Navigating the Customer Experience

Before Jeffrey became the founder of Select ‘n’ Start on a mission to help make Jamaica, and the world a better place, he was and still is many other things. He is a Businessman, Entrepreneur, Martial Artist, Toastmaster, and Game Changer are just a few of the titles held by Mr. Azan. He possesses over 18 years of experience in the retail industry having been raised in his family’s business, Azan’s. Upon completion of his Bachelors in Business Management at Boston University, he stepped into a top tier management role as a Director for Azan’s and served in that position for 6 years. In his own right he has also been a franchise owner in Organo Gold, and Amway, a café owner under the brand Café Moments, a consultant on the Brand Profit team, General Manager of the brand solution company, It’s Pixel Perfect, and the organizer of the live music show, A Moment of Jazz. Jeffrey currently spends the majority of his time working through his passion for the development of others in an effort to see a better Jamaica and a better world. He does this by providing motivational keynote speeches, group skill training, and one-on-one coaching. He founded the self-development brand, Select ‘n’ Start back in 2013, with a vision of it becoming the number one personal development brand to be birthed out of the Caribbean. The brand has taken to titling its coaches and speakers as “Game Changers” which is a title Jeffrey holds proudly. His motto is a simple one, “Change your game, Change your life.”

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• How do you believe customer experience has been for you over the years with so much experience that you have under your belt, what is your definition of customer service/ experience, do you find that it’s different in the Caribbean versus in the first world countries that you’ve been exposed to and if there’s any short comings or limitations that we’re faced with in Jamaica, what do you think they are and how do you think we can overcome them?
• What are 3 characteristics that you think any human being would need in order to be truly a server?
• How do you stay motivated everyday?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Jeffrey Azan shared that his years in retail was specifically in the housewares industry, as a toastmaster which is one of the other many things he does, he has not just been a toastmaster in terms of speaking but he has also been a competitor and recently he accumulated a win of the Caribbean Championship of Public Speaking in the category of "Impromptu Speaking." As well as competing in Martial Arts he recently went to Curacao and represented Jamaica at the 31st Pan-American Games hosted by the WKF which is the first Olympic qualifier in this region and that was a big honor to represent Jamaica. In all the titles and all the jobs, he can say at the core he tries to be all that he can be in each of those categories and so far putting his all forward, he has reaped many challenges and he manages to turn those challenges into either successes or learning opportunities and if anybody wants to know Jeffrey, that’s one of the key aspects to know is that if you involve with him, he’s going to be full force, he’s going to be full of passion, he’s going to expect you to deliver and there’s not going to be any challenge that isn’t going be for the benefit of himself or for the team. Jeffrey stated that he grew up in a very interesting household, he was a big Ninja Turtles fan as a kid and that led him to look into Renaissance, all the ninja turtles were named after Renaissance Men and it led him to look into what the renaissances was and when he looked into Leonardo da Vinci, he found that he did it all, he was a Sculptor, Painter, Doctor, Scientist, Inventor, Engineer, Martial Artist and covered so many areas and he said to himself, “If one man can do so much, what can’t I do.” So it’s really just discovering each talent that he has and working to bring those talents to full fruition through whatever means necessary.

• Jeffrey Azan stated that it is so interesting to look at customer experience and really analyze it because just in the very sense that we are placing a label on it creates the first problem in his understanding. When he worked in retail he always told his staff that, "The customer is never right", that was the first key, they are coming into the store, they don’t know what they are looking for, they don’t know how to describe it, they don’t know the function of it and it’s this guessing game to kind of figure out what it is that they want and what he tries to push is that base knowledge knowing that the customer isn’t right, what he was trying to do is pre-empt the frustration with the customer and so in getting them in that thinking to know that the customer isn’t going be right, it gives them almost an added bonus to service to a higher level, it’s not that anybody is going to come and say, “Oh, I want a green curtain for a blue bathroom” you’ll have to say, “What shade of blue it is? What type of curtain do you want? How tall is the window? How far from the ground is the window?” and all of these questions would have to come in because the customer isn’t right, you cannot give them a green curtain because that’s what they say they wanted. And from there the idea evolved and he heard it best at a customer service workshop he went to where the speaker there said, “The customer is king” he paused and reflected on that and he had to question it, and he said, “Please explain it.” And he gave him his thought process on the customer is never right and what the speaker said to him is that he agreed with him that the customer is not always right but it doesn’t change the fact that the customer still has the power, the customer is still the final boss, they are the king of the domain, if there are no customers, there is no business, nobody gets paid. What he said is that if you think of the customer as king, then what happens is no matter how wrong they are, you still have a duty to service. He stopped and really reflected on that for a long time and he thought, “Wow, what an amazing little concept that if you always think of the customer as king, you will always be of this higher level of service.” But here’s the problem with that, is that we draw this huge distinction between two (2) humans. In regards to his experience internationally, he did not just go to school overseas in the USA, but he had fortunate opportunities to be apart of programs and summits and conferences that have carried him around the world. He has been to Australia, Western Europe, he has been all over the Caribbean, all over North America and he’s sure that there’s plenty more to come. One of his most eye opening experiences in customer service was when in Australia walking on the pier, somebody soliciting business for their food stall and as he was passing, he didn’t push a sale, he engaged him as a person, he immediately recognized that he was a tourist and began having a conversation with him and they had a big conversation about Jamaica and what he was doing all the way from Jamaica over there in Australia and because he engaged him as a human having a conversation, Jeffrey was quicker to look into what he does and what’s his business and that was the first step. We as both the customer and the one serving the customer needs to remember that we are not dealing with a uniform, we’re not dealing with a title, we are dealing with a person and he hates seeing when he goes to a restaurant and somebody deals with the waiter like garbage because they’re the waiter, they’re supposed to serve, they are human, they have the same trials, same tribulations, they went through the same schooling system that you went through in a many cases. Maybe they have been dealt a hard break, maybe they have not made the best of decisions but at the end of the day, they’re still a human and real customer service starts there in recognizing that the other person is another human and if he’s going to serve that other human as the server, as the person providing the service, that’s step one on an international scale and very often, especially here in Jamaica and the third world countries that he visits is that we don’t serve humans, we serve uniforms, we serve titles and we are treated accordingly. There are some doctors that he met who are probably first class doctors but they are horrible people but the point is that they expect a certain level of service because, “I am doctor so and so”, “I give you all props and credit for being doctor so and so, I’m sure it wasn’t easy to become doctor so and so, however, at the end of the day, I am still Jeffrey, I am not server number 2, I am not in the back credit of a movie as staff number 3, I am Jeffrey.” And the second that we as the customer or we as the server forget that element, the whole interaction and relationship has gone out the window because at the end of the day that’s what it is, a relationship between two people, it just so happens that one is providing service and one is in need of that service.

Yanique stated that what she took most away from all of what Jeffrey said was that we’re all emotional beings regardless of where we are from, regardless of our background and at the end of the day, if we all look at each other as people with the same level of feelings and emotions that the customer would have, that the employee would have, that the employer would and employ that level of understanding to really see where the other person is coming from, treat them with the same level of courtesy and respect that you would treat anyone else, the quality of our relationships would improve which by default would improve customer experience.

Jeffrey stated that in Select ‘n’ Start, what they tell people they provide is motivation, inspiration and personal development and at the very root of it all, that is what it is. He stated that he cannot serve you if he’s not willing to connect with you and what you’ll recognize as humans is that we’ve grown this very disgusted outlook of a sales person because we feel like a con is coming and yet the greatest sales people in the world are some of the best humans he has ever come across. They take the time to build that relationship and in building a relationship, he has had a customer who bought nothing when they came to buy, they took 3 hours of his time and he genuinely thought it was wasted, the next time they came to the store, they came with their entire community and they only wanted to deal with him and that happened because they had a connection, he asked about the family, he asked about the home, he wasn’t just providing a product but he wanted to really understand what he needed and in understanding what he needed, he could make suggestions, in fact, there was a particular item that they had in the store at the time but based on the situation that he was in and he explained and he told him where he could get it cheaper and he couldn’t believe that he was sending him out of the store and because of that one comment in trying to help another human, he brought the whole community and he said, “What ever the prices are in here, this is where you should shop.”

Yanique shared that she did business with a company recently and the sales representative took the same approach. He said, “We don’t have that item at the moment but I know that this particular organization has it.” And he took up the phone and called them and sent her to someone specifically after calling and telling them to expect her and she thought that was really awesome because it wasn’t a branch of their business, it was a completely different company, their competition and he was willing to ensure that she got served, even if it meant her going to the competitor and she really appreciated that and she would go back again because of that experience.

Jeffrey shared that some characteristics that a person would need to truly serve. He stated that Select ‘n’ Start provide customer service training and he developed the customer service program when he had the café, so he ran the café with a partner of his for about 1 ½ years and when they got into it he was coming from the retail background and he has never done anything other than retail at the time and his partner said to him, “You’re great with people, you should train the team.” He did have a clue of what he was about to do, he knew how to sell, he knew the intrinsic knowledge but he never taught sales and what came to him through that is that the root of sales is relationships and people. He recognized that if somebody’s going to be a fantastic sales person, a great customer service person, the key of that is just to be a better person. If you’re a better person, if you have done all that you can do to keep your life in check and put it on a path of improvement, naturally you’re going to be more pleasant, naturally you’re going to want to serve more, naturally you’re going to be willing to engage with another person because you have taken care of your own problems you can now help another. You can never help another if at the forefront of your mind you’re thinking, “How is this going to benefit me.” And so what they came up with is what they call, “The Select ‘n’ Start Core” and these are things that anybody can apply and if you can work on these things and fall back on them, some people have taken it as their ethical and moral compass in life as somebody has called and told him that, is that by utilizing these things, it’s not a one size fits all but it’s a guideline to say, “Am I improving, am I getting better?” and if they do that, then everything else starts to fall into place. What those five principles are, the first one is “Real Recognizes Real”, open up yourself, be honest, he’s not telling you to go out and tell everybody your story but don’t put on a show either, people only like a show when they know they’re going to a show. Nobody likes a show spontaneously in a store, so be yourself and what will happen is, in being yourself people naturally open up to you. One of the great ways he does a motivational speech is that he shares his pain and in sharing his pain and his genuine belief, other people come and share theirs. The next logic is that “You Can Learn Anything From Anything at Anytime”, a lot of people think education is only in the book but education is around us in all sorts of interactions and stories and sharing’s and observations and if your going to be a great customer service representative then that’s what you need to do, you need to be a great observer, “What can I learn?”, you’re serving a elderly person and you’re realizing that they can’t keep up with you, get them a chair, if you’re just aware of that observation and that observation comes with the desire to learn, you’ll know that they need a chair because they can’t keep up with the pace you’re moving at. If it’s a mother with a child, he has had mothers handing him their children on a first meet basis because he engaged and he recognized and the child would even reach and the child reaches because that realness, they know it’s not a show, children are way more intuitive than we give them credit for. So by just having the desire to learn, we develop the skill of observation and if we develop the skill of observation, we’ll naturally know what to do in a situation. The third one is, “You Can Never Be Kind Enough to Somebody for Them Not to Hurt You”, so you can give the best customer service to somebody, you can take all day and sell them a $1.00 at the end of the day and anybody who’s in customer service and sales know that that’s the most frustrating sale and that person can still come back and say you gave poor service. No matter how kind you are to somebody you can never be kind enough for them not to hurt you but the flip side of the coin is that it should never stop you from being kind. In that sense, don’t worry about what the other person is going to do, don’t do it to get their reaction, don’t do it for the consequence to come from them, do it because you know you should do it and because it’s right, you don’t need a manager to tell you that but what happens is that you have 2 bad sales experiences for the day and your manager is upset with you so guess what, “I’m not serving anybody else for the day because it’s going to lead to a problem.” But the fact is that those people, no matter how good you are to them they have no reason to be kind to you. If they chose to be kind, they’ll be kind but you have that choice as well and so he always says, “You can never be kind enough for somebody not to hurt you but that shouldn’t stop you from being kind.” The last 2 points is, “Level Up”, always seek ways of improving yourself, people hate being pushed, people love being pulled, so if you stand on top of something as the expert, as the champion, people want you to pull them up, nobody wants you to be underneath them or behind them pushing them forward, so if you’re going to really serve somebody, you need to be a champion in the particular industry, you need to pull that person up to your level of understanding and expertize and anything you say, they’ll follow. Jeffrey shared that the last thing is, “Always Share What Is Uniquely Yours”, all of us have gone through life with particular stories and troubles and challenges but those stories, troubles and challenges have built a certain perspective that only we have, that only each individual has their perspective, you could have a twin and your twin can be totally different from you, same mother, same father, same school, same opportunities, same education and yet you’re 2 totally different people because of one little change, one little biochemistry and those changes create unique perspectives and it’s in unique perspectives we create unique connections, so you must always be ready to share what’s uniquely yours which goes full circle back to "Real Recognizes Real."

• Jeffrey shared that for motivation, they serve inspiration, motivation and personal development and it took him a long time to figure out the difference between the two. Motivation is the target and it’s easy when you have a target, when you say, “I’m going to get fit” and not just say you’re going to get fit but print out an image of what you want to look like, write down the measurements you want to have, see a picture of yourself, put a mirror, buy the gym clothes, get the membership, all of that can help to motivate you but if in your core, if in your soul, your root, your gut, whatever you want to call it, there isn’t a fit person there then no amount of motivation is going to help you. You must believe that you are called to be a fit person. What happens with motivation is that very often motivation is set as a goal and once the goal is achieved...loose sets in, so you have people who are world class athletes, they’re the champions, they’ve won the belt, they’ve won the medal, they’ve won the trophy and so they reach number 1 and very soon after they’ve reached number 1, somebody took it away from them. It’s because they were motivated to be champions, they weren’t inspired to be the best because if you’re inspired to be the best then every challenger, no matter your position, is a challenger that’s stopping you from being the best. And so what he had to find in himself was that inspiration and that inspiration came during that time of all the businesses that he was going through and all the changes he was making, at that time he was looking for motivation, he was looking for gold, he said, “If I get more money, I’ll get the better girlfriend, I’ll take care of the girlfriend, I’ll drive the car I want, I’ll live in the house I want.” All of that was great motivation but it was on bad days it wasn’t enough, on rough days it’s not enough and for a lot of us, we don’t recognize how rough it is sometimes for people. Depression is a real thing and depression is never depression of finances, it’s never depression of lack of food because when you lack in food your not thinking about depression, you’re thinking about lack of food. So what happens is that your soul, your gut, your being, your entity, your spirit is lacking and many people aren’t making the conscious effort to fill, they’re trying to distract, they’re trying to achieve and in achievement they will find happiness but money doesn’t soothe the soul, money can create opportunities, in fact, the bible says, “Money is the solution to all things.” A lot of people like to quote the bible and say; “Oh, money is the root of all evil” but literally couple verses down from that one it says "Money is the solution of all problems." Jeffrey says, "I am not saying don’t go after it because you can take it and create something from it but money won’t soothe the soul" and that was what he was looking for at the time as he said he grew up with a big fascination with the renaissance men and he grew up with this idea that he can and could do anything he wanted to do, if he decided to be doctor, he would be a doctor, he had no question whether he could or couldn’t be a doctor but it doesn’t soothe the soul and what came is on this journey and consistently searching and fight. He had a vision and it was clear as day and he was parked in his car at a red light and he saw himself on stage speaking to an audience, he was so clear, he was wearing a black suit, white pinstripe, it was a night show, open air venue but when he looked out on the crowd, he couldn’t see the end of the people, the people met the horizon. And in that vision he found his inspiration, so on the day when he’s not motivated because a lot of us are trying to use motivation to keep going, what he does is that he has to fall back on that inspiration, he has to fall back on, “Jeffrey, what is your soul calling you to do?” “Oh, I can’t sprint today, I haven’t eaten right, I haven’t slept right, I haven’t train right, I haven’t stretched right, I cannot sprint today but I can walk.” And if he can walk, then he can move into the direction to which his soul is calling him and the funny part about that story is that happened to him at 25 years old, he had that thought when he was 8 years old and many of us have that same thought around the same time as well, when you get asked the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and many of us throw out these phenomenal ideas like Astronaut, Scientist, Leader, Prime Minister, President, own my company and for one reason or another we give up on it and then we settle, we become employment seekers rather than value creators. What happened to him was that when he was 8 years old, he decided that he wanted to be a teacher and he told his mother and his mother said to him, “That’s great, that’s noble but just remember that teachers don’t make a lot of money.” And he went in his 8 year old brain and said, “Well if I can’t have money, then how am I going to be happy?” and gave up on the dream of teaching, fast forward 17 years, what did he turned around to do again? Teach, what more is a teacher than a single individual standing before an audience sharing knowledge, information and inspiration.

