Why Not Practice?

If you were a music teacher, would you get your pupils to practice scales and songs to the point where they could play them well without thinking about what they were doing?

If you were a golf or tennis coach, would you get your students to practice swinging the club or racquet so they could do it correctly time and time again?

If you were coaching a sports team, would you get the team to practice set moves and key skills like passing the ball, shooting and tackling until they could do it correctly, every time, without thinking about it.

If you were teaching religious education, would you expect your students would learn things like the Lord’s Prayer off by heart?

Of course you would because you know that to do something well, you have to have over-learned it, so that it happens automatically.

As a manager do you expect your staff to practice how to interact to customers until they can do it well every time without thinking about it? Do you require them to learn what to say to a customer off by heart?

Would your customers notice a difference if you did?

Oh, and don’t tell me you wouldn’t want staff to memorise what to say because it would sound stilted. Left to their own devices, people say the same thing every time now without giving any thought to what they are saying (Are you right? How ya going? Have a nice day). If they are going to say the same thing over and over they may as well say something good.

I guess you have to decide whether it is important your staff learn how to look after your customers so it happens automatically every time.

The Worst Reason for Doing Something

There are many reasons why we do what we do but the poorest of them has got to be, "Because that is the way we always do it."  If that was a good reason for doing things we would still be lighting fires by rubbing two sticks together!

Saying you are doing something because you always do it is the feeblest justification I can think of and yet it is the one I hear most often.  I was having a haircut the other day and I was in a hurry. I wash my hair every morning and therefore was a little irritated that time I didn’t really have was being wasted washing it again. I asked the hairdresser if was necessary to wash someone’s hair before cutting it. "I don't know," came the reply. "That's the way we always do it."

Even well qualified professionals are guilty of using this reasoning. I asked a professional engineer who quoted on doing some work for me why his quote was exclusive of GST when things sold to consumers always include GST. "I don't know," he said. "That's the way we always do it."

For more than two decades we have recognized we live in a rapidly changing world where change is the only constant. For many years it has become accepted wisdom that what worked for us yesterday might make little difference today and could be the cause of our downfall tomorrow.  Yet we persist on doing the things we have always done.  If that was not bad enough, we continue doing them without questioning why we are doing them.

What do you do because you have always done it? Is it still worth doing? If so, can we give the customer a better reason for doing it than: “That’s the way we always do it?”

The One Question To Ask

If you were to ask your customers only one question, what would it be? Which one answer would tell you what you need to know to run a successful business?

The purpose of a business is to attract and keep customers and since your existing customers are worth more to you than new customers, the number one priority must be customer retention. But how do you keep your customers coming back for more? By providing them with an outstanding customer experience. This is why the topic of the moment in the business world is customer experience management. The first step to managing the experience your customers have when they do business with you in to understand what, in their opinion, makes a great customer experience. Therefore the one question we need to ask is, “What makes a customer experience a great one for you?”

If you got your staff to ask your customers that question, not only would you learn what you have to do to create a great a great experience, but you would engage them in the process and they would begin to understand why managing the customer experience is so important.

Here’s a tip: Require each staff member to ask between 4 and 8 customers that question every day for two or three weeks and to record the answers. What you learn will be both educational and inspirational and the process will take your staff another step on the journey to become customer driven.

Why Do We make Price The Main Issue?

Why do we insist on making price the main issue?

I shopped for a gift for my niece the other day and the first place the salesperson took me was to the sales counter. I gave absolutely no signals that price was a consideration in this purchase.

I am a Type 2 Diabetic and yesterday I went to a Chemist to ask if a certain medication had any side effects. The drug is not covered by the government so it would cost me about $110 a month. The chemist tried to persuade me that I would be better off taking insulin instead of paying for the pills. Does she really think I would prefer to stick myself with a needle twice a day in order to save less than $4?

Do your staff make price the main issue - even when it's not one for your customers?

Ask, Listen and Learn

I have been doing some mystery shopping lately and have been struck by two observations.

The first is how bad it is out there. You will remember last month’s column about being ignored at Bond and Bond and Farmers. Since then, I have been to look at boats with a friend who is thinking of spending about $100,000. It was a Saturday morning. Three marine brokers were closed.

One marine broker who was open should have been closed. When we walked in, the salesman was sitting in a chair behind a desk. He greeted us but did not get up to shake hands or introduce himself. When he found out I was originally from Canada, he was more interested in talking about a plane crash near Winnipeg than answering questions about the boats he had advertised on the wall. When we asked to see three boats, there was a great deal of shuffling through papers and discussions with a colleague about where the boats were. It turned out all of them were at other marinas in the Auckland area.

