Everyone in your organization needs to learn how to honestly and completely listen to customers (and remember the internal customers).

In particular, it was his reminder about internal customers. How many times do we focus so intently outside the organization that we forget about the folks we serve inside? And if you don’t think you serve anyone inside your business, take some time to reconsider. We’re not talking about employees serving managers and the execs at the C-Level. We’re talking cross-functional, about departments like IT and HR. We’re also talking about the sales manager who counts on marketing to support his or her efforts. And we’re talking about the engineer who depends on product managers to relay crucial strategic info from and to customers. No matter which department you fall into or what level you’re situated within the organizational hierarchy, there’s a good bet you serve someone else inside your company at least once in a while.

Here’s the million dollar question: Does your organization have a customer experience design that includes both external and internal customers? If not, why not? Making sure your internal customers are not only satisfied but have a remarkable experience is the bedrock of smooth teamwork and operations. Here are a few suggestions for creating a better internal customer experience:

Listen intently for needs and expectations. You can’t underemphasize the importance of listening. Your objective is to listen for understanding which transforms the action into an active process. Ask for clarification when necessary. Listen for what’s not said.

Help them become even better customers. When in the act of listening, don’t be a drone content with just collecting information. You know you have needs and expectations, so reveal them. And you know you have limitations so be clear about your own workload. Constantly ask yourself, “What can I do to help this individual be a better customer?”

Keep the bigger picture firmly in view. This requires an understanding of how the organization operates and your place within it. It also means that your service objectives should be in tight step with those of the whole organizations. They should resemble a bit of the holographic that I discussed a while back.

If you’re thinking that each of these suggestions can easily apply to serving external customers, then you’d be right. Any examples of organizations getting it right in terms of creating remarkable internal customer experiences?

photo credit: wonderlane (via flickr)

Nuance amidst extremes

It was in reference to quotes and soundbites from folks who have argued that “Privacy is Dead.” In the continuum of extremes, nothing is more polarizing than declaring something dead or evil.

I fear we’re becoming much too accustomed to being at those edges, our interests numbed by a media obsessed with getting people to yell at one another instead of actually listening and having cogent arguments. We’re living in a culture where nuance is getting set aside like a quaint antique writing desk, a reminder of another time.

Why? Because being salacious and provocative gets attention, gets click-thrus, gets retweeted and Dugg and shared virally. It means we really don’t have to take the time to think about instances where our reasoning falls apart. It means we get to stick with our safe, comfortable ways of thinking and doing.

Does this scare the hell out of anyone else?

But I don’t think we’re entirely lost, yet. It’s one reason why I continue to love blogs. Writers can propose a viewpoint and then allow for others to join the dialogue in a very public space. Online communities can function in a similar way. Thriving communities know how to help its members to share feelings and rationales, absorb the points made by others, and consider new perspectives. The point is to help people generate new viewpoints rather than get mired in their own stale ways of looking at the world.

Rather than accepting a lot of other “me too” comments, let’s encourage more diverse points of view. As bloggers, we need to challenge the thinking of our readers, reply to their comments, encourage them to keep thinking more deeply about issues.

I’m continuously hopeful of our ability to grasp “nuance amidst extremes.” But we have to keep listening to each other, keep talking, and most important of all, keep respecting the viewpoints of others we come into contact with.

PS. Yes, the irony of this post’s title isn’t lost on me

What ensued was an interesting mini-conversation about how to successfully and effectively engage with a competitor’s customers through social media.

The set-up
Let’s say you work for Company Y in Matt’s scenario and have a social media/online monitoring program that watches not only for mentions of your company’s name but your competitors’ names, as well (and if you don’t already have such a program in place, I happen to know a very good agency that can help you).  In the course of your monitoring, you discover that Company X has screwed up and now has some royally discontented customers. What do you do?

Your first instinct may be to jump on this golden opportunity quickly so you can grab some new customers…and I’m going to suggest you squelch this instinct. By being overzealous in your online efforts, you can actually do more harm to your company’s online reputation than good. Don’t be the jackal eagerly waiting to pick off the discontented carcasses of your competitors’ customers.

What should you do, instead?
First, listen, do a little legwork, understand. Find out what happened. In our online world, it’s not that hard to uncover what’s going on when a competitor screws up. Do not – REPEAT, DO NOT – wade into any tweetstream or blogpost until you figure out what’s going on. Failing to grasp an initial understanding of how the customer feels will only make you appear insincere and predatory.

