Return on Intention

 

 Return On Intention Episode 15 - The Fuzzy Episode [42:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Return On Intention Episode 15 – The Fuzzy Episode

A blast from the past joins us in this episode. Ramon Garcia (or Roman Gorca as he is sometimes known) joins me to talk about the importance of Mission, Vision, Values and some of the other “Fuzzy” topics in business. Ramon was heard on episode 1 – 10 of this podcast, and although this is only episode 15, there was a large gap between episode 10 and 11.

In this episode we discuss the virtues of the fuzzy side of business, and it effect on employees, management and customers. Listen to find out why it may be some of the most important parts of a successful organization.

Running Time: 42 minutes 24 seconds.

Comment email - comments {at} reidgivens {dot} com

There is no shortage of stories about the tension between short term and long term goals. There is a constant struggle in organizations to try and balance the two. For profit and public corporations seem the worst hit by this dilemma due to pressures to constantly grow and produce ever more profits, but non-profits and social organizations have the same issues. The bulk of the major mistakes that companies run into is by optimizing for one of these goals, and ignoring the other. As Jim Collins and Jerry Porras pointed out in Built To Last, the right answer in this situation is never thinking about the OR, but taking the time to figure out the AND. Instead of deciding what is the best set of goals to deliver on are short term OR long term, the right answer is the one that can accomplish the short term AND long term goals.

The tragedy in Haiti is a great example of this problem. The Red Cross has done some really amazing things to mobilize a mass of people to raise funds for this problem. In a catastrophe like this, the short term goals have to be the major focus, after all, lives at stake. There was also plenty of media coverage about the use of social media and mobile technologies to raise an incredible amount of money for the relief efforts, but what doesn’t get much attention is that the amount of money raised, while impressive, is no where near the amount of money needed to create a good long term solution for Haiti.

This is not a criticism of the Red Cross or their efforts, the money that was raised so quickly (from what I have heard) has brought in enough food and clean water to provide for the victims. The next faze of this recovery is the hard part, and the really expensive part. The infrastructure that needs to be rebuilt (or built at all) will cost billions, not millions of dollars. Raising that much money is going to take more than can be raised through text messaging in a a month. The real problem is that there is no way that a plan can be put in place that can take into account everything needed for a crisis like this. Its impossible to know when something like this will happen, but it is known that something like this WILL happen again. The fund raising efforts for catastrophes of this scale have to be in place for years, not to mention a plan to help mobilize and coordinate the various agencies required to deliver aid in these situations.

The need for the AND solution for long and short term results seems clear for organizations of all sizes to deliver on the value they add to the world. It takes a lot more work, and some creativity, but the payoffs are worth it in the end.

Henry Ford once said “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Henry believed that innovation needed to come from inside because most people don’t really know what they want, just that they want out of the options that already exist.

Craig Newmark has a very different story to tell. Craig said that he essentially never made any decision about Craigslist, his users told him what they wanted and he implemented it.

Both Craigslist and Ford are successful companies, so which way is right? Do you get your ideas from customers or do you innovate internally? Both. Innovation often comes from insight, and that can happen both inside and outside the company. Here are few quick tips to help you create the potential for insight, and hopefully innovation.

Listen

A good start is to listen to your customers. Its a good idea to NOT rule out the feedback of your customers, it can’t hurt. This may not lead to the next great innovation (although it might), but at the very least it can point out some of the pain points they have that can give you a good idea of where to look for the innovation. Understanding how your product or service fits into your customers lives can help you find new and innovative ideas that can really make a difference.

Eat your own dog food

This point is related to the point above, but from a new perspective. To really understand the highlights and short comings of your product or services you have to experience it. I don’t mean drive your companies new car for an afternoon. Live with it for months. Fully integrate your offering into your own life as best you can.