Jeffrey stated that once he acknowledged that...that was his calling, he has never not been able to take a step no matter how poorly, demotivated, no matter how much in the hole he is, his finances at some points are abysmal, you look at the books and go, “Jeez, how am I going to get out of this one?” and all it really is, is a challenge to say how bad do you really want it and what happens is a lot of us are pursuing goals and motivation that we don’t really want, we are not answering our true calling and the thing is, if we answer our true calling, we’re happier, we’re going to find other people interesting in it and if we do it long enough, you’ll become experts in it and people will pay for our expertize, it has been proven time and time again as abstract and as cliché as it sounds, it is not easy, if it was easy and Eric Thomas says this all the time, “If it was easy, everybody would do it.” So he’s not going to jump up and say it’s easy but he is going to say, everybody can do it, it’s can you dig into that grit to push through the challenges because life is going to consistently ask you, “How bad do you want it?" And that’s what gets him going in the morning; it’s that inspirational thought that he searched 17 years actively looking for, unfortunately many people haven’t even spent half an hour looking for it.

• Jeffrey shared that Youtube is one of the tools he cannot live without. He stated that a business partner of his, Fred Robertson and Fred asked him one time, “Jeffrey, you put out so much, you’re always willing to share, you’re always willing to contribute, who gives Jeffrey? Who puts into Jeffrey?” He had to pull on other speakers, he had to pull on other motivators, he had to pull on other lines of thought and the best place for that kind of collection is Youtube. There are certain magical qualities about a video, it doesn’t allow the imagination as engaged as reading would because with reading, the brain goes into over drive and does the imagination. He does his best to read a lot but immersing the senses, the hearing, the sight and the colors, you can almost feel certain peoples videos and those boost mean push him in a big way and teaches him a lot. He has learnt so much listening to other speakers just on Youtube alone much less when he goes to actual conferences and workshops, so if he has to jump on one thing off the bat and before the interview he was listening a speech on Youtube.

• Jeffrey shared that one of the books that have had a big impact on him is “Who Move My Cheese by Spencer Johnson” he would recommend that book to everybody, anybody that comes and say, “Jeffrey, what’s a good reading?” that book for sure, you cannot move forward without reading Who Moved My Cheese. It was the book that created the business, it’s the book that took the vision and made the business. He went to a mentor of his at the time and told him about the vision and he told him about the desire, the calling that he had and his mentor said, “Okay, what’s next?” and he told him, “I don’t know” and his mentor gave him his copy of Who Moved My Cheese, he doesn’t know where that copy is, he past it on to the next person who was in his situation and he hopes that it’s still making its rounds. The book is about being resolute and just taking action as you see, if you’ve never read it, he strongly recommend that book. It is about making a decision and taking action which is where the company name got its idea, “Select ‘n’ Start”. It sets such a solid mindset, you can’t do without it. Jeffrey also recommend “Acres of Diamonds by Russell H. Conwell” It is about finding wealth where you are, too many times we look at our situation and it’s such abysmal situation that we say we must go somewhere else to find it. Acres of Diamonds go through a number of stories that shows that wealth is right where we are if we have the open mindedness and the creativity in which to extract that value. So making a decision, taking action and doing it where you are, he couldn’t recommend bigger lessons for people starting out and as he said this goes right back to customer service because a lot of the time we blame people for poor customer service or we say they are poor customers so both sides of the coin have the complaint and yet what it is that we are not mining the opportunities that we have right there. Jeffrey shared a story that a elderly woman goes into a outlet store and she looks like she can’t afford and so nobody pays her any attention except for one young man who truthfully, he’s not even a server in the store, he’s more an errand and clean up guy but he takes the time and he serves her, she buys nothing, about 3 months later she comes back and she comes with a long list, they found out that she is actually European royalty and she’s looking to buy for her parcel and the only person who she would allow to sell her was the young man and she insisted, not only does he get full commission but he gets a service fee to come to the castle to make sure it’s properly installed. That’s the kind of opportunity that lay around us and we let them slip because of poor customer service, so if you’re going to serve, go for it full force because you never know that you maybe uncovering a acre of diamonds.

• Jeffrey shared that when he was 13 years old, he spent a lot of time questioning what’s wrong with Jamaica and spoke to many people double, triple, quadruple his age, got a lot of input, got a lot of thoughts and you’ll hear all sorts of answers, corruption, education, poor health facility, poor services, poor government agencies and what he boiled them down to was two major factors that any country in the world having problems, it’s probably these two factors as well. The education system and family unit structure, what happens is no matter how good you make the education system, if you have a poor family unit, the family unit undoes what the education tries to do in many cases. The teacher tells you that you can do anything you want, you go home and your mother tells you that you’re not going to amount to anything. He recognizes those two from a very young age and he still holds that strongly today that those are the two major factors holding back any third world country and so the big project Select ‘n’ Start is working on in summary is to fix those two things. When they started Select ‘n’ Start, the mission is to help people maximize their potential in an infinite number of ways, digitally, mentally, emotionally, physically, unlocking potential and they recognize that they can fix those two systems, they’ll accomplish the mission. Jeffrey stated that if they get other contracts and speaking engagements, establish people, coming up people, entrepreneurs, they’ll going in, they’ll motivate, they’ll share, they’ll develop and for the big part, that may be the bread and butter but the mission is how do they get everybody to unlock their maximum potential and that can’t be done by doing one off corporate gigs, it must be a project bigger than him, it must be a project bigger than Select ‘n’ Start, it must be a project bigger than Jamaica and that’s what they are working towards.

• Jeffrey shared that listeners can find him at –

Select ‘n’ Start Facebook

Select ‘n’ Start Instagram

Jeffrey Azan Instagram - @jj.azan

Select ‘n’ Start Twitter

• Jeffrey shared that he has a lot of his own quotes that he reverts to in times of adversity. He stated that sometime when you do a speech as a speaker and you didn’t intend to say something and it flow together and he has two things that keeps him going and that is, “If I depend on others for my success, I’ll only have myself to blame.” He doesn’t want anyone to misconceptualize that he’s saying that does everything by himself, he knows he not a master of everything, he’s trying to be but he’s not. The point is if he depends on those doing the other jobs, if he makes his success sit in their hands then if they fail, he can’t blame them, he can only blame himself because his success is his responsibility. The second one is, “Your story matters.” It speaks to the knowledge that even your most minuscule action can change somebody’s world, some of us don’t recognize that when we make somebody smile in what was a nonchalant exchange to us but we made that person smile, it might have been the first time they smile for the day and it might be the only smile they get for the day, so we must be very conscious that all of our minuscule actions, from the smallest action, the smallest interaction, the smallest exchange, it matters and those small exchanges bill our story.

Links

• Who Move My Cheese by Spencer Johnson

Acres of Diamonds by Russell H. Conwell

Daniel Edwards is the CEO of Total One-Eighty Image Consulting, a business initiative and service tailored for the motivated, modern male professionals, which Mr. Edwards created to productively combine his three (3) passions - personal development, psychology and fashion. A trained public speaker and presenter, Mr. Edwards recently launched his series of Total One-Eighty workshops, the first being through corporate client Sagicor Life Insurance Jamaica Limited to further his holistic approach to image consultancy and personal development. With over two decades of successful experience in the sales industry, Mr. Edwards is also currently a Senior Sales Executive at Caribbean Assurance Brokers Limited. Prior to this, he was a Financial Advisor at Sagicor Life Jamaica Limited where among other things his achievements included being seated at the international acclaimed, “Million Dollar Round Table." During his time at Sagicor, Mr. Edwards also created, ran and marketed his High Street Clothing brand. An experienced performer and lover of nature, Mr. Edwards is also a proponent and practitioner of meditation and diverse self-improvement practices.  

Question

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• In terms of customer experience, how has that been for you since you started business and what is your view on customer experience as a business owner?
• What are some of the challenges you believe young men face why it is that you are compelled in this business?
• Do you think it’s because of our culture why you think the men are challenged in such a way, outside of the parenting aspect predominantly being exposed to female influence, does the Caribbean culture impact that as well?
• Can you tell us a little bit about why you think image is so important and how does that impact customer service?
• Getting somebody to attire themselves in a particular way and have a particular image, how long those that take and is it just the physical or is it like a mind set change as well in terms of how they feel about themselves?
• Who are some of the role models you would use to drive inspiration in the persons you’re trying to transform?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• Do you think it’s important as a businessperson to really be passionate about what you’re doing in order to be successful?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• If you where sitting across the table from another business owner and they said to you that they feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated human capital, what’s the one piece of advice would you give them to have a successful business, specifically as it relates to constantly motivated human capital?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Daniel Edwards shared he is a Financial Advisor, he sells primarily insurance and investment products with Caribbean Assurance Brokers but he’s very passionate about his new venture which is Total One-Eighty Image Consulting and he feels that it is an initiative that is very necessary right now in Jamaica where men are really falling behind in a number of areas, he feels compelled to push this mission to reinvigorate the males.

• Daniel Edwards shared that he always believes in under promising and over delivering, he tries to extend that to his venture and that’s what it is about and focusing more about being of service and adding value than about money because if you do that first, then the money will follow.

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• Daniel Edwards stated that a significant percentage of males in Jamaica today are raised without fathers and as a result, there are a lot of men being raised by women so they don’t get those little extra tips and instructions that a man should give another man. The daughters are okay because their mothers can teach them how to dress and how to put themselves together as women but they fall short with the men. Such example include seeing men attending a graduation in sneakers or going to a job interview like they are going to a dance, they don’t have a male figure to show them how to really put themselves together.

• Daniel shared that he doesn’t think that our culture had an impact on the way our Jamaican men dress. He stated that our parents’ generational practices that but it’s a recent departure.

• Daniel Edwards stated that it’s not just about the image, it’s about the image plus communication skills but everything begins with the visual and our impressions are formed within seconds of seeing someone and often times these impressions are set in stones within seconds and barring you doing something exceptional, they don’t change. So the first impression is the only one that matters but beyond that we have to have the communication skills and the service to solidify that reputation and really give the client a great experience. So they have to be all rounders, they have to have the look and the package.

• Daniel shared that his ultimate goal is to have a holistic approach but you have to start somewhere, so he started off by creating a workshop on dressing for success. In this workshop, they look at the psychology of the first impression, the psychology of color, they look at how suits should fit, the power of a suit, the psychology behind wearing a suit, how you think different and feel different wearing one and people treat you differently. They go into accessories, they show you what colors to wear as in suits, what suits to wear and not to wear, accessories because male fashion is all about details. He stated that he wants to get into other areas such as public speaking and all of the components that are required to make you successful and make a bold impact when you step into a room.

• Daniel Edwards stated that for inspiration, Steve Harvey is a good example, also P. Diddy and Michael Lee Chin. He stated that he’s a fan of all of the self made black Millionaires.

Yanique added that you want them to connect with someone who looks like them so that they can see that this possibility exists.

• Daniel Edwards shared that by staying motivated, he uses "Operant Conditioning", he stated that we all do things to gain pleasure or avoid pain, so operant conditioning is where you try to avoid pain and pain for him would be living a life of judgery, getting old, getting sick and then dying. Operant conditioning is a type of learning where behavior is controlled by consequences. Key concepts in operant conditioning are positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment and negative punishment. He wants to live a purpose driven life on his terms and have an amazing life, and he can only do that by running his enterprise and perusing his dreams and his passions.

• Daniel stated that he doesn’t know anybody who is hugely successful whose purpose isn’t aligned with their passion, those are prerequisites. There are millions  of businesses ventures out there that can garner money but every entrepreneurial enterprise requires grit and determination and preservation in the early years to turn a profit, so if it’s just about making money, they are not going to put in those extra hours and deal with all those disappointments and the failures and near misses unless you are passionate about it.

• Daniel stated that he likes Pinterest a lot as well as Instagram but he doesn’t think that there’s anything he could live without, as he’ll find a way regardless. He stated that they are extremely helpful for example if he’s doing a wedding for someone, as he does weddings on what to wear, he can go on Pinterest and get an outfit together, he has an internet platter of ideas he can find.

• Daniel stated that he is an avid reader and believes you should try to read a new book every month, the last book that really made a big impact on him was “The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desires by David Deida” it talks about how men should deal with women, it’s about the masculine and feminine and how they should dance together and not wrestle. He also mention “The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book) by Don Miguel Ruiz”, Toltec were like the ancient Indians in Mexico. Daniel mentioned one more book called, “Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts – Becoming the Person You Want to Be by Marshall Goldsmith”, he is a high level Psychologist and he is a trainer for CEOs, he’ll go into Forbes and train the CEO, he’s showing that a lot of our behavior that is inexplicable or destructive is really based on triggers to prior events, so when similar situations occurs, it triggers it. Once you’re able to decipher what these triggers are then you can make permanent changes in your life without being confused or beating yourself up wondering why this happen.

• Daniel shared that the advice he would give another business owner is that you must incentivize your workers, they need to feel like they have a vested interest and they need to know if they put in a little more effort, they can dictate their paycheck. If the guy comes in and he’s getting a flat salary, he’s very aware that he’s building your empire for you, why is he going to stay there for 12 hours or why is he going to go above and beyond, as soon as 5:00 pm comes he wants to go home, that’s it, he’ out. They have to feel that they have a vested interest and that they are apart of the enterprise, they need to know that they put in a little extra, they will get some money.  

Yanique asked Daniel if he believes that most or all employees based on his experience are motivated financially, does motivation comes from something else as well?

Daniel Edwards shared that it is a combination; feeling like you have a vested interest doesn’t necessarily only translate to more money. Apart of the business, you’re invaluable and that your input will leave an indelible mark in the company. And if you have a system where your staff is rewarded base on merit, then they will work a little harder too, so one person is a superstar and one person is just slumming it and everybody is getting the same paycheck, after awhile the guy who is the superstar is going to take it down a few notches because there is no incentive for working so hard. There’s a motivational speaker called Max Moyan who said, “If you’re doing just enough not to loose your job, your boss is going to pay you just enough to keep it.” Also, empower your employees, put them on a plan immediately, and create a situation where they are aware of this is where they are beginning but 5 years where they should be, you should be empowering them to be on a trajectory towards success and you get a next set, it’s not a static situation.

• Daniel shared that what’s exciting for him right now is the business blossoming, he did the Caribbean Speakers International recently and it was a mind blowing experience because he has never done something like that before. He has done talks before but he has never spoken without a script so he felt like he grew 5 years in one day.

• Daniel shared that listeners can find him at -

totaloneeighty - Instagram

Total One Eighty Image Consulting - Facebook

Total one Eighty - Twitter

• Daniel shared that he had some slumpy years in his career so now that things have turned around for him, when he’s about to make major steps, he resorts to the bad memories and then he starts to have the limiting self talks where he says, “Three years ago this wasn’t working, what makes you think this is going to work now?” Les Brown who is one of has one of favorites quotes, “Operate using your imagination not your memory.” Once you go back to your failures, it’s crippling to you.

