How to inspire loyalty from service professionals

Very little is written about how customers can improve their own experience and inspire loyalty. In research handled by Jing Zhou, a professor at Rice University's graduate business school, evidence showed that customers should not only encourage service professionals to make recommendations, but to take those recommendations seriously, and complement the service person for their input. In the end, service improves as well as customer satisfaction. 

We customers can influence the quality of service we receive by sharing control and treating everyone who serves us, from cashier to hair stylist, as an expert in their own job. 

Rice Business Wisdom: What Happens When The Person Providing Your Service Gets Inspired? 2017-Apr-17, based on research by Jing Zhou, Yuntao Dong, Hui Liao, Aichia Chuang and Elizabeth M. Campbell

When the hairdresser suggests a little purple highlight on the bangs, and you listen attentively and take her advice, you may actually get a better haircut. Though few people view a salon chair as the seat of power, researchers are learning that client decisions can make a big difference in employee performance. When customers give workers more power, the workers perform better. So do their organizations.

...A recent paper coauthored by Jing Zhou, a management professor at the business school, suggests that when customers listen to employees, respect them and allow them the freedom to do their jobs, the creativity of those providing the service leaps—and so does the quality of that service.... 

Zhou’s research shows that customers and service personnel can be co-creators. It’s a departure from the hoary idea that formal leaders in an organizational hierarchy are the standard-bearers of the quality of customer service. In fact, Zhou maintains, customer service ought to begin not with management, but with the customer herself.

Antivirus in social media

The positive connotation of virus in the marketing arena did NOT begin in social media. This Fast Company article describes the birth of "viral marketing" with Hotmail. (Like many stories it may not be entirely true, but it was written in 1999, pretty close to the actual events.) 

However, I think the social media platforms (especially Facebook) have invested in antivirus, trying to control their revenue streams. Viral marketing was always about finding a trick to get "free" awareness or sign-ups. It was exciting to think by being very clever, we could avoid the system. The system however, abides! Long live guerrilla marketing, probably without viruses.  

Medium: The viral publishing game is over and we all lost, 2016-Feb-23 by Gabriel Stein

Like every other zero-sum game, the newsfeed for publishers is now naturally minimizing and consolidating, because the advantages you gain by playing become baked-in over time. The more games you play, the more data you have about how to test and optimize for the next battles, the quicker you can react to future changes in the algorithm, the more games you win, and so on.

It’s not impossible for insurgents to compete in this environment, but it’s a lot harder and requires much more investment to gain a foothold. That’s why you’re seeing all but the biggest publishers top out at around 30 million uniques a month these days. There’s just too much competition and not enough newsfeed to do more than that unless you’re publishing a thousand times a day. Put another way, 30 million a month is the supply ceiling Facebook has imposed on the market.

Retail trends toward non-retail experiences

Retail experiences have been a trend for quite awhile. Stores from Hershey, Apple, and Anthropologie all broke new ground, but they always filled the store with things to buy. Now, the latest retail experience is to have less merchandise, more something else... 

NY Times: For Brands Like Toms, It’s All About the Experience, 2015-Nov-13 by Steven Kurutz

“Getting people into stores has become a huge challenge because the e-commerce experience gets better and better,” said Kim Vernon, a fashion brand consultant and industry veteran. “The smartest thing you can do is to get people in your store.”

The ways brands are doing that vary. Some, like Toms, are turning to coffee and events. Kit & Ace, a new streetwear brand with retail outlets in Canada, England, Australia and the United States, holds quarterly “Sunday Suppers,” catered by a local chef and promoted by word of mouth.

Nina Garduno, who founded the retail outlet and artist commune Free City Supershop in Los Angeles, is teaming with Light in the Attic, a record label, to open a pop-up record store in January. The concept is the latest in an annual reimagining of her retail space in which Ms. Garduno and her team develop a theme, asking artists to help create products, décor, art installations and events around it.

Why we will always lose customers unless we have a strategy to retain them.

