What are we doing with our Customers?

Customers.

We all know how to look after our customer’s right?

We know how to treat them, listen to them, help and support them?

So why is so few people doing this in business today?

What do we perceive when we hear a customer complaint?

What is it that makes us go on the defence and defend our product, service or personnel?

We are living in a time where business moves fast, we are in one of the biggest turnaround of the last 70 years in business. Businesses use to be able to get away with any level of service  as long as the customer or supplier wasn’t insulted, business continued and boomed in the 1950’s – 1970’s (as one account recalls ‘If Chevrolet delivered my dad a car without a driveshaft he wouldn’t have complained, he was just glad he could afford a car’). This almost applied to any business..

As we have worked our way to present times we can say that we are a customer focused world where cheap isn’t always better.

The truth is it is not as straightforward as products and services. It is who buys these products or services and when customer’s budgets are tight, as almost the majority of customers budgets are at the moment. What really separates us from our competition?

Could it just be price, if we are offering the same product?

Have you ever had an experience at a hotel, shop or a service that someone has provided like your local car garage, where you have been really pleased and satisfied with your experience? Did someone do something you weren’t expecting or go out of their way for you? It is hard to think of moments like this. If I now said to you, have you ever been treated badly in any of the above places, where you will tell people to avoid those places? I bet those scenarios are a lot easier to think of.

So if we understand that we find it hard to recall on excellent customer service and find it easier recalling on bad service. What do we need to do?

Obvious answer to the obvious question would be to ‘wow’ the customer when we can. If we were just politer that normal, did more for them than they were expecting, showed them that you went out of your way to deliver your higher level of product or service, their perception of your company would go up tenfold.

Has anyone ever asked you what you thought about a place of business, where your answer was ‘yeah they’re ok, I go there sometimes’ how about when someone asks you ‘what do you think about … business’ and your response is ‘you should use them, they’re actually pretty good’. Could you make your customers react that way when asked about your business?

The thing is that all of this is obvious but so little businesses do this. They spend time looking inwards and then to where their next project is going to take them. Focus outwardly for a while, listen to your customers they may be your next innovator, they could be the person that goes ‘what I really want from a company is someone who listens’ you could start listening.

If you get a complaint, listen to what they are complaining about because right now they are your best customer, for every vocal complaint there is at least 10 people thinking the same way. We can sometimes go on the defence, but if you drop your guard for a moment you might just learn from these people, they are only speaking up because they need your help and they believe in your product or service. Win them back. (If they say they aren’t going to use you again and you can’t change the way they feel, forget them, they aren’t right for your business)

The truth is you know what you need to do, you know that customers should be listened to just like you would like to be listened to, and only you know how to implement that culture in to your business. The culture might just be the winning feature that you have over your competition.

There are two fascinating books on this subject that I recommend.

Michael Heppell – 5 Star Service

Tom Peters – A Passion for Excellence leadership

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A Brilliant Video from Tony Robbins.

I have just come accross this video on youtube whilst searching for NLP.

This is a great way to show the power that coaching can bring to peoples lives. It takes someone removed from their situation and their way of thinking to give them clarity.

 

 

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A Typically, Unusual, Success Story.

So what does it take to become truly successful?

I have just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Outliers’ A fascinating book on how success isn’t black and white, it does not just come down to hard work and coming from the right background. These things are important but there are other factors that might not have been considered, like being in the right place at the right time, being born at a certain time or coming from a family with a strong historical working culture.

Gladwell explores the key reasons that lie behind successful people. Bill Gates, for example lived within a few miles of one of the very few super computers in the world. He managed to be born at the right time, where he was at the right age, to spend right time learning about computer programming. He also had the financial backing from a club that his mother belonged to and also managed to hack the system to spend more time on the computer without being shut off.

To top it all off by the time the personal computer become available Bill Gates had put in 10,000 hours of practice becoming an expert at his field of programming.

What if it takes more than hard work to become a success?

Does Alan Sugar, Richard Branson or Steve Jobs fit into this example? Would we find the answer, if we explored this question in greater detail? Probably.

