Embarrassing hospital gowns that are tied in the rear are being replaced with more dignified side-tying versions at two hospitals in Bristol, England.

The University of Cincinnati Research Collaborative has come up with several gown designs, one ties in the front to achieve the same modesty goal as the British hospitals are introducing.

Three new designs from the University of Cincinnati prove that something as old fashioned as the dreaded hospital gown can improve our stay at the hospital.

Do you like the UC version or the British version?

All it takes is heating the water an extra one degree, to the boiling point. On the other side of boiling is where all the winners sit.

We invite you to take ten minutes and see how one hospital team overcame the fear of change, and, surprise, surprise … the entire hospital team went gladly on the trip. And when they accomplished their goals they were collectively proud of what they achieved. One extra degree! Now they are setting even higher goals.

The consultants at Compass Clinical Consulting have spent over a decade concentrating on new approaches to help hospital leaders deliver safe, quality care more efficiently. They are sharing these approaches to help you become a leader in efficient delivery of patient care through hospital workforce productivity and planning, hospital labor cost management, hospital Six Sigma and lean hospital practices.

Take another 10 minutes and read their newest whitepaper: “Hospital Productivity without Fear” and learn how to put fear of change in its place so you can lead your hospital to the kind of success you have dreamed of and around which you want to build your career. It is the start of turning hot water into boiling water.

 I get asked all the time why I think delivering a perfect customer experience is so important. My knee-jerk response is “do you want to deliver an imperfect customer experience?” Many managers want to know if Cx is a fad or a legitimate business movement.

I decided to collect evidence on the reality of Cx as a real, honest-to-goodness, unstoppable and forever-changing business movement is in a document I researched and have attached at the end of this posting.

Without much trouble, I might add, I found 25 senior managers at successful, well-known companies who confirm that at least they see this as a big deal … one around which they are reorganizing, recrafting and reenergizing their companies. In addition to confirming the legitimacy of Cx, these business leaders are also sharing business-critical insights on how they are doing it, I urge you to read this document carefully and underline every comment that one of these leaders makes that you can put to work in your organization immediately to get Cx moving faster.

Download the PDF: business_leaders_on_cem.

A few of the high-level take-aways from this document include:

• These leaders have done their best to get everyone in the organization focused on the customer’s total experience
• These leaders have found ways around the internal and external barriers that stood in the path of moving from corporate-centric to customer-centric — this has required setting up processes and supporting technology to enable the firms to get closer to their customers, to develop deep insights about customer needs and aspirations
• These leaders see Cx as a long term, continuous improvement, constantly changing process
• These leaders have wrapped compensation for achieving customer loyalty as a big stick to get alignment 
• These leaders are not ducking from the fear and the complexity that breaking away from a product orientation causes … and they are benefiting rapidly with faster, more profitable growth

These 25 business leaders are moving out ahead of their competitors. Are you?

The Revolution Your Customers Want:

Customer Experience happens in the Contact Center:

Hospital Productivity without Fear: This whitepaper enables hospital leaders to become fearless in the face of change.

Workforce Decisions Today Will Shape Your Hospital’s Future:

The Near Death Experience: This whitepaper tells the story of one hospital that went through the Medicare (CMS) termination process and, with some expert help, fought its way back to regain certification.

Curing Anger in the Hospital

The Unified Agent Desktop Provides Single View of Customer: The unified desktop puts customer information behind a single interface to provide the best of both worlds – an agent desktop built on the same key functionality that already powers your business but delivered through any web browser.

IBM / Turning Shoppers into Advocates: A gap remains between what retailers are delivering and what shoppers expect. Retailers can close this gap by systematically integrating knowledge of what their best customers want and expect from their brand into every core operational decision.

When we want to get inside our prospective and current customers’ heads, we can be on the lookout for five traits that help build context.

The following article, entitled “Square Holes for Square Pegs,” written by Professor Adrian Furnham, looks at the “Big Five” Model of Personality and makes sound arguments for personality assessment, or success profiling. Consider how you can unearth these traits based on their responses to questionnaires, click path content selections or sales interviews … and you will be a lot closer to moving that prospect toward a sale.

The Big Five Model of Personality:

According to the “Big Five” model of personality, the most important dimensions of people’s personality in the workplace are:

1. Introversion/Extraversion
2. Agreeableness
3. Openness
4. Natural Reactions
5. Conscientiousness

Introversion/Extraversion:
Some people are talkative, sociable, and socially self-confident.

They like other people and tend to be socio-centers. They are comfortable in groups and teams and enjoy intensive and extensive people contact. Others are quiet, retiring, and apparently shy. They prefer to work alone and have a much lower need for social contact of all kinds. This, of course, is introversion-extraversion.The salient question here is about social contact at work: with colleagues and total strangers (i.e. customers). People can be excited, enlivened and energized by social contact, or frightened and exhausted by it.

Agreeableness:

Next, some people tend to be sunny, cheerful, warm and empathic while others are dour, unsympathetic, and grumpy. This is about being hard or softhearted. It’s about sensitivity to and interest in the feelings of others. This dimension is called agreeableness. However agreeableness can be a handicap when agreeable managers have to deal with recalcitrant, difficult and disagreeable staff. Their natural warmth and kindness may prevent them from ”kickin’ ass” as frequently as they should.

