How’s YOUR Reputation?

Three Ways to Ruin Your
Business Reputation

Funny how the minute I use the word ‘reputation’ ears prick up. We all know the power of a good reputation, and the damage a bad one can do. Businesses are concerned over matters like their environmental impact; Fair-trade policies; adherence to health and safety standards; etc because those issues impact on their reputation. A good reputation drives good publicity and ultimately longevity of a business. A bad reputation leads to bad publicity (whether via the media or simply the power of ‘word-of-mouth’), lost customers, and can ultimately result in business failure.

This article is not about to focus on environmental impact, Fair-trade policies, or health and safety. What it is going to focus on is three other areas that customers find critically important. Customers are, after all, the lifeblood of your business. If we as businesses are not delivering what our customers deem important they will drift away and go to our competitors that are. Specifically we are going to address three customer satisfaction issues that impact on your business reputation.

I hosted a survey among a group of consumers to find out what key issues made them extremely dissatisfied with a service provider. The following three issues came up over and over and over again. They were:

1. Recurrent Mistakes – with little or no attempt to prevent future occurrence,
2. Disrespectful Behaviour from a member of staff, and
3. Appalling Telephony Systems.

Recurrent Mistakes

No one is saying that we have to be perfect and are not allowed to ever make mistakes. Humans, being imperfect as we are, will always need to allow a margin for error. The problem comes in when people do not learn from their mistakes and keep on doing the same wrong things repeatedly. A number of complaints I have heard are around the lack of effort to correct mistakes.

There could be different reasons why mistakes are repeated. At times a lack of skills or training is to blame. At other times it is a personnel issue – either the wrong person has been assigned to do the job, or the employee involved is simply careless and takes no pride in their work. And of course a management issue is often involved – failing to address issues before they escalate (be they training, staffing, or attitude issues).

Disrespectful Behaviour from a Staff Member

Now while you as a business owner are gasping that none of your employees would ever treat a customer disrespectfully, 2 out of every 5 people I surveyed (that’s almost half of them) have a different view! The kind of behaviour that they find disrespectful includes:

• An inconsistent level of service from different people in the same organisation;
• Discrimination based on their perceived value (or lack thereof) as a client;
• Staff members unwilling to take responsibility;
• A member of staff who obviously regards customer interaction as an interruption; and
• Unfulfilled promises (phone calls and emails not returned; promises not followed through; etc).

Would it surprise you to know that Harvard Business School conducted a study a few years ago, which established that nearly two thirds of customers that leave an organisation do so as a direct result of bad service or discourtesy from a member of staff? And it’s not just junior members of staff that are guilty of disrespectful behaviour either. In my survey there was evidence of managers and other senior people giving their junior staff very poor examples to follow.

Appalling Telephony Systems

Ooh, now this is a hot-potato isn’t it? Customers hate call centres!

We can all relate personal experiences of being caught in an automated loop with no quick way to a real, live person; or being stuck with “option 1, option 2, and option 3″ whether our call had anything to do with those options or not; and when we do actually get to speak to somebody on the other end, often they can’t actually help us at all.

Is it the call centre per se that is the problem? Or is it perhaps the individuals on the other end of the telephone that either enhance or ruin your experience?

There are two distinct areas here that need addressing, and both relate to training. On the one hand, customers need to be better educated to use the alternatives available to them. I feel qualified to say (because I am frequently guilty of this myself) that if the customer first referred to their user manual/policy document/the business website; there would probably be no need to pick up the telephone at all. On the other hand, the staff within these call centres need to be more adequately trained in product knowledge and in effective use of the telephone.

Let’s face it, as a customer, I would have no objection (nor be any the wiser) to my call being answered anywhere and by anyone, as long as my call was efficiently dealt with.

It’s easy to see how failing in these three areas can completely ruin our business reputation. Customers talk. Fact. We really don’t want them spreading negative publicity about us. I’ve heard it said that a happy customer will share their story with one or two close friends, but an unhappy customer will tell everyone they can! So then is there an easy way to protect our reputations? Absolutely Yes!

These issues (and indeed many others too) can usually be resolved by the following three steps:

1. Sharpening the recruitment process – finding the right people, and putting them in to the right roles;
2. Managing problem staff more closely – being close to the causes, is it motivation, attitude, or a skills gap? and
3. Providing an adequate, ongoing, and consistent training and personal development programme for all members of staff.