What does this mean for the rest of us? What has happened during our time that we could turn our hand to?

I collected Pokémon cards; I had a pile so big that I needed a big elastic band to hold them together. I used to believe that I could tell if a pack had a ‘shiny’ in it before I opened it. One day I was walking around a wholesaler with my dad and come across a box of 90 packs of playing cards for £90. Wow. “When I get older I am going to by a box of them. It is what I dreamed about and if I could make a career out of it back then I probably would have.

Long story short my school banned them and I grew up.

A Tamagotchi was something I was great at, unfortunately the same story above applied, I grew up.

We have been there for the mobile phone generation. My first phone a Nokia 3310 was one of the first phones with a game on them – they had snake- and didn’t even think about colour or anything internet based. I was there for when the phones went micro to what they are now – a hand held computer.

We have been there when the internet has become what it is now, I remember when I first Googled.

But I am not that interested in phones or going on Google.

The thing is that all of the above things we have been there for, we have been using these things and probably have put in more than 10,000 hours on the mobiles or the computers. The answer is that yes, we probably could find anything we wanted to find on the internet without too much trouble or work out how to use a new phone in a heartbeat.

We aren’t there for anything new, yet!

Yet, is a big yet. Because the point of what we can learn by the giants of innovation and business is that you have to find the time, with a bit of luck, to discover something revolutionary.

What could we be working on today that could turn out to be great, how are we changing the world, what is becoming important that isn’t quite yet. How can we change the world?

Find something you love to do, there is no way that you will be able to put in 10,000 hours of practice into something that is just going to change the world but you don’t care about it. So find your interest, make it an art.

Business is changing all the time. The way that people are reacting to Business, ideas and principles change all the time, every day in fact there could be one statement that contradicts the other, and we are making sense of it. People are spending the time to make sense of it.

I can’t make a go of Pokémon cards anymore or Tamagotchis, I couldn’t make a business out of texting or the internet, I might do these things but they aren’t my passion.

What is your passion?

This is the real answer and the truth of it all; you can be in the right place at the right time in hindsight. What’s to say you aren’t in the right place or the right time now?  

Do what you love, work hard, become an expert, work hard on becoming an expert. Enjoy the experience, if you don’t end up changing the world, worst case scenario you might just enjoy your life.

 

 

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The power and the why of changing your lifestyle

HOW AND WHY DO WE NEED CHANGE?

WHAT DO WE NEED TO DO TO START?

When I say change I mean the sort of change that makes us better.

I believe this change starts when we have decided that what we are doing now and who we are now is no longer good enough. What I am doing right now will not get me to the stage that I have dreamed of. It will not give me financial freedom it will not give me job satisfaction.

I want to go to bed at night and feel fulfilled and when I get up the next day I was to feel excited about what I can add to my life and to others. 

So how do you decide when enough is enough? 

Well are you completely happy right now, how many of you can say that I am right now, where I want to be?

We carry on the way we are because we believe that is the easy option, the easy option allows us to go to bed at night not satisfied, waking up not satisfied, doing our job not satisfied.

I decided the ‘easy option’ was no longer an option. If you were to ask anyone that has stepped out of that easy option comfort  zone and into a new way of life with constant self improvement and making a difference. They will say that was never an easy option looking back. When you have a plan with what you would like to achieve, life flows, reasons to be at your job are easier to find and when you go to bed you are satisfied and when you wake up you are satisfied.

So are you where you want to be?

 I know I am not, but I will work for the rest of my life towards reaching my goal and when I reach my goal I will set another one and work towards that.

I don’t think that I will reach a point of where I decide that I have done exactly what I want to do. I like to dream big

At 19 I ran my own business and I ran it for 2 years but I couldn’t see my future within my company because I had no direction and everything I dreamt of doing I was told that ‘probably won’t work’.  So in the end I decided to go back to employment, feeling like I had failed but also feeling like I had gained a lot of experience with some questions unanswered. 