Openness:

Third, some people are curious, imaginative and artistic, while others are practical and focused. This dimension is called openness to experience. The more open people are, the more prone to boredom they are. They think outside the box too much.

Natural Reactions:

Some people are calm, contented and placid. They are stable under fire, resilient and emotionally robust. Others are easily upset, tense, anxious, moody and highly-strung. It is, in short, the ability to handle pressure and stress. We call this Natural Reactions. Most jobs have some sources of stress. Tight deadlines. Disgruntled customers. Competing demands. Indolent staff. Tough performance standards. At the extreme, people who can’t handle stress cave-in with psychosomatic illness, depression or erratic behavior. They can be a menace to themselves, their colleagues and the business.

Conscientiousness:

And finally, there is conscientiousness, the work ethic, diligence, and prudence. Some people are hard working, self-disciplined and well organized. Others are (alas) disorganized, easily distracted and undependable. Conscientious people have self-discipline, drive and a sense of direction. They stay on and come in when required over and above what it says in their contract. They just need a direction and an appropriate reward.

Acquire

The Cincom Acquire™ Guided Selling & Product Configurator solution delivers application, product, pricing and process knowledge to the point of sale, ensuring the optimal fit between product offerings and customers’ needs.

Astadia

Astadia takes businesses to the cloud, increasing ROI and lowering TCO.  As Salesforce.com’s #1 partner, we have deep expertise in streamlining front office sales, marketing, and customer service.

Eloqua

Eloqua captures and tracks lead information, campaign response, and web activity— the information about your buyer that salespeople need to present a more relevant solution. Segmenting and personalizing your campaigns based on this data can significantly increase your marketing effectiveness.

Synchrony

Cincom Synchrony™ is a unified agent desktop that helps deliver an exceptional customer experience and improve effectiveness in the contact center.

Tealeaf

Tealeaf enables you to see your customers’ actual online experiences, analyze their motivations and ultimately, gain insight as to why abandonmentor other site actions occur.

This law hit me in the face watching a TV commercial for Ally Bank.

Two small girls are sitting with a suited man at a children’s-size round table. The man asks one of the girls if she’d like a pony. “Yeah,” she says. And he reaches into his pocket and hands her a toy pony. Then he turns to the other girl at the table and asks, “would you like a pony?” She agrees and out trots a real pony. The first girl looks back at the man while holding her plastic pony and says, “But you didn’t say I could have a real pony.” The expression on her face is one of shock and dismay when the man says, “Well, you didn’t ask for one.”

A narrator overrides the scene saying, “Even kids know it’s wrong to hold out on somebody. Why don’t banks?”

My point is not so much the merits of this commercial, but the fact that kids and adult creators of TV commercials, in fact, all of us do have a sense of when we are being treated right or wrong. The people who left comments on this commercial posted on You Tube by and large agree and feel some sort of anger at Ally Bank for the wrongness of this message.

Which is where I get to customer experience.

Yes, we do all have a sense of right and wrong. It is when companies who want our money and yet treat us badly that this law comes roaring to the surface of our emotions. We know when we are right. We also know when we are wrong. And we know when we are wronged. When this happens, the reaction is always emotional.

Like when I recently wanted to return a purchase back to the retailer and they simply refused to take it back. I pointed out that it was unopened and never even touched. No restocking fee would even be necessary. The woman across the counter simply refused to refund my money. The adrenalin that hit my brain was instantaneous. I slammed the purchase back on the counter (and stupidly) walked out the store — never again to return. I felt like I was being wronged. I felt if I was the woman behind the counter that she knew she was wrong.

Treating children by giving them an unfair situation was Ally Bank’s way of dramatizing that while most banks behave badly, they would never do such a thing to customers.

No company can do well when it treats its customers wrongly. That is the essence of Customer Experience Relationship Building.

Perhaps no industry should be more centered on improving customer experience than healthcare … where the experience has enormous personal implications and where buzz around experiences at hospitals can dramatically impact market share and revenue growth.

At a recent HealthLeaders Media event, it became apparent that C-level managers are catching on fast to the validity of patient experience as something that is directly affected by how management approaches its employee relations.

One example that you could be easily replicated in any organization came from keynote speaker Al Stubblefield, president and CEO of Florida’s Baptist Healthcare Corporation. He talked about the importance of sharing “feel-good moments” with employees. When a friend of a patient wrote to praise hospital employees and departments for the excellent care his friend received while hospitalized, the organization created a video of the man reading the letter and showed it to employees. Accompanying slides highlighted the individuals and departments he mentioned to show, as Stubblefeld noted, that “everybody makes a difference.”

Kate Fenner, CEO of healthcare consulting firm Compass Group, “There are a lot of factors that impact patient satisfaction, with outcomes being the obvious to top the list. But equally important in shaping the patient’s perception of one hospital compared to another include physician satisfaction and employee satisfaction since these drive clinical quality. Hospital leaders must set the environment for exceeding expectations for care outcomes, accessibility, waiting time and how well such factors align with the hospital’s brand promise.”

