photo credit: eschipul

Today’s guest post is from the guys over at Lateral Action and is all about seeming busy while not being productive.

Or more accurately, it’s about being more productive and efficient but at the wrong things.

Are you productive where it counts – at the right things?

Make quick work of the post at the above link and see if you’re reading about yourself. If you are, put some tools in place to help you focus on the right stuff.

A paper notebook / checklist is fine – as long as you USE it.

Paper doesn’t work for me. It creates clutter and makes things worse.

I need an automated solution that nags me a little – and I use the GTD system by David Allen to make stuff happen. Fortunately, there’s software that supports GTD. If you use Windows, the GettingThingsDone add-in for Microsoft Outlook is a strong tool. On the Mac side of things, OmniFocus uses Getting Things Done principles to help you stay on track. I’ve used both of these tools and find them incredibly helpful.

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photo credit: rick

One of the things I’ve always counseled you to use in your marketing is testimonials: carefully chosen things your customers have said about their experiences using your products and services.

On Dec 1 2009, that changes a bit.

In some ways, it’s a good thing. It’ll make almost all those lame infomercials edit their fake testimonials.

In others, it’s a bad thing because it will punish (or frighten) good businesses by making them think they can no longer use testimonials or that the ones they can use have to be gutted.

Neither is true.

A great testimonial addresses…

…a common sales objection.

Getting a testimonial – particularly a strong, believable, honest one that directly addresses a common sales objection – can be difficult. Not so much because they are hard to get, but because people don’t always like to talk about their use of a product/service. A lot of that depends on what it is.

Not everyone understands what kind of testimonials are truly valuable. When people tell you they love the product or that they love working with you and your service is wonderful, those are nice and heartwarming comments, but they aren’t strong testimonials.

One type of strong testimonial states specific results, such as “We’re up 70% in same month, prior year sales after working with Mark to improve our marketing over the last 3 months”. That’s a good testimonial, and it’s (naturally) the exact type of thing the FTC doesn’t like.

Why? Because it states specific results that might be 100% factual for one person (or 100, if you have that many), but it still doesn’t mean that every single Joe Blow can achieve the same results by simply falling out of bed in the morning.

If everyone who buys your product can’t typically achieve a documented, 100% factual result stated in a testimonial when THEY use your product / service, you will have a problem using that testimonial EVEN IF 99% OF YOUR CUSTOMERS NEVER USE IT.

Isn’t that grand? “Lowest common denominator” comes to mind.

As you likely assume, these regulations came about mostly because of the bad apples out there. So be it. Let’s get to the details.

Bad apples beware

The new FTC regulations that take effect on December 1 2009 that will require you to be far more careful about the testimonials you use.

Quoting the hard-to-believe results of one highly-motivated person and then saying “these results are not typical” is no longer sufficient. You have to state typical results that your customers get when using your product or service. If those turn out to be difficult or impossible to achieve, expect the FTC to come calling – and not for dinner.

If you haven’t already done so, you need to check your marketing materials TODAY for any claims that – no matter how real and accurate – are not typical.

You can see the FTC-issued guidance on this at http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm

This applies to bloggers, advertisers of products/services and many others, so I strongly suggest you give it a look. It’s not a game. Regardless of what party is running Washington, these folks seem to revel in making examples out of business people to ’send a message’ to everyone else.

Sometimes, these things come down very unfairly. Don’t let it happen to you.

More details from the FTC are available here.

Be gone with you, Debbie Downer

Now that we have the “Debbie Downer” stuff out of the way, there is some good news in this because it does punish the slime in your market along with the good guys.

Several things come out of this, but one thing is clear – it makes measurement all that much more critical to your success.

If your product or service can somehow anonymously document what it does – easy for some products and services, almost impossible for others – you will be ahead of the game.

A lot of this applies to software businesses and those with automation in their products / services – but if testimonials are important to your business, measurement might become essential across your entire product line.

Implement results measurement into your products and services. Not only will it help your product / service, but it will help you sell them to those who REALLY need them AND it’ll be the evidence you need to prove the results of typical use.

NO, I’m not a lawyer. If testimonials are central to everything you do, I strongly urge you to consult your attorney about these regulations.

Meanwhile, you should be measuring results. Imagine what will happen if your products / services can prove to your customers what they are doing for them (and what they are not).

That’s why we’ve had this measurement conversation for years prior to the FTC forcing it upon you.

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photo credit: orangeacid

Yes, I know that is going to rile some folks up, but you probably need to be riled up anyhow.

What exactly do I mean by “give them the fish”? Let me back up a little.

You’ve undoubtedly heard the saying: “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.”

I used to agree. It used to seem that teaching someone to fish was sufficient, but human nature is a powerful teacher.

Not anymore.

First, a couple of examples from the Rotary world:

• Do you think that Rotary should just airdrop polio vaccine (and instructions) over Africa and let those folks take care of vaccinating themselves?
• What about the hand-operated wells that Rotarians regularly donate and install in third world communities? I’m talking about the wells that eliminate a mother’s 6 mile daily walk for water. Before you think “So what?”, think about how long it takes a mother to walk 6 miles, then walk 6 miles back carrying 5 gallons of probably not-so-clean water. If you’re taking care of a couple of infants, consider how that impacts your child-rearing and your ability to make a living. Now suddenly you’re taking clean water out of a well right in your village. Impactful.

