Month: August 2014

Corn, Teamwork, and Decisions

Back in 2006, I was reading a blog by “The Rainmaker”, Rick Roberge, that I wanted to dredge up from the annals of history.   The MIT class president of 2006 told a story about corn.  Fascinating, isn’t it?  Well, honestly, the story itself made a lot of sense and drives home how working together brings the best food (foot ;)) forward for everyone.  This farmer was both a good neighbor (sharing his corn) and a selfish one (looking to ensure his corn wasn’t degraded). Yet the net of the matter is that everyone benefited — a positive impact. Be aware that your decisions and your choices can have a lasting impact on yourself as well as those around you.

Here’s the story…

“There was a farmer who grew corn. Every year his county held a contest to determine which farmer grew the best corn. Every year he won. Year after year this farmer grew the best corn in the county and he won the award. One day, a visitor noticed that this farmer gave some of his best seed to one of his neighbors. The visitor asked why he was sharing his best seed with his neighbor. Wasn’t he concerned that their corn would be better than his? Wasn’t he concerned that they would eventually win the contest for having the best corn in the county? The farmer explained that the winds in the county pick up the corn pollen from all of the neighboring farms and deposit it to all of the other neighbors, so some of his corn pollen ends up on his neighbors’ farm and some of his neighbors’ corn pollen ends up on his farm. If his neighbors’ corn was very inferior and it was deposited on his award winning corn, wouldn’t his own corn become less superior. By sharing his best seed with his neighbors, the pollen that was deposited on his farm was better than it would have been had he not shared and his corn wasn’t degraded by the blown in pollen.” (Kimberly Wu, class president of MIT, 2006 as posted by Rick Roberge).

Customer experience pitfall — focusing on the micro

Michel Falcon is a public speaker and business coach in the space of customer experience.  He posted something a little while ago called “Customer Experience isn’t Customer Service.”

In that blog, he had a single line that struck me as excessively poignant.

Customer experience is the premeditated design of what your customer experiences when doing business with you from beginning to end.

Too many companies focus in the micro-transaction instead of the macro-experience around the customer. Elevating the experience from mediocre to phenomenal takes a lot more focused effort than how do I handle this single transaction, this single event.  There is a massive difference between how someone implements their business and focuses on the customer.

All too often, companies make the statement of “we’re customer focused”.  What does this mean?  In many cases, it means that they handle the individual micro-transaction with the customer well or it means that the company is rated A+ on the BBB or it means that they have a 5 star rating for customer service on Yelp.  When you drill down into the depths of this, the fact is that the majority of the BBB or Yelp ratings are based on a single event – a single opportunity to do well or badly. It doesn’t mean that there is a strategic, concerted effort to build a customer experience from start to finish for the entire lifecycle of that customer.

Similar to the difference between Customer Loyalty and Customer Satisfaction (which I’ll cover in another blog post), Customer Experience and Customer Service are two separate entities.  One speaks to the way that you service a complaint or deal with an order.  The other, the more broad reaching, speaks to the overall impact that your business can have.

Customer Service leads to Satisfaction. Customer Experience leads to Loyalty. 

 

Blogging & Me

I’ve blogged on and off for years (mostly off), so please realize that this won’t be a traditional “posts once a day/week/etc” blog. The purpose behind setting this up is to bridge professional, networking and personal drive in a location that I can write at a more strategic and global level than I can in my regular work environment.

Posts will likely be varied in nature with a focus around customer loyalty, service functionality and support organizations.  Posts will be made as things draw my attention across the news, issues that come up in discussions or I feel the need to write about something.

Please feel free to contact me or add comments if you have specific topics you’d like me to discuss!