Links

• The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desires by David Deida
• The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book by Don Miguel Ruiz
• Triggers: Creating Behaviors That Lasts – Becoming the Person You Want to Be by Marshall Goldsmith

Carlos Villares was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico; he lives in Miami, Florida since 1994. He is an International University Graduate and has 10 years work experience for The General Electric Company in the area if sales and financials services. He is co-founder of Gustazos.com, Daily Deal site in 5 countries. They represent Global Sales and Business Development Executives and they manage over 50 sales people on these markets with gross sales surpassing USD$26 Million as of 2016.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• Can you tell us a little about how you manage customer experience and the whole customer service process at Gustazos?
• Can you share 3 things that you have found that have really contributed to your success, primarily from a customer experience prospective, not just on an external customer prospective but also in terms of employee motivation and development and really getting the right people to perform in the right way. What are some of the things you took away from General Electric that have made Gustazos so successful over the time you’ve been in this leadership position?
• How do you view customer service yourself for customer experience when you visit locations throughout the world in these markets that you operate in or even when you have to travel independent of Gustazos, what is your view on customer experience on a global level?
• How do you guarantee that the partnerships you’re forming are with people/organizations who have the same values you have as an organization as it relates to delivering quality experiences?
• Do you find the different cultures in a country may pose challenges for the businesses you partner with?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or your people?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Carlos Villares shared that what brought him to where he is today was that his father transferred the family significantly when they were kids even though he was born in Puerto Rico, he grew up in New Jersey, Argentina, Brazil so Soccer is very important to him like it is for Jamaicans and he has been in Miami since 1994, he got to work for corporate America and about 7 years ago he was introduced to the "Daily Deal" module from the famous company call Groupon which was the fastest growing business in the history of businesses and they decided to launch a very similar module but in San Juan, Puerto Rico and long story short, here they are.

• Carlos Villares shared with managing the customer experience, you log into Gustazos.com if you’re not registered already, it’s free to register and you can either visit the website and see the types of promotions they have going on. From the consumers stand point, everything you’re going to see on Gustazos, they work very hard, that’s basically what they live, breathe and sleep, it’s giving you a 50 - 90% discount on everything you see on the page, so the promotions you see right now, if you would just call or visit the hotel or call or visit the restaurant you would find it at 50% more expensive, so that’s what they do, they give you amazing places, the best businesses Jamaica has to offer with the best prices those businesses are able to provide in order to win you as a new client in most cases.

Carlos mentioned that he worked for General Electric for 10 years and when he was hired into General Electric, Jack Welch was still the CEO. He stated that many people talk about Steve Jobs and Ben Olsen and some other CEOs, his all time favorite CEO is Jack Welch and he loves his philosophy. Carlos is a Six Sigma Green Belt, he should have become a black belt but Gustazos lured him away but he applies a lot of what he learned at General Electric (GE) in Gustazos. He manages the sales teams in Gustazos in the 5 markets they have a presence in and he’s in charge of opening new markets but a lot of what he learned in General Electric with Jack Welch is a lot of what he applies today.

• Carlos shared that Jack Welch would say, “You should always release or let go of your bottom 10%” and that came with a lot of controversy because it takes away from the human factor and even though that’s the reality, your most important asset is Your People and it’s not easy to find the right people so it’s hard on a daily basis, they are consistently looking for good talent and when they find good talent they do everything in their power to bring them on board. Their number 1 asset is people that work in Gustazos and he values them tremendously and he does the best he can to motivate them and to keep them engaged and to love the atmosphere that they create, the culture they have at Gustazos so it’s a great environment for them and they are extremely respectful and flexible with personal issues, if you’re a mother, if you’re a father, if tomorrow you need to work from home, they are very flexible in regards to work, life, balances and they try to really incentivize a culture of having fun at what you do because at the end of the day if you have happy people, that’s contagious and your customers will feel it so it’s a happy go lucky type of atmosphere that they try to invent.

• Carlos shared that customers come first and in order to survive, you need customers and you have to make sure that you’re listening to them, you’re looking at them and you’re getting their feedback so that if you need to change, you can make those changes appropriately. In his personal experience, he is privileged of the fact that he gets to fly to amazing destinations and visit the best hotels in the market and the best restaurants the market has to offer. So immediately when he walks into so many restaurants that he can sense the difference in service, in product, in quality, in attention, so for him customer service is pretty good because he feels internally when one of Gustazos customers’ expectations are not met, for instance if they buy a restaurant deal and they visit the restaurant and they were maybe treated in a different way, they refund their money and they’ll give them a gift for their bad experience so they are really careful in regards to bad experiences and they strive on making sure that people understand that they are doing everything in their power for their experience to be not only memorable but one that can be shared with their family and friends.

Yanique mentioned that that’s the most important question every company asks, "Would you recommend this organization to a family member or friend?" and the reality is that if we have a bad experience we are probably not going to want our friends and family to have that same experience so we are going to tell them don’t go there.

Carlos stated that bad news travels faster than good news and they have a team in place internally that is constantly monitoring Social Media, their phone lines and he could go out on a limb and say that they address 100% of the cases, they do their best to make everyone happy and they feel like they do a pretty good job because the customer at the end says you know what, things may not have worked out because you’re going to have trouble, when you’re in business, you’re going to meet challenges and there’s going to be moments when clients are going to complain and that’s going to happen regardless of how hard you work, the question is how do you manage that situation, you can make it right, if you make it right, you’re gaining a client for life, so it’s not about the bad things that happen, it’s how you address those bad things and one of the things that he tries to convey to the team is make sure the customer is happy.

• Carlos stated that they have people on the ground in their team, they call them the Marketing Campaign Planners and they are in charge of visiting every single establishment before they are presented on the website, so all the promotions that you see on Gustazos, they have done a pre-screening of that location, whether by visiting the location physically and many times in the case of restaurants, they actually eat and evaluate the service of that restaurant so they don’t allow just any establishment to promote themselves on Gustazos, their commitment with their consumers and with their audiences is that everything thing that you see on Gustazos has been blessed by them and they guarantee that you’re going to have an amazing experience, they guarantee that your expectations are going to be met other wise your money is going to be refunded and they are going to give you something in addition to refunding your monies. They work very hard in talking and meeting and documenting everything with the business owners or the person responsible for that business to make sure that the customer experience is their number one priority. Carlos stated that he was watching an interview with this restaurant expert and he said, “If a person comes into your restaurant and the food and service is good, there’s a 40% chance that they’re going to come back a second time, if they come back a second time and the food and service is good, there’s a 42% chance that they are going to come back. If they come back a third time and the food and service is good, there’s a 75% chance that they are going to come back.” You can’t give up, you have to give them good service and there’s nothing more important than keeping customers happy.

• Carlos agreed that different cultures may pose challenges for the businesses they partner with and that’s why they have their head quarter team that is in charge of presenting these promotions works hand in hand with the local Jamaica team to make sure that they are speaking the correct language because they are headquartered out of San Juan so a lot of the operations is there but they have a team of 10 people in Jamaica right now and some of those folks are in charge that were speaking the way Jamaicans like to be spoken to and the some for Panama, Dominica Republic, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean which are the other markets where they have a presence. His experiences has been in many countries and living in Brazil, he didn’t’ speak the language when he moved there and that really opened his mind and it makes you open-minded. So going to Jamaica when they first started evaluating Jamaica, Jamaica has so much to offer in regards to cuisine, resource, businesses, you name it, spas, salons, adventures, it has so much to offer and they are an amazing vehicle to connect businesses that can use more traffic or new traffic or new clients with consumers  of their niche but they consider themselves local in Jamaica because this stage is run by a local team so they are in charge of what is being published 100%.

• Carlos shared that by staying motivated, you have to find what you’re passionate about, he talks about the pursuit of happiness and you need to work in life because you need to have a purpose in life, so everybody must have a job, you may be a Dentist, you may be Veterinarian, you may be a Talk Show Host or you may be a guy who basically manage sales people, you have to do what’s passionate to you. And because he’s doing what he’s passionate about, it’s very easy for him to wake up in the mornings at 7:30 am and start engaging the website and his people and getting into meetings. So first and foremost, you have to be passionate about what you do and if you’re passionate about what you do, you’re going to be happy. He believes when you’re doing something you’re passionate about, success is destined to happen. He’s a Caribbean guy by nature, he loves our seas, he loves our food and plus he loves the impact they are causing businesses and he loves more the impact they are causing consumers. They get a lot of feedback from consumers for example, Puerto Rico is in an economic crisis and they get notes once in a while for example, “Thank you Gustazos for giving us this particular promotion because I’m getting to do things with my family that I used to do with my father about 30 years ago and if it wasn’t for you guys and your promotions, I wouldn’t be able to do it with my family.” So that touches you, that will bring tears to your eyes, so the impact that they are causing businesses and the impact they are causing on consumers is very powerful and he really values that and it brings a lot of satisfaction to him.

Carlos mentioned employees and that sometimes they hire people from college, sometimes they hire people that just moved to that country and you see them grow and you see them improve their financial situation and things get better, they are able to afford better school for their kids, buy a new car, move into a new house, so those 3 components are very important to him and those are what drives him and keeps him motivated and waking up every morning and engaging with everything that they have going on.

• Carlos stated that Whatsapp is one of the tools he cannot live without. He thinks that Whatsapp is going to revolutionize the way we communicate and it’s doing it now. We don’t know how long emails are going to last and how efficient emails are going to but right now the fact that you can creates groups and right now it’s impacting your professional and your personal life because right now what Whatsapp is doing is your creating internal groups, he’s in a group with the Jamaica team, he’s in a group with the Puerto Rico team, he’s in a group with the leadership team, he’s in a group with the programming team and then in his personal life, he’s in a group with Argentina - with his high school friends, he’s in a group with his Brazilian friends. So Whatsapp is becoming an instrumental communication tool for us internally as a company and for him it’s kind of like where Facebook was when it launched when you reconnected with your classmates and people from your childhood, he’s seeing it in a more efficient way through Whatsapp. The other one is the tool that Gmail offers which is the Google Drive, Google Drive right now you can actually update Cloud setting, in business, you would historically have to email an excel file, that person would open it and you can no longer make changes if you’re the person who sent it. So Google Drive today you have excel there and he makes any changes, everybody that’s copied there is able to see that change and he can communicate within that tool whether it’s a comment or it’s an email, he can send emails from that excel file and he can send PDF, so it’s a very efficient and interactive tool, not only that but they also have word files and a number of others. Google Drive and Whatsapp are 2 of the most important assets that they use internally.

• Carlos shared that he’s a martial artist and he does grade 2 Jujitsu - it’s very popular with the ultimate fighting championship and there’s a book called The Gracie Diet by Rorion Gracie, the Gracie’s were a family that created this martial art it’s considered to be the most sufficient martial art today and there’s a diet behind it that consists of a lot of fruits, a lot of vegetables and the combination of these foods, so if he was to recommend to the audience and amazing book if you’re looking for a great diet and not something that you would do temporarily but something that you would do long term and make it part of your life - this is the book for you. The other is Winning by Jack Welch and he’s a big fan of his and anything he says and writes, if you’re in business, he would highly recommend it, two authors that you can’t go wrong.

• Carlos shared that he is really excited about the call he just got, a mega power player in Jamaica who is very interested in taking Gustazos Jamaica to the next level and he thinks it can take Gustazos to the next level. He is also excited about the new partnership that they established in the Dominica Republic because he always say Gustazos.com because of their email data base that they grow on a daily basis, they should be apart of an ad agency because at the end of the day, they are a marketing campaign tool the same way the newspaper is, a magazine is, a radio show is, they are a channel and they partner up with BBDO which is a big ad agency, they are internationally known but their representative in Dominica Republic just purchased 40% of Gustazos in Dominica Republic and now they are offering a platform to their clients, for example, the number 2 bank in the island is going to start using Gustazos services to change their miles into Gustazos dollars and credits. They are also in the automobile industry so there’s going to be some promotions. So now instead of being restaurants and hotels, they are tapping into the ad agency industry and the ad agencies are noticing that, “This is a powerful tool that has a very efficient reach and we might as well try to use it, leverage it with our clients and make it part of our portfolio.” And that’s going to open a lot of doors for the people that work for them and those 2 opportunities are things that he’s very excited about.

Carlos stated that he is giving the Navigating the Customer Experience audience a gift, if you go to Guztazos.com/gimme5, they are going to give you USD 5.00 in credit for the purchase of anything you want on Gustazos.

• Carlos shared that listeners can find him at -

Carlos Villares LinkedIn

Email – [email protected]

• Carlos shared that the quote that he always reflects on during times of adversity is, “Control your destiny.” Sometimes, especially in sales, the client is not calling him back or someone in the office is not doing this for him, you have to control your destiny and if you need to so something yourself in order to achieve your goal, you have to control your destiny, don’t let your destiny fall into other peoples hands.

Links

• The Gracie Diet by Rorion Gracie
• Winning by Jack Welch

John DiJulius Show Notes

John DiJulius is an international consultant and best selling author of 3 customer service books, his latest book; The Customer Service Revolution instantly hit number 1 on Amazon. John works with world-class companies like The Ritz-Carlton, Lexus, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Nestle¢, Marriott Hotels, PwC, Cheese Cake Factory, Progressive Insurance, Harley-Davidson, Chick-fil-A and many more. John isn’t just talking about it, he lives it. As a very successful entrepreneur of 2 businesses, John Robert’s Spa, a chain of upscale Cleveland locations has been repeatedly named 1 of the top 20 salons in America and The DiJulius Group, a consulting firm focused on changing the world by creating a customer service revolution. John will demonstrate how we can make our customer service our single biggest competitive advantage and make price irrelevant.

Question

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• What is your view of customer service and customer experience, why is it so important? What are some everyday solutions that you believe the business owner can do to still set themselves apart?
• Tell us a little about your book, The Customer Service Revolution: Overthrow Conventional Business, Inspire Employees, and Change the World, what inspired you to write your book and 3 key things our listeners would be able to take away from the book?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• John DiJulius shared that his first business, he and his wife opened up a small hair salon back in 1993 and it was 900 square feet and they had no money, no employees and they had no customers and they were on a street that had over 100 hair salons up and down within a few miles and they only way that he could think of to make them competitive was to invest in how they treated people because it didn’t cost has much as extensive advertising and all the traditional means back then. They started growing so rapidly that they had to knock down a wall and expand to the next location and then a year later get the next unit next to them and then couple years later they build a much larger facility and then they open another and then another and then another. They found 5-10 years later when they had money, they had customers, they had employees that the best investment was still the customer experience and still they didn’t spend on advertising, they just invested it. Their business grew to be 1 of the top 20 salons in the United States and he started getting asked to speak all the time because of their rapid growth and so he started speaking and then that started snowballing. His first book Secret Service came out in 2003 and from that point on, he went from being a salon owner who spoke a few times to being a speaker that owned a salon and he haven’t been to involved in the salon industry ever since and then the next book, What’s The Secret cam out in 2008 and that was more base now from 2003 to 2008 he started working with these incredible companies, the weird thing is, no one bad hires him, you would think that it’s the other way around but it was only great, exceptional companies and he probably learn has much if not more from them than he was probably teaching them. Now it’s just spiraling into a full pledge customer service consultant company and that’s all they do is just work with clients on their customer experience.