Get to you know your place in the ecosystem

Your product or service fits into your customers live’s not in isolation, but in the midst of all the rest of the stuff in their lives. A coffee mug is not an isolated experience. The “user” of the coffee mug uses it in conjunction with their coffee pot, coffee grinder, milk, creamer, sugar and their morning newspaper to create an entire morning routine experience. By understanding your product or services place in this larger experience you can then try to see how your offering can  increase the pleasure or effectiveness of the overall experiences. That’s innovation.

Look at other industries

Every industry has gone through wrenching changes that have created amazing innovations to deal with the crisis.  While this can be challenging, if you can identify the current state of your industry and match that to the state of another industry before a time of change, you might find some insight into your  industries next innovation.

There are more books published in a year then any human being could possibly digest. Business books are no exception. Whether it’s the latest marketing tactic book or the newest breakthrough in human resources, there will be a dozen books dedicated to the subject. I’m not complaining, I love reading about a subject from multiple view points ( I enjoyed both Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and Think!: Why Crucial Decisions Can’t Be Made in the Blink of an Eye), but there is a pattern emerging in the business literature category. It seems no matter what the subject matter, there is a case being made for either a new position or promoting an existing one to the C-suite. The conference room is going to get crowded.

Whether or not every position that has had a case made for it reaching the C-suite actually gets there is up to each organization to decide, but the fact that the case is made so frequently suggests a few points to consider.

1. Most departments or professions feel under represented. The only reason to be part of the C-suite is so that your department has more of an influence on major decisions. This suggests that many people believe that their profession is either under represented or that other departments are taking more of the spotlight than they deserve. Everyone just wants to have a voice, right?
2. Interdepartmental communication needs some improvement. A persons belief that their point of view is over looked or at least not defended when they are not present is a good indication that organizations still suffer from departmental silos.

The strength of a brand relies on the ability of the organization to work toward a shared set of ideals and vision. Each department needs to be performing it’s function to support the goals of the organization. With departmental silos, it can be difficult to rally functions toward a common goal. As the economy returns to one driven by marketing instead of advertising, unity will become more and more important.

“Thank you for calling MegaCorp. All operators are busy assisting other callers. Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line. Do not hang up. Hanging up will increase your wait time as all call are answered in the order they are received. We are experiencing a high call volume right now, so please be patient.”

As of 1999, the above is the internationally recognized sign to cancel all your appointments for the next few hours and get a cup of coffee. Nothing makes you feel like a number more than being told to wait your turn in line. This is doubly so if you are calling a governmental agency. To the government, you are a number. In the US they give it to you at birth.

Customer service is becoming one of the most important parts of an organizations success. As the name implies, it is where you service your customer. If you can’t shine there then what else is there?

In this new world, you have to be on your game. There is too much competition and conversation going on not to. 20 years ago if a front line employee of yours fell asleep in your customer’s home, only a handful of people will hear about it. It would become a running joke over turkey and stuffing every year when the extended family gets together to drink—I mean, celebrate the holidays. Your company’s embarrassing botch will only be know by about 20 people. Fast forward to now, and if the same thing happens, it gets posted on YouTube and is watched by millions of people. How’s that for brand building?

A companies success lays in its reputation. Its part of the brand. If you perform well, then all goes well. If you fail and can’t recover, the word spreads. This isn’t new. This is word of mouth. The difference is now not only can you share your experiences with friends and family, you can also share it with 1,000,000 of your closest strangers.

Building a brand is done by ensuring that the customer’s expectations and experience match. If the customer expects good service and gets it, they remember you, prefer you and will do business with you again. If the customer expects bad services and gets it, at least they will remember who you are. The world as they know it is still intact. If your customers expect good service and your technician falls asleep on the couch you get a shocked customer. Shocked customers love to share their stories. The best stories in the world start with “You’re not going to believe this!” Those stories spread fast.

In the always-on world we now live in, everyone is sharing their story with the world. A world full of potential customers. This makes getting customer service right paramount. So why do most companies fail at it?

