jbsh

In my last post I talked about business process modeling and how it could help understand the activities in a business prior to cost cutting for survival. In this post I’m going to riff on the concept of delighting your customers so they come back.

The hygiene factor in delighting your customers is not pissing them off in the first place. How easy is to buy your product & service? Does your product & service do what your customers want (when was the last time you asked)? How you handle complaints / faults / genuine cock-ups?

The easy sell

It may sound obvious but there’s a good reason why Amazon went to all that hassle over their ‘One Click‘ purchasing system. If folks give up half-way through a transaction not only have you lost a sale, you’ve now got a dissatisfied individual that will quite happily tell everyone how poor your service is.

Some companies actually make it fun to buy their products. Moo have this absolutely nailed. Not only do they get you to do a lot of the (perceived) hard work in designing your business/greeting card/post card/etc, but its a fun and engaging process. Innocent Drinks have a delightful approach to their products that makes choosing which smoothie to buy more fun than just a straight choice between ingredients lists.

Even if you’re in the B2B market, a human somewhere will make the decision to buy your product & service so at least make it a painless decision. Think about their pain points; at this stage in the econoclapse no one wants to sign off a large order over 3 years, perhaps you can get a rolling contract with stage payments. That’ll help both your cash flow positions. Know what the sign-off limit is for your primary contact and sneak under that for each stage payment.

Does exactly what is says on the tin

Uploaded on March 18, 2008 by David Clow - Maryland

The simplest form of customer feedback is your sales. If people are prepared to hand over cash then whatever you’re doing has real value to them. If you’re giving the stuff away then it’s a time investment that acts as a proxy for cash (people returning to your app/game/etc and using it over an extended time period).

Our tagline is “advancement through integrating knowledge” which is what we do, work with clients to advance their business / organisation / research through bringing together our own multidisciplinary knowledge base and integrating with the client’s knowledge base to solve whatever problem was chosen. But if that was all we did we’d be competing with every other consultancy that ‘works closely with their clients in unique partnership, blah blah blah”.

We integrate through networking and engaging in the local, regional, national and international communities we’re a part of. We share knowledge through this blog and by publishing research papers. We support the advancement of others through OpenCoffee, offering advice and reviewing journal papers, and generally trying to connect interesting people.

What low-cost but high perceived added-value can you provide to differentiate from everyone else?

Oops, mea culpa

We all make mistakes. Some are large, some small, some public some private (though you should assume everything is public these days). How we deal with these will for many define the character and long term relationship between a client and your business. With all the social media tools at our disposal, there’s no excuse for not knowing if someone’s complaining about a poor experience. Google & twitter searches with RSS feeds for your company / product names will quickly highlight opportunities to directly engage with dissatisfied people.

Carsonified recently had a promotion where they gave away some very cool journals as part of FOWA; they proved so popular they were offered for sale. There was a mix up with the orders (it happens) but rather than brush it under the carpet or get all legal, Ryan sorted it quickly, humbly and openly on Twitter.

The internet is full of people reporting poor perceived customer service and business practice, not being part of those conversations is often seen as an admission of guilt. Are you monitoring your brand online? Are you part of the conversation?

Going Above & Beyond

Delighting the customer isn’t about huge extravagant gestures (especially not in this economic climate). Mostly its about treating customers as people and offering them unexpected delights. If your basic products, services and internal processes don’t function then no amount of customer service will compensate in the long term. But in a competitive market it makes the difference between competing on price and competing on value.

Dan Such bags a netbook

A variation of igFest’s Moosehunt came to Bristol yesterday in the form of Vodafone’s LiveGuy, his mission (which it looks like he accepted with eagerness):

I’m travelling from the north to the south of Britain, laying down clues to my whereabouts. Your mission is to find me - and maybe even bag yourself a netbook. You’ve got two ways to win. Either Find LiveGuy in person or Find LiveGuy online.

