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.

Uploaded on November 26, 2006 by Manzabar

With the econoclapse in full effect, most companies are cutting back, trimming the fat, stopping non-essential spend. Which is good, but what if the budget you’re about to slash is the one that’s keeping you alive?

The trouble with businesses is that once they get bigger than a couple guys with laptops in a Starbucks (and sometimes even before then) they get complex. When you have to do lots of things more than once, you tend to set a routine, because this helps save time and money and ensures consistancy.

The trouble with people is that (with a couple of exceptions, I’m not one) they can only cope with 7±2 ideas at a time. Which means lots of fudging and scribbled notes to remember for next time. Unfortunately, decisions get forgotten and when times change, who knows which of those routines are the ones that are critical and which were the nice-to-haves because someone at a masterclass suggested all well run businesses applied a 15 point check list to Quality Assurance…

Setting up automatic routines/reports/etc on Remember the Milk, or Basecamp doesn’t get away from the problem, it just automates it.

Uploaded on November 5, 2006 by vivisquare

What you need is a picture of how your business works. The series of inter-linked activities that between them represent your unique business. Something that’ll allow you to hack’n’slash at your business in theory and diagrammatically before actually making a change that’ll piss of your best customer.

What you need is a business process model.

What you don’t need is a legion of McKinsey consultants. At the most profound level, process models are diagrammatic representations of the systems that make your business function. Boxes and arrows. Easy.

There are two simple things to remember with process maps (OK, there are a couple more but to get started in a blog post…); 1) the ICOM is your friend; 2) decompose where sensible.

Integration Definition for Function Modeling (IDEF0) Box Format

There are lots of methods for developing business process models, I quite like IDEF0 (its what I used in my research work, it’s simple and robust, which is handy when developing models ‘on the fly’; there aren’t to many things to remember - back to the 7±2). The basic unit of the IDEF0 method is the ICOM; which stands for Inputs, Controls, Outputs & Mechanisms.

This basic unit forms the basis for modeling the business. As always there are two general approaches to generating a model, top-down or bottom-up. Bottom-up generally involves stapling yourself to an order and recording every activity that happens between the customer placing the order and the end of the cycle (either payment or receipt of goods). In larger companies this is how you find out how things actually work, rather than how the ISO9000:2000 manual says they work.

Top-down is often easier to explain how the method works. At the top level, there a 3 things that all businesses do, Manage, Operate and Support the business. You can decompose the Operate Process into Get Order, Fulfill Order, Develop New Product, and Support Product. Then start with Get Order, what does this involve? What controls how you get orders, what outputs are generated to enable you to fulfil those orders, what mechanisms do you use to make all this happen, what triggers the process in the first place?

Keep breaking these actions down until you get to the smallest unit of actionable work. When you get to ‘pour water into teacup’ you’ve gone too far!

The idea is to be able to remove, combine, move, change an activity and be confident that there are no unexpected impacts that aren’t captured by the diagram.

Uploaded on July 22, 2006 by jodigreen

It doesn’t have to be a long draw-out process, you can sketch quickly with pen and paper and have a reasonably good set of diagrams after a couple hours. You also don’t need to model every..single…process in the business, just the ones you’re looking at.

Providing every box has an output, control and mechanism and that if you’ve decomposed a box the arrows that touch that box are represented in the child diagram; then you’re good to go.

Now if you cut an activity you’ll be able to see the wider impact. You can see which activities to combine and which are obsolete.

You can have a look at other businesses and see how they handle those processes, and copy them (best practice and all that). Rather than just cut’n'paste’n'hope you can figure out how processes fit together.

Plug the savings into your cash flow forecast, see what effect it has, rinse, repeat until you’ve looked at everything.

Whilst you’re plugging through the accounts, check every line against the business model; where does it fit in, which process does it relate to, does it add value or costs?

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.

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.