But…I didn’t start this conversation to talk about Rotary. Their polio and water efforts just make the point easy to illustrate.

Personal Inertia

All of this is really building up to some comments about personal inertia.

Inertia is a big obstacle for an 80,000 lb 18 wheel truck or a jumbo jet, but a person’s personal inertia makes their inertia pale in comparison.

Powered by daily routines and daily “crises”, as I referred to yesterday when quoting Mr. Rohn, it’s bigger than most people realize.

While everybody can do what so and so does to be successful, reach a goal, get out of a mess, change some aspect of their lives, or market their product; but not everybody will.

Why Personal Inertia happens

A lot of the reason for this is that people just aren’t used to taking NEW actions. Sure, they get up for work in the morning (even if they work for themselves) and they go about their business, but they struggle to make new things happen.

Rather than making things happen, they often watch things happen (or worse, wonder what happened).

That’s why you have to give them the fish. Change is tough. Sometimes scary. Sometimes, just different enough that your routine just doesn’t seem to allow for them.

And that’s where the fish comes in.

Sometimes you have to give them the fish to prime the pump. To make the impression necessary to show that the learning is worthwhile.

What IS The Fish?

The fish is what you do for others. Maybe a service, maybe something you teach or something you create for them if they can’t or won’t do it themselves.

I know you can teach them to fish (whatever your fish is), but they have to WANT to learn to fish or your time will be wasted.

Yep, WASTED.

More than likely, whatever you do is the fish your client needs (or is related to it).

Again, giving them the fish primes the pump and helps make that action part of their routine.

Until it’s routine, it’s unlikely to happen.

Before you give them the fish, before they “get it”, they might not have the vision you have.

The fish might be necessary to make the impression (produce the results?) necessary to show that learning to fish is worthwhile in the first place.

Give, then teach

Once the lesson, the results, the vision/buy in are there, learning to fish seems like a good idea.

Their idea. Your gift made it so.

When eyes light up, budgets appear and/or time opens up, it’s time to teach.

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photo credit: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³

One of the first things you notice when you get materials from Dan Kennedy is that they aren’t glossy. They aren’t printed on luxurious paper, with fine bookboards and perfectly sewn bindings.

Usually its a comb binding or a 3-ring notebook, if it’s bound at all. And there might be typos and some hand-drawn diagrams.

Dan insists that perfect is the enemy of good. It isn’t at all unusual to hear him say “good enough is good enough”, largely because he is all about taking action. He might write a book in a weekend because he is capable of covering the topic in that time, so why spend 3 years writing it?

This is one of the reasons that Dan can produce the volume of info that he produces. The binding might not be worthy of a collector, but the information isn’t any less valuable as a result.

Good enough

Along those lines, a guest post from Wired on the topic of good is good enough.

I know what you’re thinking.

“Aren’t you the one who is always talking about differentiating yourself with higher quality, high-touch service, etc?”

Yes indeed and continue to I stand by that.

You should remember that I’ve also suggested that you have multiple tiers of products and services to reach more people with that wonderful (whatever) that you do/create.

It isn’t just about quality. Your lower end product might still be high quality – it just won’t be a Bentley. And that’s OK, because not everyone wants/needs that.

As a result, you need to “show them the ladder”: Show them how to do business with you. Here’s the entry level product/service and here’s where you go next.

If you need a visual: Sell them a Chevy. Next time, sell them a Buick. Then an Oldsmobile. Then a Cadillac. Skip a rung or 2 if they wish.

There’s always room for improvement of those products. You’ll likely never create a perfect product the first time out. Well, you might – but it might take you 10 years to perfect it.

By that time, someone will have sold your market a Buick.

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photo credit: * Honest *

Not world peace mind you (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but peace between your ears.

Do you find yourself somehow mindlessly wasting an hour, 2 hours or more a day? Maybe not even every day?

You arent alone. Rarely does a day go by when I don’t hear it from someone.

In today’s guest post, Peter Bregman has a solution you might find useful. It only takes 18 minutes a day.

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photo credit: eyeSPIVE

Ever messed up a bid?

Even after 25 years in the IT business (much less other stuff), I find that one of the hardest things to do accurately is bid a sizable time and materials-based project.

If you’re in IT, you know all the reasons.

Stuff changes. Requirements aren’t necessarily what they really are. Features get added, removed, changed and re-added.

It can be troubling if you live by (or try to live by) a schedule.

As long as the communication channels are open, it works out. It works out because over the years, you’re zig zagging across the good bid/ouch line with smaller and smaller zigs and zags each time (mostly).

But I deal in atoms not pixels!

Yeah, that’s another reference to Free. I’ll stop with that eventually.

I wonder how big construction, architecture or engineering firms can afford to do that zig/zag thing.