Fenner added, “In an era where maybe a third of hospitals lost money, patient happiness is crucial for gaining market share and with market share comes the ability to negotiate better payments from payers. Everyone in the organization from patient registration staff to surgeons and nurses to various clinicians and support staff to senior managers — everyone must see delighting the patient as Job One.”

By Dale Wolf,

That’s one fact — there are a lot of data points about hospital patients.

The second fact is most of these patients are not at all happy with their hospitals — the experience overall is dreadful. While the patient’s health outcome is obviously the most critical measure, it is a variety of other factors that determine satisfaction … even when the outcome is good.

Just 68% would recommend their hospital to a friend.

Such a score at General Electric could well get the team fired!

Such a low Customer Experience would shock managers at Zappos, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A– just a few other businesses that take customer satisfaction as a serious metric and who would be demanding answers from their staff if their Customer Sat scores dripped below 90%.

The highest scores are communications with doctors at 80 and with nurses at 74, and discharge information at 80. The rest of the satisfaction criteria measured by the Federal Government tumble downhill fast: Quiet environment 56, clean environment 69, communication about drugs 59. But the real cruncher is hospital staff responsiveness at just 62.

Are Low Satisfaction Scores a Result of Leadership Neglect?

A recent study published in Health Affairs reveals that fewer than 67 percent of hospital boards discuss quality of care issues at every board meeting, and when quality is discussed, it takes less than 20 percent of the board’s time. This is a strong indicator of why patients are so dissatisfied with their hospitals — the Boards leading the hospitals are ignoring patients.

CRM Technologies Typically Non-Existent at Hospitals

CRM is employed at about 15% of U.S. hospitals, even though the tools can be used to improve quality and service, attract patients and reduce hospital expenses via information management and comprehensive data collection.

Internal and external data collection can help hospitals proactively tailor services to meet patient needs. Data is at the crux of developing systems that remind patients about necessary health screenings and inform new residents about their area healthcare facilities. In addition to modifying marketing strategies, CRM tools can augment and improve Web sites, health awareness programs, online bill payment, pharmacy discharge activities and nurse triage.

Three Action Steps

The first action … hospital leaders need to make patient satisfaction a higher priority.

The second action … hospital leaders need to change internal processes, policies and cultures.

The third action … get IT involved in reviewing technologies that can help manage and measure customer experience.

 Sales people live and die by the relationships they make, not by their histories of contacts.

Like archeological finds, rolodexes preserve the past.  Some can tell you the entire career of technology buyers over twenty years.  Rolodexes are a fine research instrument but a selling tool inching towards irrelevance. 

Kick Some Life into Your Selling Relationships

Whenever some senior sales professional proclaims “I’ve got a killer Rolodex and I can sell millions of dollars in enterprise software!”  Inside I immediately call B.S. on it.  A Rolodex belongs in a museum, relationships are what matter today.  Can a Rolodex lead to someone buying more? No.  Can a Rolodex inspire trust?  No. 

How many times have you gotten a call from someone you haven’t heard from in years and all they want is to sell you something?  Congratulations! You have just been excavated from a Rolodex. This is no way to sell in an era where trust is more valuable than gold. 

Social Networks and Investing In Relationships

So if you’re in sales and you haven’t gotten on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter to connect with your prospects and customers – it’s 2010 – what are you waiting for? 

It’s time to wake up and realize everyone, even technology buyers, are changing fast. Social networks are a big part of that shift.

Authenticity, honesty, transparency and trust, they are the fuel of social networks that make them work.  Sure there is a ton of deception going on out there, but imagine how powerful it is to be the one person in another’s network who is real and can really help them?  Powerful indeed.  You will never get a selling relationship to these levels sitting at your desk thumbing through a Rolodex.  You have to engage and be real. 

If you are in sales there is no excuse for not having a calendar full of appointments and lunches with old contacts you’ve reconnected with through social networks. If they are not on Facebook, Twitter or the social networking platform of choice, you need to get them there.

Key Take-Aways

• If you aren’t earning trust you aren’t selling. It’s time to take that bold step and take accountability for your own selling network, your own selling brand. Ultimately it’s your reputation on the line, regardless of the strengths or weaknesses of who you work for. Social networks unleash your brand as a sales professional.  Making social networks work for your selling strategies does a lot more for your career than any amount of whining and complaining ever did.

• Pick 50 cards out of your Rolodex now and make the relationships live again.  Call each of these people, your top 50 contacts, and connect with them on Facebook, Twitter, and talk to them.  Make the relationship alive again.  Real selling is about tackling problems for customers even if there isn’t necessarily an immediate sale – it’s about building trust by freeing giving insight, intelligence and help.

• Playing the Blame Game is a cop-out, work your network instead. I deeply respect the salespersons in enterprise software, computer hardware and electronic components that nailed their quota in 2009 and are kicking butt right now even though the economy is tough. They were smart enough to build their networks early on using social networking apps, worked the networks to understand how the economy was impacting their prospects and customers, and in short – have a passionate interest in what is going on with each of them.  Not just monthly for a filing their status reports.  Daily. With intensity and focus. They are 110% committed to their prospects and customers. These people are too busy working their networks to play the Blame Game.  

