Have you heard of the ‘Gold Fish Principle’? It's not new but it is worth being reminded that many businesses treat customers as fish, that is as if customers had no territorial memory. The business focussed solely on current transactions and gives little thought to customer memory. With no memory of a customer’s past and no regard for the future, and organisations decision are unbalanced.

The question therefore becomes “why does a customer choose you instead of one of your competitors?” Is it:

•     Trust
•     Confidence
•     Strength of customer relationships

“A Customer creates the most value for you when you create the most value for him” according to Don Pepper

This requires an organisation to earn the trust of the customer. The components of trust include: credibility, reliability and intimacy ie competence.

“Treat the customer the way you would want to be treated if you were the customer.” Customer advocacy is the best indicator of whether companies are able to achieve cross-sell success to a customer base.

What does it mean to NOT be self oriented – it means you are customer oriented, that you take the customers point of view – the customer is not interested in your store or product. They are simply interested in having his needs met.. So speak the customers language.

So how to destroy trust through incompetence.

• Make the customer tell you personal details and preferences over and over again. (Ugh I hate that)
• Treat all customers exactly the same
• When customer calls IVR ask for account number then when he speaks to a rep. ask for the account number again.
• Offer to sell the customer a product he already bought from you
• Encourage customers to use the web by hiding your phone number
• Give customer contact people no authority to deviate from strict policies

Simply you can not automate great customer service!

“Through 2010, empowering employees will be the quickest rout to improving the customer experience.” Ed Thompson, Gartner

What customers say they want from companies:

• 76% Improve the product
• 71% Empower Employees
• 41% Share customer data across departments
• 35% Brand Strength
• 34% 360 Customer data base
• 32% Online self service
• 11% Cross Selling
  (Richard Lee and David Mangen survey “Customers say what companies don’t want to hear”)

Employees must be empowered to make decisions – to surprise and delight customers. That is people making non-routine decisions. Unanticipated situations, creative issues, matters requiring judgement or enthusiasm. How do you inspire employees to ‘delight’ customers? This all requires a high level of  employee engagement to achieve customer delight. For employees to use their judgement, creativity, empathy and intuition they must be empowered to act.

An employee must trust their employer – alarmingly 60% of American employees don’t trust their bosses to communicate with them honestly and only 36% of employees believe their leaders ‘act with honesty and integrity.’ 76% o f employees have seen unethical or illegal conduct on the job in the last 12 months – according to Steven Covey in The Speed of Trust 

To earn your customers’ trust, first you have to earn your employees’ trust.

Hence corporate culture is more important than ever. A culture based on trust ensures that your people will create value with their decisions

All the Built to Last companies in Jim Collins book had a strong culture.

“Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization’s makeup and success- along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like… I came to see, in my time at IBM that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game it is the game.”
Lou Gerstner IBM.

According to the Hays Group, there are four requirements for engagement:

1. Confidence in the organizations leaders
2. Collaboration and collegiality (positivity)
3. Development opportunities
4. Clear and promising sense of purpose

A productive culture requires a purpose. (Lifes purpose is not to breath just as a businesses purpose is not about increasing shareholder value – it is more about why you are in business – which is not about making money)

Does your job feel as if it has meaning. (If so you are in the minority.) 59% of UK employees see no meaningful purpose in their jobs, whilst 90% of employees want to leave their conventional jobs – Patrick Dixon 2006

If your brand mission is to earn and keep the trust of customers then trust is also more likely to characterize other relationships as well.
Employees trusting managers and each other, vendors, stakeholders, investors, clients.

The point is do you know what both your employees and your customers are saying about the brand? If not perhaps it is time to find out.

 

I was delighted to receive this photo from a client...It is from one of their 28 launch events as they rolled out the RedBalloon Program at each of their branch locations. When I opened it...I wondered who the people were... where do they live? I wonder what they have always wanted to experience.

We never know where the conversation ends up and in what way people are talking about us - that they are is a privilege.

"Remarkable isn't up to you. Remarkable is in the eye of the customer. If your customer decides something you do is worth remarking on, then, by definition it's remarkable'
Seth Godden.

I often say that icing on mud pie does not a cake make. I read this quote recently...if your relationship with your manager is fractured, then no amount of in-chair massaging or company sponsored dog walking will persuade you to stay and perform. It is better to work for a great manager in an old fashioned company than for a terrible manager in a company offering an enlightened, employee-focused culture' Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman 'First Break All the Rules'.

People resign from managers. And given that 48% if disengaged employees are planning to leave their company within the next twelve months (according to Gallup Orgnisation)– what impact is that having on the business. How productive can someone really be if they are constantly looking at seek.com.au? The question is what does it cost an organisation to have people who just are simply not happy.