Pixels are cheap. Atoms are not, especially when you’re talking about a project like a mall, a bridge or 23.3 miles of Interstate highway. Which brings us to yesterday’s measurement discussion.

I was talking to a guy in the construction biz a while ago and asked him about this. Based on all the bidding processes for huge municipal (etc) construction projects, are any of them right? It seems like they all go over budget and over time.

Can you imagine what the expense of being wrong is if you’re the construction, engineering or architecture firm?

Parts is parts

And then I was thinking… buildings, roads and bridges break down into finite tasks just like programs do.

In the programming world – or at least in the academic one – there’s something called function point analysis.

The theory is that you can assess the time/complexity/cost of a project simply by counting the function points it contains. Rumor has it that it works if used properly. Guess how many businesses I’ve encountered using it over the last 25 years.

Doughnut. Zippo. None.

Why? Because it’s hard work. For small clients, it may not be worth the effort. Add to that, it means you have to properly plan and spec the work in pretty good detail. Not a lot of people want to put that effort in before handing a job to a programming staff to complete it.

On the other hand, not even Electronic Data Systems used it when I was there back in the Ross Perot days and we checked, rechecked and re-tested *everything*. Twice. Three times after 5pm.

I beam with joy

Let’s get back to the architects and such.

As I noted, buildings, bridges etc break down into components like beams, walls, pillars, etc. (Now you see why I just had to talk about function points, sorta.)

Like programmers (perhaps more so), these folks deal with complex bids with lots of variables.

They bid a bridge job because they have the best bridge designer in the state. Or condo. Or stadium. Whatever.

3 days before the bids are opened and awarded, she gets hit by a bus. Or gets a 3x salary offer from some Middle East engineering firm. Or disappears to find herself by walking the Great Wall.

Regardless of the reason, she’s gone.

It isn’t unusual, but it sure will throw your design time estimate a wicked curve ball and any technically-oriented business might see this.

What if?

What if your design software had the ability to measure how long it took to design an I-beam that will hold a dynamic load (ie: a load that changes/moves). Or how long it takes to design a retention pond at a factory.

So what, right?

OK…Imagine that your design software has the ability to do that for each staffer, broken down for each possible component of a building, screened-in patio, bridge, truss, lake, or other feature.

Like function points in software, the design software might keep track of all this based on complexity – such as by the number of load points and force vectors, or maybe square footage and materials have an impact.

Maybe experience and type of training comes into play. Maybe you learn that the designer’s college choice impacts these numbers.

Speed, Quality, Complexity

Now, imagine that this software can aggregate all this data by employee, by component.

With a little extra effort, you eventually figure out which designers are the best at designing each type of component.

A combination of speed, quality and work complexity ends up telling you exactly who to allocate to a particular piece of design and most likely that comes along with a very accurate estimate of the time needed to do the job.

If you break down the design of the most complex project you ever had, you know how many I-beams, trusses, concrete walls, pillars and so forth there are, as well as what kind of loads they have.

And now – because you have measurements of what the real work takes – you can make a bid that is far more accurate than the guesses those other folks are making.

Now imagine that you make the software that allows for this kind of measurement.

Your customers are the ones who bid more accurately. They win more bids. They become more successful. Your software becomes their secret weapon. You know what that means.

Imagine soft puffy clouds

Now… consider this discussion in the context of the service you provide, from programming to sports writing to graphic arts to small engine repair to architecture to plumbing or whatever.

You may already do some of this assessment by the seat of your pants / gut feel. Is it accurate? Be honest with yourself, it doesn’t matter what you tell me.

But would it be as accurate as an ongoing set of measurement data that is based on your current staff mix? I doubt it.

Would it help? Let’s see.

• Imagine how much easier it would be to manage a project if you knew exactly what each component required time-wise.
• Imagine how much easier it would be to manage a project if you knew exactly how to allocate your people to different details of the project.
• Imagine what your sales staff would face out in the field when they realize they can confidently bid a job and know it’ll come in on time and on budget and they can whip out performance reports to prove it.
• Imagine how your testimonials would change and the impact that would have on prospects.
• Imagine how your customer retention numbers would improve.
• Imagine what something like this could do for your staff’s morale. Never a late project, ever again. Well, maybe almost never.

Measurement. Might be a good idea, ya think?

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photo credit: BruceTurner

Despite Chris’ assertion that information wants to be free, some of it just isn’t. Sorry.

In fact, some information is worth far more than the paper it is printed on (or the pixels it lights up).

For example, imagine that your company publishes technical articles. Short, sweet, fine-tuned to a specific purpose for a very specific audience.

The trick is making money from them, so maybe you’ve found that the best way to do that for your company (vs all other models) is to charge for access to your publication.

The Wall Street Journal does this. So does Investor’s Business Daily, as do a number of publications (online or print) in technical fields like auto mechanics, programming and FOREX trading.

Prove it

One of the biggest challenges these firms have is proving their publication’s worth at renewal time.

When renewal time comes up, or the charge appears on the credit card bill, the customer thought process goes something like this:

Come on, why should I pay $300 a year for a technical investing article resource when I can find everything Google has indexed for free?