There is a problem with the system. The internet has not only made communicating with friends and expanding networks of people simple and easy, it has made us all impatient and time-starved. The world moves faster now that it did before but most customer service plans have not. If you had a problem 15 years ago, you would call the customer service line and wait to talk to someone. If you have a problem today, you still have to call the customer service line and wait. You also have the added complexity of navigating through a convoluted telephone system just to get in line to talk to a human being. In today’s super-charged world, this process takes too long.

We don’t want to sit on hold for any amount of time. Sitting on hold slows down our day. What do we do while we wait on hold? We complain to someone else. Someone who will hear us now. We’ll tweet it, or we’ll blog about it. We will make a video and post it online. By the time its our turn to talk to a customer service representative 10,000 people have heard of our problem. Then when we explain our problem to the customer service representative who schedules an appointment for a technician to come out and look at the problem. They tell us that the service tech will be there at some time within a 4 hour window. Now half of tomorrow is gone as we wait for the technician to show up. That’s decades in internet time. So we tweet about it again. We write another blog post. Now another few thousand people hear our story, and more often than not, one of them knows how to solve the problem.

GoldCorp opened its business up to the outside world and became one of the world’s largest and most successful gold mining operations. Linux was completed by a group of mostly anonymous programmers just to make a better operating system.  Wikipedia has more data than the Encyclopedia Britannica, and it was created by a bunch of amateurs. In the new web, we can solve our own problems, and most often its faster than waiting on hold for a customer service rep. We can and we do. Then we wonder where the companies that are supposed to be there for us are. The companies we gave money to. And then we stop wondering. Then we forget about those companies.

We have become tired of waiting for everything to be run up the chain of command for approval. We have become tired of waiting for a response to be vetted by legal. We want to know where the smiling salesman we bought from went, the one that made us feel like a person. We wonder when we became a number. We wonder why we talk to robots when you call the customer service line, then we wonder if it would be faster to cancel our business with that company and solve the problem ourselves.

We stop calling customer service. We complain online, we get our problems solved online and slowly the company that used to provide our services becomes less important. Most often, the company doesn’t even know there is a problem because we stopped telling them. It’s not that we stopped talking about it, we just don’t do it the way they want us to. We do it the way we want to. The fast way. Online.

Fortunately, when the internet closes a door it opens a window.

The tools and services we all use online to live our lives are open to everyone, even the people in charge of customer service. After the Comcast fiasco with the sleeping technician, Comcast got the message. They found out how poor their customer service had become. They found out in a very public and embarrassing way, but they did find out, and then set out to fix the problem using the very tools that were used to point out the problem in the first place. If you have a problem with Comcast service or equipment, just post your problem on Twitter. Comcast will see that post and contact you. For the user, nothing has changed. They still get to complain about their service if it goes wrong, but now instead of calling the 800 number and waiting 16 internet years to talk to a person the company that is responsible for the problem will contact you. You get to keep on living your life away from the sterile hold music and constant reminders of how important your call is to the company.

If I need to call my cell phone company, and there is a long wait, they don’t tell me to get in line. They tell me to leave my name and they will call me back. It may not seem like much, but being asked for your name is a lot better than assigning you a number. The rules of customer service are changing. It’s getting better for the consumer, and will be better for the companies that decide to hear the challenge, as they start to engage with their customers. Those that don’t will get left behind. It’s all free market. Evolve to add value by the customer’s definition and live. Resist the change, and go the way of the dodo. Unfortunately, we won’t wait around for the answer. We have other things to do.

This post is part of the Cluetrainplus10 Project. This project is to celebrate the book The Cluetrain Manifesto, written by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger and what has happened in the 10 years sence it was published.  The Cluetrain Manifesto is 95 theses published to direct orginations into the new world the internet is creating. I choose “85. When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn’t have such a tight rein on “your people” maybe they’d be among the people we’d turn to.”