Bottom line: Imagine if all the sales teams in your company decided to make the most important relationships cataloged in their Rolodex come alive again. That infusion of intensity and customer focus can change a company – and no sales team ever accomplished that going card after card in a Rolodex dialing for dollars.
Flickr image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roach-family/182395939/sizes/t/

Like archeological finds, rolodexes preserve the past.  Some can tell you the entire career of technology buyers over twenty years.  Rolodexes are a fine research instrument but a selling tool inching towards irrelevance. 

Kick Some Life into Your Selling Relationships

Whenever some senior sales professional proclaims “I’ve got a killer Rolodex and I can sell millions of dollars in enterprise software!”  Inside I immediately call B.S. on it.  A Rolodex belongs in a museum, relationships are what matter today.  Can a Rolodex lead to someone buying more? No.  Can a Rolodex inspire trust?  No. 

How many times have you gotten a call from someone you haven’t heard from in years and all the want to sell you something?  Congratulations! You have just been excavated from a Rolodex. This is no way to sell in an era where trust is more valuable than gold. 

Social Networks and Investing In Relationships

So if you’re in sales and you haven’t gotten on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter to connect with your prospects and customers – it’s 2010 – what are you waiting for? 

It’s time to wake up and realize everyone, even technology buyers, are changing fast. Social networks are a big part of that shift.

Authenticity, honesty, transparency and trust, they are the fuel of social networks that make them work.  Sure there is a ton of deception going on out there, but imagine how powerful it is to be the one person in another’s network who is real and can really help them?  Powerful indeed.  You will never get a selling relationship to these levels sitting at your desk thumbing through a Rolodex.  You have to engage and be real. 

If you are in sales there is no excuse for not having a calendar full of appointments and lunches with old contacts you’ve reconnected with through social networks. If they are not on Facebook, Twitter or the social networking platform of choice, you need to get them there.

Key Take-Aways

• If you aren’t earning trust you aren’t selling. It’s time to take that bold step and take accountability for your own selling network, your own selling brand. Ultimately it’s your reputation on the line, regardless of the strengths or weaknesses of who you work for. Social networks unleash your brand as a sales professional.  Making social networks work for your selling strategies does a lot more for your career than any amount of whining and complaining ever did.

• Pick 50 cards out of your Rolodex now and make the relationships live again.  Call each of these people, your top 50 contacts, and connect with them on Facebook, Twitter, and talk to them.  Make the relationship alive again.  Real selling is about tackling problems for customers even if there isn’t necessarily an immediate sale – it’s about building trust by freeing giving insight, intelligence and help.

• Playing the Blame Game is a cop-out, work your network instead. I deeply respect the salespersons in enterprise software, computer hardware and electronic components that nailed their quota in 2009 and are kicking butt right now even though the economy is tough. They were smart enough to build their networks early on using social networking apps, worked the networks to understand how the economy was impacting their prospects and customers, and in short – have a passionate interest in what is going on with each of them.  Not just monthly for a filing their status reports.  Daily. With intensity and focus. They are 110% committed to their prospects and customers. These people are too busy working their networks to play the Blame Game.  

Bottom line: Imagine if all the sales teams in your company decided to make the most important relationships cataloged in their Rolodex come alive again. That infusion of intensity and customer focus can change a company – and no sales team ever accomplished that going card after card in a Rolodex dialing for dollars.
Flickr image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roach-family/182395939/sizes/t/

By Randy Saunders

Amtrak (U.S. national passenger railroad) has an automated telephone agent named “Julie” who answers about 50,000 calls per day.  Since her debut in 2001, Julie has earned high marks from callers, who have given her an approval rating of more than 90 percent.  As automated attendants go, the system is one of the best.  She’s designed to be friendly, pleasant and helpful — and mostly, she is.

For those thousands of passengers that call to check  a schedule or make sure their train’s on time, they’ll hear Julie reply with “got it!” to each request.  And when she doesn’t understand you she even apologizes, “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.”

While Julie efficiently handles most transactions and has saved Amtrak millions of dollars, she’s still a robot.  What she can’t do is build a human, emotional connection with customers.

A few years ago, NBC’s Saturday Night Live featured a recurring parody that showed “Julie” attempting real-life conversations in everyday social settings.

Not only is this skit entertaining, it demonstrates how awkward interactions really are between people and machines.

The importance of the human touch
Psychologically and mentally, people consciously and subconsciously interpret natural audio cues during conversations. These cues can’t be replicated through technology. These cues give us a sense of security and trust that can lead to a great experience, or create mistrust and outrage if we perceive the agent is inattentive to our needs.

A successful customer-experience strategy makes an emotional connection with the customer ― and it’s much easier to do that with an upbeat, empowered, and engaged agent than with an automated attendant or unmotivated and incapable company representative.

The contact center agent is perhaps the only human touch a customer will have with your organization. Taking a tip from U.S. customer service legend, Zappos, whose motto “we’re a service company that happens to sell shoes,” is a good first step.  For Zappos, customer service as an investment, not an expense.

Here is some more advice from Zappos:

• Don’t hide your customer service number
• Don’t measure call times
• Don’t avoid callers or send them to a lower cost channel.

