommend as being influential as he is an avid reader! He mentions “Consumer Behavior Models for Non-Statisticians” by Jerome Greene and he states Greene was a media researcher not an academic that went into some statistical and technical data that has been helpful to him and continues to be helpful for his students. He further mentioned another book - “How Brands Grow” by Byron Sharp as a Professor at the University of Australia. Dr. Fader says he highly recommends this book to everyone because the principles presented here are radical but they are supported by the kinds of models that Dr. Fader builds along with other people around the world and it is completely non-technical as it has mostly stories and principles.

 

  • Dr. Fader is very excited about Zodiac - his new start up! He shares Zodiac (zodiacmetrics.com) is an online platform that bolts right on to a company’s transaction log system, sucks out their transaction log data, calculates all the CLV in real time and then injects them right back into their CRM system. Dr. Fader says he does not want to tell companies what to do, what experiments to run, which customers to go after - Dr. Fader just wants to give them the right ingredients for them to be able to do that. Dr. Fader wants to create that magic wand, that engine that will give companies one less excuse to not do the CLV thing.

 

  • Dr. Fader also mentioned he’s already thinking of a follow up to his first book - the CLV Playbook - once more companies get to really understand and practice the true functions of CLV - this book would be their guide.

 

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here! 

 

INTERVIEW LINKS:

www.PeteFader.com

www.ZodiacMetrics.com

www.Twitter.com/FaderP

“Angel Customers and Demon Customers” by Larry Selden and Geoffrey Colvin

“Consumer Behaviour Models for Non-Statisticians” by Jerome D. Greene

“How Brands Grow” by Byron Sharp

Aug 23, 2016

Jay Baer is the world’s most retweeted person among digital marketers. He is a renowned business strategist, keynote speaker and the New York Times best-selling author of five books who travels the world helping businesspeople get and keep more people. Jay has advised over 700 companies since 1994, including Caterpillar, Nike, Allstate, The United Nations and 32 of the FORTUNE 500. He is the founder of Convince & Convert, a strategy consulting firm that helps prominent companies gain and keep more customers through the smart intersection of technology, social media, and customer service. His Convince & Convert Media division owns the world’s #1 content marketing blog, the world’s top marketing podcast, and many other education resources for business owners and executives.

Jay believes that now more and more of our customer contact is in public, and that changes the dynamics of customer service considerably.

“It changes the value of customer service considerably, but the problem is most businesses haven’t figured it out yet”

He says most businesses are using old customer service playbooks to solve 2016 customer service problems.

“The other thing that’s really useful for executives is to show them how customer service is the new marketing.”

For example, when a customer has a great customer experience they talk about it, when the experience is shared on social media as part of a rating, review or tweet, that is part of your marketing.

“One-third of customer complaints are never answered.”

Most of these complaints are via social media and they go unanswered by the company. These are public complaints that other customers or prospects can see and have access to, yet they remain unsolved.

80% of businesses claim to have exceptional customer service, however only 8% of their customers agree.

“There is this massive difference of opinion between what businesses think is good customer service and what customers think is good customer service.”

Jay adds that customer service is chronically underfunded for almost every business because for generation’s, customer service has primarily been a “necessary evil” and nothing more.

He notes that customer service is public now through social media and has more impact on purchases; companies need to re-evaluate their current focus on customer service.

Jay points out hiring the right people for your customer service front lines are crucial to your business. Recruiting people who have the type of personality that can show empathy for the customer is very important.

“You can learn an awful lot about somebody’s skills as a potential customer service representative just through an exercise.”

Jay shares one online tool that his company could not live without, virtual desktop software called Sococo. While working with people from all over the world, Jay says this is the tool to keep everybody connected.

“The greatest managers in the world understand, find out or determine what motivates each person (employee); they put incentives and programs in place at the individuals personal level to motivate each person instead of trying to motivate everyone together.”

Jays sees the value in developing his people. He started a six-month program for his staff so that they could grow their speaking skills in order to go and speak at conferences all over the world.

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!

INTERVIEW LINKS:

www.ConvinceandConvert.com

www.HugYourHaters.com

www.Sococo.com     

“Different” by Youngme Moon

“Procrastinate on Purpose” by Rory Vaden

 

 

 

Aug 16, 2016

Marc Mawhinney is on a mission to help coaches build stronger businesses! A lifelong entrepreneur, he achieves this with his podcast, “Natural Born Coaches”, and his 1:1, group and online coaching programs. He frequently makes media appearances and is a contributor for Entrepreneur.com. You can learn more about Marc at NaturalBornCoaches.com!