Two of my Facebook friends are deceased now, but they are still in my Friends Count. Of course, I appreciate seeing their names although I don't visit their profiles. I do remember them fondly when I see their names in the list. 

Deceased customer names in a marketing database? Not such a good idea. Unfortunately most marketing databases are cluttered with the names of people who moved away or aged out of our market or just rearranged us out of their lives. 

We compete not only with chance events but with competitors who are stealing our customers. If we don't have a strategy for retaining customers... checking in with them, ranking them, scoring them and wooing them back, we'll have no idea where they went. Having no strategy to retain customers means that we don't care when they leave. And that means our operating expenses will be higher than our competitors who do care. 

Canalside View: Marketing Crack: Kicking the Habit, 2015-May-13 by Martin Weigel

Laurence Freedman (also a military historian) too, makes the same point in his magnum opus Strategy: A History:

Strategy is required when others might frustrate one’s plans because they have different and possibly opposing interests and concerns… The inherent unpredictability of human affairs, due to the chance events as well as the efforts of opponents and the missteps of friends, provides strategy with its challenge and drama… ”

Because they can distinguish between plans and strategy, they’re able to focus on the long-term game, and be able to respond to events and circumstances at the same time.

Make your resume a customer experience

We usually write a resume that makes us feel good. Unfortunately we are not the target audience. Asking our business associates for feedback may make us uncomfortable, but it is vital. The more like our targeted hiring managers they are, the better. 

Career Marketing Coach: A Little Resume Tough Love, 2015-Mar-25 by Debra Rosenfeld

…because a resume is a very personal document, and it feels uncomfortable to have qualified people tell you that you need to change your very personal document. It feels much less threatening to ask for advice from people who are not qualified to give it.

So, if you’re not getting interviews, I encourage you to have your resume reviewed by people who are qualified to give you valuable feedback:

* Direct hiring managers in the field in which you work
* Your previous managers
* Senior colleagues or other managers with whom you worked

In building a relationship with email, go to your customers' space in your head

Maintaining an email-based relationship with a prospect can be very grueling. "Checking-in" emails just don't work. News from our own companies are usually too self-serving. To engage someone by email, we should first sit and think ourselves into their office... even if we've never been there. What's going on in their world? It used to drive me crazy that I didn't know specifics, but news about their city, their industry, their culture works just as well. Of course, sales people have used sports team connections for years... not gonna work for me, but restaurant news can!

Chicago Creative Space: How a Travel Magazine Helped Build a Company Culture, 2015-Jan-19 by Lou Barreiro

I started to go through each [travel magazine] issue to find articles on places where Performics had offices in. The next time I would reach out to each individual, I would share with them some cool places near them that were being featured. Response times immediately improved, as did turnaround times for the info I needed. Crazier yet, I started to form relationships with these global contacts. I went from being the nagging minion to someone that these people actually looked forward to connecting with.

Defining a value proposition with meaningful differentiation

After earning an MBA, after spending 30 years reading about business strategy, after dozens of seminars and webinars and coaching sessions, business educators find it hard to stump me. 

In my struggle to market Steady CRM, my value proposition is an approximation, nothing that's providing any traction yet. Potential customers nod, but they do not buy. Harvard B-School teacher Frank Cespedes has great advice for honing our value propositions (see below). 

His "invisible differentiation" may not be the only problem I have, but it's the only problem I can address immediately... I'm confident that better customer relationship management reduces marketing expenses... I just don't have all my stories lined up, YET. 

Harvard Business Review: Any Value Proposition Hinges on the Answer to One Question, 2014-Jan-13 by Frank V. Cespedes

[If you plan to sell it for a premium, make sure] ...your product or service provides better performance on attributes that are important to target customers and for which they are willing to pay a premium. This approach must continually avoid the following pitfalls:

• Meaningless or false differentiation: the points of superiority are unimportant to customers or based on a false presumption of superiority.
• Uneconomic or invisible differentiation: customers are unwilling to pay for additional performance or are unaware of the difference.
• Unsustainable differentiation: the product or service features are imitated over time.