By enabling and even encouraging calls to their contact center agents, they build lasting and loyal relationships with their customers. Along the way they gather customer feedback in a conversational, natural way. This information gives them a better understanding of their customers, their products and what works. This invaluable insight enables them to guide and improve the business moving forward.

Customer Experience Crossroads

CRM2Day

Robert Winton

Customer Service Zone

Customerspective Service Untitled 

Experience Manifesto

Flooring The Consumer

Customers Rock!

Human actions are diverse to the extreme. So, too, are the motives and the causes which drive them. But, behavioral scientists have found that certain types of Actions, Behaviors and Conducts tend to cluster together around certain Types of Temperament, Styles of Behavior and other aspects of human character. This means that if one tends to habitually do certain things, or behave in certain ways, then closely allied Actions, Behaviors and Conducts can be expected.

Of course, nothing about human actions or behaviors is ever certain. But, that’s precisely why we can benefit by knowing just a little bit more about what to expect, and how one might better respond to another. For example, a person who tends to be very analytical, which is a good thing, may also be one who suffers from Paralysis By Analysis, which may often not be a good thing. So, one who must rely on the analytical powers and interests of another may be required to insist that some type of a decision be made, and that such a decision be made by a certain date.

The demands and requirements of human interactions and interdependencies make the recognition of a person’s character a very important necessity. What one both chooses, and refuses, to do provides important indications and inclinations of a person’s character. Our character thus becomes a matter of choices – and over time we become our choices. This is why a hierarchy of values, or ethics, which governs our choices largely influences, if not determines one’s morality.

But I fear there is evidence that many corporate managers still see the world this way.

If we are at all good about building a business that customers care about, it has to be win-win. There will be an ebb and flow, but in the long run if customers rule the world, many businesses will go broke trying to meet lower prices. And if the business managers rule the world, some other smarter business will come along and steal customers. The balance is lovely.

And now some new thinking by consulting firm, A. T. Kearney, may cause these managers to one-sided victories that in the end will be their downfall. This kind of marketplace shift calls for strategic management and careful thought about the customer experience.

A. T. Kearney has a point of view that busines-to-business customers (at least in some markets) are no longer in the same level of control over suppliers as before the gas crisis.

Kearney says that “Consolidating supplier markets, rising energy prices and the growing demand for raw materials in emerging markets have fundamentally changed the purchasing framework. Suppliers are more powerful than ever, which means buyers must adjust quickly to a new playing field.”

Kearney developed The Purchasing Chessboard — a compilation of insights and experience from thousands of purchasing projects performed worldwide—to help procurement professionals master the tools of their trade. Check his PDF for a comprehensive look at macro and micro strategies to help procurement professionals improve their operations based on insights from thousands of purchasing projects performed worldwide.

I add my caution for all you suppliers who may be finding yourselves back in control of the buyer. Shortages can do that. One of the main reasons customers got control is that typically there is an over-supply of just about any product or service offered in the world. With over-supply, customers can be demanding. In under-supply, suppliers can be demanding.

But I would contend that in either marketplace situation, both suppliers and customers should be working to make each other successful. Cement very strong relationships between each other by delivering great customer experiences. That way, when supply changes in the marketplace (and it will), then your relationship can be the genesis of ongoing business that is profitable for the supplier and rewarding for the customer.

Every year AMR Research’s Supply Chain Top 25 portfolio of companies outperforms the market, with 2007 delivering an average return of 17.89%, compared with returns of 6.43% for the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and 3.53% for the S&P 500. Leading all companies in stock price performance was Apple (AAPL) with a 133.47% gain during 2007.

As an example of how critical demand-driven supply chains are, consider the the following factors that in 2007 contributed to Apple’s growth. First, the company was able to support an aggressive product launch schedule of Intel-based Macs with very competitive pricing, an OS refresh, and expanding distribution globally. 

The second factor is the growth of the mobile phone opportunity with iPhone, the recent/ongoing European rollout followed by Asia launch in 2008, along with possible model expansion (e.g., 16GB iPhone, 3G iPhone, lower-priced models). To put iPhone’s success into perspective, it took 22 quarters for BlackBerry to ship over 1 million units in a single quarter, while Apple accomplished this in its first full quarter with only one carrier in the US. Meanwhile, PALM, another smartphone vendor, has yet to ship over 1 million units in a quarter since introducing its Treo products four and a half years ago; and Continued growth of iPod, with refreshes across all of its prior models and the launch of the iPod Touch

AMR Research has since 2004 published the top 25 performing supply chains globally, and has a website devoted to explaining the methodology used, prior years’ list and research. 

Link: The AMR Research Supply Chain Top 25 Blows Away Market with 17.89% Return

Nearly 30% of customers were not satisfied with the call. Sheri Teodoru, partner and program director, CFI Group, noted that call centers need staffers who are not only knowledgeable about the products or services, but who are also able to solve problems. They need to be able to direct consumers to a place where their issues can be resolved, such as the company’s website or a retail location.

Ms. Teodoru said that customers who thought an offshore call center was handling their problems rated their experience 26 points lower — and were twice as likely to leave the company they were calling — than those who thought the center was in the U.S.