We have all been taught that the customer is always right, but Marc has a slightly different view on this topic. Marc has experience in both brick and mortar and online businesses, and from those experiences he feels that there needs to be a common area where the client and the business have mutual respect for each other.

“I think there has to be a balance and there has to be respect between both the business person and the customer.”

After Marc’s experience in Real Estate and dealing with all types of clients, Marc’s coaching business allows him to have the freedom to have more control over who is a well-fitted client for him.

“I can say that I am much less stressed. I look at where I am today compared to when I was twenty-something and doing real estate, with coaching I can say that I really have fun working with my clients because I have a tighter set of criteria with who I work with.”

When Marc was asked his thoughts on the controversy of turnaround times regarding responding to emails, Marc feels he does not have an obligation to drop what he is doing in order to have a quick turnaround and 24 hours is a reasonable amount of time to reply.

“I’m not surprised if it takes a few days for someone to get back to me because if they’re successful, they’re busy!”

Marc shares some everyday solutions that could help improve customer service on a global level.

“I think it is really important to put yourself in the customer’s shoes, which sounds like common sense but I don’t think it is very common. What I’ve always made an effort (before when I was in real estate and now and with coaching) to try and put myself in the customer’s shoes and look at it that way.”

Marc stays motivated by reading a lot of motivational and personal development books, but also he blocks people out of his life that are not supporters of him, which is something he has gotten better at over time.

“The other way I stay motivated and conserve energy is I don’t jump into things that don’t warrant my energy.”

Marc says the biggest online resource, tool or app that he cannot live without would be his online calendar. This is how Marc controls his time and schedules for each day.

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!

INTERVIEW LINKS:

www.NaturalBornCoaches.com

www.TheCoachingJungle.com

www.YourFirstFiveClients.com

www.NaturalBornCoaches.com/ABCbook

ScheduleOnce

“Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill

“Thick Face, Black Heart” by Chin Ning Chu

“Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand

“The Fountainhead” By Ayn Rand

Aug 9, 2016

Vance Morris is a Service Trainer & Management Alumni of the Walt Disney Company. He now coaches companies to create magical and profitable service cultures in their businesses through his companies; DELIVER SERVICE NOW INSTITUTE (DSNI) and The Marketing & Entrepreneurial Growth Alliance (MEGA). 

With Vance’s background and experience, he wanted to find a business that he could add his special touch of high level customer experience to. He found a franchise to work with that had strong systems and processes already in place.

“They already had a framework that I could work from and then take that and be able to add to it what makes me special, and provide a complete service powerhouse.”

Vance shares about a service technique that he uses in setting the tone for reciprocity by providing a housewarming gift to clients.

He was able to implement different qualities and concepts from Disney into his business, including providing a monthly newsletter highlighting the company’s level of customer service and detail.

“I think it is very important that you educate your clients and educate your customers, especially when it comes to the details you are providing.”

Another thing Vance has implemented from Disney is having a set of service standards. He notes that for over 50 years, Disney has had the same standards in place.

“You know Disney only has four (guiding principles) that have been with them for 50 years now and they are: Safety, Courtesy, Show, and Efficiency. I have taken that 100% into my business.”

Vance feels that businesses have been too focused on profitability and cost cutting, which has led to a major decline on customer service.

“They have created a department called Customer Service when in fact it should be everyone’s job”

He is really excited about being part of a mastermind group, and says the help and support you can get from other businesses owners is phenomenal.

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!

INTERVIEW LINKS:

www.DeliverServiceNow.com

www.GKIC.com

www.Vistage.com

www.facebook.com/DeliverServiceNow/home

“Be Our Guest” by Disney Theodore Kinni

“Good To Great” by Jim Collins

 

Aug 2, 2016

Angela Powers is an instructional designer helping entrepreneurs become “freedom-preneurs”, partnering with them to create and optimize their online programs. She has designed, developed and delivered training to hundreds of thousands of students globally for the past 12 years, working with large companies including Google, Amazon, Boeing and F5, as well as individual entrepreneurs.

A few years ago, Angela decided that she wanted to be a coach, and she says this had been something she was thinking about for a long time.

After completing coaching school, she came up with multiple ideas of what she wanted to focus on. She realized that her greatest expertise was as an instructional designer, building online courses.