©Vanessa Deakin and Zee2A Limited 2009.  Vanessa Deakin works with Professional Service Executives frustrated and disappointed with their current growth rates, marketing efforts, and business profitability. Through one-on-one and group mentoring programmes she helps them to skyrocket their results and break their own best records. To learn more, sign up for her e-zine, or make an enquiry please visit her website at www.zee2a.com.

Customer Service No-No’s

I noticed two interesting news headlines in the last few days.
Firstly, the OECD say that we are ‘at the bottom’ of the current economic recession – actually a positive thing, because it suggests (without promising) that things may begin the slow climb back to prosperity in the near future. The second indicated that the UK economy suffered a 2.4% shrinkage in the first quarter of 2009 – 0.5% worse than predicted and the worst for 51 years, apparently. Again,
although it may not at first blush seem like it, this is good news.
These type of figures are by definition retrospective – they look back at a period we have already lived through. There are many signs of recovery, mostly in the form of a slowdown in bad news!

In this week’s Marketing Edge (out for publiction tomorrow) we are re-running what was one of the most popular articles of 2008 – a critical look at customer service no-no’s. Remember that everyone struggles in a recession, but those who take customer service lightly will continue to struggle even when conditions improve. So take the key points to heart and root poor customer service out of your organisation. When you do, your customers will show their appreciation via longer, more profitable business relationships.

Sign up for your free subscription at: www.zee2a.com and make sure to verify your request before midnight tonight!

Two Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in Your Start-up Business

You can hunt ducks and pheasant with a shotgun – a weapon that sprays tiny pellets around a broad area. But if you want to bring down big game, that approach won’t work. Why? Because the mass of the pellets is simply insufficient to bring down the animal. So you need to change your weapon, and use a hunting rifle instead. Hunting rifles are designed to propel a massive bullet with sufficient velocity to get you your trophy – but there is a downside. You can’t just aim in the general area of the target and ’spray’ bullets. You need to be pinpoint accurate with your shot – and most times you get just the one shot.

Right about now you’re thinking: “What the …? I don’t read this blog for hunting lessons!” An understandable reaction, of course, but in a roundabout way that is exactly why you read this blog! As business owners and Sales and Marketing people we are hunting down new business and revenue streams, and we can learn lessons from things hunters already know. Like the fact that you can hunt rats and mice (and birds) with a ’spray and pray’ approach; but when you want the impressive wins you need very sharp aim.

Small businesses pass through four phases in their passage to becoming big businesses, and each phase requires a slightly different aim. Over the next few articles we will look at each phase, and analyse the Sales and Marketing ‘aim’ required in each.

The four phases come about at the intersections of two key dimensions: Your offering (we’ll call it a product), and your market.

Primary Focus: The Start-up Phase

When a business first begins operations it sits at the Product/Market intersection labelled ‘New/New‘. An untested product offering is being marketed to an audience of prospects who have never done business with the organisation before. It goes without saying that this phase is fraught with dangers and challenges! However, the good news is that once you have passed out of this phase there is no need to ever re-visit it – although some willingly step back into the maelstrom for reasons which escape me.

The Indiscriminate/Ineffectual Approach

There are two ways in which we can get it wrong in this phase: First (and very common), we can take a shotgun and fire on anything that moves. We don’t care what we kill, as long as the pot doesn’t remain empty at dinnertime! Here at Zee2A, we call this the Indiscriminate/Ineffectual approach. It is manifested by a high level of marketing activity, spread across an impossibly wide range of channels. Think: three or more networking commitments a week in widely different environments; brochures; flyers; adverts in the local paper(s); AdWord campaigns; Yellow Pages-based cold-calling – and the list goes on. If you’re checking boxes for the majority of these in your new business, you may well benefit from going back to First Principles.

Why does this approach not work? For starters, by taking the shotgun rather than the hunting rifle you have pretty much guaranteed that you will only ever bring home ‘rats and mice’. None of your many marketing initiatives is massive enough to influence substantial prospects into doing business with you. And there’s a further consequence – by blazing away at big game with a shotgun you run the risk of causing irritation, thus losing the chance to ever do business with that prospect. This happens when you put in front of a key prospect an ill-prepared marketing message or sales proposal – because you didn’t have the time to focus on their real needs. Once the door closes behind you (and it will) it will be extremely difficult to open it again.