<plug>All with the help of a very cool looking Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook connected to the Vodafone network and with a GPS chip giving location updates (delayed slightly for the purposes of giving LiveGuy a fighting chance).</plug>

Sam Machin catches up with LiveGuy

Through the wonders of social media, Mike Coulter met with with LiveGuy at the start of his journey in Edinburgh. It was his blog & twitter stream that alerted me to the project. Mike then dm’d me to see if I wanted help drum up some interest around Bristol.

A few txt messsages, phone calls and emails led to an early morning rendevouz at a top secret location before the day’s excitment around Bristol. As well as bringing Liveguy and his support team (Alastair) up to speed with some of what’s going on around Bristol in the creative use of mobile & locative technology we also had a really good discussion over the future of such technologies and what you can achieve with them.

Obviously the creative and pervasive media projects going on around the Pervasive Media Studio were of interest along with the robotics research between the Universities, but what struck me was the genuine interest around communities, engagement and ways in which technology, and the service providers, can help facilitate that engagement.

Bristol has as checkered a history at public engagement as any other city but in recent years a number of really good initiatives have shown what can be achieved. The flagship is probably the Knowle West Media Centre with a huge and expanding range of community programmes covering pretty much all aspects of digital media. These are so good they’re now running a social enterprise with clients including blue chips and local community companies. They’ve also engaged in a number of innovative mobile and locative technology projects exploring the ways in which civic engagement can be facilitated by technology.

Tom Dowding also spotted LiveGuy

We also talked about the Connecting Bristol project which came out of the Digital Challenge. This is another area where creative use of technology is being applied to wide civic challenges. Under the wing of the City Council, but operating independently out of the eOffice on Wine St, Stephen Hilton and Kevin O’Malley are part of 10 city collaboration. As well as news about the DC10 grouping of cities, Kevin regularly posts about other initiatives and news that is of interest for those at the intersection between technology and civic change (environment, education, planning, transport, are just some recent topics).

With that it was nearly time for LiveGuy to fire up twitter and hit the streets of Bristol, and for me to head off also. I’m staying in touch with Alastair so watch this space for more announcements.

Congratulations to Dan Such, Sam Machin, Tom Dowing and the online winner, Ruth Bailey.

Disclosure: Although I knew where Liveguy was starting his day in Bristol, I didn’t know the itinerary and chose not to take part in the Find Live Guy challenge. There is no business relationship between jbsh LLP, Vodafone or the agency behind LiveGuy.

Update: the picture links to Picassa didn’t seem to work - so I’ve copied the images to jbsh.co.uk and linked to them here.

One of the great aspects of working alongside Universities, is the breadth and depth of critical thinking that you get exposed to. Wednesday evening I was a guest at the Bristol Business School’s Distinguished Executive Address Series and the speaker was Karen Dunnell. Since her Wikipedia page was last edited the ONS has merged and become the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) with Karen as CEO.

In a wide ranging and refreshingly honest talk, Karen covered many of the organisational and structural challenges that she and the civil servants in her charge have faced over the past few upheavals.

The framework for her talk was the departmental model of leadership around four key factors. There are as many models of leadership as there are leaders, this is a particularly interesting one from a small company and social media perspective as I’ll try and indicate below.

Integrity

As an organisation of knowledge professionals there is a delicate balancing act between “pure” mathematical “truth” and the political need for answers to quite specific questions. In providing leadership for the UKSA, Karen ensures that each individual maintains their integrity and thus the organisation remains true to its purpose. This is encapsulated in their Code of Practice, but we demonstrate our integrity (or otherwise) in everything we say, do and (increasingly) are perceived to be saying & doing.

We’re all judged and evaluated on our integrity, the concept of Social Capital or personal brand is an integral part of a wider corporate integrity. Ultimately your integrity is inextricably tied to authority and people’s willingness to be led by you.

Direction

This is the Vision/Mission/Strategy bit that applies equally for UKSA with over 3,000 staff and a wide ranging statutory and agile reactive environment as for new start ups and growth businesses. Do you know where you’re heading and do you have a plan & the resources to get from here to there. Do you have a contingency plan?

