It’s the Customer Stooopid!

An May 14th article by Jane Heifetz on Harvard Business Publishing is, well cough, cough an expressed disappointment with a customer service experience.

And author Seth Godin has another, Um mm, Comment on a disapointment with some consumer goods packaging.

A common thread between these two posts?

You can call it “lean consumption” or you can just call it what ever you like, but we need to re frame ourselves to look at our product or service through the lens of our customers.

A post I did in February states; Sometimes it becomes easy to lose sight of this - the customer is the one who pays the bills.

That does not mean improving segmentation, or reviewing adjacent markets - that means walking a mile in their shoes.

UPDATE: By Faisal Hoque Biting the Customer Hand That Feeds Us

Recovering from a customer-be-damned spiral requires a new mindset or course, but this means more than cute slogans framed and hanging on the wall. We need a broader perspective: We need to see our business as an extended enterprise, that is, one that doesn’t begin or end at our four walls.

 

Do It Right, The First Time

A personal mantra of mine. Within the technology environment I know there will always be requests for changes, or yes, even things that break. It can be tough to maintain the discipline for all of these to ensure that you are thinking strategically on what the “actual” problem is. Then design a solution that fits the present and the future.

Slapping band-aids and duct tape on an issue may fix something temporarily, but in the longer term it just creates fragility and issues within the technology environment.

If a 5 minute band-aid solution will get rid of the “immediate” issue, but leaves the possibility of re-ocurrence or more difficult work in the future, and a half hour solution will get rid of it permanently and and can be leveraged into the future. Take the half hour.

I know it can be difficult to do, especially when there is an issue that has one or more people hanging over your shoulder demanding a resolution yesterday.

An Information Week (Canada) print edition quote of Michael Serbinis, CIO of Indigo sates;

There are a lot of long term negatives to short term positives”

The context of the quote is doing the wrong things well, versus doing the right things. So if it is worth doing, take the time to do it right.

 

Do SMB’s Hate Web Sites?

I have posted a few comments on the state of web sites in the small business / medium business space. The K.I.S.S. principle, as well a reference to some statistics here.

A few more references, Bill Flag (President of Regonline) here states;

Our open account page used to have three times as many fields than it does now… and 1/3 the conversion rate! The conversion rate of a registration page is inversely correlated to the number of fields. The less fields, the more business we convert.

And a remark and excellent reference by Rick Spence on his Canadian Entrepreneur blog;

…. business people hate the Web because it involves two commodities that they don’t understand: technology and content. He claims 60% of businesses in Canada do not have websites, and “the ones who do have terrible sites. …. His handy formula: “Show. Do. Tell.

Let me add one additional point. Your web site must also quickly and effectively identify your value proposition, and how your value proposition will fix a customers problem, or pain. If you have multiple products or services, each needs the same treatment. One single page should identify with the customers pain or problem and how you can fix it.

In the second reference on this post, the Ottawa Business Journal article identifies that if your customer has to click through more than 5 pages, you will lose them. I have zero statistics supporting it, but that 5 pages number is probably less if a visitor to your site cannot even figure out what you do or what you sell - in other words, what your value proposition is.

Ensure that you add to your website building checklist;

Content that identifies what is your customers pain, and how you have the cure.

 

The Game Changer

Just finished reading The Game-changer: How You Can Drive Revenue And Profit Growth With Innovation by AG Lafley & Ram Charan (see bookshelf). The book was great - but…….

In business books like this, there is great writing about strategic goals and planning - but the piece that is missing? We know that there were a lot of very difficult conversations getting traction on these - you don’t make changes in a multi-billion dollar company without breaking a few eggs.

Those difficult conversations is what I would like to read about.

 

Psst - Wanna Save Some Cash?

Seriously?

I did it! You can too!

OK, that sounds too much like one of those “Available only on TV” offers.

But reality is that in the Small Business space, technology spending is often an ad hoc an affair. I saved quite a bit of money just cleaning up the entire purchasing process of IT OPEX and CAPEX expenses.

1) If your chart of accounts does not already break out technology expenses, you should do it. At the very least an accurate addendum of fiscal costs should be kept.

2) Get rid of ad hoc purchases - ensure that written requests (electronic or paper does not matter) for all purchases exist and are signed or approved. Approval levels may be different depending on dollar value.

3) Ban credit card or retail account purchases. Utilize distributors and re-sellers.

These simple steps can save money in multiple ways. Direct costs are lower through the channels, plus accounts of Net 30 with a a few points is a lot less than credit card rates. And ensuring that proper sign off is made gets rid of the requests for some “cool” thing that is “only” 300 bucks.