• John DiJulius shared that the reason he wrote his first book because when they were trying to be exceptional, one of his frustrations at customer service is all the books on customer service that he could get his hands on and all the speakers he listened to never gave him the practicality, they always say, “Treat your customers the way you want to be treated.” all those high level platitudes but they didn’t tell him how, so they don’t want to compete in prices wars, they want to compete in experience wars and that’s really important to them so their methodology is all based around making price irrelevant and making price irrelevant is base on the experience you consistently deliver to your customer, they have no idea what your competition charges. He price sensitive and he has made the mistake of driving 3 extra miles to save 50 cents on something, on the flip side, there are some people he do business with as a consumer that if you’re looking, he would say you have to use that, how much do they charge and in a lot of cases, he couldn’t tell you, he doesn’t know, the businesses, the people he is so loyal to, he doesn’t know what they charge, he would have to look at his receipt, pull up an invoice but he doesn’t care, they are so great and he likes to say, discounting is the tax you pay for being average.” They don’t want to be average. The difference between customer service and customer experience is Jim Gilmore, great author of The Experience Economy says it, “Customer service is what you do, customer experience is how you do it.” He stated that customer service no matter what business you’re in is a commodity, everyone does what you do and doubt that you’re any smarter than your top competitors, it’s now, you’ve got to use that expertise and make sure you’re making an emotional connection and knowing something about our customers and knowing what they need and so it’s all about the service aptitude, how good any company is at customer service comes down to the service aptitude of their employees and your service aptitude gets shaped, yours, mine and the newest hire gets shaped by 3 places, previous life experiences, previous work experiences and current work experiences, so most people didn’t grow up staying at 5 star resorts, flying first class and driving Mercedes Benz when they turn 16 years old, yet our first jobs and a lot of times people we hire, we expect them to give that type of experience to our customers and it’s not fair, you just don’t know what world class look like at 19, 21 or 25 because your life experiences didn’t afford it. Same thing with previous work experience, previous work experiences, most businesses are paranoid and they want their employees to screen and not let customers take advantage of them and then we get that employee and they’ve been brainwashed not to treat the customer and trust the customer, it’s not the employee’s fault so we can’t control he first 2 things, it’s about what we do with them after we hire them and you won’t find people with high service DNA, don’t expect to, you have to create the DNA, it’s not you’re employees responsibility to have high service DNA, it’s yours to give it to them, you the company, you the entrepreneur, you have to train it.

Yanique agreed and stated that it’s interesting that he said how you can increase on their service DNA and asked if he believes that if the person doesn’t have the right attitude, that training can bring them to the level that you want to bring them to or is it something that comes in terms of their innate abilities that comes naturally in terms of how they relate to other people?

John stated that he believes that the vast majority of people out there you can change, he doesn’t believe it’s innate for the reasons he just explain, we were growing up and eating at fast foods restaurants and we didn’t have world class experiences so we don’t know what it is like to deliver and our family life, depending on what we were taught, you’re not going to find people who are taught that it’s just a few. He stated that he loves asking this one question to his audiences when he first started, “If you’re going to build a world class customer experience company, what is more important: a) the training and culture you bring your new employees into? Or b) the hiring?” In a little bit a way, it’s a trick question because the answer is both, you can’t have one without the other but he always say, if you’ve got to give 51% to one or the other, it’s training and culture. Disney did not find 50,000 employees born to serve, there is not 5,000 people walking the earth born to serve but they converted them and one of the quotes that Disney has about their new employees is they say, “We don’t put our new employees in Disney, we put Disney in our new employees.” Every one should put that quote with their company name, put your company in your people and make them proud and make them understand it.

• John shared that the Customer Service Revolution is the last 20 years of working with the best companies in the world and seeing what they have in common and why they have been able to dominate their industry and not have to be sucked in on price and be the brand customers can’t live without. So the definition of a customer service revolution is a radical over throw of conventional business mentality designed to transform what employees and customers experience, the ship produces a culture that permeates into people’s personal lives at home and community which in turn provides your business with higher sales moral and brand loyalty, thus making price irrelevant. Some of the key take away in the book, it just talks about how you increase your employee service aptitude and one of the best ways that their clients do when they help them and listeners can do on their own is the first thing they do with their clients is they create a “Day in the life of a customer”, it’s a video and you don’t have to do a video, you can do a slideshow but the reason is that in most businesses the customer facing employee, your employee that’s dealing with your customer, is not the customer, whether it be a different age, they might be in their 20s dealing with 35 to 55 year old professionals, they might be account executives dealing with CEOs and they can’t relate to one another and so these day in a life of the customer scripts help your customer facing employee understand all the pressures and chaos and demands that your customer may be going through on a given day and how they get hit at home with kids and illness and significant other and financial burdens that we have and then they get to work and the customer demands and their boss and the economy and all these things and when you could really understand all the things that your customer are battling and how what you do for them impacts their success and their relief, it makes you more present when you deal with them and it really helps you to have more compassion and empathy, so scripting out a day in the life of a customer, before they even come in contact with you so everyone on your company can have more empathy and compassion for what your customers are dealing with and how you can come to the rescue. He also mention that some of the things they do is help companies create a customer service vision statement and that’s different from the mission and purpose, a customer service vision statement is the action statement you have to do every time you interact with a customer, be it 10 seconds, it’s about focusing on providing a positive experience on every interaction whether it’s face to face, click to click or ear to ear, it might be 10 seconds, it might be 10 minutes, it could be an hour but it’s about a short statement that is actionable, measureable, trainable and observable that every employee is reminded what their job is to do when they come in contact, so one of the examples of their biggest customer they have had is Starbucks, the next time you go to Starbucks anywhere, in Cleveland, Ohio, Malaysia, they all were the green apron, if you ask them to turn over the top inside of their green apron facing them, is their customer service vision statement that John and his team help them create and it’s cool because it’s not for the customer to see, it’s for each of their employees to see and be reminded of what to deliver to every customer they come in contact with. He always ask people, “What’s going to be your green apron that you can advertise to your employees that they constantly have to be reminded that your branding what your service vision is, what they have to do every time?”

• John shared how he stay motivated, he stated that he is blessed, he loves what he does and that’s very important and he has had bad days and he has had deadlines missed and flights cancelled and principals calling about his kids getting in trouble but he thinks it’s about the attitude, it’s how you look at things and he can’t believe he gets to do what he does and he thinks it’s important that we remain as leaders, passionate, the higher we get in a company, the more responsibility we get which means we can come to work with the weight of the world on our shoulders and we can wear that and try to make payroll and we just lost a big client or we lost a key employee or his family isn’t too happy with him because he hasn’t been in town lately, when he brings that with him to work, he starts to get moral issues, the moment you became a leader you have lost your right to complain and make excuses. There’s a lot of people counting on him, a few hundred employees, tens and thousands of customers that he can’t let down, so it’s his obligation bring his best version of himself otherwise he’ll just hurt all of them and when we look at it that way that we have an obligation to bring our A game and sometimes he has to be an academy award winner and most of the times he truly feels it, when he brings his A game, when he bring the passion that has for what he does around the people he do it with and for, things go really well. So he just understands that there are several things and a lot of them they have in common. The things he has to do on a daily and maybe hourly basis in his life to not allow him to get on that rollercoaster that worries him, “I got the flat tire” he can’t let that happen, we all are going to get the same amount of flat tires but some people might dwell on them and other people may say, “God, was I lucky that I got a flat tire right after I drop my kids off at school and no one is injured and I was still able to get to work within a decent time.” Instead of letting that ruin the rest of their day. It’s what he’s feeding his brain on a daily basis, listening to podcast like this, listening to great experts, listening to people really inspire him and make him think, it’s who he hangs around with and that is the greatest thing. He stated that he hopefully won’t brag about too many things but the one thing he will brag about and he will take credit for is the people he surrounds himself with, he believes if we all are going to be known and judge by the people you surround yourself with and if he is judged by that, he’s a world champ, the people he allow in his circle and spend time with, they are positive, they are great husbands and have been married for 20 to 25 years and great fathers, those are the people he want to have their quality rub off on him versus we all have that friend from high school or college who wants to stay out at the bars until closing time, he has to see him once a year, he doesn’t want that influence on him more than the annual picnic on July 4th.

• John stated that he has many apps that he uses. He stated that he loves where he gets education. There used to be an app called Pulse but it was bought by LinkedIn but it all the magazines and articles and customer service one place, he could scan and see everything he wanted to know from headline news to know if anything bad or good happens to where he can click on and it’s a great story of someone who did something customer experience, it’s a one stop shop where he can look at 60 to 80 different resources in 10 minutes and then send the article to himself or send it to a client, he do that traditional way now like having 10 or 20 different places he would go to find all that stuff. He also mention that he has a cool customer service app called YouMail, it’s free and it is a great customer service app, it replaces your voicemail on your phone, so if you’re in his contact list and you call him it will pick up and say, “Hello Suzanne, John is unavailable right now but he would love to call you right back.” And it personalizes the recording for every single that calls and it just blows peoples mind and they’re like, “how did you get someone to do that?” so that’s a fun app.

• John shared that there are a lot of books that have impacted him, he mention that The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage by Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore is a great book. The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, anything on Steve Jobs he just loves his business side and how his mind worked and his whole mentality was, “Don’t give the customers what they want, give them something they can’t live without.” Anything on Howard Schultz, Starbucks latest book, Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul, how he overcame, he is the CEO of Starbucks, anything he says just really inspires him and he really likes Biographies and Autobiographies and the great entrepreneurs of our time and their battles, what they overcame and you find out that people have a lot of things in common and no one just fell into anything and their perseverance is really exciting and motivating stories.

• John shared that they have some really good things, the Chief Experience Officer is the fastest growing C Suite position in corporate America today and while that’s great and it’s really helping businesses improve their customer experience, the one thing that’s missing is education for them. At least in the United States, there is not even classes on customer service that you can take courses let alone degrees which is really sad. So as they are trying to find and hire these new Customer Experience Officers or Chief Customer Officers, the problem they have is how do they train them so John and his team roll out The Customer Experience Executive Academy and they have an online course and a physical class that people can take either one and all their methodology so they can be the Customer Experience Office for their company, so that’s the fastest growing thing that they have and he really loves it. They have people has far has Qatar, Israel, Australia and all over the world that they couldn’t have touched before that are getting this information, taking it back, using it in their company and that is really helping them to achieve their mission which is, “To change the world by creating a customer service revolution.”

• John shared that listeners can find him at -

www.cxea.org

www.dijuliusgroup.com

The DiJulius Group Facebook

John DiJulius Twitter

John DiJulius LinkedIn

• John shared that his 4th book came out and it’s a quote book, his favorite quote and it’s in the last chapter of his book, The Customer Service Revolution is “I want to live an extraordinary life so countless others do as well.” And that’s really important to him and that’s his personal mission statement and it’s not just a quote, it’s an obligation. He doesn’t want to live an extraordinary life so that he can have more, more houses, more cars, more vacations, he wants to live an extraordinary life so countless others do and if you think about the greats in our world, from the Nelson Mandela’s to the Walt Disney’s, Steve Jobs’, Oprah Winfrey’s, Richard Branson’s of the world and the impact that have had on our world and changing the world and the way we think, what if they would have said, “I just want to be ordinary, I’m just going to mail it in, I’m just going to be average.” How much different would our life be today and we have that obligation and we all have these seeds of potential that we have inside of us and the seeds that we don’t grow fully, we have cheated others around us, we cheated our family, we cheated our neighborhood, our communities, our employees and our customers, so when he looks at it that way, he looks at what he needs to do live an extraordinary life so that people benefit and it becomes like a burden in a good way like, “I’ve got to eat right, I’ve got to exercise because if I don’t, I’ll be lethargic, I’ll be lazy, I’ll be crabby, when I get home tonight from work today, I want to collapse on the couch instead of play catch with my son.” By looking at it from that lens, he feels responsible and guilty if he doesn’t do that because he’s cheating others that are depending on his success.

Links

• The Customer Service Revolution: Overthrow Conventional Business, Inspire Employees, and Change the World by John DiJulius
• The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage by Joe Pine and James Gilmore
• Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul by Howard Schultz
• Mastering Customer Experience and Increasing Your Revenue Online Course

Shep Hyken Show Notes 

Shep Hyken is a Customer Service and Experience expert and Cheap Amazement Officer of Shepard Presentations. He is the New York Times best selling author and has been inducted in the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame for Lifetime Achievement in the speaking profession. Shep works with companies and organizations who wants to build loyal relationships with their customers and employees. His articles has been read in hundreds of publications and he is the author of 5 books, he is also the creator of The Customer Focus, a customer service training programme which helps clients develop a customer service culture and loyalty mind set.

Question

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• What is your view of customer service and customer experience, what do you think is the number 1 reason why it’s not consistent across all industries both private and public sector?
• If you could describe the most amazing customer experience that you’ve ever had, what would that be and why?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Shepard Hyken stated that his first education on customer service and experience was when he was 12 years old. He was doing magic shows for parties and he came home and his mom said, “Make sure you write a “Thank You” note.” He thought that was a great idea but little did he know that that was customer service. His dad said, “Follow up a week later and thank them again with a phone call and also ask what they liked about the magic show and find out what was their favorite tricks and how they felt about the show.” And that was also a sales tactic because soon as they said, “Hey you were great” and he would ask why and say, “I notice that little Johnny had a sister, does she need a magic show too?” That was all helpful but what he was learning was: 1 – Show appreciation to customers, 2 – Ask for feedback. His dad actually told him that,“When they tell what tricks they like, if they aren’t mentioning certain tricks as you go and do more and more shows, see if the parents aren’t mentioning the same tricks or are mentioning the same tricks and then you’ll know what tricks you might want to pull out and replace to try and make better because nobody is talking about them.” And he goes, that’s great feedback and isn’t that what we do in business today and that’s why he jokingly say but it’s really no joke that his customer service experience started with common sense that was taught to him by his parents and that’s really where a lot of customer service falls in the world of common sense. There he was age 12 doing that and he worked in Gas Stations when he was a kid and he was in a self serving station when he was in college at a gas station where you pump your own gas but it was a cold day and an elderly woman came, jumped out of her car to pump gas and he said, “Mam, get back into the car, I’ll pump your gas, it’s too cold.” And he pumped her gas and the manager at the gas station as he was a low-level employee, got upset with him for pumping her gas and he said, “This is the right thing to do, the woman could slip, she could break a hip.” She had to be 80 may 90 years old and he thought it was the right thing to do, once again common sense. He believes in all of that and he eventually in that retail organization was a region manager for the convenient stores and gas stations that they had and eventually the station’s operations manager and when they sold their company, he didn’t have a job and he decided to get into the world of professional speaking and he had a little entertaining background and he had some business background, plus he had gone to college, got his degree and he felt he could write a speech and within a very short time, all the research that he was doing and his favorite topic was in that world of customer service, so that’s what he gravitated toward right away and that was over 30 years ago. He was hired back in the early 1980’s by companies like IBM and General Motors and Enterprise Rent a Car, these were his first clients and he’ll never forget because to him IBM was one of the greatest companies and is still a great company but back then they were the ones that really bring customer service on the map, “We want to be so good at what we do that price doesn’t matter.” And of course price always matters at some point but when it becomes less and less relevant, it’s because of the value that you offer and many times that value is because we have a reliable product, we have unbelievable response time, that’s customer experience.

• Shepard Hyken stated that what amazes him, he read that customer service they spend about 1/10th of what they spend on marketing and at the end of the day, customer service is the best marketing you can have because if you do a great job, people go out and talk about you. Customer service used to be where the value was and then it slowly shifted to something they call customer experience and experience for a long time was just another word for service. Steve Jobs figured it out and he use him as an example of the Apple products he has, obviously you walk into an Apple store great service, you call their support line, you get great service but really what he figured out is the experience is more important than just the service, although service is a big part of it, when you get your new Iphone or Ipad or your Mac computer, the way it’s packaged alone is a great experience. So all these different touch points the customer has with you and it’s not just people to people touch point, it’s what you experience. He stated that he always quote Jan Carlzon, when he’s doing a speech, he talks about this concept called a “Moments of Truth” and he came up with it and primarily he focus on the people to people experience but he called the “Moments of Truth” in business whenever a customer came into contact with any aspect of the business, they form an impression. Jan Carlzon ran Scandinavian Airlines so his customers were passengers, so there were main impressions that were formed when a customer call to make a reservation, today we go online and do it but back in the early 1980’s when he was running Scandinavian Airlines, you pick up the phone and you made the call, you check your bags at the curb, you make check in at the ticket counter, all of these are major touch points but if you think about it, you sit down in the plane and is the seat comfortable? And he used to joke that if the tray table doesn’t work, the passenger might worry that the landing gear might not work. So it’s like, “They can’t keep the tray table from falling down.” But what is the user experience in addition to the customer service experience, so you combine thoseand that’s the total experience. All of his work for the first three quarters of his career was based on customer service, now a chunk of his work that they do, he is brought in to talk about what is the experience going to be? What can we do to enhance that? Which he emphasize that customer service is a big part of that.

