When you engage in a new connection, expect friction.
You are trying to tie-in two (or more) parts that were separated before, and therefore it is granted there’s going to be misunderstanding, resistance, overreaching and suspicion.
Your role is to not misinterpret all of that as a signal a connection is not needed or wanted. Building bridges is the only way to progress, and you have to keep motivation high and fear low to gather people around a vision, a concept, an idea.
Hang in there.
When you are on the wrong track, the wisest thing to do is to change course.
It’s complicated, because even if we often know when it is time, we fail to grasp clear reasons why and we fail to act. It’s that combination of past commitments and unconscious awareness that things are not working. It’s that place where projects and enteprises go to die.
When this surfaces, we should be brave enough to take the commitment out of the equation. Forget about the time we have put in, the energy, the money, the people we have brought onboard, the ones we would fail, the knowledge, the connections and relationships, the opportunities.
If we keep looking back, we won’t move forward.
Customer service should be a function of marketing.
It’s an opportunity to establish a personal relationship with the customer, right in the moment when the customer wants to speak to you and is willing to provide information about their experience.
Not only.
If an organisation is smart enough to mine the information collected from customer service interactions and analyse them qualitatively (sentiment, voice of customer, etc.) rather than quantitatively (first rime response, contact rate, etc.), a treasure trove of customers insights could be found, good to use in messaging, positioning, differentiation, price and promotion, and more.
Customer service has the potential to become a true channel for personalisation, as well as the source from which all other personalisations originate.
Diversity is a tough sell because in the short term it only adds complexity.
In a context in which all that matters is what you achieved yesterday and what you are going to be doing tomorrow, adding someone to the team that might have different habits, different thoughts, different ideas, a different language, different ways of doing things is only problematic.
What is everybody else going to say? How are they going to adjust? How can we deliver against the targets if most of our time is spent aligning our views? Wouldn’t it be easier to just hire somebody like us, someone we don’t have to explain everything to?
Of course, if your mind is set on the long term, instead, the benefits of diversity are very easy to understand.
What team do you want when everything you have done so far is not going to work anymore (I promise you, it will happen)? How many points of view are you going to consider when that difficult problem nobody can crack is going to be presenting itself once again? What background should your organisation have the next time an interesting new market is going to open up in front of you?
Diversity is always enriching, you just have to give it time. As with most good things, truly.
.. is much more important that what gets done.
That is to say, if culture eats strategy for breakfast, tactics are not even on the menu.
If still somebody has doubts about this, after all that has happened with Uber and WeWork these past 12 months, here is a statistic that further supports the importance of culture (and of executives and management promoting culture with their own behaviour) on organisations’ and personal success.
In 2018, 39% of the CEOs losing their job were ousted because of unethical behaviour (vs 35% because of poor financial performance).
It was the first year in which unethical behaviour led the list of reasons why CEOs get fired. And it is an additional sign that more and more people, even at board level, start taking culture seriously.
The way things are done is much more important that what gets done.
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