The answer these businesses might commonly respond with include some of these:

• Because it’s well-indexed so you can quickly find the exact trading info you need.
• Because it has a search engine that understands investing terminology so you can quickly find exactly what you need
• Because our publication is fine-tuned to the audience’s investing style (or whatever). It’s as if it was written solely for day traders with between $4200 and $6500 to trade per day.
• Because it includes proven step-by-step guides for trading without losing my shorts (pun intended).

All of that is warm, fuzzy but not so exciting.

#3 and #4 aren’t bad but #1 and #2 are Google’s domain. They get better at it every day and paying you for it is going to get less and less likely unless you are much, much better at it in your specialty area.

I got your proof right here

Bottom line, almost all of that is pretty subjective. Bean counters (and spouses?) want hard numbers: “Why do you need this?”

Why not let them tell you?

If your article instructs them and provides them with a skill or offers a way to discover a new technique, make sure your feedback mechanisms (on the site or whatever) allow a way to say “Dude, this article saved me 2 or 3 days of struggling with this task”.

And yeah, it’s a lot like a Digg or a reTweet, but it’s more accurate than that.

The mechanism that works for you might need to be a number they can type in, or it might be a radio button with selections like “Waste of my time”, “Saved me maybe an hour”, “HUGE, DUDE. This got me back on track after a week”.

Whatever it is, it provides them with a way to tell you how much time, money, etc your information, your service, your product, your help saved them.

Think about where you could go with that info, even if it is largely anecdotal and not scientifically defensible.

If you have 100 clients and they (on average) provide feedback via a mechanism like this that says you save them 112 hours per year, seems to me that your prospects might want to know that information.

It also seems like it would be a great way to totally defuse the “your price is too high” argument (and maybe a number of others).

It might tell you how outrageous you can make your money-back guarantee. If it’s 30 days but it should be a year or 5 years, these numbers will give you some insight into it.

Who knows, you might even find out that your pricing and your value proposition are in vastly different places.

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Download audio file (BoatAnchorBadSharingGood.mp3)

photo credit: Robb North

Over the last month or so, I’ve been playing phone tag with someone at the local bank’s office.

I use this national bank primarily because they offer some electronic banking services that local banks don’t bother to offer (such as a real-time, seamless interface with QuickBooks), despite my repeated “encouragement” to do so.

Some have noted that the cost to provide this QuickBooks interface is substantial – yet I get interesting wrinkled brow looks when I remind them that I pay $15 a month to use this nifty QB service because it saves us hours per month. Until the fee got to the point where the time was more valuable, I’d pay it. But I digress…

Anyhow, we’ve been talking with someone there about a refi and a combination of my schedule / travel and her schedule /travel have made it difficult to get into the same room at the same time. Not their fault, just one of those things about a busy summer.

This last time I called, the person I’m working with was out of town for several days. I asked the person on the phone if they could put me on their appointment calendar for the week after they return.

My calendar! Mine, mine, mine!

Astoundingly, the answer was no.

Yes, the folks at this large national bank, the same ones who are advanced enough to have their accounts seamlessly talk to my QuickBooks, do not allow or cannot manage to let their employees see their appointment book or schedule an appointment for someone else.

Insane.

I have a feeling it might be related to worries that someone might raid someone else’s appointment calendar for plum prospects, but there are ways of showing only open dates. Even so, that shouldn’t be necessary.

If you can’t trust a *bank* employee to access a co-worker’s appointment calendar, tell me why you trust them to work at the bank in the first place – cuz I don’t see it. But that trust thing is a topic for another day.

Unseen Value

Now we get to the point where you see where this affects you and your business: Are there resources (like an appointment calendar) that your staff should be able to share so they can help each other serve your clientele?

Back in the photography software days, it was a huge deal for new users of our product to finally get off that paper calendar at the front desk. It allowed anyone to see which photographers / camera rooms / salespeople / presentation spaces were booked and make an appointment no matter where an employee was when they answered the phone.

Sounds completely obvious, but many businesses simply couldn’t do it because they were still tied to that boat anchor – the paper appointment book.

Big, heavy and “somewhere in the warehouse”

Another market I worked with manufactured expensive custom items that were big and heavy. They stored them in the warehouse once they were finished.

The information about the build status and storage location of these custom-ordered items was kept on a set of clipboards on a line of nails in the manufacturing area.

Sometimes the info on those clipboards was out of date or missing because someone forgot to write the build status or location down. An order might get lost / forgotten until a customer called for it – and then you might find out that it hadn’t been built yet.

Now imagine that you are a receptionist in the front office and you’re all alone over lunch hour or during a big sales meeting. When that big customer calls to ask about their 27 piece, $57000 order, you have to put them on hold (or tell them you’ll call back), run back to the clipboards, flip through the orders manually, find the order and run back to the phone.

If the clipboard is missing because someone has it at a manufacturing station, or it is on the manager’s desk (or car seat), you know nothing.

If the data on the clipboard wasn’t filled out, you get to run back to the warehouse and look on dozens of shelves from floor to ceiling for an item that has a little paper tag on it showing the customer name.

That’s a boat anchor.