The study found that marketers in certain industries, such as cellphones, are trying to upsell unhappy consumers — that is, trying to offer new products to generate more revenue from callers. Almost a third, or 31%, of callers were given sales pitches, she said, and those customers were less satisfied than those who were not approached.

This, it seems to me, is the direct result of company managers focused on themselves instead of on their customers. We’re measuring the wrong things and rewarding the wrong behavior. 70% might get you a passing grade in high school, but not in the world of competition for the hearts and minds of customers.

For marketers, mark this as “Year 11 AA” (After Amazon) – the point in history when a line was drawn between traditional marketing and data-driven marketing. A point in time when a convergence of technology, the rise of consumer power and the potential for longitudinal customer relationships mandated we change how we converse with customers. It is change or perish. It’s that simple.

In Year 1 AA, Amazon’s personalized recommendation engine launched ecommerce and began a revolution in marketing that has reached far beyond the World Wide Web.

Just three years later, two Stanford programmers developed an algorithm that echoed Amazon’s automated personalized recommendation engine. They founded Google with an engineering concept that treated website links as recommendations, and from that foundation came the world’s most effective search engine.

Much has been written about Googlezon, a fictional scenario developed by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, both staff at the Poynter Institute for Journalism in Florida. In a thought-provoking look back at the history of the Web from 10 years in the future. Their story is fascinating, amusing and unnerving. But their vision of an Evolving Personalized Information Construct is where marketing will eventually move. It will take time because a generation of marketers who grew up practicing the 4P’s is still at the helm. They are only begrudgingly giving up on traditional mass marketing.

But the facts are clear to anyone who wants to read them.

Traditional marketing is no longer working.

Pete Sealey, former CMO of The Coca-Cola Company, at a conference of the Association of National Advertisers, was downright emotional in his assessment of the stupidity with continuing to mass marketing. “We’ve got to stop, folks!” he cried plaintively as he described the runaway inflation of network media pricing combined with stomach-churning declines in reach and effectiveness.

Seth Godin confirms the failure of traditional marketing in today’s business world. Successful marketing is no longer “advertising” — it’s simply too hard to get people to care, because people in the U.S. already have everything they need, most of the things they want, and don’t expect significant differences between brands.

A Tillinghast actuary noted: “The market is currently smart and educated, and we cannot trick them into lower benefits. We cannot provide lower benefits for the same amount of money, especially in an era of full disclosure. Rates of return for shareholders of insurance companies are barely at acceptable rates of return. There is no room to take profit from a shareholder.

Customers have never liked to intrusive marketing. While there are exceptions, most mass marketing has hovered in the 2% response rate for years and years, across all media – free standing inserts, mass direct mail, trade shows, TV and radio, banner ads. By any standard, a 2% return on investment is not a good deal. Our CEO’s would be better advised to invest the money in a long-term bond than to spend it on such programs.

There is a better way.

The New Marketing Construct for Changing the Customer Conversation

The new construct makes four fundamental changes:

1. Marketing becomes data-driven, targeted, addressable.
2. Marketing becomes customer-centric and more relevant to customer needs.
3. Marketing becomes a longitudinal, evolving, interactive personalized relationship.
4. Marketing becomes more measurable and accountable.

Okay, so politicians are just humans and subject to stupidity like the rest of us mortals.

But it begs the question … how often do you recommend a campaign or a product decision that flies in the face of facts that seem to tell you to go the other way? True confessions — I’ve done it. Hopefully at this point in my career I have stopped doing it.

But I continue to witness brand marketers who — in the face of contrary evidence –want to make a mark by producing a product or an ad campaign or one of a thousand other kinds of things that get done in the world of marketing.

Egos get tied up into the idea of the moment.

The risk of not succeeding prevents us from dumping a sunk cost.

We rationalize the facts away.

We support decisions that come our of our department and counter the decisions that come from other departments.

Maybe the existence of this LiveScience research will cause us to challenge projects before they go too far — especially when there is some evidence to the contrary.

One of the repercussions of all the corporate downsizing is that we picked up the work of those whose jobs were terminated. The work didn’t go away … we just took on more. But we didn’t do this efficiently. We just worked longer hours. The 50-hour week became a 60-hour week. And the quality of what we did went south. We’re tired and frustrated.

Shocking though it may seem Busyness Club is where we spend 90% of our time. This based on research by Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal. They revealed in Harvard Business Review that “fully 90 percent of managers squander their time in all sorts of ineffective activities instead of spending their time in a committed, purposeful and reflective manner.”

You’d be seen as Superman or Superwoman!

Imagine what you could really accomplish if you converted even half of this squandered time into more productive activities.

Bad Habits Reign

Not long ago I became fascinated why people with chronic illness lived such unhealthy lives. People with just three health conditions account for the majority of healthcare expenses. All they need to do is eat right, exercise, stop smoking and take their prescriptions as recommended by the doctor. But they don’t do it. They stay sick.

What if these chronically sick people just set a goal for themselves to enjoy every day of life more fully? What if they changed critical personal behaviors? What if they got support around them to help them through the behavioral change process until new habits formed? My guess is that they’d be happier and the Federal Government would save billions of dollars a year in Medicare payments.