No organisation exists in a vacuum and whether it’s Government ministers or tabloid newspapers screaming for yet another set of stats to justify their hobby horse, or economic disruptors throwing a spanner in the works; a well articulated direction provides the framework and context for the other aspects of this leadership model.

There’s a delicate balance between being an intransigent branch of the civil service and a gadfly chasing policy directives. Karen was balancing some pretty tough negotiations on what the UKSA was about and could do, against having to please political masters that control her budget.

Capability

This was more than just the capability to deliver customer expectations. It also covered organisational capabilities. Getting the best from everyone when everyone’s moving around. Although a large organisation (around 3,000 people) Karen highlighted the incredible changes that have taken place as a result of the relocations that are leading to a need to balance capabilities across staff and plan for the future (link talks about changes to legal profession but I think the challenges are identical for any knowledge/professional based business).

Results

It was very telling that this was the last on the list, yet the one that Karen felt the UKSA was strongest at. As a statistics authority you’d expect lots of measurable results. However, even the UKSA operates against Time-Cost-Quality results metrics. The interesting aspect from a senior executive perspective were the wider results matrix. How to measure the impact of an organisation (especially one that is not a profit centre)?

For Karen this was about raising the profile of the statistics service and educating the public in the role and benefit of stats in providing the evidence to inform decision making. A crucial aspect was the presentation of results in the media, not just the hard statistics but the processes and interpretation of those stats.

So what’s in it for me?

Good leadership means demonstrating integrity in everything you do, articulating a clear direction of travel, identifying and building the capability mix needed to get there, and bringing everyone along in delivering the results that stem from the direction you’re headed. This applies to running a start-up, established company, multi-national or nation.

Uploaded on September 27, 2008 by Steve Wampler

…after you’ve crossed my palm with silver.

There’s always been a healthy market in one group of people selling access to a small second group of people that a third, larger group of people value. In many circumstances this is entirely right and proper.

I was recently at the 31st International Conference on Small Business & Entrepreneurship, this was a massive gathering of academics researching the world of the small business and entrepreneur (slightly devalued by the lack of small businesses and entrepreneurs but that’s another story). Part of the value was the stellar network of UK and International academics interested in supporting and developing businesses. It was certainly cheaper than schlepping my way around the UK and most folk were already in an ‘open mindset’ to making new connections. For the academics, part of the value was in presenting their research to other academics.

On the other hand, there are plenty of networks and the like that will provide access to potential investors (for a fee). It could just be coincidental timing but I’m seeing more of these networks and events pushing themselves harder than before.

I’ve nothing against introducing people to potential investors (something I try and do in a small way around Bristol), nor have I anything against events to get people networking for business benefit (e.g. OpenCoffee). It’s the bit where you fork out hard cash for the opportunity, to possibly, meet someone that might be interested in your business. And lets face it, no one sensible is going to hand over a wedge of used £20’s on the basis of a 1 minute pitch over lukewarm coffee and limp biscuit.

I can see a valid business case for someone that can introduce me to a sizeable chunk of funding receiving a suitable fee for that service, but a fixed fee rather than an arbitrary % and that should be no-win-no-fee.

As a business development professional, I would expect to get paid for adding value to a business. Sorting out a business strategy, or identifying new markets and executing an exploitation plan, or implementing an efficiency plan following some process mapping, etc.

I can see that with the profile of Kliner Perkins / Sequia / etc comes a great deal of attention and that access might need to be managed. On the other hand, folks like Fred Wilson, Rick Segal and others are openly out there sharing their stories of how to approach them (and how not to)! So why pay someone else good money to preview your business plan and then mailshot their contact list?

So get out there and have confidence in your business. If you feel you need support with the business of building a business, have clear deliverables contractually agreed before you hand over the cash. It’s a sales channel just like any other, the only difference is that you’re selling a stake in the business (or buying entry to a particular market) rather than a website or set of APIs.