Another reason to avoid the Indiscriminate/Ineffectual approach is because even duck-hunters have to have some semblance of good aim! Yes, the shotgun makes it easier, but you still have to be pointing at the right area of sky, and be able to time the shot.

The Discriminate/Ineffectual Approach

A second way to get it wrong in the Startup phase is to take our hunting rifle, then use it to shoot at ‘rats and mice’! Sounds crazy, I know, but we’ve seen it happen. This Discriminate/Ineffectual approach is characterised by a small set of highly-prepared marketing and sales initiatives, delivered with precision to the wrong audience of prospects. You’ll know you’re doing it when you find your order bookings are rising but your profits are shrinking – then when you try to raise prices to address the profit issue your order-book shrinks. You’ll also be guilty of it if you invest so much of your time and skills in working with the prospect before getting an order that they then don’t place the order because you’ve addressed their need for free.

Why does this approach not work? Principally because the business won doesn’t warrant the investment in winning it. It’s a gruesome visual, I know, but imagine how much would be left of a rabbit struck by a bullet from a rifle designed to hunt Wildebeest. Not enough to go in the pot for dinner – and that’s precisely the problem!

Being both Discriminate and Effectual is the Key

How can we avoid these mistakes in our start-up business? Consider the following pointers:

• Know what you are hunting. Understand clearly who your target market is, so that when you get a prospect in the cross-hairs you can decide in an instant whether to take the shot or keep looking.
• Know where to hunt. Know the demographics and psychographics of your target market, so that you can choose marketing and sales initiatives that will bring them – and only them – into your gunsights.
• Be confident and positive in offering your product to prospects – after all, they’ve never done business with you before so they don’t know what to expect. Planning and preparation are the key to success in this area. Hunters don’t ask for permission – and they’re okay with the fact that they don’t hit the target every time.

In a future article we will look at the marketing and sales focus needed to a business in the Core Market phase of growth. In the meantime, Good hunting!

©David Deakin and Zee2A Limited 2009. Would you like to reprint this article? You may do so as long as you include the copyright notice and the following paragraph: David Deakin, CEO of Zee2A, is a marketing mentor who works with Professional services Executives yearning to take their business to the next level. Through one-on-one and group mentoring programmes he helps them to create sustainable marketing strategies that attract more clients at profitable rates. To learn more, sign up for his e-zine, or make an enquiry please visit www.zee2a.com.

Why Are Your Customers Giving You Bad Publicity?

Three Ways to Ruin Your
Business Reputation

 

Funny how the minute I use the word ‘reputation’ ears prick up. We all know the power of a good reputation, and the damage a bad one can do. Businesses are concerned over matters like their environmental impact; Fair-trade policies; adherence to health and safety standards; etc because those issues impact on their reputation. A good reputation drives good publicity and ultimately longevity of a business. A bad reputation leads to bad publicity (whether via the media or simply the power of ‘word-of-mouth’), lost customers, and can ultimately result in business failure.

 

This article is not about to focus on environmental impact, Fair-trade policies, or health and safety. What it is going to focus on is three other areas that customers find critically important. Customers are, after all, the lifeblood of your business. If we as businesses are not delivering what our customers deem important they will drift away and go to our competitors that are. Specifically we are going to address three customer satisfaction issues that impact on your business reputation.

 

I recently hosted a survey among a group of consumers, to find out what key issues made them extremely dissatisfied with a service provider. The following three issues came up over and over and over again. They were:

 

1.       Recurrent Mistakes – with little or no attempt to prevent future occurrence,

2.       Disrespectful Behaviour from a member of staff, and

3.       Appalling Telephony Systems.

 

Recurrent Mistakes

 

No one is saying that we have to be perfect and are not allowed to ever make mistakes. Humans, being imperfect as we are, will always need to allow a margin for error. The problem comes in when people do not learn from their mistakes and keep on doing the same wrong things repeatedly. A number of complaints I have heard are around the lack of effort to correct mistakes.

 

There could be different reasons why mistakes are repeated. At times a lack of skills or training is to blame. At other times it is a personnel issue – either the wrong person has been assigned to do the job, or the employee involved is simply careless and takes no pride in their work. And of course a management issue is often involved – failing to address issues before they escalate (be they training, staffing, or attitude issues).