So through employment on my next job I passed on the passion and experience and changed as much as I could. With my questions still unanswered.

So now I need to do something different I need to something where I am in control of how I feel and how I can create betterness in my life and others.

I asked myself what are my skills and what where does my passion exist, so that’s business and the people within it.

I wanted to be working hard at working clever instead of being clever and working hard. So how does someone that has a passion in business and also wants to work hard at working clever.

I wanted to be able to give something back to people that I interact with. So for me the natural fit was coaching on business and personal performance, aimed at people that really want to make a difference in their lives and are committed to this kind of change. My passion for coaching will rub off on anyone who comes to me, so far I have 100% success rate and that is to the credit of the passion from the clients I coach.

I want to make you ask the question what am I passionate about what do I want to achieve with my life what do I desire.

So what do we do with our vision and is it realistic?

This is a passage from an interview done on the founder of IBM

IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream – my vision – was in place.

The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done.

The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look like when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there.

In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one.

From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, and discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference.

Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business.

We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one.

So what we can learn from one of the most successful people in business and in history is that to start with the end in mind. Stephen Covey talks about starting with the end in mind in his book ‘the seven habits of highly successful people’ If we start with our vision our perceived future we can work our way backwards.

VISION
This is where we see our future the things we can picture to make us happy where we will feel content with our lives, satisfied and fulfilled.
GOALS
These are the things we put in place to make sure we achieve our vision, our perceived future. The things we can work towards to say that we have achieved that gets us that one bit closer to our vision.
STRATERGY
This is how we are going to achieve our goal, these are the standards we set our self by, how we carry ourselves towards our goals. What we need to do and how.
ACTION PLAN
This is the every step part. The every step I take is towards the vision. We must make sure at this stage that we do not lose focus that we are following the strategy towards our goals. We must remain in constant sight of our vision the reason why we are doing what we do never loosing focus.

I have met people that have said are you really going to achieve what you want. Is what your doing a waste of time. What happens if you do not become successful?
I know what I think when I hear these comments and I am sure you can come up with your own answers. And it all depends on your mind set.
I read a quote.

“It is not given to us to know what difference we can make, and perhaps we can make no difference at all. But that is no reason not to make the attempt"

It sums up for me the message I want to get across to all the disbelievers out there. If I fail I fail but I will be much further than you will ever be in my mind and in my heart because I took the risk for a want for a better future for myself, my family (which is in my vision) and for every person I come in to contact with.
As JFK said ‘the only thing to fear is fear itself’.
I have no fear of taking that risk.

A great video from someone who could have took the easier road...

What I would like to finish with is empathy. Not everyone’s situation allows for a complete over haul of life, sometimes we have to put our family and friends first which is important. So allowing for everyone’s circumstances from the most tied down of people to the freest of people, 

If I was to ask you if you didn’t have to worry about sleeping, money or your own self-doubt, in an ideal world where would you be in a week? 

This time next week what would you like to achieve?

 Think about this right now or on your way home tonight or on your way to work tomorrow, whenever you like but please think about it because this will be your first step to making your life slightly better and if anyone in this room could say they wouldn’t like something in their life slightly better they are lying but they are lying to themselves.
So spend time on your vision on your life and making yourself happy and remember what Bob Dylan once said

‘A person is a success if they get up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do’

Seek first to understand, then to be understood

How much time do you spend trying to understand someone?

What are the benefits of taking the time to understand someone?

How can it affect your life?

How can it affect your ability to sell?

How much time do you spend trying to understand someone?

If we were all to answer honestly, we would probably say, well not that much. We are prone to when talking to someone, thinking of how this may affect us, what advice can I offer or I think they are saying… We base our conversations subconsciously on assumptions. We can sometimes assume the other person and where they are coming from, make a judgement and carry the conversation from there. This is where awkward silences come from or someone not understanding what you were saying. We all know how frustrating that can be when someone explains what you have just said but getting it totally wrong and making a point that has no relevance. Frustrating? Definitely! 