Second, be a human being. Sorry if that seems overly simplistic and obvious, but its astounding how often we forget that long-term sales relationships starts with treating customers like humans with respect. After gaining an understanding of the situation, practice some empathy. Ask yourself, “If I was this individual, would I want someone to start aggressively hawking their wares under my nose right now? Or would I prefer someone to treat me better than I’ve just been treated by Company X?” A little empathy goes a long ways.

What might this look like? Here is a fresh scenario from Twitter:
A customer becomes irritated with a rival’s product or service. Here’s an example from @Dotpage who is calling out @logitech’s slow driver updates:

Let’s say you work for Altec Lansing and uncover a tweet like this. Now maybe no one – including your own company – has drivers ready for Snow Leopard, but here’s a prime opportunity for you to approach a competitor’s disgruntled customer. A course of action might be to research the social media chatter coming from Twitter (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=+to%3Alogitech) where you’ll find this issue is significant source of irritation among Logitech’s customers. Then, your first @ reply should be to note the problems faced by the individual – in this case, a lack of updated drivers. Perhaps send a tweet such as “Sorry to hear about the problems you’re having with speaker drivers…it sucks to not be able to hear sounds from your Mac.” Resist the urge to openly sell your product on first tweet. Remember, your aim is to build a long-term relationship not make a quick sale.

Not everyone you send @ replies are going to respond and that’s okay. For those individuals who do reply, here’s the opportunity to guide your competitor’s customer toward your own products and services. Ask what they want from a product, what drives them crazy, what a company can do to improve their experience. You now have a personal, one-to-one conversation with a buyer that can turn them into a raving fan. People become passionate about purchasing from other people, particularly those who genuinely want the best for them. This interaction can be a catalyst for introducing a customer to your own products and services without the need for even making an open sales call.

After you’ve made contact with the individual on Twitter, then follow them. Don’t make following the first course of action – this is the type of behavior that bots employ and again can be seen as an overly aggressive predatory tactic that will turn off the potential prospect.

Third, make sure every single person in your company is working from the same playbook. This is where breaking down silos and cross-functional planning cannot be under-emphasized. If just one person from your company leaps in like a jackal, then there’s a better-than-average chance your company’s image will be tarnished along with that of Company X.

Any thoughts or counterarguments here? What’s worked for you as a disgruntled customer? What’s worked or hasn’t worked for your company in having conversations like these?

The point I’m attempting to make is to be mindful of your own community. Do you have any cliques? Is there an “elite” class who may be excluding other members from their group? I’m not suggesting that allowing groups to form is a negative. Just be careful about the dynamics forming from this behavior. If members feel they are not included and welcome in different areas of the community, they’ll likely make way for the door.

What to do? Here are four ideas to get you started:

• Build a language of inclusion into your community communications. Don’t miss an opportunity to express the values of the community. And if you don’t have a guiding set of values, create them.
• Monitor discussions and interactions. Look at how community “elders” communicate with “newbies.” Is it respectful or disdainful? You may need to pull out some conflict mediation skills here.
• Reach out to the individuals in the cliquish group. Chances are they don’t realize the potential harm of their actions. Calmly and clearly remind them of the community’s values and desire for inclusion.
• Find members who model an inclusive approach and send them an appreciative message. You’re rewarding action that you want to see.

Have you ever had to break up a clique or flag inappropriate behavior like this? What did you do? Love to hear your stories.

Oh and by the way, Heathers is one of the most grossly underrated films of all time.

If so, that’s a prescription for buyer fatigue. The reality is that sales are driven by relationships not broadcasted advertisements.

In many ways, this is nothing new. Years ago, when I took over as director of membership development for a professional association I encountered similar outreach attitudes. The only time the association sent a message to a member was when their membership was about to expire. For first year members, the communication path was to send an overwhelmingly large welcome packet (or the “hernia kit” as it was jokingly termed) and little else until their membership expiration notice nine months later. As you can imagine, that did nothing to build the kind of engagement necessary to guide that new member toward renewing for a second year. Does this sound familiar?

When I entered, we assessed the plan but we did more that just retool around specific objectives. We knew what we wanted: renewals. What was missing from the prior plan was what our members actually wanted. They wanted value, they wanted a relationship with the association, they wanted to be recognized as more than a walking wallet.