Angela shares that her main motivation as an entrepreneur is her family, which includes her 5-year old daughter.

“As a freedom-preneur, I can work from home and set my own schedule; I work with the people I love to work with.”

She worked with her first coach 10 years ago, which transformed her own life.

“I work with a lot of coaches. I love being able to help them transform more people’s lives and have a bigger impact.”

Tools that she used during her time in the corporate work, like design logs, are important in her current role working with clients. Angela says issues such as communication and tracking are just as vital for small business owners to pay attention to as they are for large companies.

“I think that’s a big part of customer experience, being on the same page”

Angela believes that customer service on a global level needs improvement and as a customer herself, her own standards keep going up.

A good amount of Angela’s expertise has been acquired through on-the-job training, and she also received her certification in professional learning and performance four years ago, which required about 150 hours of work, written tests and projects.

Usability testing is an effective tool that she uses when creating content.

“You can’t get any better than real (people) actually using your prototype and giving you that real time feedback.”

She takes advantage of multiple platforms to help clients create programs, including Udemy, and says that they all have different advantages and features available.

“I’m open to really finding out what somebody wants to achieve through that training”

Angela stays motivated by breaking her goals down into 12-week timeframes, which keeps her focused. She has also successfully used accountability partnerships to keep her on track.

She is a big believer of taking care of herself, by blocking off personal time as well as meditating every morning.

Angela is most excited about learning ClickFunnels, a tool designed to create sales funnels for online marketers.

“As an instructional designer, that’s what I’m usually doing; creating a specific path to get you to a goal.”

The mantra that she lives by is “We’re born to teach.”

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!

INTERVIEW LINKS:

www.LearnWithAngela.com

www.Facebook.com/LearnWithAngela

www.Twitter.com/LearnWithAngela

Make It Stick

Immunity to Change

ClickFunnels

Wunderlist

Books by Brene Brown

Brene Brown’s interview on Elizabeth Gilbert’s podcast

 

 

Jul 26, 2016

Suzy Prudden is a prize-winning International speaker, seminar leader and best-selling author. She’s won numerous awards for business and speaking, and has appeared as a guest expert on over 1,000 radio and television shows including Oprah, The Today Show and Good Morning America.

With her publishing company, Suzy say they pride themselves on customer service. She tells us it should be your number one priority.

“It’s the only thing that going to make your business work. If you don’t have good customer service, you might as well seriously not be in business.”

Suzy says her employees need to leave their personal problems behind and not bring it into the office. She wants her employees to change their mindsets upon arriving at work. An example she gives is about a mother with a sick child at home.

“I would say go home and be with your kid, and I would not dock their pay for that either. You have to create a culture of support. If you have a culture of support in your company, then the people who work in the company will want to support the company.”

In order to sustain a culture of service in your business, Suzy gives the advice of simply paying attention.

“You have to pay attention to your customer, you have to pay attention to the people that work with you and most importantly you have to stay on top of everything!”

She notes that if you fail faster, you’ll also learn more quickly as a result. When you fail, you learn, and when you learn you get better. Failures give the opportunity to know what isn’t working and what needs to be fixed.

“I like to teach people how to make money and I can do that through Itty Bitty Publishing.”

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!

INTERVIEW LINKS:

www.IttyBittyPublishing.com

http://suzyprudden.com/

“Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill

“Psychic Energy” by Joseph Weed

“Mind Mapping” by Tony Buzan

Jul 19, 2016

Lee Caraher is a CEO and acclaimed communication strategist known for her practical solutions to big problems. She started Double Forte as a new kind of communications firm designed to work with good people, doing good work for good companies doing great things in their categories. So far so good. This is not her first rodeo, and she’s learned a lot along the way that she shares with others in the hopes that everyone can reduce drama and conflict in the workplace and create careers that matter.

Lee has a reputation for building cohesive, high producing teams who get a lot done well and have fun at the same time. A sought-after coach and confidant to her clients, Lee regularly helps organizations navigate complex, sensitive and critical situations. She is a straight talker who doesn’t hold too many punches, although she does her best to pleasant about it.  An experience speaker and facilitator, Lee blends immediately applicable insights with inspiration and humor for engaging and entertaining sessions for audiences large and small.