There is quite a conversation going on right now in the marketing departments across America. There seems to be a new (well … sort of new) bright shiny object that seems to be causing some trouble. It’s called social media.
With Comcast and Zappos on Twitter and Nike on Facebook, social media is the place to be. Every day we hear about another traditional media source losing revenue or shutting down and more reports saying that advertising isn’t working the way it once did. From the other side of isle we hear the social media crowd saying that the new read/write web is the future. Social media or die, or so it goes.
Compounding the problem, there are rumblings that the top referring sites for many successful websites aren’t Google, Yahoo and MSN anymore. Now it’s Google, Twitter and Facebook. Something’s afoot. So, should all businesses rush to social media as a means to succeed, or is it all hype?
Given all this noise, it’s easy to see why so many marketers and business people are trying to figure out what a “FaceTube” is. How about advertising? We get that. Do it online? Get me some banner ads!
Social media is supposed to enable groups of people with similar interests to get together and … hang out. It seems to work great and brands want in on it. But even if the company manages to figure out the technology, then what? Well, they engage the group. Does that mean sell more stuff? Does that mean more “Top of Mind” awareness? It’s not clear, but people like it.
So it seems that customers want companies to get in on social media. Most companies seem to think they should, but they also don’t know why. The main reason is that while the internet is much more measurable than other marketing communication channels, it’s still hard to figure out if your Twitter account or YouTube video is closing sales. Many people have done amazing things for their business, brand recognition and bottom line using social media. So it stands to reason that it works and companies should do it. People like to do business with people like them, so getting involved and engaged with customers has to be a good thing, right?
Hold on a second. This conversation sounds familiar!
It seems that social media is widely regarded as “the right thing” for companies to do. There is some signs that it works but it’s hard to tie to direct sales. This sounds a lot like brand awareness advertising. We do it (or did it depending on who you are) because it was “the right thing” to do to be successful. It seemed to work, at least all the big successful companies did it, and it seemed to work. It’s just kind of hard to directly tie it to sales.
Is social media the “new” branding? Does it make a difference in this ROI driven world? What do you think?

A budget will tell you more about what needs to happen than any specification sheet ever will. The purpose of budgeting isn’t to find out how much you can get away with not spending but is an exercise in insight. Developing a budget requires a company or person identify how much they CAN spend on a project. To get that information, it is necessary to first identify why the project is going to be done and what it is supposed to accomplish. ( Don’t spend $500 to get $400 of value. Also, don’t expect to spend $500 to get $1,000,000 of value. )

Often, this process is done the other way around. Someone gets an idea that they “need” something, and then put together a Request For Proposal (RFP) to find out how much it will cost by getting bids on it. This doesn’t seem bad on the surface, except that most of the RFPs I come across are copies of some other RFP for someone else, or an old one that is reused with only a few words changed in it. To say the least, these RFPs have missed the whole point of an RPF.

This happens most with technology related purchases. It seems that some companies base their decision to buy something on some technology that is hot, or that other companies like them are buying. “Well, XYZ company just got a new widgetizer 5000, and they are doing good, we should get a widgetizer 5000, too.” This line of thinking does not a good strategy make.

A new technology foundation for your website (read CMS) or a new shopping cart will not increase the value of your website on its own. A good web strategy is not defined by what software packages you put on the back end. You can run a website on anything if your strategy is sound. If your strategy is not, no software package in the world will help you out.

Magento is an open source shopping cart and storefront that seems to be getting a lot of attention lately. I’m in the midst of working with Magento right now for a few clients myself. It has some really great features, but it is not the greatest thing to hit the internet. It will not improve your conversion rate. It has ton’s of features, but that also means its very complicated. One client requested it from the C-suite, and when the employees that actually have to run the software found out, they go scared. “We have seen Magento, and we don’t get it.”

We have been shown time and time again that sometimes what makes a technology so successful and useful is by what it DOESN’T do, not what it does do. Don’t buy bullet points on a box. The only way to know what features you need and what features you don’t is by understanding what you need to accomplish, and why. Start with the strategy. Plan it out, make charts. Understand as much as you can about the outcomes you want, and then work backwards to arrive at what you need. When all that is done, then go software shopping.