What if we business people did the same thing? 

That is, change the behaviors that are adding to our frustration and minimizing our productivity. What if we set out deliberately on a goal of accomplishing more while doing less?

• Change behaviors that hold back our potential for greatness.
• Clear our decks so we can seize new opportunities as they surface.

Clarify Your Values and Vision for a Successful Life

Create Immediate Separation and Balance between Work and Personal World

Your job is your job. Your life is your life. But your job is not your life. What is the personal dream and career dream you have for yourself? Begin at the end and work backwards. Values are the beginning of the end. Establish your priorities based on your values. Get focus on these and let them run what you do and who you do them with.

• What’s important and why?
• What’s the flow chart for how you will achieve the important things in life.
• Put it in writing.

The balance part comes from saying “no” more effectively. Low self esteem leads us to say “yes” when we should say “no” and you can still be a team player in achieving this balance. Do first those things only you can do rather than doing the work of others. The Do-it-Yourself mentality is self-destructive to you and the team. Protect yourself and the team from over-commitment, but do it positively. If you dump your work on others you are being an obstructionist.

Become Aware that Bad Habits Sabotage Us.

Kick them and Replace them with More Productive Habits.

It turns out that changing attitude and behavior is hard to do, even when we desperately want to do it. We’re not yet seeing the huge advantage we can gain. Habits will cause success or failure.

Begin thinking differently about priorities. What are the real values in life that make you feel good. The values and our vision of how to achieve them cause us to behave the way we do. If our focus is on accomplishment, then we will do more stuff so we feel good rather than focusing on the real issues.

Breaking this cycle is not easy.

• Identify the wasted time in your day … what’s not working?
• Replace these activities with new habits that lead more successfully to your values and vision.
• Know what is really important rather than what someone else says is important.
• Set aside your most productive time of the day to do the most important things.

Is answering the never-ending stream of emails that hit your desktop consuming the time you need to do more important tasks? You feel good about email because it gives you a sense of accomplishment, but it is not what will make you or your company successful. Break the habit and replace it with a new one. Instead of answering 50 emails, pick the one that no one else wants to handle … successful people do things everyday that other people don’t want to do.

If the 80/20 rule is at work (and it probably is), then 20% of what you do produces 80% of your value. Stay laser focused on the big things.

Follow the FAST acronym to move a team forward more productively.

Focus – do the important things right

Agree – collaboration is essential

Schedule – commit to deliverables and deadlines

Track – performance, quality, results

Start today. 

Pick off the one thing you have been avoiding. Then pick off the one thing you can do better than anyone else. Keep things simple.

End the frustration and begin the celebration when you find the realization to get the motivation without hesitation to build the foundation for your salvation.

This demands the dramatic and dynamic challenge of what is often referred to as the creative destruction and the rapid rebuilding of an organization in order to improve it – and to be willing to do so repeatedly.

In order for organizations to consistently win over time, internal revolution (not evolution) must be driven by leaders and managers with the ideas, the heart, and the will to continuously respond to an ever-growing number of new opportunities. To stay alive, an organization must adopt life-sustaining change as its way of life. Of course, not all change is improvement, but without change an organization cannot improve itself.

Similarly, without the ability and desire to respond to new opportunities, or better still, creating products and services that create new opportunities, an organization can neither survive over time, nor thrive in its current time. There is little doubt that the revolutionary changes usually needed to properly respond to new opportunities can be painful, and risky. Nor is there little doubt that the conserving forces within an organization will tend to resist the potential pain and risk that such dramatic change demands.

Leaders Needed
In all facets of life, including business affairs, one must master change. Faced with increasingly difficult, demanding, large, and frequent mega-shifts in worldwide economies, societies, technologies, marketplaces and competitive forces, organizations need leaders and managers at every level and throughout all aspects and functions who can optimally redirect an organization’s emotional and economic energies and resources.

Throughout every organization, its leaders and managers must be willing, if not eager, to repeatedly let go of the tried and true established ideas and ways of doing things and quickly adopt newer and better ones. And, its leaders and managers must be able to encourage, to guide and to help each and every member of the organization to generate the very high levels of positive energy and commitment needed to do the same. As the monkey swinging through the trees of the forest must let go of the trailing but then still supporting branch as it grasps the next branch forward, so too must all members of a modern organization be eagerly grasping upon the next great opportunity as it moves rapidly forward, and willingly letting go of the old as it progresses.

For us, today’s economic life is one of constant change. And these changes, while individually often seem to happen little by little, collectively they occur at such a great rate of speed that, in very short time, very great shifts in the organization have occurred.

Sometimes before we have realized what is happening, it has already happened. If, at every level, people are not constantly noting and thinking about the possibilities latent within seemingly small changes, by the time the cumulative effect of these is realized by those at the top of an organization, it is usually too late. No organization can rely solely on leadership from the top.

Leaders and managers at every level must realize that an organization will survive and thrive only through change. No matter what its situation, an organization’s managers and leaders, at every level, can improve the organization and its competitive performance only if individually and collectively they can do an ever better job of generating new ideas, instilling better values, creating more positive energy, making tough decisions, and having the courage of their commitments to implement both incremental improvements, and to also gain quantum leaps forward as well.  In today’s organizations, everyone must contribute to the collective knowledge for us to achieve.