But unless an organisation authentically embraces its people – and by that I mean leaders of the organisation truly being leaders. It is all just lip service that will be met with cynicism making people even more disengaged. People are just not going to hang around if they don’t feel valued. This is a tight labour market, and people have choices. The labour market has moved from a model that values security to a model that prizes personal fulfilment. The challenge facing companies now is how to make the week as rewarding as the weekend.

It is why we often ask the question to our potential clients - 'Are you really ready for a RedBalloon Days program?'

'Good news for businesses is that in most cases, staff loyalty in business has nothing to do with money...If you don’t capture the hearts and minds of an employee, no amount of money will keep them long-term.' Denis Orme – CEO, Insurance Brokers of New Zealand

Employee engagement starts with leadership.

I was at speaking at the Talent and Leadership Conference at the Marriott this morning and I was asked

"What do you know about rewarding people who work in the public sector, we don't operate in a world about profit, and we need to be sensitive to the allocation of public funds?

I started answering the question based on metrics other than profit....but the question was not really about profit.

I paraphrase the question to mean "We cannot be seen to be going off and having a good time at the expense of the tax payer - when people get paid salaries for doing their job."

Good question! I have come back to the office and checked with the RedBalloon Corporate team. We have many clients who work in various areas of the public sector. So do they fly under the radar or are they formal programs?

We established that it could be a mixture of both and it totally depends on the type of work and the culture of the organisation.

It is a competitive environment to attract talented people, and to compete with the private sector to get great people obviously is going to have the same talent management programs as them.

Some of our government clients purchase vouchers on our web site (and given that they can get lots of great experiences for under $100 – that probably flies under the radar).

I’d like to understand where this ‘guilt’ comes from. Imagine a truly happy public sector, that is truly recognised for the contribution they make. That when they get noticed for exceptional performance they also get rewarded - the way they want to be, by doing something with their family and friends.

The reality is that putting formal reward programs together for the public sector does take our team a much longer time. From concept to implementation has in some instances taken more than a year.

But I am passionate about all employee engagement – not limiting it to only those in the private sector.

What difference could we make if we can just move employee engagement by 1%...for the whole economy. What it does take is people who will make a stand for what they know will work for their teams.

Success breeds success, and the word does travel. Successful public sector programs will spread and create more.

I feel fantastic when I've done something to be proud of. Something that was not necessarily easy but I worked at it and got a result.

I always said that I would run a marathon when I turned forty. Do two halves make a whole?

When it comes to Reward and Recognition it is no different. People want to be able to tell the world what a great job he or she did...but culturally we don't tend to big note ourselves so we don’t tend to tell people of our successes. But when you say “Oh I got to off, fly and land a helicopter” people will instantly ask "Really, how come?" Hence the conversation continues.

Some of the most successful R&R programs I have seen have produced a 'Hero board' where people come and stick photo's of them doing their experiences. Another client has a Friday afternoon 'Home movie' drinks session where people bring a DVD or digital photos of their experience. And everyone loves to giggle and imagine what they will do on their RedBalloon Day.

The best thing about what we do is hearing what people got up to. Have you ever seen Kirsten's DVD of when she jumped out of a plane in NZ...to read the review. SkyDive Queenstown,

This is why we have so much fun writing reviews - we too have a great sense of achievement. RedBalloon Australia Reviews, RedBalloon NZ Reviews,

Finish this sentence I have always wanted to.... Now aren't you likely to tell others when you finally get to do it.

At least a year ago after I had presented the three elements of a successful program at a breakfast for business leaders I was taken aside by one of the attendees at the end of the event.

She said to me 'You know that you were saying about how people will share about their experiences much more than talk about their possessions, well I agree to a point, but not all experiences are worth talking about.'

Of course at this point my ears pricked up (she couldn't be talking about RedBalloon experiences surely!). I asked her to clarify what she meant because all the research that I have read says that an organisation using experiential rewards can spend as much as half the amount to get the same result as a program based on cash or merchandise, because people want to share their award with family or friends.

When asked ‘how do you want to be rewarded for a job well done?’ only .01 said a desk accessory, .04 said flowers, 1.4% said a CD/DVD voucher 1.7% movie tickets. 17% said dinner out (though these are really hard to organise and can be embarrassing at expense claim time) and 56% said a fun activity with family and friends.

Knowing this I was quite surprised at this woman’s question. She explained further that she had a job putting on events, and what her manager did to 'thank' her was arrange to have some personal items delivered to the suite of the hotel and this woman got to spend the weekend at the hotel. She said ‘quite frankly this 'experience' was the loneliest weekend of her life. As a single mother she simply hated being a canary in a gilded cage’.

I responded ‘out of what you have heard in my presentation what was the element that was missing in this sort of reward....?’ After some thought she agreed. Choice.

Even now after putting together countless programs we still never assume that we will know which experience someone will choose. You never know what they have always wanted to get up to;)