Take a look at how your company is building relationships with your customers. If your only communicating more ways for customers to buy, then you’re likely not cultivating the long-term relationships necessary to generate more sales to your current base. And this is a base that – if they’re wildly engaged and passionately loyal to your company – are going to spur referrals.

This video was part of a project headed by astronaut Andrew Thomas. Among other objectives, he and his team were specifically asked by senior management to look for reasons why new ideas get ignored or blocked at the agency. Rather than develop yet another snoozefest of a PowerPoint presentation that would likely find its way shelved into oblivion, they took the inspired step of producing the above video:

“And I wanted to try and capture those in a way that people would understand, in a way that would resonate,” says Thomas. Heather Hava, who plays the role of the engineer, says Thomas took stories and anecdotes that the team discussed and wove them into one storyline. “He compiled all that and wrote a little dramatization of all of our experiences,” she says. “It was a composite of many, many people’s experiences.”

There are several different takeaways from this terrific example:
Video storytelling beats the crap out of PowerPoint. Let’s be honest, if you have the choice between watching a movie or a slidedeck, are you really going to choose the latter? True, a movie isn’t always the most appropriate medium to deliver ethnographic and research results, but I believe those times constitute a minority. At the very least, video ought to be a frequent consideration in every presenter’s toolbox. Certainly the technology (Apple’s iMovie, for example) makes it easier than ever to drive home your points in unique and powerful ways.

Video is a perfect medium for the business anthropologist. Thomas’s team conducted a type of ethnography, recording assorted stories and anecdotes that would eventually build a cohesive understanding of how things actually worked inside NASA as opposed to how they were supposed to work. That’s the true value proposition of working with a business anthropologist. This video is a perfect output for distilling research findings in ways that engage and move client organizations toward positive actions.

Video is a perfect subversive tool for employees. In this case, NASA’s senior management ordered the video (well, not really…bet they were merely expecting just another presentation and bound report). But if you’re a company executive, don’t be surprised if you see more videos satirizing your organization’s internal workplace practices popping up on YouTube (there are already plenty of videos chronicling customer services experiences). Do you really know how your employees feel about their everyday work experience? Do you know if you’re getting the full picture of employee health from your middle managers? Do you really? Because the price for being wrong is finding a quickly circulating video on YouTube showing just how unimaginative, unresponsive, unappreciative, and unfulfilling your organization and workplace is.

From the exhibitor side, I’m not a big fan of them, either. There’s a certain quality of salesmanship that I find hard to grasp…there’s also a certain quality of will that doesn’t seem entirely authentic for me. And I guess it all comes down to my preference for depth. Can you develop a deep connection with a potential member, customer, or client in the span of 5-7 minutes (that’s the average amount of time you get to speak to one person at a trade booth)? Probably not, which is why so much leg work is required after the show to seal the deal. The practice of trade show exhibiting assumes that you already KNOW the needs and desires of your customers – it’s just a matter of talking to them until they fully know it.

Of course, there are alternatives. It starts by doing this: take all the <em>assumptions</em> you have about your customers – what they want, how they want it, what they expect from your products and services – and get rid of them. Write them down and burn them in your wastebasket. Give them the ceremonial flush down the toilet. The important point is to realize you may not know anything real about the folks with which you want to connect.

Now, take all the money that you would spend on your trade booth and put it toward the conference registration (you might even find this is less expensive). Don’t exhibit; instead, be a student. Go to the sessions and honestly listen to what the presenters have to say, attend the workshops and openly participate in the dialogues. In between, strike up real conversations with fellow attendees and figure out what’s going on in their lives and their work. Of course, be prepared with some brochures and swap business cards. But remember, the point isn’t to deluge the other person with info about your product or service (if that’s what you’re really after, be truthful about it and just get yourself a trade booth). The point is to immerse yourself in the rich world of your customer. What you give up in terms of having a long list of prospects (many of which may never be interested in you anyway), you gain in having a deep understanding of the individuals who comprise your market and how you can make their lives better. Trust me, they’ll love you for it.

From Bailey WorkPlay, first published November 7, 2005 (with minor edits)

Among the topics discussed are:

The relationship between confidentiality and trust in organizations

Secrets as a source of power within organizations

An assumption that confidentiality creates more truthfulness

The podcast lives here and lasts about 30 minutes. Enjoy!