• Shep stated that he talks about a cab driver in many of his speeches and it seem to be like a normal cab but when he got in it was spotlessly clean, it had 2 newspapers to chose from waiting for him, he gave him a soda and this was back before bottled water. He had a dish of candy, he asked if he needed to use his phone, he was great and he send him a thank you note because he asked him for his business card because he said he collected them from people he drove. He sent him a thank you note after a ride; think about that, that’s amazing. Every time he goes to Dallas he calls him but he’s retired now. The interesting thing was that has he got to know Frank, he would tell him things like he used to wait at the airport like every other cab driver 2-3 hours in the long line and now he just goes and parks the car and walks and waits 10 minutes for his next customer and he’s managed to make back in the day more than USD $100,000.00 a year as a cab driver because he figured it out, he figured out the average cab drivers making 3 or 4 decent trips a day that are making them money and he’s making 15 or more because he’s not waiting in line, he’s waiting for his customers and he figured it out because it’s customer service and the lesson is there is a big difference between satisfied customers and loyal customers. There is statistics and facts that will prove that satisfied customers don’t always go back to places that satisfy them because the moment they have a chance to do business with somebody a little bit better, a little more convenient, they will do that and that’s the difference and the loyal customer’s a mind set, it’s an emotion, you feel connected, so he felt truly connected with Frank, when he sent him that thank you note, that was it. It was like in that movie with Tom Cruise where he plays a sports agent, Jerry McGuire, “You had me at with the thank you note, you owned me at that point.” Shep stated that he has a lot of stories like that but he really loved that one because of the ordinariness of the job of being a cab driver and taking it to a whole level of being extraordinary and anybody can do that if a cab driver can figure it out, we can do it virtually in any business.

• Shep shared how he stay motivated, he stated that he is an optimistic guy and sometimes you’re just born with the luck of thinking that way, some of it has to do with the way you are brought up by your parents. He stated that he has this optimistic outlook, at a very young age he surrounded himself with the right people and even as a teenager, he had great mentors and these people drove him to be more successful because maybe they made him feel good, maybe telling him he’s doing a good job like a coach telling you, “Go out there, you can do it, you did it, that’s great” pat you on the back but he over came fears, he did the magic shows and you would think a kid at age 12 doesn’t have fear, he was scared to death of those little kids staring at him. Even in his mid 20s, he started his speaking business and if the audience was under 100 people, he felt comfortable but as soon as it got bigger than that, he was scared, when he got in front of an audience of 1000 or 10,000 so he’s still nervous but he gets over it because mostly anxiousness than, “I’m scared to get out there.” How do you get motivated? You have to over come things and feel really good about what you do so that drives you. He reads a tremendous amount of good things, one of the things he doesn’t do anymore, he doesn’t watch local news and even the national news, national news keeps you inform of many things but local news, they are showing car accidents, crime scenes and other than the weather and sports, he doesn’t need that negativity in his life, he needs to know the big picture things. He also works out quite a bit and he has fun. He shares that he has a really good balance, he works very hard but he has a really good time, he takes advantage of things when they are in front of him, he has a great wife, great kids. If he’s going to a sporting event, he soaks it all in and he just loves having fun. He works a tremendous amount of hours but when it’s time to have fun, he knows how to do it.

• Shep stated that one of the apps that cannot live without in his business is Outlook, he also mention that he loves a good travel app because he travels so much and he’s using TripIt but it feeds into Flight Update Pro and so that way he can track flights coming into his gate, if they are going to be late many times he knows before the gate agent, so because he travels a lot and that’s great. He stated that for email, he just signed up for Sanebox so if you want to check out Sanebox you can put his email address or his name and you can get a free month. What Sanebox is doing is everything that’s coming into his inbox, it recognize when he’s getting a newsletter and puts it in the newsletter box that he can get to it later on. It is actually learning his routine, it is putting his best emails in his inbox and putting everything else in another box and it’s unbelievable accurate, they say it will essentially save you up to 12 hours a month. There is a feature on it called the Saneblack hole, if somebody subscribe you or you start getting on somebody’s promotional email list of a company and you don’t know how you got on the list, you just put it in the black hole and you’ll never see it again. They give you a trail period to play around so that’s a cool app for a reasonable price. He just got a Slingbox at home so now he can watch TV on his phone and where that counts is when he’s traveling on the other side of the world and his favorite sports teams are playing in the USA and he wants to watch them, so that’s a cool app. Another app is BombBomb, if he wants to take a short video that say, “Hey thank you for having me on your show” and then send it to you, he can do it with the phone but what happens is that attaches the video to the email and if the video is too big, it may get block by your email system, so what BombBomb does is allows you to create a cool template that’s custom to you and then you shoot your video and then you send the email and the person just pushes the button and actually plays if they are connected to the internet, it’s a very cool thing and that’s the most basic use. You could have a list of people and you want to send everybody a video message.

• Shep shared that he mentioned Jan Carlzon book, Moments of Truth was written mid 1980’s and the first time he ran across Jan Carlzon was in an article but he eventually went on to write the book about Moments of Truth and it’s a thin little book that would take an hour to read. Shep stated that to him one of the greatest customer service books of all time. However, his favorite book is called The Experience Economy by James Gilmore and Joe Pine, what a great concept and they used Starbucks and that book has been out for maybe 10 or 20 years and for a company like Starbucks to maintain its relevancy in the experience base is really cool. He stated that Thomas Peters co-author a book back in the 1980’s called In Search of Excellence and he believes he had 50 companies that he considered most excellent companies in the world and if you look at it 25 years later he doesn’t know if half of them made that list anymore. For Starbucks to stay relevant and he predicts that Starbucks will stay relevant, their module is all about the customer not just about coffee and that’s why Amazon has been so successful and when Jeff Bezos says, “We are trying to stay a step up ahead of our competition, we’re trying to stay ahead of the customer” meaning what are we giving the customer more than what they thought they were going to get, get them something they didn’t know and that’s what Steve Jobs did too with Apple, give them something they didn’t know they needed and create this need or discover the need the customer didn’t realize they needed then deliver on it. To put another book, in the latter part of the 1980’s a guy name Harvey Mackay wrote a book called Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive: Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate Your Competition, we have anyone out there with entrepreneurial type businesses or anybody that’s in a business to build a relationship with your customer, this book is unbelievable, it’s filled with so much great information, common sense information from a guy that was really doing it at the time.

• Shep shared that there are 2 or 3 things, number 1 is they have an amazing online group of courses based on the work he has put into his books and what they do with their training programmes and speaking programmes in person, so he’s very excited about how over the years it has been revolving into a major part of their business. He is just finishing up a book called Be Amazing or Go Home, so that’s kind of fun, you got a choice in life, if you want to come to work, be amazing otherwise why show up for work. The other book that’s coming out next year is a book all about creating convenience, they talked a little bit about that’s a part of the experience, how convenient and easy can you make it for a customer because today you walk into a business, you expect a certain level of customer service and that’s table stake and for the last 30 years he has been talking about the table stakes and now he thinks it’s becoming common when companies get it and understand it, whether they execute on it is another thing, so what’s the next level of delivering amazing service and that is be more convenient than your competition.

• Shep shared that listeners can find him at -

Shep Hyken Twitter

www.hyken.com

• Shep shared some of the quotes that inspire him in times of adversity. He loves Jiminy Cricket who said, “Let your conscience by your guide.” In business when he’s up against somebody who is upset about pricing or maybe he’s upset that something is a little more expensive than he thought it was going to be and he always remember Aldo Gucci said, “Quality is remembered long after price is forgotten.” so when he thinks about business in general, it’s not just the quality product, it’s the quality service and experience and even though he didn’t write it, he thinks it’s a mantra we should all subscribe to, we deliver the best part of the quality, an experience, everything does what it’s supposed to do, great people, people aren’t going to be so concern about the price. 

Links

• Moments of Truth by Jan Carlzon
• The Experience Economy by Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore
• In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best Running Companies by Thomas Peters
• Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive: Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate Your Competition by Harvey Mackay

Winning Accounts vs. Winning Relationships with Yanique Grant – Episode 047

Thank you, thank you, thank you so much – this episode is very special episode for me. It is very near and dear to my heart! Approximately one (1) year ago, I started this podcast – Navigating the Customer Experience and one year later – we are at over 5,000 downloads, being listened to in over 70 countries worldwide with 46 episodes and counting. I am so happy to know that this podcast has really done so well that we have persons listening to us from all different parts of the world in over 70 countries worldwide – that is just amazing! We focus primarily on Customer Experience, Leadership, Business Development, How to Win the Customers, Service Recovery, Social Media Customer Care. We have touched on so many topics in the last twelve (12) months and it has just been a wonderful experience and to know that I am here today to proudly report to you that we are being listened to again in over 70 countries by over 5,000 people is just a really proud moment for me! I really wanted to express my deepest gratitude to all our listeners out there and even those future listeners who will be hearing this episode when it is aired.

 Today I would like to focus on Winning Accounts vs. Winning Relationships - Winning an account is a great accomplishment and is usually celebrated by the boss and the team as this means more business and more money. Just as any other accomplishment achieved requires maintenance and consistency so does maintaining a consistent relationship with that account holder.

 Every business works extremely hard to acquire new customers. In order to acquire the business, your first step would be to make initial contact with the customer either through email, phone or face to face. After initial contact you now have the customer’s attention, they may purchase your service or product based on their needs. 

Let’s take a look at a few examples:

 Scenario 1 - a newly opened print supplies business opens and they contact you to tell you about their products and services and also how competitive their prices are. You advise them that you already have someone that supplies you with toners and stationery for your office and you decline their offer. They call back one month later and remind you of their services and products because they would really like to stay front and centre in your mind in order to “win your account.” Six months pass and every month they call you to share the same information. One day they even show up at your office with sample products and a free giveaway bag. After one year of courting you – you eventually start purchasing items from them. However, the difference in behaviour is they no longer call and check up to see if you need supplies and months pass sometimes before you even remember that they still exist.

Scenario 2 – an automotive company has sales representatives who prospect at different events and one day while attending a business luncheon you were approached by one and you were intrigued by the cars they sold and also the features and benefits of these vehicles. The sales representative calls you weekly as they know you really want to change your vehicle. They contact the bank and have the relationship manager at the bank call you, they also contact the insurance company and arrange for everything. Over 6 months have passed and you have encountered other automotive sales representatives but the original one that you met stands out in your mind as they always followed up no matter what. Therefore, when you were ready to make the purchase – you automatically called the representative who contacted you consistently. You finally receive your new vehicle and the representative called you a day after the delivery of your car and also a week after. However, one year has passed and you have never heard back from that representative.

In all the above scenarios – we must recognize that winning the customers’ account is very important, however, building strong relationships is much more important. Customers do not want to be treated as transactions instead they would like to be treated as people. All customers want value added services.

My challenge to you is think of your business offering and look at how you can offer value-added service to your customers…..

Statistics have shown that people don’t remember what you did but they do remember how you made them feel. How do your customers feel after doing business with you – are your customers your biggest fans? Do they speak highly of your company? Do your team members feel proud to work at your company? When they wear their branded shirts with your company logo and go in public areas do they feel proud to represent your brand and company?

If the answer to any of these questions is NO! Your company specifically your leaders need to look at why the team may feel this way and also why the customers feel this way because as we stated before human beings usually remember how you made them feel!

Tips for Building Relationships

1. Give back to your existing and loyal customers even if you are a monopoly. Customers like to know they are saving money or they are getting value like a free item or service for a month such coupons and complimentary gift certificates.
2. Use the information in your customer records such as birthday, anniversary, upgrades or specials in relation to a previous purchase a customer made.
3. Courtesy calls for customers just to see how their business is doing and also how they are doing as people. This can be scheduled such as every 6 months.
4. Do business with the companies that do business with you. We should all support each other especially the people who support you. This will allow you to get to know your customers on another level as well.
5. Be human. This last tip is quite simple but if not applied can damage your business. A company is not made up of equipment, machinery, products etc. but people are the ones responsible for how your employees feel and how your customers feel! Be connected in your words and actions, be deliberate when working with your team and customers and make sure you show compassion in your interactions because “People won’t show you how much they care, until you show them how much you care.”

Links

Navigating the Customer Experience Facebook Community

Navigating the Customer Experience Twitter

First Online Programme – Mastering Customer Experience and Increasing Your Revenue

Tema Frank is a best-selling author, international speaker, teacher and business consultant. Tema Frank has over three decades’ experience in marketing strategy, usability testing, and customer experience improvement. In 2001 she launched Web Mystery Shoppers Inc., the world’s first company to do “omnichannel” customer experience testing. Using social media techniques before “social media” existed, she recruited a panel of 75,000 mystery shoppers worldwide. In doing all of this, Tema was able to test all of the customer service channels that organizations would experience such as: live chat, telephone, social media and in-store. Tema is also a fellow podcaster and she started podcasting in 2012, she is our podcast senior and her podcast is called Frank Reactions Podcast on Customer Experience, a definitely must listen.

Questions

• Tell us a little about yourself and your journey
• Can you speak a little bit about your 3P profit formula that you speak about in your book and why do you think the brand is so important and what would be some of your recommendations as it relates to a small business trying to incorporate some of the things that your book recommends into their own business?
• What are some everyday solutions that you believe that can help change the mindset of some of these business owners so that training their staff and getting them understand how they want them to treat their customers a priority?
• Tema’s first experience working at a bank where she had team members that were hanging out at a bar with the boss drinking during the working day, while you guys put in all these work, how was that experience?
• What are your thoughts on Social Customer Care?
• What is the one website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• We have a lot of listeners who are business owners and managers who feel they have great products and service but they lack the constantly motivated Human Capital. If you were sitting across the table from that person, what’s the one piece of advice that you would give them to have a successful business?
• What’s one thing going on in your life right now that you’re really excited about (What are you working on to develop yourself and your people)?
• What is one quote or saying that during times of adversity and challenges that you refer to as a reminder to help you get more focused?

Highlights

• Tema stated that she was always customer focused and her very first career was in Business Government Relations and as a known as a Lobbyist and that’s all about understanding public and how the public react things and what’s important to them. She stated that she started to develop it from there, that this focus on understanding customers, understanding users, so it was always an interest of hers and then her first book which came out in the mid 1990’s was about Canada’s best employers for women and what she concluded was that best for women were great for men too because they treated all people well and of course a huge element for great customer experience is great employee experience. The recent book just kind of ties it all that together but she thinks that customer experience is just so important because we all are customers and to have a good society, we need to treat each other with respect.

Yanique stated that it’s one of the things that motivated her to start this podcast because she is a customer experience trainer and she goes into organizations and helps them to work with their leaders, work with all of their team members so that they can all get an understanding that customer experience is everyone’s responsibility not just the customer facing employees because for some reason, IT and Accounts seem to think that because they are not directly interfacing with the customers it’s not their responsibility.