I was out on the Mini USA site tonight looking at the Mini Cooper. My daughter is looking for a new car and this one is on her list.

As I was touring their site, it reminded me of how important timing our marketing efforts becomes.

Car companies are desperate to sell but unless you are in the market, all their TV commercials and direct mail go totally ignored. Only when we’re looking to buy something do we pay attention. Timing is one of the major “customer contest” factors we must get right.

It is one of the factors that impact the response rate performance … 2% rates are the norm because 98% of the targeted prospects are not in the market now. Does that mean we stop trying? Of course not. Marketing is a longitudinal process; not an episodic one. We need to build relationships with prospects so that when they come into the market, our brands are in the considered set.

Working the 98% of prospects who do not respond to us is the one thing most marketers fail to do. Most follow up only on the 2%. That’s a waste. Work the database. Work the market. Catch prospects when they come into the market. Our experience is that this longitudinal approach moves overall response rates up to the 50% range.

We all know the pressure to innovate, but all too often innovation really means more product line extensions or added features. There is the magic line that when we cross it all we have really introduced is complexity — for us, for the distribution channel, and for the end customer.

Mark Gottfredson (Harvard Business Review) and Mike Booker  (Bain & Company) note that innovation often manifests itself as more choices which breed complexity and send cost out of control and profits downward. The solution, they suggest, is to take charge of what they call the “innovation fulcrum” — a balance between product variety and operational complexity. This balance utilizes a concept that manufacturers know as “mass customization.”

Reveries Magazine cites a few examples of companies who customize their offerings by extending from a standard platform instead of making every offering unique. Take Starbucks, for example, where you can customize your latte by size, type of milk, temperature and flavors — but everything works off the same standard platform. Or HEB, the supermarket where every store operates on a standard model but tailors its offerings to suit local tastes. Or Honda, where you can have any kind of car you want as long as it is one of their 32 build-combinations in one of four colors.

The “innovation fulcrum” essentially picks up where Henry Ford’s Model-T left off. Henry got it right by standardizing his offering, but missed when he made every Model-T black. Mark and Mike think companies need to think about what processes would like with one standard offering and then add back those options valued by attractive segments of your customer base. The secret, they point out, is to add only a single variable at a time and then trace the effect through the value chain. Henry Ford finally got it right by offering the Model A in various colors … but, of course, by then he was chasing competitors who managed mass customization faster.

Mark and Mike warn that today’s complexities begin with the product line. It is a result of incremental buildup of systems and mechanisms for managing complexity in the product line. Their advice is to “raise the hurdle rate by requiring a higher rate of return on new products” which they say both “makes it more difficult to arbitrarily add variations and boosts the innovation discipline.”  They urge us to pinpoint responsibility for making innovative decisions as well as to track how the innovation fulcrum can shift over time. They conclude: “Companies that hit the right balance between innovation and complexity create more efficient operations and more profitable customer relationships.”

Mass Customization Benefits and Opportunities:

• Mobilize product rationalization efforts to support mass customization strategies.
• Increase configuration accuracy to ensure manufacturability.
• Bring engineering closer to the customer and eliminate non-value-added activities.
• Build products on-demand to customer requirements.
• Integrate your front-office and back-office strategies for rapid order fulfillment.

We can all imagine the scene on the other end of the phone. The prospect accidentally takes the phone call instead of dumping us into voicemail. It’s not that they are rude, but just that the people we want to talk to are rather popular with all vendors. They get 25 calls a day from vendors and that could be a waste of their time. When we get them on the phone, they are immediately doing their best to get us off the phone. It is a gargantuan struggle of wits.

What we say in the first few seconds will determine if we can help a prospect solve a problem and move the prospect into your sales pipeline.

There are two immediate paths – a product path or a solution path. Either way, should go through a relevant reference that proves we can address the customer’s situation and earn the right to get the first face-to-face meeting.

“Hello, my name is (Charles Dickens). Thanks for taking my call. I’ve been looking into the comments your CEO has made about improving distribution productivity being a high priority for the coming year. Do I have that information correct?

“Yes, distribution is one of our major initiatives.”

“We have done a lot of research in this area ourselves, including some interviews with agents who sell your services. We helped XYZ Company with solutions that improved their processes by 15%. I’d like to share some of this information with you. I will be in town next week. Would Wednesday or Thursday be best for you?”

“What company are you with?”

“I’m glad you asked. I am with Technology Systems. We have been bringing process improvement solutions to hundreds of clients around the world for the past 15 years. We are just coming off a record profit year. We’re doing great because we have clients who value the solutions we offer.”

What happened there?

We thanked the prospect because we genuinely appreciate it these days when a busy person takes time to pick up the phone. We did not start off with our company or our product, but instead tried to establish empathy and dialogue. We established a key metric along with an example of how we fixed a similar problem. Get them to tip off what their pain really is. Get the appointment.

This calls for doing the right research before the call. Get the story right. Get the approach right. Get the call objective right. Know your value proposition. Stay contextually relevant from beginning to close.