One marine broker who was open should have been closed. When we walked in, the salesman was sitting in a chair behind a desk. He greeted us but did not get up to shake hands or introduce himself. When he found out I was originally from Canada, he was more interested in talking about a plane crash near Winnipeg than answering questions about the boats he had advertised on the wall. When we asked to see three boats, there was a great deal of shuffling through papers and discussions with a colleague about where the boats were. It turned out all of them were at other marinas in the Auckland area.

One brokerage had a sales dock. My friend and I walked up and down the dock looking at the boats, reading the information about the boats nicely displayed on a stand by each boat. We even walked onto the boats in the hope of being noticed but nobody came out from the office to talk to us. I walked back up the ramp to the office and found the salesman sitting at a desk. I stood behind him and, looking out he window said, “So, you can see the sales dock from here.”

“Yep,” he replied.

I told him my friend and I would like to look at one of the boats. He said that would be fine but he needed to turn the phones over – whatever that means. He did not introduce himself nor did he ask any questions about why we might want to look at that particular boat.

You have to give people a reason to buy from you and those kinds of experiences are not going to do it. By contrast, I was speaking recently at a sales conference in Australia. During the discussion, one fellow said he always gave new customers his mobile phone number and told them that if they had any questions or problems, they should call him directly and not ring the call centre. I could see from the expression on his colleagues’ faces they did not think that was a very good idea because he was opening himself up to being constantly “interrupted” by his customers. At the awards dinner that night, he won six awards including Sales Executive of The Year.

My second observation is that even the good salespeople are capable of answering questions but do not seem very interested asking any. This problem is not confined to the marine industry. I have mystery shopped car yards, retailers and other types of businesses lately and found the same thing. In the ‘good’ companies, staff are generally knowledgeable enough to answer the customer’s questions but rarely ask any of their own.

This tendency to be reactive creates several problems for the customer. First, it is hard work asking all those questions, trying to anticipate issues that might crop up in the future and generally thinking of what you need to ask about.

Secondly, we make dangerous assumptions if we do not ask questions. When I mystery shopped a car dealer I told the salesman I wanted to buy a car for my teenage son. “The cheap cars are over there,” he told me, pointing to an area of the lot.
“Where do you keep the BMWs?” I asked.

The third problem with not asking questions is that customers are always right but often wrong. Customers buy because they have a problem or want to avoid having a problem. They are always right about their problem. They know they have one and they know what it is. Admittedly, they may, or could have, other problems they do not know about but they do have at least one problem they know about or they would not be in the marketplace in the first place.

What customers are often wrong about is the solution to their problem. They do not understand your business as well as you do and so customers may, and often do, ask for the wrong solution. They do not know what other solutions are available and the pros and cons of each. Your job is to look past the customer's request for a particular solution and ask questions to understand the problem they are trying to solve. That way you can affirm their request or suggest a better alternative. If you do not ask questions, you are just an order-taker and there is no shortage of those in the marketplace.

But perhaps the biggest problem with not asking questions is that if you do not understand the customer’s needs, you cannot compete on value. If you do not compete on value, you will have to compete on price.  And we all know where that road leads!
So that I practice what I preach, let me ask you some questions. What reasons do you give your customers to shop with you? Do your staff ask questions or fill orders? Do they understand the need to ask questions? Do they know which questions to ask? 

Could these be good questions to discuss at your next staff meeting?

Helping You Manage Your Customer Experience

As you know, the quality of the experience customers get when they do business with you is one of the biggest factors influencing whether they buy from you again and whether they recommend you to others.  But very few businesspeople actually manage the customer experience.  In fact, most don’t even think about it! Ironically, most of us put more effort into managing the experience guests have when the come to visit us in our homes than we do into managing the experience our customers have when they do business with us.

If you are serious about managing the experience your customers have, you will be interested in a newly-formed valuable resource called customer experience management New Zealand (www.cemnz.org.nz).

customer experience management New Zealand is a community of businesspeople dedicated to providing business leaders with the knowledge, tools and resources they need to turn their customers into loyal raving fans.

customer experience management New Zealand is free to join and members can simply register on the cemNZ website (www.cemnz.org.nz) to begin to enjoy the benefits from this growing resource.

While you're at it, join our Linkedin Group too.