The alternative? A system that integrates customer information, orders, build status and delivery information together. When the phone rings, you can look up all of a customer’s orders, find the status of any of them and tell them right then. The items are barcoded as part of the manufacturing process so most status and location info is automatically updated. Depending on your situation, “most” could be “all”.

What’s your boat anchor? What can you share to get rid of it, enabling your staff to be more helpful and more productive?

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photo credit: ckaroli

Finally, the last installment of my friend’s Apple customer service story (start at Part One here), the in-store experience that finally resolves everything.

Here we go…

Wednesday arrives, I walk in, and head to the back … what’s called the Genius Bar. The guy says, “I’m sorry. Can’t check you in, no more available appointments.” So I explained what the girl on the phone told me and I get the, “Corporate doesn’t have a clue. We’ll put you on the wait list. Might take a few hours. Might not get to you today.”

And so, it’s Christmas morning again, and there’s the present I didn’t want instead of the present I dreamed of and wrote the letter to Santa Claus in great detail about.

I explain that Corporate isn’t the failure. The failure was in the training of the very first young lady I spoke to Sunday. Her bad information put me on the wrong path.

I notice a young lady listening carefully with a different colored t-shirt from the fellow I was speaking with. When I finish making him feel all of my pain, he says, “I’ll let the manager know and you’ll be in the queue. It might be a little while but we’ll try.”

So I wait a while and notice the wait list popping up … without my name on it. I look over the shoulder of the guy checking appointments in and, sure enough, I’m like #4 on the list. So I must be in a different list.

After a few minutes, the lady in the different colored t-shirt comes by and says, “I’m going to speak to the manager as well. It won’t be long.”

And she returns and says, “You’re next”. I’ve been standing around for 30+ minutes but I’m cool with that.

All this pain and suffering, just to get in front of a service person at what is supposed to be a very customer-oriented company.

Is that how you view your company, as a customer-oriented company?

Is there a black hole that customers can fall into and swim around in for hours or days before they pop up in the right place? It’s better that you find it than your customers do.

So now, we’re finally in front of a service person. Let’s see if the expectation of Apple’s care for the customer holds…

A young man walks up and says, “Joe? Let’s see what you have.” I hand him the iPod and say, “I bought a pair of these for Christmas. One works with both sets of headphones. This one works with neither.” He nods.

We walk to his workstation. He turns the device over, types in the serial number, and says, “I’ll get you a brand new one. It won’t have any of your current data on it. You’ll have to resynch on iTunes on your home computer.”

I’m cool with that.

He doesn’t test the unit I handed him. He didn’t even look at it except to read the serial number off of it. I’m out of there in 3 or 4 minutes after he’s started. (Emphasis mine – Mark)

I get home late that night and plug the iPod into my wife’s laptop. It takes a little while but iTunes jumps up. It says it’s a new device and wants to verify what iTunes account this is associated with. I tell it and it immediately offers to download Joe Jr’s settings into it … that’s the one I swapped … and away it goes for 30 minutes if not more.

Finally, it’s finished. I update a few apps that had updates since the last sync. It doesn’t remember my wireless network’s password but it remembers the network name. I put in the password and away it goes.

Then, it doesn’t know the email account’s password though it knows the account name. I put that in.

Everything is as it was before except the headphone jack now works.

So, if you get entered into the queue correctly, they seem to have pretty darn good service.

One little snag caused all that happened over the last 3 parts of this story – and as you see, it could have been resolved in 3 or 4 minutes.

One snag that could lose an influential client for Apple. Fortunately for them, it didn’t.

Are your biggest or most influential clients this patient?

Study your customer service logs. Talk to your most angry customers. Find the cases that dragged on “forever”.

Figure out where your customer service blackhole is.

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photo credit: James Jordan

In part 3 of our series (start at Part One here), my friend’s story about his customer service experience continues on the phone with Apple Store continues on the phone…

So I begin to explain, yes, of course, there are ways to make appointments without my needing to sit at a computer. So, she transfers me to corporate help on the national level.

There, after a host of menus, I’m not getting far. So I answer in my best Cajun accent knowing that they’ll send me to someone who is bilingual. Sure enough, a young lady comes on the line.

She explains that she, too, can’t take an appointment. I explain to her that she has a computer, she has the URL, of course she can take an appointment. She can fill in the blanks and I’ll tell her what goes in them. She says, yes, of course she can do that.

Then she says, “There are no available appointments for a few days.”

So I said, … let’s be clear. I’m in your local store. I tell the lady I’m coming through on Wednesday afternoon and what time. She says I have to dial a phone number to set up the appointment and I can’t do it until a day or two before Wednesday. I do that. Then I find out that a day or two isn’t far enough ahead. And that the phone number doesn’t allow me to set up an appointment either. And then I remember that toy I really wanted for my 4th birthday and I channel all of that pain into the phone call.

She says, “Just drop in, find the manager, explain what happened on Sunday and today and she’ll take care of you.”

Cool. I give her the “human engineering talk” about the touch tone system as well.

