STRATEGY CENTRAL

Picked up my copy of Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh today.  Don’t know if you know the story of Zappos.com but this is a great read!  I really only knew two things about Zappos when I opened up the book.  First, they are well known for their practice of offering new employees a lot of money to quit.  Second, they are known for offering “superior customer service.”

Delivering Happiness is more than the story of Zappos though.  It’s really a look at “the highlights of the path that [Hsieh] took in [his] journey toward discovering how to find happiness in business and life (p. xii, Delivering Happiness).”

You need to know that this is a really fun read!  Some books are packed with helpful takeaways but a pain to work through.  Others are just plain engaging, page turners, that end up being very impactful.  An hour on the front porch and I found myself on page 76 and reluctantly setting it aside for the night.

I’ve got to say there are not many books that I trip across that are as fun to read as this one.  Probably not since Chip Conley’s Peak have I been this captivated by the story itself.  Interesting to me that Peak was also really the story of a superior customer service organization.

Delivering Happiness is a great read.  I highly recommend it.

Think a satisfied customer is all you need?  Not hardly.  According to a multitude of studies customer satisfaction "is the cost of entry.  It will not differentiate the good from the great (Human Sigma, p. 137)."  But the question is, "What’s happening in your organization?"  Are you set up to generate "beyond satisfaction results"?

The reality for many of us?  We’re too busy getting through our normal routine to worry about anything beyond satisfaction.  Delighting the customer?  Not happening.  So what happens if you are simply focused on satisfying your customer?  According to Fleming and Asplund, "Focusing on creating satisfied customers is a one-way ticket to mediocrity (p. 137)."

Interesting?  How about scary.  The question we might all need to be asking is, "What am I doing to move beyond satisfaction?"

Here’s the kicker:  The same findings are true of employees.  Call them what you will (employees, associates, team members, etc.) simply giving them a satisfactory experience is not enough.  Helping them move into the next category is the goal.

So…what are you doing in your organization to move beyond satisfaction?

So here’s the question: If people have a tough time following your instructions, if you’re not connecting with your customers, if things just aren’t turning out like they used to, whose responsibility is it? 

No one says it better than Seth Godin.

I love this paragraph in today’s post:

What’s helpful is to realize that you have a choice when you
communicate. You can design your products to be easy to use. You can
write so your audience hears you. You can present in a place and in a
way that guarantees that the people you want to listen will hear you.
Most of all, you get to choose who will understand (and who won’t).

Oh my.  To actually choose who will understand.  What a thought.  I can think of some places that are choosing, not happy about the outcome, but unwilling to change…for fear of losing their existing customers.  Even though existing customers aren’t who they long to connect with.  And still they do nothing.  Wonder if this was the slowwww reaction to the ice age?

Catching up on my reading this a.m. I came across Bill Taylor’s first Video blog post for his Game Changers Blog over at Harvard Business Online.  A very good start.  If you’re not aware of Taylor, he was a co-author of what for me was the very best book of 2006, Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win.  By the way, if you haven’t read it, you really need to pick up a copy.  Be sure and have a pen though…because that book really is packed with great ideas and concepts that will connect immediately with what you do.

The video post is a good taste of the kind of writing Taylor does.  Insightful.  Very applicable to what all of us are grappling with.  Check it out.

What if you could divide your customers into four categories based on their engagement?  Maybe the four categories would be fully engaged, engaged, not engaged, and actively disengaged.  And what if you could learn some keys to producing a greater sense of engagement, possibly even help a growing number of engaged customers move up to fully engaged?  Think it would be worth the effort?

What if you learned that "customers who are fully engaged represent an average 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth than the average customer (Human Sigma, p. 95)?"  Think it would be worth the effort?

Debugging the Concept

Before we go any further, let’s take a moment to debug the concept.  First, we might need to go back and talk again about the concept of "customer."  Don’t be so quick to retort that you don’t have customers.  That you’d never think of your members (constituents) as customers.  Get real.  They’re the same thing!  No matter what business you are in, you have a product that is theoretically designed for an end user.  And that end user, no matter what you call them…is a customer.

Second, it doesn’t matter if you’d automatically say that your organization isn’t about things like "share of wallet" or "profitability."  Truth is, whether you admit it or not your organization is about those things.  You may not think of it in those terms, but down deep those concepts still matter.  Take "share of wallet" for instance.  You might think that’s a purely business oriented concept.  But isn’t it really an indication of priority?  After all, "wallet" is a pretty good indication of "attention span."

Back to the Idea:

Now that we’ve gotten real about whether what we have are customers and what we want is an increased share of wallet…wouldn’t it be a good thing to figure out how to increase the number of fully engaged customers?  Isn’t it at the heart of what we need to be doing to try and help the engaged group become fully engaged?  Yes!

But the question has to be, "How can we do it?"  You’ll have to stay tuned.  We’ll be working on this for a while.  It’s too important.  Way too important.  And the cool thing is, this is where Human Sigma is going.  Pick up a copy and tag along.  You can get a copy right here.

Side Note: It’s interesting to me is that this is actually one of the possible explanations for the findings in Willow Creek’s Reveal study.  Couldn’t full engagement be represented that way?  Just a thought.

Think "satisfaction" is enough?  Turns out that satisfying your customer is only the entry-level bet, just enough to get you in the  game but not enough to keep playing.  As we learned in Peak, customer satisfaction is not enough.  By now, we all recognize that satisfaction is offered everywhere.  Very satisfied is what we’re going for.  Right?  How ’bout noooooo.  We’re actually looking for something even beyond or distinct from very.  How could that be?

Taking another look at Human Sigma, I came across this section:

Empirical results from a large and growing number of case studies suggest that customers who are extremely satisfied—those who provide the highest rating of overall satisfaction with a company’s products or services—can be classified into two distinct groups: those who are emotionally satisfied and those who are rationally satisfied (p. 76).

What’s the significance?  Customers without the emotional edge are still more likely to defect.  Emotionally satisfied customers "buy more products, spend more for those products, and return more often or stay longer with the business (p. 77)."  Rational customers?  "Behave no differently than customers who are dissatisfied (p. 77)."

You’re killing me!  Are you telling me we need to get our customers all the way to emotionally satisfied?  Apparently the answer is "yes".  How do we do it?  Stay tuned.  Or pick up your own copy of the book.  You can do that RIGHT HERE.