• Tema stated that the exciting thing is that in some ways it is easier for small businesses because one of the key elements to creating great customer experiences is a leader, a CEO who cares and who thinks that it’s important, so if you have your own business, you’re in a wonderful place to set that tone. The book Peopleshock: The Path to Profits When Customers Rule, when she talks about the 3 P’s of profit, the 3 P’s are Promise, People and Process and you need to all of these right to create great on going customer experience. The Promise is: why are you doing what you’re doing? And what about it will motivate people to care? And those people include customers and employees and she gives some examples in the book. Even a business as seemingly uninspiring as a janitorial service company, you can find ways to make that inspiring. The Promise is also important because it sets a guideline and a filter for decision making because part of providing great customer service and customer experience involves letting go and giving your front lines more responsibility and more authority, if they’ve all understood and bought into this common vision then they have a filter it helps them make the right decisions when they have to make decisions without you there to say yes or no. People is the second element and we obviously focus a lot on employees which is crucial because you’re not going to have happy customer if you don’t have happy employees but beyond that and beyond the customers and prospects, there is a whole range of other people who will effect whether or not you can deliver consistently great customer experience, so that includes people like your suppliers, your distributors, so if you have been rude to your suppliers and don’t treat them well and there is a shortage of supplies, who think is going to get it? It won’t be you. So all those external relationships with vendors, with all these people can influence ultimately whether or not you can keep on delivering great customer experience through good times and bad. The third P and this is where a lot of organizations slip up is Process, when you are just getting started, you don’t have a lot of processes in place and you can sort of fly by the seat of your pants and just do stuff and get it done and that’s great when you’re getting started. Tema stated that she would really recommend that any small business right from the beginning, start documenting how you’re doing things. There’s a whole bunch of reasons for doing that not just for customer experience, it will also make it easier as you grow but you want to re-evaluate your processes as you grow so every once a year, look back, “how we’re doing things and does this make sense?” there is an example that she gives in the book of a manufacturing company and they complain that there is this one customer for whom they always have to punch a into a piece of metal before they can ship it to them, it was kind of annoying but it was a good customers so they said, “ok, fine, we’ll do it for them” then interviewing the customer, it turned out they were saying, “we love working with this company but it’s really annoying because they ship us these parts with holes in them and we have to fill the hole before we can use it.” Doing some research it turned out that the need for that hole dated back to a decade earlier when they were both using different equipment and at that point it was needed but nobody really had ever reassess the process, here they were doing something that added to the time, added to the cost, added to everybody’s frustration and it wasn’t helping anything, in fact it was hindering. So regularly evaluate that third P.

• Tema stated that the best thing you can if you can persuade them to do it is for them to go and work on the front lines for awhile, just spend a day or half a day or even a month working on the front lines and find out what’s really going on there because as you become more senior in an organization or even in a small business, if you as the CEO are focused on raising money and doing big deals, once you get the deal you’re not thinking about what’s happening to that customer and it’s really easy to lose touch. So the most important thing is get out there, talk to customers, existing customers not just focusing on getting new ones and if it’s possible, get on the front lines and find out what they are experiencing or go undercover. She stated that there is a show in the US called Undercover Boss and it amazes her with that show how many of the CEO’s and they are always shocked by what they discover and she’s thinking, “What makes you think you need to go on TV to do this?” Throw on a wig, go to your store, you don’t need a TV show to do the undercover thing. So that’s something that is really valuable. If you are not the CEO or the owner of the business and you’re trying to convince them then the next best thing that you can do is bring them the voice of the customers, so whether that’s through an audio recording where they are actually hearing the customer complain, something that makes it real to them, even if you can’t get an audio recording, even if it’s transcribing, writing out the words, these are the exact words our customers are using, that will help make it real to them in a way that reports our statistics or you telling them in your own words just aren’t going to have the same impact. She recommends if you can get them on the front lines or getting yourself on the front lines and if you can’t at least present the voice of the customer to those in charge.

• Tema shared that one of her first work experiences was depressing and that was what led her into entrepreneurship because she thought that was just ridiculous. It was an interesting experience, basically they apart of a rebel unit that was set up and the guy that was leading the rebel unit, he was great at building a team which did involve hanging out in bars and partying but then once he had the team in place and there was work to be done, he wanted to continue hanging out in bars and partying and her boss came to her said, “Look, you’re not helping your career by staying in the office and doing your job, you should be at the bar with the VP” she was working in marketing at the time. She said, “Sorry, that was not what I signed up for” when the time came for lay offs, all the first people to get let go were those of them that was doing the work and it took 9 months before head office realise that everything was falling apart and then he finally got fired but it was really frustrating and disheartening experience but it gave her the opportunity to start her own business.

Yanique stated that she believes that out of every negative situation there is always something positive that can come from it. So Tema sharing her story and seeing how she has been able to rise above the obstacles and she is able to let people know that at the end of the day you do have some employees who genuinely want to come and do a great job, they are not into slacking off and just sitting around and not doing anything, so that’s important.

Tema shared that the thing is, if employees are just slacking off and not doing anything is usually because you have failed to motivate them with that promise. You’re not treating them right; you’re not inspiring them. Tema stated that money is necessary so that you can survive but paying somebody more won’t get them to be more customer friendly. She stated that one of the biggest solutions that entrepreneurs could use to motivate their employees is involving them into decisions making, instead of imposing decisions from above, try to get decisions to often flow from below, so the people who are closet to your customers in some ways have the best knowledge about what’s going on in your organization and a lot of employee unhappiness is because they feel they are not heard and they do in fact know better than some of their bosses but the bosses won’t listen and don’t care about what they think. So you want to involve people at all levels and from all departments in decision-making and in strategizing about how we can make things better for the customer. Earlier Yanique mentioned that often IT and Accounts don’t think that customers have anything to do with them and one thing to over come that is to get those people on departmental teams and let them start hearing the customer. Her first major business with Web Mystery Shoppers, the reason she created that company which was in the early days of eCommerce and websites and she found that their was a marketing department, sometimes a completely separate eCommerce unit and then the IT people, they all depended on each other but they were set up as completely separate units and weren’t even speaking the same language and what she did with that business is that she would have anywhere from 30 to 300 people from their target market who gave detailed feedback about, “This is what’s frustrating us about your website” and when she was able to go back to all these units and show them that it was a way to bring all these people together and realise that they did have a common objective.

Yanique stated that on Tema’s website is that there is a free book that you offer 85 Tips for User Friendly Website and one of the things she found is that when she is looking for guests for her show and she’ll probably source them through Amazon if they wrote a book that really inspired her and thinks it would be good to hear their message and Amazon probably has their profile with information about the author and it usually should have a link to their website or some of the authors has their email address listed right there, what she found very frustrating as a customer herself is that most websites for some reason have a contact us form where they control how they contact you versus giving her the opportunity for you to provide their email address so that she can reach out to them because when she sends that contact us form and it says send, she is not guaranteed that somebody is going to receive that in an inbox and respond to her in a reasonable time. Tema shared that is part of what is driving people onto Social media to complain as if you provided me with better service in quieter means whether it’s making yourself easily accessible to customers through phone or through email and dealt with that better then people would not go and complain about you so much in public.

• Social Customer Care is something that is rising – many companies have contributed to that happening by underfunding their Call Centers. Therefore, as a customer if you have a choice in sending out a tweet and getting a response versus spending half an hour hold – of course the customer will choose the quickest response and do the tweet! So what has happened is companies have trained customers to go on Social Media, so we can’t turn that clock back and so smart companies are now staffing accordingly and making sure they catch things on Social Media quickly and deal with them well and quickly.

• Yanique shared that many customers do not share private messages with companies – they post the complaint on their wall. Tema agreed and said as a company – you should respond immediately in a non – defensive way. Tema also made reference to the CEO of United Airlines that companies should start by blaming the customer! Companies should approach the complaint calmly, let’s talk about this sounds complicated, maybe we can discuss this offline – I would be happy to help you. Then you send the message to anyone that saw the public tweet that, “Yes, we care and we want to help.” Tema responded to Yanique’s question by saying deleting posts or complaints that customers make is a very silly approach as this places you at risk for the situation to escalate further. Especially in an era with Screenshots!

• Tema shared the one website, tool or app that she absolutely cannot live without in her business is Gmail. An enhancement to Gmail called “Active Inbox.” Tema shared Active Inbox is a task manager that is attached to Gmail that allows you to set tasks, set appointments.

• Tema shared some of the books that have some great impact on her over the years – “The Effective Executive” by Peter Drucker – so much good advice about how to bring out the best in your people. The one message that has stuck with Tema over the years is instead of trying to fix people’s weaknesses – structure their jobs so they focus on their strengths. Her other book recommendation was “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jnr. and E.B. White, about how to write more clearly and effectively – the main message Tema has taken away is to omit needless words – anytime you have written anything go back and see if you can substitute a 3 syllable word with a one syllable word and have the same meaning – the more you can distill that way – the more powerful your message will be.

• In response to Yanique’s question on how to motivate your employees in having a successful business - hire carefully and listen to all of your employees, ask them questions, get to know them, involve them in ideas and decision making. If you do that and involve them as a real person – you will get plenty out of them.

• Tema shared that she is working on an update for her first book that she wrote in the mid 90’s – Best Employer. Tema is also working on how she can make the concepts and principles of Peopleshock: The Path to Profits when Customers Rule more accessible through online courses and workbooks.

• Tema shared that connecting with her is pretty easy:
  • Email: [email protected]
  • Twitter @temafrank
  • Linked In – Tema Frank
  • Frank Reactions Facebook Page
  • Frank Reactions Podcast on Customer Experience

• Tema shared the quote or saying that she uses to re-ignite her spirit during times of adversity is “Remember the movie isn’t over yet” – meaning we are at a low point but something good is coming!

This episode with Yanique Grant will spend some time speaking about business culture, a little bit about leadership and also customer experience. According to the business dictionary online, business culture is the module or style of business operations within a company, the culture determines how different level of staff communicate with one another as well as how employees deal with clients and customers, culture is very important.

Highlights

As a Customer Experience Strategist and a Coach in customer experience and in the experience that she as garnered over the last 8-10 years, many companies have asked her, “Yanique, how can we improve our customer experience? What do you think is the main reason why customer experience is so poor?” and her number 1 reason is always the leadership, “Are you walking the talk? Are you showing behaviors and attitudes that your employees can emulate? D you have systems in place that reward employees for great behavior, for great interaction with your customers?” Many of the great brands globally believe that customer experience is the backbone of their business and it’s the number one differentiator because no business has a monopoly in what they’re doing in terms of the product or service they offer, it’s guaranteed that somebody else out there that sells a book or somebody else out there that’s a health coach or somebody else out there that is repairing a car but what is going differentiate the experience is the quality of the experience, the things that happing in the experience, when things go wrong how does that individual recover the experience with the customer and that’s why culture is very important to your business growth and your business development.

Yanique stated that she will share some basic things that she believes should be incorporated if you are clearly serious about your business and you want to improve on your culture. Throughout her career as a leader, managers have developed culture management systems around 5 key points and they are:

The right vision and unique ways to constantly reinforce why we do what we do and it goes back to walking the talk. As the leader in the organization, you need to know what kind of culture you want demonstrated in your organization and find unique ways to constantly reinforce it so that people can see it everyday, it’s similar to parenting. You hire all these people and they may have the right attitude and the necessary competencies to complete the job on a daily basis but they all socialize differently, coming from different backgrounds, having different life experiences and now they are all working together towards a common vision and goal but they are not going to be able to miraculously come on day 1 or day 3 or day 10 or day 50 and just know exactly what to do and this is why as a leader it is important to constantly reinforce what it is that they are doing, why they are doing what they are doing and how is it going to benefit them. Yanique stated that she is a big supporter of leaders in an organization who have a vested interest in the development of their employees, so if your business is going to grow and your bottom line has increased immensely and your shareholders are very happy, your employees should actually see an improvement in the quality of their lives as well because if the business grows, the employees should be growing as well not just professionally but they should also be growing in a way that they can advance their life. Point number 2 is simple focus systems like focus scorecards to align key managers, so you need some level of assessment and measurement because people will do as they feel like doing and it’s very important to have a structure in place where people are measured and assessed consistently. Reward systems that drive the right behavior is number 3 because it’s so important for people to know that when they do something right, they are commended for it, they are rewarded for it. Reward doesn’t mean you have to give them money because many people are not driven by money, it could be that the team gets a weekend away or maybe they get a book or a gift certificate so you have to take time a leader to get to know your team members and figure out what it is that they like and what they don’t like because everyone isn’t motivated by money. Effective coaching tools that help associate and live the values and help associate to get the results, so coaching is very important because all of these people are new to this experience of a corporate culture and customer experience and having that mindset where everything that you do is driven by the customer in mind first. Coaching is very important to that process because if that’s not how the individual naturally thinks or naturally processes information, they are going to need help in terms of guiding them coaching them in that direction. Point number 5 is constant process improvement; now quality customer experience is about doing it right the first time, every time and so consistency is key. Customers can be unforgiving at times so you can have a customer who has been your customer for 20 years and the one time you mess up, they just blow the roof and you simply say to yourself, “I’ve been doing business with you for 19 plus years, we’ve done it right the first time, every time and this one time, can’t you just cut us some slack?” Unfortunately, some customers don’t give you that opportunity and that’s why constant process improvement will help to drive consistency of those interactions and behaviors with your team members and customers so it will minimize the errors and risks that may come about in creating problems with your customers. It is so important to ensure that you have a good business culture. Leadership is critical to cultural development and has much as many leaders may want to shy away from the opportunity or responsibility of cultural development; it is very much apart of your daily interactions, most leaders should have a scoring that they are assess on by the board of an organization in terms of whether or not the culture of the organization has improved, because culture is not just the HR department’s responsibility, HR is just one small function of culture in  a business and it’s very important for the leader to recognize that you drive HR processes and the department, you drive the marketing, you drive the accounts, you drive the culture because the culture is the interaction of the people with each other and as a result of that their interaction with your external customers. Yanique stated that one thing that she strongly believes as it relates to culture, culture can often be mistakenly thought of has a vague concept, like the nice to things but it’s not just the nice to things, it’s the things that drive the behavior and interaction and if it’s not driven correctly, it can lead to you having a lot of service issues and service issues can cause a lot of money especially if you’re losing customers. In customer experience no business wants a customer never to come back, they want their customers to repeat their business over and over again so that you have customer lifetime value and you can listen back to many of the previous episodes where they have had guests who came on who are experts in the customer lifetime value calculation and the importance of ensuring that you retain your existing customers because it costs so much to get a new customer. You want to focus on critical que behaviors in your organization so that you can change the existing behaviors, you won’t be able to change everyone but the aim is to try and do as much as possible to get some form of improvement within the organization. If you culture is wrong, it can make or break your organization very easily, so you want to make sure that your leaders in your organization understand the importance of culture. We hope that persons who are listening to this podcast understand that the employee in an organization is really driven by the behavior and attitudes that your leaders demonstrate and they watch you every single day even when you think they are not watching, they are watching, they are forming an impression and they are forming a perception, they observe how you interact with the customers, they observe how you interact with the employees. If you get upset with an employee because they did something to satisfy a customer’s need, it is going to drive fear into other employees who have observe because now they are not going to feel as confident to step out on the limb and satisfy a customer’s need because they observed you reprimanding Bill last week for dealing with a customer’s issue and in Bill’s mind, Bill was able to satisfied that customer’s need and the customer left happy but in the bosses mind, he should have not taken that decision on his own and with that in mind, Tom who observed what happened is not going to take that action on their own next and if you’re no there then that delays the whole service experience. Service recovery is the backbone of customer experience and it’s most effective at the first point of contact, if you customers recognize that you’re not taking their business seriously then they are going to move their business to somewhere that that company values their business and appreciate their business. It is so important as the leader to really recognize what requires improvement and understand your role in that entire process. We are at the beginning of second quarter in 2017, for those of you listening to this podcast; Yanique is going to encourage you to think about your own business, whether you’re the business owner, whether you’re the business leader, whether you’re a manager in the organization and even if you’re an employee, you can contribute as well. If your business is not the type of business that your customers are walking up and down everyday speaking positive things about your business or people are not clambering to become employees of your business because you have such an amazing culture then there is opportunity for improvement within your business. If your answer to any of these questions, made you sit down and think and say, “hmm, maybe we could improve in this area or maybe we could improve in that area.” Yanique is challenging you to make that improvement by the end of this month. It is so important to focus on what needs to be improved and then take the steps to improve them, everything can’t be done overnight and culture is not something that changes within a month or within 3 months, it takes time. We encourage you whether you work with an external consultant and bring them in as a subject expert to help you business grow on a consistent basis or if you chose to do it on your own internally, whatever your strategy is you have to make an effort to do something. Sitting down and doing nothing is not going to achieve the results that you want to get and because your customers are the reason why you are in business, you have to ensure that you empower your employees, equip them with the necessary tools and tools don’t always mean the system that they are using or the procedures they need to follow but tools also mean the interpersonal skills that they require in order to feel confident and empowered to deal with your customers. We challenge you to do something differently than what you’re doing now so that you can improve on your business and improve on business culture. What kind of culture do you want to have, do you want when people call your business name in public the positive thoughts or the positive sayings that come about are, “Yes, that company is really great, their employees are very friendly, they are knowledgeable, they operate with speed, my deliveries or my orders are always on time, they can answer any question that I ask, they are very efficient, they are very responsible, they are reliable.” Those are adjectives that can only come about if your culture is one that has values that support the things that people are saying. We challenge you as a owner, a leader, a manager, as an employee to go back into your organizations and look for opportunities that you can change one thing that can contribute to a positive culture in your business.