Longer term, it provides visibility into which parts of the organization are generating the most IT spend requests, and helps identify services or components that can be reduced in price or utilized better, leading to lest wasted spending.

And finally, it provides excellent detail into operational expenses that can be tied into improving future budgets.

 

SMB Security Outsourcing - Again

I posted an article in March recommending that in the SMB space, outsourcing the configuration, management and reporting of routing and firewall devices. Those little boxes that protect our internal office networks from the Internet.

Allan Leinwand at Giga Omni Media posted an article on small companies that learned this the hard way.

 

Component Marketing

I just finished reading Tim Hurson’s book Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking (see bookshelf) The book mentions a topic that has been on my “to write” list for a while.

Mr. Hurson mentions successes by W.L. Gore and Assoc. as well as others, that have successfully become household names, even though they do not physically manufacture or create the “end user” product. In this case Gore-Tex. The term is component marketing, getting the consumer actually asking for your product.

As mentioned a few times in this blog, I am employed with an organization that is a (very) small provider of services to the automotive industry. In the automotive industry, a key source of revenue is getting you, the customer, to bring your vehicle to the dealer for your maintenance and repairs,rather than the corner garage or your local quick lube joint. When you think of the car manufacturers, you instinctively consider other manufacturers as being the only competetion, however at the dealership level, the competition is also those other automotive service providers.

Except for real “gear heads”, the parts that go into your car are invisible. You may know that brakes, or shock absorbers are there, but really, so what?

About a year ago I did a presentation demonstrating that the service parts on a motor vehicle are just as invisible to the end-user (the owner or driver) as the computer chip in a computer. Yet one of the most famous component marketing campaigns in history is Intel Corp’s. “Intel Inside” advertising. (who above the age of 15 does NOT remember it?) For a supplier of something that no one outside of the technology world will ever see, Intel is a household name. To this day the little “Intel” sticker is on most consumer and business laptops or PC’s that you can purchase.

Personally, I saw a huge opportunity for the OEM industry to mimic that type of component campaign. The idea never went anywhere, but to this day I wonder if it could be as successful as the “Intel Inside” campaign was.

Maybe some marketing guru can tell me why it wouldn’t work.

Maybe some auto dealer is willing to try with your local market tier 3 marketing dollars.

 

Online Productivity Suites

I have been doing some experimenting with an online “productivity” application at www.zoho.com. Along with competitors like Google Docs I think that these will be the the next step in the Software as a Service (SaaS) or “Cloud Computing” market.

Personally - I really cannot wait for these tools to “shake out” a little bit. I know that is a bit cynical, but in this new field, there will be failures, acquisitions and other issues to deal with.

The point for SMB’s is that suites such as Microsoft Office are bloody expensive to purchase, Microsoft Word alone in Canada is about $300.00, for one single licence. There are volume discounts and other incentives, but at the end of the day. It is a lot of money.

I see the possibilities;

1) Internal work is completed using cheap online tools - relegating the pricey office software for one or two individuals that receive emails with documents in those formats

2) More virtual companies. No office, no software - all in the cloud.

Still, there are issues though. documents are not used in a vacuum, sharing with a few people is one thing, but collaboration with dozens or more is someting else. Also, these online formats don’t use any document standards. If they go out of business or are acquired, where is your data. A WordPerfect document that is 15 years old can still be accessed, how about these online ones?

 

A Few Days R&R

Took a few days off! it has been too long.

Spent an extra long weekend in SanFran. Did all of the usual tourist visits and squeezed in a visit with friends at Travis AFB.

All in all a wonderful time

 

How Cheap is This?

Talk about ignorance, or nasty advertising.

Here in Canada, we use the metric system (yes I grew up in that change) it was a hassle when Miles changed to Kilometres. When it came to automobile “gas mileage”, we went from the familiar “miles per gallon” to the more confusing number of litres of fuel per 100 kilometres.

Now - liters are smaller than US gallons (to the tune of approximately 1 US Gal being 3.78 L) So in the Litres per 100 Kilometres equation, smaller numbers are better, vs. large numbers in the “miles” part of miles per gallon.

I drove past a car dealer yesterday and found that they had emblazoned absolutely HUGE numbers on the cars being sold such as 66 or 77.

I could not see any other text at the time, but I knew that sure as hell, that those cars would not get 77 MPG, and even a Hummer gets better fuel economy than 77 litres of fuel per 100 kilometers.

So, I drove past again today - what they had done was put 77 KMPG

In other words, the shorter kilometer as the distance measure, with the larger gallon as the fluid volume measurement.  And I am sure that there will be some out there illiterate enough to get caught in a scam like that.