 

Disrespectful Behaviour from a Staff Member

 

Now while you as a business owner are gasping that none of your employees would ever treat a customer disrespectfully, 2 out of every 5 people I surveyed (that’s almost half of them) have a different view! The kind of behaviour that they find disrespectful includes:

• An inconsistent level of service from different people in the same organisation;
• Discrimination based on their perceived value (or lack thereof) as a client;
• Staff members unwilling to take responsibility;
• A member of staff who obviously regards customer interaction as an interruption; and
• Unfulfilled promises (phone calls and emails not returned; promises not followed through; etc).

Would it surprise you to know that Harvard Business School conducted a study a few years ago, which established that nearly two thirds of customers that leave an organisation do so as a direct result of bad service or discourtesy from a member of staff? And it’s not just junior members of staff that are guilty of disrespectful behaviour either. In my survey there was evidence of managers and other senior people giving their junior staff very poor examples to follow.

 

Appalling Telephony Systems

 

Ooh, now this is a hot-potato isn’t it? Customers hate call centres!

We can all relate personal experiences of being caught in an automated loop with no quick way to a real, live person; or being stuck with “”option 1, option 2, and option 3″ whether our call had anything to do with those options or not; and when we do actually get to speak to somebody on the other end, often they can’t actually help us at all.

 

Is it the call centre per se that is the problem? Or is it perhaps the individuals on the other end of the telephone that either enhance or ruin your experience?

 

There are two distinct areas here that need addressing, and both relate to training. On the one hand, customers need to be better educated to use the alternatives available to them. I feel qualified to say (because I am frequently guilty of this myself) that if the customer first referred to their user manual / policy document / the business website; there would probably be no need to pick up the telephone at all. On the other hand, the staff within these call centres need to be more adequately trained in product knowledge and in effective use of the telephone.

 

Let’s face it, as a customer, I would have no objection (nor be any the wiser) to my call being answered anywhere and by anyone, as long as my call was efficiently dealt with.

 

It’s easy to see how failing in these three areas can completely ruin our business reputation. Customers talk. Fact. We really don’t want them spreading negative publicity about us. I’ve heard it said that a happy customer will share their story with one or two close friends, but an unhappy customer will tell everyone they can! So then is there an easy way to protect our reputations? Absolutely Yes!

 

These issues (and indeed many others too) can usually be resolved by the following three steps:

1.       Sharpening the recruitment process – finding the right people, and putting them in to the right roles;

2.       Managing problem staff more closely – being close to the causes, is it motivation, attitude, or a skills gap? and

3.       Providing an adequate, ongoing, and consistent training and personal development programme for all members of staff.

 

© Vanessa Deakin and Zee2A Limited

This article was originally published on 20 February 2008 in The Marketing Edge

 

Would you like to reprint this article? You may do so as long as you include the copyright notice and the following paragraph: Vanessa Deakin is a Marketing Coach who works with Professional Service Executives frustrated and disappointed with their current growth rates, marketing efforts, and business profitability. Through one-on-one and group mentoring programmes she helps them to skyrocket their results and break their own best records. To learn more, sign up for her e-zine, or make an enquiry please visit our website at www.zee2a.com

Read More Articles Like This! Request a Free Subscription to The Marketing Edge

Three Ways to Ruin Your Business Reputation

Funny how the minute I use the word ‘reputation’ ears prick up. We all know the power of a good reputation, and the damage a bad one can do. Businesses are concerned over matters like their environmental impact; Fair-trade policies; adherence to health and safety standards; etc because those issues impact on their reputation. A good reputation drives good publicity and ultimately longevity of a business. A bad reputation leads to bad publicity (whether via the media or simply the power of ‘word-of-mouth’), lost customers, and can ultimately result in business failure.

This article is not about to focus on environmental impact, Fair-trade policies, or health and safety. What it is going to focus on is three other areas that customers find critically important. Customers are, after all, the lifeblood of your business. If we as businesses are not delivering what our customers deem important they will drift away and go to our competitors that are. Specifically we are going to address three customer satisfaction issues that impact on your business reputation.