Links

• 10 Vital Principles to Improve the Culture, Performance and Revenues in Your Business

• How Company Culture Can Make or Break Your Business

As Founder and CEO of Mattson Enterprise, Inc. Glenn oversees an elite team of practice development consultants who provide solutions to agency leaders and salespeople facing the challenges of achieving extraordinary success in highly competitive and overcrowded markets. Glenn is an extremely sought after keynote speaker, a gifted and respected platform trainer, coach, advisor and author. He stated, “My business is helping my clients transform their business into a more efficient, productive and profitable one” Glenn’s background is that he helps his clients build a successful business comes from successfully building and selling his first business while he was still an undergraduate student. Glenn was so effective at generating new revenues for his business that it dominated the marketplace and was later sold for a multiple of annual revenues. After college, Glenn joined the Sandler Training organization. His early career was nothing to brag about. He made mistakes. Some costly. But, using the same systems he uses with his clients today, he became the #1 Sandler associate both nationally and internationally. His personal success was a difficult, deliberate, and demanding journey. One of Glenn’s philosophy is, “I believe once you are crystal clear on WHY you want something, finding HOW to do it won’t be far behind. Being successful isn’t difficult. Thinking and acting successful, IS!”

Question

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• How do you believe that customer experience supports efficiency and productivity, give some examples of why customer experience is important?
• As a customer, how do you feel about customer experience?
• As part of Sandler Training, could you share with us a little bit about the customer experience section that focuses on customer service and what that program is about?
• How do you change the mindset of persons who believe unless you are in customer service, customer service doesn’t apply to them?

Highlights

• Glenn Mattson stated that like most people if you were asked how they are on a personal level, he thinks the great balance is the golden rule which is to do unto others as you want to be done unto you and that usually in the last 40 years has been a really good rule for him among others, so the golden rule is an important one for them and it does help traumatically making sure you’re doing the right ethical thing and instead of thinking what’s right for you, if you’re in their shoe, what’s right them and that always works. He stated that the flip side is that he was asked about what really makes a difference in his life, one of it is among other things is literally having a very clear picture of what you’re trying to build and with that very clear picture is being incredible motivated to the actions not the results but the actions you need to have to achieve those results and unfortunately in this day and age everyone wants everything quickly and time needs to be apart of the success. He stated that one of the greatest things were patience and grit and long-term dedication to doing the daily behaviors.

• Glenn Mattson stated that if you look at the pure numbers, 80% of the people that don’t go back to rebuy is because of a bad experience, so when we look at it, your experience is what you dictates repeatable sales. Your marketing and selling will get you the first one, your selling and everything will get you the second and third but your client experience is really a true testament on your second, your third, your forth, the ease of the sale afterwards is the direct proportion, so if you look at it, 80% that decide not to go back, decide not to buy again is due to poor experience. Glenn stated that we spend so much time and energy trying to get in front of the right people and then we forget about how to keep them and unfortunately that’s just as important as finding them.

• Glenn stated that the way he looks at it is depending on what your expectations are because experience is historically for most is that they didn’t get what they expected and for more times than not you have to ask yourself what are you explaining, what are you conveying, what’s the message you’re giving, what kind of experience can they have. There are plenty out there that are very inexpensive products that tell you that you’re going to buy it cheap but you’re not going to get a great customer experience, meaning that you’re saving on all fronts, so others that have more value, they have the ability of heighten level of experience so they feel that the money they are investing is worth it. When people spend a premium or spend a dollar amount and they don’t get the service they are looking for, that is the number one reason people leave, they expected A but they got B.

Glenn stated that we all have experience bad customer service. He stated that most people want attention, we want value, we want to have respect in a lot of ways, we want resolutions when something goes wrong, we want you to fix it but we also want to make sure that you follow up. When he looks at his own experiences with service, everyone makes mistakes and that’s understandable, it how you handle the mistakes that are critical. Glenn shared an experience he had, there was service issue that he had with a client where he was the customer and someone was going through it and instead of just flat out saying, “we made a mistake, I apologize, this was what he can do to fix it” it was more of the questions they were asking was trying to make it seem like he made a mistake and what was happening is that they were reducing his level of respect, so more times than not, that’s usually what gets us is that respect, that integrity, it’s the “I did what you told me to do and it didn’t work” “I got that, I understand it, let’s just fix it, let’s not try to figure out why, I’m the one to blame when it came out this way” that piece was probably the one that left the biggest taste in his mouth which is they didn’t accept responsibility.

• Glenn stated that when we take a look at efficiency and effectiveness which means that they have some type of process in place and within that process, the sequential steps but also there is competencies and skills in that part of it, once they have that done, how you get better at it, it becomes efficiencies and effectiveness in terms of results, so when they look at what they call their customer care program, it’s not just external customers, it’s also how do you do treating your internal customers, how you do treating your staff because your staff is a direct portion to you, to your client base. He stated that it’s interesting when he has conversations with people and they talk about what a successful mindset is, a successful mindset is someone who takes responsibility or accountability or ownership, people don’t realize that 87% of your staff learns how to deal with clients, how to deal with each other and how to deal with stress based on how their boss does it, they are one person above them. So when they look at customer care, they have a 12 module program that they run people through and a lot of it has to deal with understanding a couple of things, one is what is the backdrop of what’s happening, do you really have the skills, the patience, listen, questioning skills, are you getting emotionally involved, are you getting defensive because if that happens, you cannot be a successful customer service person. They look at what do you need and then they turn around and say, “now let’s take a look at the process itself, how do you create the right attitude, how do you develop trust really quickly, how do you take control, how do you have ownership of the situation and what are the best ways to follow up and if there is, how do you identify opportunities for potential future sales.

• Glenn agreed that people think that customer service is a title and not necessarily a culture or an attitude. He shared that Harvard University did a study that will tell you that the majority of companies will fail in achieving their goals is because the individuals don’t understand one of two things; one is what is the direction of the company, what are the rules. The other is they don’t know how to tie their personal into the company, so when you talk about sales people, sales people desperately needs customer service and so does IT, that’s usually one of the biggest areas that people have issues with. Once you realize that everyone’s role is to maximize or heighten the client experience. He shared an example, down in Florida, at a resort in Tampa and the person who owns it is well known for his artwork inside and it has to do with the oceans. He is at the resort and is there for 4 days with his daughter, his wife and his son, he’s at an essence lost in looking for where to find the tennis courts, simple easy, piece of cake. Walking down 7:00 am in the morning and he asked a woman who is clearly leaving one building to go to another for something else, she’s kind of moving fast, he said, “I don’t mean to bug you but can you point me in the direction to where to the tennis courts are?” she said, “absolutely, are you running late for a lesson?” and he said, “yes I am” and she said, “follow me then” she walked him right to the tennis courts versus telling him where to go and as they talked, she asked him all about his family, they talked about why he was down there, what is experience was, she has been apart of that hotel for 25 years. The hotel was a nice place but what he’ll remember about it and why he would recommend people to go there is because of the feeling he got from her. That was the home run, the mere fact that a woman who has been there for awhile, who had no interest in helping him find something, could have just pointed in the direction and just said, “it’s over there, keep moving until you find it” but she walked him over and they had a great conversation, he had a connection to the hotel now through a person and it made his experience.

Yanique shared that she had a similar experience when she went to a hotel for an All You Can Eat Pizza Night, it was extremely disorganized because they had a book launch before and they didn’t advice the persons who where coming for the All You Can Eat Pizza Night that they was a launch before and so these events were merged together and so those persons who didn’t know of the launch came famish and completely ready to engage in pizza and the waitress they got, she was extremely courteous, friendly, she really came down to there level, spoke with them candidly. It felt like she was a friend at the end of the evening, she knew her name. She told her if she came back to the hotel, she would definitely come back and deal with her again, it really boils down to the feeling, the connection she gave to them, she’s not sure if everyone at the location had the same experience but she certainly left feeling much better than she when she just arrived.

Glenn stated that most people want to be better but most have never been trained on how to be better.

Yanique agreed and stated that she had an experience in a supermarket and her girlfriend was there with her and she was by the fruits and vegetable section and there was a young man packing out sweet peppers in the fridge, he referred to her in a very informal term, she can’t recall what he said and she said to him, “you really shouldn’t refer to your customers like that, you should say to them excuse me miss or sir or madam” and he said to her, “no one has ever told me that before” what was extremely a BFO (Blinding Flash of the Obvious) to her was that how can you have someone working in your organization, even if they are just packing things in an area in the supermarket and you have not even brief them on how it is that are to interact with your customers because you can’t just hire people and put them to work.

Glenn shared that most unfortunately don’t realize who might touch a customer, one of the first things they do in one of their modules is who is the front line, receptionist, sales, billing, accounting, technical people, installers, drivers, warehouse people, anyone who has any interaction with a client at any level and for most they realize that, why would you train a driver for instance that delivers things on customer care. The reality is that they have some of the best ears and eyes that others don’t have, so who is really that person, how do we effectively communicate, how do we effectively understand our clients or customers and then you get into one the best questioning techniques because customer service is not about information you give, it’s about the information you can obtain, you need to understand what’s going on in the world to provide good customer service. Customer service is not talking; customer service is exceptionally great ears and being very good at asking questions so you can get to the root of the problem. You add the attitude piece to it, which is a lot of time when you deal with customer service issues, people aren’t the happiest all the time, so how do you deal with difficult people, how do you make sure that you don’t get emotionally involved, how do you make sure that we don’t get stuck in the emotional game, meaning that when they do something or say something, we take it personal, we get defensive, our brain shuts down, we panic, we start doing self talk to ourselves, we forget everything they say, for some people they block out and when they hang up the telephone, everything that we’re suppose to say, should have said, could have said pops in their head. So it’s not a problem of not knowing, the problem was in the heat of the battle you panicked so mentally you left the battle and after you have the chance to regain your composure, all the techniques came to you.

• Glenn shared that what he finds is that most of us is that our goals create motivation, motivation creates a sense of ownership which is responsibility because when we do goals, one of the things that he found for years is that everyone may say that they have a goals program and 80% of the people walking planet earth have no goals whatsoever. Sixteen percent of the people that are walking planet earth have an idea of what they want, less than 4% actually have goals, have them written down and less than 1% look at them but where the numbers get crazy, is the people that are at 16% who just have an idea of what they want in life, they are 10 times more effective than those who don’t have any idea and the people that have the goals written, they are 3 times more effective than those who just have a concept, now they translate it into action now this is the staggering thing about motivation, people who have goals, they look at them every week and they do their plan, they earn 9 times more than those who don’t. When you look at motivation, it is what are you really trying to build, are what are you willing to give up to get it. They are very clear on what they trying to do, they are trying to maximize the client experience, and they are reducing the cost to sale. How do they give their clients what they want the fastest, easiest, most productive, most effective way possible? They are never sitting on their roles, they are never sitting back saying, “we did really good that year” the question always become is how do they get better and they do it more efficiently, more effective. He is and he has to be a pure representation of what they trying to get their clients to do.

• Glenn stated that there are about 3 apps that he couldn’t live without, it’s one of their own, it’s an app that he uses for managing his behavior, it’s called an Arbs a behaviour and Accountability app, once you have your plan and your action steps it tracks it everyday, you can’t hide from it, he finds it fantastic. The two other apps that he uses, one is because he travels, it’s called Flight Tracker and he finds it very effective. The third app that he thinks is phenomenal, it has transformed itself, it use to be a service where they read emails to you way back before we had cellphones, it’s called Copytalk, Copytalk transformed itself into a dictation service, so every time he’s on the phone with someone, it could be a prospecting call, it could be a client call, it could be a service call, it could be a training meeting, anyone. He could do a Copytalk and it transfer his memory from his head to his mouth and they transfer it from his mouth to typed, so at the end of the day he’ll get 10 or 15 or 20 emails from Copytalk on all his summaries of everything he did that day. For instance he says to someone during a quick call, “that sounds like a good idea, let me send you that slide” or “that’s great let me put that book into the mail for you” if he hangs up and jump right into another call, that goes to his to do list and those to do list get big fast, it works best for him for follow ups, for efficiency and effectiveness, it’s not relaying on his memory. When he Copytalk he tells people on his staff, “I need you to do this or can you do that or make sure that gets to so and so”, so now they have a memory jogger too and it gets transferred to the to do list. They have found it to be the best ways to internally communicate within the team on where they are with progress and statues.

• Glenn shared that he has a couple books that has had the biggest impact and one is The Formula for Success by Napoleon Hill, the other one that he found to be quite useful but it’s his background but he’s a big proponent of Eric Berne, he is a psychologist that transformed or created something called Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy and it’s a theory that says all of us have 3 different egos states in us, so child, adult and a parent and we have to speak with them independently. So if someone comes to us very angry in a customer situation, that’s their 4 year old inside of them that is angry, so you need to hear the 4 year old but you need to fix the adult, because it’s the adult one that’s going to tell everyone about it, if you try to fix the adult without talking to the child, you’ll never get to the true emotional bonding part. The book is powerful and understanding human nature. The third book that is fantastic is a Sandler book, You Can’t Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar: The Sandler Sales Institute’s 7-Steps System for Successful Selling it is basically saying that if you do really want to expand, if you do really want to get great at your profession, you’re not going to figure this thing out at a one day seminar, so it does take time and energy. He had a lot of problems when he just started, a lot of head trash, a lot anxiety, a lot of fears, a lot of issues with people thinking he was a sales person versus an account rep or a service person, but what he found is that once he started working on his beliefs, his fears, his anxiety, his scripts and then understanding how to put plans together, understanding that the majority of people don’t in the world do that and those who do are really more successful than he was so why would he buck the system, so he just became a product of his own process and it worked.

• Glenn shared that one of the things that they are doing right now is spending a lot of time and energy into distant learning. That’s helping individuals all around the world learn versus just having him present face to face, so one of the exciting things is how they can really maximize technology today and how they can help more people around the country versus only helping those he can get face to face or get time to go to conventions.

• Glenn shared that listeners can find him at -

www.mattson.sandler.com

Glenn Mattson LinkedIn

Sandler Training YouTube

• Glenn shared the quote that inspires him in times of adversity is “Today I will do what others won’t, so tomorrow I can do what others want but can’t.” In other words, do what most won’t do to have a life that most want. Glenn stated that for persons listening or starting a business or thinking about starting a business, one of the beautiful thing about business is that you can start, you just need to do your due diligence, find out about your product, find out about your plan, find out about your finances, do as much diligence as you can and do the best you can to take you and have you number 3, your clients number 1, your staff number 2 and you’re number 3 or 4. If you remember that it makes building a business a little easier.

Links

• Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy by Eric Berne
• You Can’t Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar: The Sandler ales Institute’s 7-Step System for Successful Selling by David Sandler

Nicole McLaren Campbell is professional Speaker, Educator and Entrepreneur. Driven by a passion for empowerment, she represented Jamaica at MIT’s Junior Summit and was selected to address then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan at just 13 years old. She was subsequently featured in local and International Media including CNN and Nickelodeon and was chosen has one of 20 teens who will change the world by Teen People Magazine. She’s a graduate of the St. Andrew High School for Girls and completed her High School studies at Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts before going on to earn an Undergraduate Degree in Economics from Princeton University in 2006. Nicole also studied at the Stanford University Summer Institute and the University of London where she earned a Master’s Degree in Globalization and Development. In late 2016, Nicole started the AIM Higher Foundation with a mandate to indentify, develop and empower promising low income students so that they can too access and unlock their potential through access to tertiary education, her vision is to inspire youth globally to aim higher.