What is an agitator? When you hear the term agitator get thrown around, it’s usually done in a pejorative sort of way. It gets easily confused with words like rabble-rouser and inciter. But the true agitator has a noble mission. Consider the agitators who fought for independence and equality. Or think of agitation as an act of nature: it’s agitation that creates the rare beauty of a true pearl. Here are some key qualities that define an agitator:

Principled
It’s crucial that you agitate with principled purpose. Else you’ll just be a whiner that no one takes seriously or an ornery crank that no one wants around. Remember to keep the ‘why’ behind your agitation firmly in your mind.

Tenacious
Being an agitator is can sometimes be about as comfortable as being dragged by a horse down a gravel road. It takes a steely determination to see the end result, believe it’s worth pursuing, and remain focused on getting there.

Flexible
But with tenacity comes a somewhat paradoxical commitment to flexibility – it’s a bend, don’t break mentality. I like Bob Sutton’s mantra of “strong opinions held loosely.” Just remember that always being an unyielding jerk will not only cost you allies, but credibility and influence down the road.

So, what are the benefits of agitation? What goodness do agitators bring to an organization? Here are just a couple of the benefits:

Disruption
The status quo is death to today’s companies. The current level of change isn’t going anywhere…actually disruption is the new norm. Now, most organizations talk a good game about not adhering to the status quo, but often what they say does not match what they do. The agitator rocks the boat (and flips it over when necessary). But an agitator is also emotionally connected with her or his surroundings. They know how to adjust organizational forces to keep the proper level of pressure.

Perspective
Ever been in a meeting where the communication barely skimmed the surface? The real root issues that needed to be addressed were being ignored? Noticed that a small herd elephants were hanging out in the corner of the room? An agitator calls bullshit on all of this and surfaces the things that need to be dealt with for the good of the organization.

Having an agitator at the senior executive level is fine. But what happens if you’re a manager and have an agitator on your team? Don’t be like 9 out of 10 managers and banish the agitator to the basement. Here are some suggestions:

Bring Them Closer
Integrate these individuals into the organization rather than push them further out. Listen carefully. Agitators are engaged folks who want to make a difference.

Get Okay With Discomfort
One of the complaints I hear most from managers about agitators is that they’re perceived as negative and combative. I always respond, “And what does this say about you?” This complaint usually stems from a manager’s unease with conflict and intense personalities.

Build A Culture Of Agitators
Finally, don’t make agitation a strange behavior, but bake it into your organizational DNA. Make it a prized characteristic and reward it accordingly. Agitators shouldn’t piss you off, it’s the silence, passive acceptance, and blind followership that infiltrates common organizational discussion that should get you hot…and worried. Francois Gossieaux at Emergence Marketing offers a very powerful reminder of the price organizations pay by not honoring agitators. He writes:

Most of us have been in organizations where it is politically unacceptable to speak openly about what is going wrong – only to see projects fail because of weak sponsorship, unreasonable constraints, unmotivated team members, or plain old politics. It is sort of ironic that while not speaking up will eventually kill the organization in which you work and thus your current job prospect – it is job preservation that drives this behavior.

What most organizations do not realize is that this is not based on individual behavior, but rather on social behavior. Fixing this problem will not happen by focusing on changing individual behavior first, but instead by changing the social norms that drive the social behavior – and that is not a trivial task.

So, what is your organization doing to encourage this crucial role of the agitator? Anyone have experiences to add? Or if you’re an agitator, any frustrations to share?

Note some of the common language used here – always, every, never. These are the kind of absolutes that get in the way of an open perspective and honest dialogue. They position our own thinking about people toward an extreme edge that most folks rarely occupy. Do we really believe that those around us are so one dimensional, so monochromatic? It certainly makes it easier to pin labels on them and make snap judgments.

Since people rarely exist at these extreme fringes, we need to stop trying to force them there. Whenever we think of a person in a very limited way – he’s just this way or she’s just that way – it’s time to think in a more extra-dimensional way. We can’t let laziness or a perceived lack of time get in the way of how we perceive other folks. If we commit to building a more well-rounded, and therefore more human, story about individuals around us we’ll immediately see that they have a rich personality that isn’t so easily pegged by one limiting label.