I recently hosted a survey among a group of consumers, to find out what key issues made them extremely dissatisfied with a service provider. The following three issues came up over and over and over again. They were:

• Recurrent Mistakes – with little or no attempt to prevent future occurrence,
• Disrespectful Behaviour from a member of staff, and
• Appalling Telephony Systems.

Recurrent Mistakes

No one is saying that we have to be perfect and are not allowed to ever make mistakes. Humans, being imperfect as we are, will always need to allow a margin for error. The problem comes in when people do not learn from their mistakes and keep on doing the same wrong things repeatedly. A number of complaints I have heard are around the lack of effort to correct mistakes.

There could be different reasons why mistakes are repeated. At times a lack of skills or training is to blame. At other times it is a personnel issue – either the wrong person has been assigned to do the job, or the employee involved is simply careless and takes no pride in their work. And of course a management issue is often involved – failing to address issues before they escalate (be they training, staffing, or attitude issues).

Disrespectful Behaviour from a Staff Member

Now while you as a business owner are gasping that none of your employees would ever treat a customer disrespectfully, 2 out of every 5 people I surveyed (that’s almost half of them) have a different view! The kind of behaviour that they find disrespectful includes:

• An inconsistent level of service from different people in the same organisation;
• Discrimination based on their perceived value (or lack thereof) as a client;
• Staff members unwilling to take responsibility;
• A member of staff who obviously regards customer interaction as an interruption; and
• Unfulfilled promises (phone calls and emails not returned; promises not followed through; etc).

Would it surprise you to know that Harvard Business School conducted a study a few years ago, which established that nearly two thirds of customers that leave an organisation do so as a direct result of bad service or discourtesy from a member of staff? And it’s not just junior members of staff that are guilty of disrespectful behaviour either. In my survey there was evidence of managers and other senior people giving their junior staff very poor examples to follow.

Appalling Telephony Systems

Ooh, now this is a hot-potato isn’t it? Customers hate call centres!

We can all relate personal experiences of being caught in an automated loop with no quick way to a real, live person; or being stuck with “”option 1, option 2, and option 3″ whether our call had anything to do with those options or not; and when we do actually get to speak to somebody on the other end, often they can’t actually help us at all.

Is it the call centre per se that is the problem? Or is it perhaps the individuals on the other end of the telephone that either enhance or ruin your experience?

There are two distinct areas here that need addressing, and both relate to training. On the one hand, customers need to be better educated to use the alternatives available to them. I feel qualified to say (because I am frequently guilty of this myself) that if the customer first referred to their user manual / policy document / the business website; there would probably be no need to pick up the telephone at all. On the other hand, the staff within these call centres need to be more adequately trained in product knowledge and in effective use of the telephone.

Let’s face it, as a customer, I would have no objection (nor be any the wiser) to my call being answered anywhere and by anyone, as long as my call was efficiently dealt with.

It’s easy to see how failing in these three areas can completely ruin our business reputation. Customers talk. Fact. We really don’t want them spreading negative publicity about us. I’ve heard it said that a happy customer will share their story with one or two close friends, but an unhappy customer will tell everyone they can! So then is there an easy way to protect our reputations? Absolutely Yes!

These issues (and indeed many others too) can usually be resolved by the following three steps:

• Sharpening the recruitment process – finding the right people, and putting them in to the right roles;
• Managing problem staff more closely – being close to the causes, is it motivation, attitude, or a skills gap? and
• Providing an adequate, ongoing, and consistent training and personal development programme for all members of staff.

Do you ever receive customer complaints? Are your staff repeating the same mistakes? Do you run a call centre? Don’t despair, Zee2A can help! Vanessa works with organisations who desire increased commitment from staff who take pride in their work. Organisations that are striving to provide a faster, friendlier, more efficient service. Organisations that want satisfied customers who remain loyal and evangelise about how great your service is, to others. Read about our Service Essentials Programme here.

©Vanessa Deakin and Zee2A Limited 2008. Would you like to reprint this article? You may do so as long as you include the copyright notice and the following paragraph: Vanessa Deakin, Operations Director at Zee2A, is a Marketing Coach who works with Professional Service Executives frustrated and disappointed with their current growth rates, marketing efforts, and business profitability. Through one-on-one and group mentoring programmes she helps them to skyrocket their results and break their own best records. To learn more, sign up for her e-zine, or make an enquiry please visit our website at www.zee2a.com