Ethical Business Practice

We had to renovate the house. We called up a contractor to outsource the work. The initial dialogues went on well. We awarded the contract to the person. During the transactions we could find that the person was not following very good business practices. Even though he finished the work with quality, in the process he lost our trust.
Family members were debating on what went wrong etc. My spouse shared about a real estate developer who happens to be practicing a very healthy, transparent business practices for more than 2 decades. He charges premium for his services, however because of his frankness and openness, he has been able to get very good business all along.
So, sustainability of business is possible provided good business practices are followed. It does not matter, whether your business is real estate, retail outlet, financial service or IT.

People watch the business practices, integrity, honesty etc. with close eyes. They don’t like to be cheated. They liked to be made feel good at the same time tell them what is good for them very honestly. At times the truth you speak might not be accepted, but if they realize that it was in their own interest, then they will come back. They will refer you to their closed ones. Your business will flourish.

Branding

Branding is an effort of creation of mind share with the customer. It is better to create a positive image and positive mind share than a negative one.
Hence, every customer touch through different channels viz. sales, marketing, delivery and product/service creates an impression about the company. If the touch creates a positive feeling, it creates a positive recall and makes customer come back.
If there is a negative mind share created then it takes a longer time to change it & bring them back to the positive side. As most of us aware, the customers share the negative words with more people than sharing the positive results. This word of mouth, in turn creates a barrier for the companies to cross the bridge as the new customer who has heard the negative words would take more time and energy to cross to positive side.

Few tips to maintain the positive image of the company:

• Ensure every individual directly touching the customer is aware about the responsibility of the interaction.
• Ensure that people working on customer deliverables (product/service) is aware about their responsibility & impact of their work to the customer and to the company.
• Basically everyone in the company needs to understand the bigger picture

Happy branding..

Why innovation is important?

It is said that the “nothing brings failure than the success itself”. If you don’t innovate and bring out new initiatives or new changes to the business, someone else will. The impact of this is, the customer would move from you to other vendor provided there is a clear benefit of value, price & time factors.
To sustain and grow, new value additions have to be brought to the table. Every customer wants to learn something new all the time. He/she wants to learn about the new features, new uses, new products etc. It is the job of the marketer to invocate these thoughts and produce the environment suitable for this growth.
To provide this environment to the customer, the company where the goods are produced, the people who are involved in these have to spend time and innovate new ideas to help customer.

Ultimately, the truth of the business is if you don’t then someone else will..

Who owns the customer?

“Today’s customers seem to think the world revolves around them—and
they are right.”. This statement was written in one of the customer centricity article by Accenture.

Customers are lured by every company or most of the companies. Who ever not doing it today, either they are planning to lure customers or paying a high price for not doing it.

The customers learn very quickly (like a child). They understand that they are important and they have been pampered. They start demanding more and more. That is exactly what has happened. They observe the innovation/customer centricity in one industry and expect the same or better service/product from everyone else who is serving. In the long run, only the one who keep pace with the customer expectation wins and continues to be in the market. Though, It is not an easy job..

Let me come to the point. In this hyper customer centered market, who owns the customer? Is it sales people, is it marketing people, is it product designers, is it people who manufacture the products.. etc.. The list goes endless.

Usually the organizations are very much fragmented and at times this is the reason why customer orientation falls apart. To the customer, it does not matter who is interacting with him/her. For him, it is the company/brand which is represented by the person interacting with the customer. So, it is very important to make everyone interacting with the customer to be made aware that he/she owns the customer. It should be a cultural shift or paradigm shift in customer service.

To be a successful CIO and successful business leader

I was reading an article: Customer Data Should Drive IT Decisions on CIO.com by Michelle McKenna. Michelle is a senior vice president and CIO at Universal Orlando Resort in Orlando. Michelle writes in this article on how she could devise the strategy of her company based on the customer data. Incidentally she used the IT to capture and analyze the data. I did mention in my earlier blog about IT’s relevancy in customer relationship management.

It is very apparent from this case in point that, a CIO can become a transformation agent of a company & be a successful business leader in doing so.

Having an affair with a customer

Last week I happened to visit a mall & happened to overhear the conversation over the counter – “Find out who is the customer contact and see whether you can have an affair with her”. A senior colleague was suggesting a junior – who was trying to break an ice with a customer.

It sounded very funny to me. However, when went through deeply, it made sense. What teenagers/people do when they are in love? They try to find out every minute detail of the person they are in love with. He/she want to know what the other person’s likes/dislikes, hobbies, interests and what not? They approach the other person very carefully and treat them very important.

You know what? If we apply these principles or even 10% of these principles with our customers, our day is done. We get ideas to serve them better. When we serve them better, they obviously feel good and naturally come back to us. That is all what is relationship is about.

In the business language, having an affair with the customer is building good customer relationship. You might ask a question, what is IT has to do with customer relationship? My answer is most of it. You can capture all your customer information through the IT systems. They can help you get the single view of the customer, interests and what not? You can leverage IT to gather information and monitor the relationship. Here you go..