So at this point, if you are the call center person, how do you relay to your corporate IT/communications group that there is an obvious problem in the phone menus? Many small companies lack a trouble ticket reporting system for people at this level. It might get written on a Post It note and referred to someone later, or it might be forgotten.

Just a thought…

If the next customer to deal with this problem buys iPhones for a Fortune 500 company, what’s the potential cost to Apple and AT&T?

If the next person to fall into your trap does so because you don’t have a solid mechanism for reporting, tracking, fixing and getting user feedback from your own people – what could that cost you?

How big is your biggest customer? That’s how much a simple customer service problem could cost you.

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photo credit: MShades

Last time, we talked about the start of an unfortunate experience with Apple customer service.

Let’s continue the story with the joy of a voice mail phone tree. Click here to read part one of this story.

Watch for the one failure point – the one place that takes the customer off the customer service highway and pushes them into the maze.

The young lady handed me a card, said call that number a day or so before I was dropping in, and everything would be cool.

Off I went.

Wednesday night, I was planning on returning to the city. So, Tuesday, while driving around, I call the number on the card. “For this problem, press 1. For this problem, press 2. For this problem, press 3. For an appointment …” so I pressed 4. And the menu started again.

Must not have stuck.

“For an appointment …” I hit the 4 again. The menu starts. I press 4, Bye bye. It hangs up.

Well, I remember my old Windows phones would sometimes not give the button tone on a call and calling back worked. So, I do it again. 4 … menu starts again. I press 0 … hangs up.

So, this time I _really_ listen.

“For an appointment, go to this website blah blah. For anything else, press 5.”

Duh.

4 doesn’t work. The 4th option is the only option that you can’t press a sequential number for. Somebody in human engineering dropped the ball.

I press 5.

A person in the Apple store answers and I explain I want to make an appointment. “Yes sir, here’s the URL” … uh, I don’t have a computer. I’m in my truck. I just need to make an appointment. “I’m sorry. You can’t make an appointment that way.”

If someone was standing in front of you, would you tell them to go home and get online to make an appointment? Of course not.

You have the customer on the phone and tells them to hang up and do something else to make an appointment? They are right in front of you, just as if they are standing in your store. What in the world would make you think the ideal thing to do is send them on their way?

I hope I don’t have to elaborate on the inane nature of a request like this. Clearly a failure in design of the service appointment process. Employees need to be empowered with systems that allow them to deal with this situation.

Next time, we’ll see where this mess continues and learn another lesson from Apple.

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photo credit: psd

A friend of mine tells me this story about a recent experience while trying to get service at the local Apple store.

As the tale winds on, we’ll stop and go over a few lessons and suggestions along the way. It’s a long and winding story, but it’s critical to include the whole thing so that you understand the entire scenario this customer experienced and how it impacts your business.

So here goes…

So, Sunday, my iPhone could receive calls but nothing would display on the screen. I tried holding down the power button for some time but that didn’t help. I held the power button and the front button down and nothing happened there either.

I was on my way to the city when this happened. I pulled into a quick stop and asked a young man to borrow his phone so I could call my wife and put her on the project of locating the Apple store nearby.

I stopped in there, a big open space store with lots of folks, and a young lady met me at the door. I explained the problem and she called a young man over. He held both buttons down for a while and it rebooted. I thought I did that but, obviously, I didn’t hold them for enough seconds. My old Windows phone would clear everything out of it when I did that so I was too jumpy to wait long enough.

I remembered as I was leaving that one of the 2 iPod Touch units we bought for the kids was having headphone jack issues. They said just make an appointment and we’ll look at it, either fixing it or replacing it.

An appointment.

You have the customer in front of you. You have already stopped whatever you were doing to help them and you have solved one problem.

The next solution will take 2 minutes to fix or you’ll replace the unit and return the broken one to the factory (definition: the repair department of the 21st century).

Yet – you send the customer away instead of helping them right then.

Everything in this story that happens from here is a waste of company time, a waste of store time, a source of potential frustration to the customer and a way to waste a pile of the customer’s time.

Alternative: Spend perhaps 2 more minutes of working with them as they stand in front of you. Avoid delays, possible appointment snafus and take care of the customer at the first opportunity – or at least figure out if you can help them quickly.

Mistakes happen to everyone and every company. You can’t necessarily prevent a bad human interaction. You can prevent a bad design (yeah, that’s ironic, given that our example is an experience with Apple).

When these problems are designed into a system, people get caught in a riptide of customer service.

Instead of getting to shore, they get pulled farther and farther from their goal and yours: solving the problem and getting back to living their lives or back to work. You should be looking to find and eliminate the traps engineered into your business processes.

Everyone has a name for them: Whirlpool. Riptide. Twilight Zone. Black Hole. Maze.

Is there one of these places designed into your business processes? Your customer service system’s worst nightmare cases might tell you exactly where it is.

Your customers who encounter it certainly can tell you – but you might need to ask.

In the next part of this series, we’ll learn more about this Apple experience.

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photo credit: h.koppdelaney

I was over at ZenHabits.com earlier in the week and stumbled across a link to this ZH-inspired poster at GoddessGuidebook.com.