Question

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• You can tell us a little bit about your company Aim Educational Services and what it is that you do and why do you think customer experience is important to that whole process?
• How do you feel about customer service/ customer experience as a customer yourself doing business on a regional level or internationally?
• Nicole’s book, Making It Count: The Tips on Unlocking Your Vision in 2017 and Beyond, some of the key points are fear, having courage to ask for what you want, procrastination and tuning into your purpose and staying motivated. How do you do all of those things for your team members?
• What are some important considerations that you would recommend to business owner they take into account moving into the online space in order to be successful?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Nicole McLaren-Campbell shared her journey and stated that part of it is making sure and trying to protect your motivation every single day as much as possible and being deliberate about your approach every single day and then wherever possible, try to coach your team in a similar way but also be very cognizant that as a leader/parent, you have to lead by example and that’s something she takes really seriously and so it’s about taking a deliberate approach and understanding yourself and how the brain works and how the human body works and then doing what you can everyday to get the most out of both of them.

• Nicole McLaren-Campbell shared that at Aim Educational Services, when she just started Aim about 7 years ago, it stood for Aspiration, Inspiration, Motivation, so Aspiration, Inspiration, Motivation is the meaning behind AIM and every single day they aim to empower students to unlock their potential and really chart an education and career path that’s fulfilling for them based on their interest and talent and customer experience is really important at AIM because how people feel about the service you’re delivering and from the minute they make contact with you on the phone or you make contact with them via email or an initial meeting to the very moment the service is actually delivered to even after - their feeling about how they were dealt with and the experience they had with each person that forms apart of AIM is really important. It’s important for them to deliver the endgame which is admission to college or scholarships but it is also important that the journey a family takes with them is one that they feel empowered during and feel great about. They don’t always get it right but the whole point is that as human beings, when we make a mistake we have to own that mistake completely.
• Nicole stated that she made a pretty large blunder the other day and she is not afraid to talk about it because she thinks what everybody needs to understand as business owners and even as human beings as we try to do our best in life is that sometimes we fall short because we are not perfect, the most important thing in business as well as in one’s daily life is that when you fall short, be very quick to own it and to learn the lesson and ensure you apologize and take responsibility and then put in place what you need to try and ensure that it doesn’t happen again but instead a lot of people hide when they make mistakes or hide when they fall short and that puts a bad taste in the mouth of your customers. It shows your team that instead of taking on something hands on and taking responsibility and dealing with it that it’s okay to make an excuse or give a reason and then that will set the tone. It’s not always perfect and we do fall short but the idea is that when do fall short, own that and take the lesson and move on and apologize and try to make it right with that customer.

• Nicole shared that as a customer she has a lot going on, so she likes a service that is delivered in an efficient way where the communication is very clear from the get go and where she is really treated as somebody that is important, in other words, not that cavalier attitude but she likes when the service provider makes things easier for her. She doesn’t have an issue paying the bill or whatever it takes but at the end of the day as easy you can make it for her to consume/use your service is the easier it is for her. Make it possible for her to send somebody to collect something or send it to her or give her a reminder when she needs to get something done. The world is moving so fast so she thinks it’s also instructive to challenge business owners to put themselves in shoes of the customer because as a mother, wife, you’re running a business, you’re trying to be a great civic citizen and leader as well, there’s a lot going on and she puts herself in the shoes of her customers. She would say to her team, “I know we sent an email remainder about this but not everybody checks their email day.” Or in the same way she could miss an email, the customer could have missed the email too. They are college advising and helping families to chart the educational path of their child and they are tutoring and that means that the parent plays a significant role but AIM has to be responsible at the end of the day for the deliverable, so you can’t just say, “Well, I emailed the parent and they are supposed to now do this and they haven’t done so it’s their fault.” No, at the end of the day, she has to put herself in the shoe of her clients and say, “The same way I’m busy and I would really appreciate a text message reminder.” or “I would really appreciate if all the information is communicated one time instead of piece by piece.” It’s about continuous improvement.
• She stated that she was reading a book called Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth and it’s talking about how people can be in a job for 20 years but they get the same one (1) year of experience 20 times as oppose to 20 significant years of experience where you’re growing and improving every year and that’s a deliberate thing that you have to keep in mind as a person but also as a business owner, your business shouldn’t be at the same stage this year as it was last year, you shouldn’t be doing things in an identical way. How can you make the experience better? They keep looking, they have management meetings every week with their team and they have strategic meeting every two weeks and she’s really about that because it keeps them focused on the fact that it’s all about constant improvement and really making sure that they are flexible to change because they are dealing with Generation Z kids. They are dealing with parents who are generation X and so they have to communicate with them in different ways because both of them are customers. Whereas the email might work for the parents, maybe it’s a What’s app that’s working for the student or maybe they need to be delivering messages through an app instead, it’s just this constant idea of How can I make this experience better for customer? How can I make the deliverable of this service actually happen and not just say, “Well, I did my part” but how can I constantly try to provide support and empower her customers and understanding how the different users or customers receive and process information and what different things prompts each sector to action. You can’t treat the student the same way or try to communicate with the student the same way you would with the parent, so it’s trying to be sensitive to that and making sure it’s a customer centered business.

Nicole stated that based on her team, how they are structured, they have part-time college consultants, part-time tutors, they have a core full-time team of 7 people and everybody else is part-time. They have 15 part-time tutors and 7 invigilators and then they outsource things like accounts and other administrative; they have 4 part-time college consultants, so the team is just under 30 persons.

• Nicole McLaren-Campbell stated that key is to grow her team members and the company and part of it is now insistence on a weekly management team meeting, all members of the full-time core will meet every week. It’s leading by example; nobody wants to hear their boss preaching to them every week so she would try not to preach. They have a book club now and every month somebody gets to choose the book and so she is deliberate with her choices because she’s trying to sneak in the coaching and inspirations through the book club even though they don’t know it. Nicole tries to impart a lot of what she learn in the daily day to day, like when she makes an error she tries to own it 150% so that they can get from her no excuses, things like that are important. She arranged a Vision Board Workshop for her team in the past and now they are due another one, she brings in inspirational person to lead their strategic sessions and to work with them in terms of business coaching because that’s really important, so part of it too is that they see her everyday so she not doing all of that coaching work herself but to also introduce external people who can help with that. There’s nothing better than leading by example and then trying to make sure that just from the way they set their vision and the things they talk about every week and different situations that comes up in the office with clients or with students that the idea of it is all possible, removing obstacles, focusing on solutions and not problems, these the things that they really do on an everyday basis in various ways and she tries to be very deliberate about that. The other thing is that she tries to look for opportunities for them to grow just as the same way she seeks opportunities to grow herself.
• Nicole stated that just the other day she was talking to her assistant about an online course that she wanted to do and she recommended that he also take it because based on what he is interested in that it can be a useful skill set, so that emphasis on continuous growth and improvement where she try to share these opportunities as they come up and be deliberate about the different types of exposure and experience she wants them to have internationally every year, so they are looking all around for those opportunities all the time.

• Nicole stated that this year 2017 is when AIM really plans on expanding its online presence and to do more work remotely with students all over the world, so far they have had students from almost every Caribbean country, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada and St. Lucia as well as United States of America, Canada and United Kingdom but those have come from word of mouth, they are looking to establish more of their presence in some of these countries to do more online work. With students they work online with, the idea is that to make sure that they are kept in the loop and don’t miss out on any opportunities that face to face students have, the challenge for them as with any business owner trying to do more online is to make sure that the experiences are as similar as possible to what a face to face experience would be like, making sure that the software they are using actually works, making sure that when it’s time for their meeting there’s no internet problems and the call dropping and they feel like, “Oh my gosh, if I was there in person then it would be a better experience.” It’s about making sure that they have the same access to group sessions, so looping them in via video conference, making sure that they are getting the same communication and having the same number of meetings as much as possible and that it feels intimate and that might involve them getting 1 or 2 more extra online one to one meetings than you would someone who comes in face to face but whatever it takes to make that happen then you have to do. The beauty of it is that most of their communications are done online so it doesn’t feel that much different from a face to face but it depends on the business you’re in, examine the business you’re in and try to see how you can ensure that the two (2) experiences are similar in terms of the deliverable.

• Nicole shared that she believes in full disclosure and authenticity as much as possible so she doesn’t maintain motivation every single day. She stated that it is not that she doesn’t try every day but sometimes you sort of don’t get there for whatever reason, what really counts is that sometimes you’re not 100% feeling it, sometimes you feel “pop down” for whatever reason. She stated that at the moment she may have a sinus infection coming on or the flu and it makes her really tired and when she has low energy, then she can’t do anything as well as she normally could and what that means for her is that she has to understand her body at that point and maybe she needs extra sleep for example which she managed to get. Sometimes she doesn’t feel 100% motivated, ready to get the world. Yesterday was very hard for her to even get through what she had to and what she had to end her day early to get some rest and so that would help her for the next day where she is not 100% but she is not where she was the day before. When she is feeling low on energy, she prays about it and does as much as she can, understanding that she is not 100% herself but she will be and not being too hard on herself about it or worry about it too much because sometimes it’s the worry and anxiety that kills us.
• As business owners you always feel this pressure to lead by example so you don’t want to have a meltdown but at the same time you have to take care of yourself and show your team that it’s okay to care of yourself because if you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t bring a 100% to your job, you’ll just be sitting at your desk and you’re not doing anything, productivity all the way down. It’s very important in staying motivated to know your body and know when you need to pull back a little bit but her system is to just develop really good habits around her eating, her exercise and her sleep, those 3 things are very important, the minute any of these 3 start to slip then you know it’s danger zone, disaster, productivity cut down so because they are important, she tries to develop good habits and plans around them. She stated that for her food, she try to make sure that it’s prepared two (2) days in advance so that she knows what she is packing to eat and she doesn’t have to get stuck being hungry wondering what to eat and then possibly making a low energy food choice. What she likes about habit is that it cuts down on the work your brain has to do and she likes that because her brain has to do really important work during the day, for example, she pick out her gym clothes the evening before because at the time she wakes up in the mornings to go the gym, she doesn’t want to be making any decisions and thinking too hard about anything, she just want to go and so she get into the habit of exercising which powers her up, gives her energy, gives her a feeling of discipline that can carry through the day, gives her a feeling of winning she feels like, “Oh my gosh, Nicole you can do it, you have so much will power, you’re such a winner.” She tells herself all these things.
• She stated that prayer is important to her, every day she is praying and thanking God for things that have happen, things that haven’t happen yet, for opportunities, she’s thanking Him for the people in her life, for her family, for love, thanking Him for a thriving business where all her visions are being realized and for the different opportunities that are coming her way. The food, the exercise and the sleep are the 3 things that she really tries to build a habit around and feeding her spirit with prayer everyday and that’s her routine that she finds is key for helping her to be motivated.
• The other thing that is important for her is being really clear about her objectives, not just for the year but for the week because when she feels like she doesn’t have clearly established objectives, then there is so much going on that she feels overwhelmed and when she gets overwhelmed, she also gets worried, anxious, depressed and so she try to plan out her days according to her highest objectives and goals for the year overall.

Yanique stated that she loves the fact that Nicole spoke about eating properly, sleeping and also ensuring that you exercise because those are 3 things for you to be optimally productive and in the society that we live in currently, she doesn’t think that 90% of Jamaicans are doing those 3 things in a habitual practice and that’s probably one of the reasons why organizations are not as productive as they could be because the companies are the people, if the people are not healthy, they have all of these diseases that many of them that we contract from poor eating habits like hypertension, high blood pressure and diabetes, then they are going to be affected by the quality of work that they put out in the organization.   

• Nicole shared that one of the tools she can’t live without is Solid, it is an app that tracks all your meetings and allows you to type the meeting notes in while you’re having the meeting and then you can key it as an action item. As soon as she opens the app, it shows her all her action items out of all the meetings and nothing is as good as the satisfaction she gets from ticking them off as done so she knows three (3) more pieces of research that she has to do, so it’s exciting. Asana is very important for her team at work because it gives them an awesome way to track where all their students are in their different programmes. When you’re advising a student for 3 years in terms of College planning, there are different things you need to do for them and that you need to remind them to do for themselves to create an awesome, winning College Admissions worthy profile, “So I need to remember to research summer programmes for Robert, I need to remember to remind Robert’s mom link her friend that does Environmental Planning because he might need a two week internship.” And things link that. If they don’t have Asana they are basically lost. Asana is really good when you have a team and everybody needs to see what everybody else is working on because sometimes they have students who in their College Placeme programme they might also be doing tutor and those 2 things need to speak to each other. For her home team, she has Wunderlist, it is a great app, and her team at home wouldn’t need Asana as it is a bit much for what they need. They need things that can help them keep track of the grocery list, for example, one of her housekeepers at home is in charge of the putting the things that they need from the supermarket on the app on the tablet that’s in the kitchen and whatever she gets she crosses off so that Nicole will know, “Oh, there’s no more Almond Milk at home.” She wasn’t able to get it from wherever she normally gets it from, so if she has time she can stop and get the almond milk and cross it off the list. She stated that there are small things that lead to a woman being confused, she finds herself responsible for most things having to do with the home and then her husband is responsible for most things having to do with the outside of the home. Making sure to keep the outside intact, he’s in charge of all the building projects and all the decorating. While she’s in charge of making sure that everybody has good things to eat, the Wunderlist also helps her as she has two (2) children in school and a stepdaughter and sometimes all three (3) of them needs things for projects at the same time or they have Valentine’s Day project and things they have to make and do and it becomes overwhelming, small things becomes big things if you have a lot of things going on, so she try to organize down to the very last detail and Wunderlist is wonderful.

• Nicole shared that one of the books that has had a super impact is Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth which is beyond amazing. She stated that there is this other book called The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do, and How to Change by Charles Duhigg which has been phenomenal and then there is another book called No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline by Brian Tracey which has been really phenomenal. As well as Nicole’s book Make It Count: Tips on Unlocking Your Vision in 2017 and Beyond.

• Nicole shared that the big thing right now is that they are working with a really awesome, amazing, inspiring business coach and she is really excited to see just the results they will have out of this accountability because that’s really important for business owners no matter how inspired and on top of things you are, there is nothing like an external party to keep you accountable and what she like is for the team as she is the one who is keeping everyone accountable in their weekly meetings, so it’s good to have somebody else to keep all of them accountable. She hosted their strategic retreat. She really excited about that because really knowing that this outside accountability visionary influence will really cause them to aim higher this year.

• Nicole shared that listeners can find her at -

www.nicolemclarencampbell.com

Nicole McLaren Twitter

Nicole McLaren Campbell Facebook

Nicole McLaren Campbell LinkedIn

Instagram @nicolemclarencampell

Snapchat - nicmccampbell

• Nicole shared a few quotes and stated that one thing that she think is really important and she has really being understanding the value of it recently is that, “You have got to be focused, not only as a person but as an entrepreneur.” She got it from Grit and sometimes the Lord knows what she needs to hear and He keeps sending it in all different ways and she said, “Okay, Lord I get it.” And it’s focus, you might be good at a number of things and you might like a number of things but you can’t pursue them all and be an expert in them all and do all of them to the level of brilliance with the level of impacting the world you might want to have. In the book Grit, Warren Buffett did an exercise with someone and made them write out 25 Career Goals and tick the 5 that are most important to their life where they know what they are and what really drives you and once you tick the 5, cross out the other 20 and focus exclusively on 5 and don’t allow the other 20 to distract you from the 5 core ones that you know are of most importance to you. “Do less with more focus” and really get clear about what your 5 are.
• The other one is for when she feeling really tired, “But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” Sometimes it gets hard and you’re tired but at the end of the day, if you manage yourself properly you can get it done and sometimes you need to rest. She stated that she also says this one, “Everything begins and ends in your mind.” You have to really force your mind to go further than your present circumstances if you want to change your present circumstances.

Links

• Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth
• The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do, and How to Change by Charles Duhigg
• No Excuses!: The Power of Self Discipline by Brian Tracey
• Make it Count: Tips on Unlocking Your Vision in 2017 and Beyond by Nicole McLaren Campbell
• Solid
• Asana
• Wunderlist