How is that true about you, have you ever done it? Has anyone ever said, "Oh, I know just how you feel. I felt the same way." "I had that same thing happen to me." "Let me tell you what I did in a similar situation."

Because you so often listen autobiographically, you tend to respond in one of four ways: 

Evaluating:	You judge and then either agree or disagree.
Probing:	You ask questions from your own frame of reference.
Advising:	You give counsel, advice, and solutions to problems.
Interpreting:	You analyse others' motives and behaviours based on your own experiences.

What can we do about this then…

What are the benefits of taking the time to understand someone?

Would you like to be understood, what would it mean for someone to truly listen to you? Don’t underestimate the power of someone really listening to you, or you really listening to someone else.

We often listen on 3 different levels; I will use a restaurant analogy, for example;

Listening level 1

A couple on a first date get a table for two near the kitchen, the man starts thinking as he has booked this restaurant, is this the best place to be seated? What if the smells from the kitchen affect our evening? Is it going to be noisy? He starts thinking of the things that affect him and what might spoil the atmosphere. 

Listening level 2

After a while the man settles down and realises his fears of what may be disruptive, isn’t that bad. So he starts to talk to his date across the table and whilst she is speaking, he is thinking, ‘what can I say that will impress her?’ What can I now say that is interesting? She is obviously talking about, for example, how much her mother means to her. After some awkward silences and some misunderstandings the man has to change his tactics and start listening instead of hearing what she is saying.

Listening level 3

So when she is talking he mentally removes himself from the conversation and listens objectively to her language, body language and the way she is talking. He notices now not everything she is saying is matching her body language and the way in which she is explaining it. So now he listens without thinking about what difference he can make. So when talking about how much her mother means to her, he says, tell me more. Using the same words she uses and reflects back to her what she has said, the more they fall into this conversation about her mother, this gives her a greater quality of attention and may feel for the first time she is truly being listend to. The man is now showing more interest the woman is falling into a moment that does not come around too often.

We have all been given this time, when you think back, how did you feel? I bet you didn’t notice what was going on around you, focusing on nothing but what you are talking about. Do you think that with that sort of attention the man will get a second date?

How can it affect your life?

The more time you spend understanding someone else, the more influence you can have with that person, you can build rapport and power (please note this power is only used for integrity and honesty, treat it callously and your influence will disappear instantly). Rapport and Influence is a by-product of understanding someone first, then being understood.  Think of someone you have great rapport with and ask yourself whether they are likely to take your advice? Would they be likely to help you should you need it? You bet they would. Understanding someone first gives you a great chance to create rapport, then once the rapport is built, influence soon follows and then power. People are more likely to listen to you and in return help you and offer advice should you require it, you will be understood.

Would this have a positive or negative affect on your life?

How can it affect your ability to sell?

Sell yourself in a job.

Sell your product or service.

Sell your point.

It doesn’t matter how you look at the word ‘sell’ you can apply it any circumstance. 

You have to start by creating a need in the other person, so, how do you create a need?

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

What is it that is missing in the other person’s life or environment? What would you like to change? If you were to change one thing what would it be? – And then listen.

If you sell your position first, then your audience (1+ people) would less likely be able to connect with what you are saying. They may be thinking, ‘well that doesn’t apply to me, then what they are saying does not apply to me’. This can be a reaction that is done subconsciously or consciously but whichever way they react it is not in your interest. Think of when you have thought like that, I bet you have. So then we have to create the need, or realise the need as the case may be.

So you say that you have not got enough time in the day to do the things you want to do, what would having more time mean to you? Listen. So you say you would like more time to spend with your children, how important is that to you? Listen.  If you were to have an extra hour a day what would that mean? Listen. If I could offer you something that would save that sort of time, how much would that mean to you and your family? Listen.

 

You can use this type of questioning on any statement they give you, because it isn’t the statement that carries the power it is your question, listen and then repeat technique.

Build rapport, Influence and Power. 

Please follow me bellow, and if you believe that coaching will help you please contact me. My blog doesn’t even touch the surface of what caching can do.

 

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