It’s a little quirky for the serious business type, but the message is all business.

Check it out, it’s today’s guest post.

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photo credit: scragz

Today’s guest post comes from Adrian Savage, who was guest posting over at LifeHack.org when he wrote “There’s no time”.

If you struggle with having to much todo list at the end of your day/week/whatever, you might find the discussion of what amounts to a “ToDont list” helpful.

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photo credit: WTL photos

Today’s guest post comes from Entrepreneur.com, specifically from author and Entrepreneur writer James Stephenson.

You’ve heard many of these things from me, but it never hurts to hear them from someone else.

Start here and dig in!

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photo credit: Sarah606

If I only had a dollar for every time I heard someone say “I wish I could clone myself” (or every time they wrote it).

Maybe even a dime:)

It’s a pretty common thing for people to say. There are over 2200 google hits on that exact quote (ie: search google with ” on each end of the sentence).

Everyone is busy, but are they getting anything done? Probably lots of stuff. Stuff that lands in front of them like a TV commercial. “Oh, I’ll just deal with this because it’s in front of me”.

That sort of thing.

But what exactly are they getting done?

Maybe a more accurate question is “Are they getting anything done that actually moves them toward the goals of the business?”

“Anything” is probably a bad choice of words. How about “lots of things” or “as much as you expected”?

We could talk about distractions all day – but wouldn’t that be a distraction? :)

The point about today is cloning.

What work are you doing?

Think about what you did today or yesterday, or some randomly selected “average day”.

How much of that pushed you and made you think?

How much of it was something you considered real work, ie: stuff that required to you focus and that was something hard?

How much of it require your strongest capabilities as a business person – those things that you wouldn’t DARE let anyone else do?

Was that half of your day? One third of your day? Or maybe 20 minutes of your day?

I’ll cut you some slack and assume it was half of your day. I think the number is far smaller, but we can argue about that later.

If you worked for 8 hours on this so-called average day, then you spent 4 hours of that day doing stuff that presumably could be done by an administrative assistant, a freelance local web person, the local print shop, or an independent accountant.

Paying the bill

Yes, these outside vendors cost money. So let’s find a way to pay for it.

If you could increase (say by 50%) the amount of the work that you get done, would you make any more money? In the case of your average day, I’m talking about 2 hours.

Specifically, if you could get 50% more of that “real work, requires absolute focus, needs your strongest capabilities, really makes you think” kind of work, wouldn’t your business be doing a LOT better?

We’ll assume you get 50% more because nothing is perfect and even 50% is such a big number that you might even do better once you get a taste of it:)

Doing the math to find money

Using your average day, you just got an extra 2 hours of serious work per day.

Multiply that times 3 days a week. I picked 3 days because I’m assuming you’ll get this right perhaps 60% of the time.

Now multiple that times 40 weeks per year. I picked 40 weeks, figuring that you’ll not do this for 12 weeks per year given travel, vacations, sick time, conventions, chamber of commerce events, trade shows and other distractions that you’ll manage to come up with.

So, how much time did you just find?

Two times 3 times forty is 240. Two hundred and forty hours. 6 work weeks. A month and a half. 30 full days of work.

How much is that worth to your bottom line?

If you have employees, many of them fall into the same trap. What’s that worth?

Yes, it’ll cost something to outsource that other work or hire someone as an employee to do it – but look at the cost of NOT doing so.

Don’t assume that I’m suggesting that you outsource this work to someone in East Bananastan and pay them $0.12 an hour. This will pay off in spades even if you pay a local $50-75 an hour to get the right work done.

Will it make you more competitive? Will it improve the quality of the really important work your business does?

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Download audio file (TrainingYourSalesStaff.mp3)

photo credit: DeclanTM

Yesterday, I was in a box store (cuz no one here in Columbia Falls carries the items I needed) and sauntered by an iPod Touch on a whim.

We’ve talked a few times about the productivity that some custom iPhone applications would have for your business. You might not know that there are no Montana cell carriers that can offer the iPhone (yet), so the iPod Touch is a reasonable alternative if cell-driven applications aren’t important to you. 

Ok, so maybe it wasn’t entirely a whim:)

As you might expect, a salesperson walked up to me and asked if I had any questions. Trouble was, I actually did:)

I suspect that I’m not your typical user of tools like this and I don’t think he was prepared for my not-too-mainstream questions. 

I asked about syncing the iPod Touch’s contacts and calendars list with my Outlook. He wasn’t sure if that worked or not, but he thought it might. 

As you might imagine, I don’t spend $300 on “I think it might”. 

Next, I asked if it does do syncing with Outlook, does it require iTunes to make that sync happen.  He wasn’t sure. 

Note: I’ve since found out that both of those questions are true. It does sync to Outlook and it does use iTunes to make that happen.

Are you ready to service the early adopters?

The problem: If you’ve read Freakonomics or Crossing the Chasm (written for software companies, but applicable to all businesses IMO), you know that the early adopter types are instrumental in exposing new products like iPhones and iPods (and new services) to a much larger group of potential customers. 