Her first book “Millennials & Management: The Essential Guide To Making It Work At Work” was published by Bibliomotion in October 2014. The book is based on her own work building a successful intergenerational workplace, as well as the insight from more than 250 managers, leaders and employees of all ages in different industries across the country. For Millennials, management, and senior leaders, the book is a practical and entertaining guide to breaking down the misconceptions between Gen Y, GenX and the Baby Boomer generations, and details how to build a constructive, productive work environment that builds business, loyalty and strategic advantage.

 Lee started a public relations and communication strategy firm with a partner almost 15 years ago. Before that, she was employed with many other large communication firms.

“My whole career has been in this function of figuring out what to say and who to say it to so they can hear it”

She says her journey to entrepreneurship came out of necessity when she needed the flexibility in her schedule to help her mother who was diagnosed with cancer.

Lee believes that the customer experience is the lifeblood of any company.

“The brand that you have is only half of whatever is in that package (of what you sell). The other half is in the experience that people have with your brand.”

The experience your customers have is going to be the indicator for company sustainability.

Her agency is very focused on service, and Lee says that if you deliver good results but a great experience you will keep that client forever.

You have to recognize that each client will have a different culture.

“We have to shift to each culture. Really understanding who your customer is is important.”

She notes that communication is a big issue in companies all over the country, and can be a challenge as most businesses have three generations in them. Millennials tend to prefer communication by text, whereas baby boomers are more likely to pick up the phone.

“Don’t assume people have the same communication preferences as you do”

Your business is only as good as your relevancy is. For this reason, staying up-to-date is the most important thing you can do in your day.

Lee says that companies need to have a plan in place for the worst-case scenario.

“In today’s world that’s moving so quickly, there’s no longer 24 hours to figure it out”

Companies that receive negative feedback on social media should respond immediately and direct the person to a private email address to get the conversation off of the public forum.

She shares that if team moral is bad, you have to address the issues right away. However, going through challenging times as a team can create a stronger bond with employees.

“People come to work with all of their baggage. How do you help them focus, be productive and be happy?”

Employees want to do work that matters. When they don’t understand how they are making a difference, this is when you get the negative impact.

“My experience is the best leaders are the ones who basically love the people around them. They’re very motivated by other people’s success.”

Lee explains that if you don’t intertwine your work and your life responsibilities, it’s very challenging to do either very well.

When she is well physically, her company too is well, and healthy companies are the ones that people stay at.

Two quotes Lee lives by are, “Focus is your friend”, and “Family first.”

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!

INTERVIEW LINKS:

www.LeeCaraher.com

www.Twitter.com/LeeCaraher

www.Facebook.com/LeeCaraher

Focus @ Will

Word Swag

Relax & Rest

Facebook Pages

“Primal Leadership” by Daniel Goleman

“Are You Fully Charged” by Tom Rath

“The Optimistic Workplace” by Shawn Murphy

“Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi

Jul 12, 2016

Paul Potratz is the COO of Potratz Advertising Agency in New York. They work with businesses creating top funnel brand strategies, consumer engagement, and content on websites, social media and sales training.

Paul worked in both radio and television, and then made his way to an ad agency. In 2003, he made the decision to start his own advertising agency.

“Every business is like the seasons; you have to stay motivated when things slow down because it’s just right around the corner before they start to pick up again.”

“One thing about entrepreneurship (is) if you’re motivated by always reinventing with change, then I feel you will always be successful.”

Paul identifies current global customer service as an essential component of your business.

“You don’t have anything if you don’t have customer experience.”

A part of great customer service is showing the clients how much they are appreciated. Paul and his customer service team created a way of letting his clients know how important they are with Coffee Mug Strategies. These mugs have strategy options that are tailored to the business and create leads.

“We’ve heard it over and over and over it’s much easier and much less expensive to keep a client than always trying to be adding new clients.”

Building great content on your website, providing research, having comparisons and providing it to your potential clients will invite them in, and make them more comfortable to purchase from you.

“Become a content machine, get that content on your website and then take them to the next logical step.”

Paul talks about how he stays motivated. Other than loving what he does, he likes getting in on the action.

“Roll your sleeves up once in a while. Granted, we can’t always do that because you can’t scale but you can do it every once in a while and it gives you the sense of excitement.”

INTERVIEW LINKS:

www.MugStrategies.com

www.facebook.com/PotratzAdvertising

“As a Man Thinketh” by James Allen

“Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl

“The Energy Bus” by Jon Gordon

“Scientific Advertising” by Claude Hopkins

 

 

1 2 Next »