If your staff isn’t prepared to deal with the not-always-mainstream questions that these early adopters have, it’s likely that they will lose the sale. 

These days, many people walk into the store with model numbers, prices and specs in their phone or on a note. They know what their choices are. Reviews and every other possible piece of info is available to them BEFORE they arrive at the store. 

What this means is that when the prospective buyer enters the store, it’s less about selling them the item and far more about helping them choose *which* item fits them best. 

You don’t know what you’re missing

The scary thing is that you’ll never know about the customers you lost because a question like this didn’t get answered.

All it takes to make this a really expensive problem for you is something like this:

One owner of a business (or the owner’s tech guru) walks into your store and asks the same type of questions (and perhaps more). You have no idea that their business has 100 salespeople and technicians in the field. You have no idea that they want to find out if the iPod Touch would work for their remote staff as a custom business application they’ve discussed for deployment on the iPod Touch or iPhone.

Depending on which model they were going to buy, that’s a $30,000 or $40,000 sale. 

This sort of thing happens far more often than you’d expect. 

Training your sales staff is expensive, but not training them is even more costly. Even if two or three of your staff are “ultra-trained” and can be the resource for the remaining staff, that would be an improvement.

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Download audio file (GetParallel.mp3)

photo credit: jsgphoto

Obama made reference to it Tuesday during his Inaugural Address, acknowledging that many say he can’t do all the things he’s got on his agenda.

Maybe so, maybe not.

Admittedly, his obstacles are substantial.

Some might assume they are insurmountable, specifically those 500 or so people in the Capitol building.

The thing is, that’s  just the kind of situation that often makes people succeed well beyond their own expectations, much less the expectations of others who have counted them out.

Ask Joe Namath, Roger Staubach or John Elway about being counted out.

On second thought, do that later. I’m not here to talk to you about those 4 guys – I’m here to talk to you about you.

Got obstacles?

Who’s counted YOU out? Neighbors? Friends? Family? That little parrot on your shoulder?

Your obstacles probably shrink in comparison to the ones faced by Presidents, but they still might be daunting for you.

So what? Act in parallel and make em all wrong.

What exactly do I mean by parallel?

Most people act sequentially. They think “I’ll do this project, then this project, then that project.” We’ve been taught that way, at least most of us. Learning anything different is often something you stumble across. A failed project acted on sequentially is like a losing season.

Most really successful people tend to act in parallel. They often have a dozen or more projects going on at once. If one of them sticks to the wall, fine. If not, those other 11 projects will pick up the slack. A failed project is just one of the many things they’re counting on, rather than an entire losing season, it’s more like an incomplete pass.

Sure, you’re wondering how they get it all done. How do they juggle a dozen projects when one is enough to drive you crazy?

I promise you one thing: it sure doesn’t happen by accident.

How do they get parallel without going postal?

• They have a mentor. Even *billionaires* have mentors, coaches, confidants or mastermind groups. Don’t imagine for a minute that Bill Gates plays bridge with Warren Buffett just for fun, nor that Buffett does because he can’t find anyone else to play cards with him. Look Tiger Woods can spank any golfer on the planet, yet he still has a coach to help him keep improving. Who do you have?
• They have systems in place to relieve themselves of tedious crap. I’m talking about the same stuff that bogs down your day, interrupts you during productive stretches (you DO have those, don’t you?) and create piles of minimum wage labor on your desk – work that you end up doing yourself.
• They’ve surrounded themselves with people as smart or smarter than themselves. Their ego isn’t driving the bus. Quite often, they do this to relieve themselves of time-consuming manual labor – often technical skills like copywriting and web design.

Acknowledging the theme of the day, Abe Lincoln is quoted as saying that if he had 8 hours to cut down a tree, he’d first spend 6 hours sharpening his saw. What sharpens your saw?

Jim Rohn says that “You become the average of the 5 people you surround yourself with.” No, that doesn’t mean you should go stand in a circle of supermodels<g>. Seriously…Who have you surrounded yourself with?

Get Parallel. Show the parrot who’s in charge.

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photo credit: Nihit Goyal

Today’s guest post comes from David Armano, who provokes the manager in you by asking if you can handle the truth. 

No, wait. That was a movie..

David’s question is more challenging. Can you handle a passionate employee? Do they even belong at your business – even though you probably think and say that you want them? 

Anyone who has worked for someone else and felt like they were the only one who really, truly gave a rip will find themselves nodding their heads. 

http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2008/12/passion-vs-productive.html

BUT…now that you’re in charge, could someone like you excel at your business? Or would just rather have someone who is “just” productive?

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Even today, plenty of businesses – particularly those run by consultants who charge by the hour – find themselves with too many customers.

How many is “too many”? Simple. One more than you can handle, regardless of the number, regardless of your economic situation.

Fortunately, it’s an early warning signal that your business model needs some work, though you might say it isn’t early enough:)  You shouldn’t feel bad about it – a lot of people find themselves in this situation: accountants, lawyers, doctors, dentists, chiropractors and others who charge by the hour.

Ann Rusnak talks about the too many customers problem in today’s guest post.

Where is she going? Among other places, right here.

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