After she left, we all turned to each other and said "Milkshake Moment." Here's why.

What to Say to a Porcupine is a book that contains twenty different tales all centering around customer service and it offers topics for group (or single) discussion at the end of each fable. Some chapters include: My Big Fat Greek Chorus, Chilly Willy, The Knight Shift, Going to the Dogs and Sloth is Not a Vice.

Richard S. Gallagher, the author of all these little vignettes, has created such a great way to emphasize the fact that customer service is so important to companies and great service makes everything run more smoothly, intelligently, etc. In fact, What to Say to a Porcupine ends with the Gallagher saying that customer service is more than just another fable.

This book is great for any company that needs a little kick-start or even a reminder of how customer service should be like. It's thought-provoking in a very interesting way! I hope when you get a copy - or even copies for your whole staff - you'll enjoy it!

Have a GREAT weekend!!

This little introduction to another realm made me do a little think about business and fashion and the fashion of business. There are more and more people working either full or part-time from their homes. This means that the culture of most companies is in a state of flux. Co-workers are now wearing PJs, slippers and robes while corresponding to emails, trouble-shooting computer problems or booking lunches. It makes one wonder where this is all going and how it is effecting the work environment. More people are finding that they can bring their personal style to work. This means cute stuff on the desk to what they wear. Fashion Week may be the tip of the iceberg for 800-CEO-READ. We may get requests from Janice Dickinson and Tim Gunn fans now. Who knows, we just might get another audience that is both concerned about what they wear and how they do business ...

Of course on the other hand, this could just be another fad.

Other books that deal with business and fashion to keep you as painfully hip as 8CR:
New Woman's Dress for Success
Details Men's Style Guide
Beyond Business Casual
Fit In!: The Unofficial Guide to Corporate Culture
The End of Fashion

Speaking of New York: More Information on the Strike on Broadway.

We pride ourselves on great customer service; in fact, it's one of the few things that makes our company stand out in such a competitive market. So it came as no surprise, as I paged through it, to find that we've already implemented much of Markert's advice. For instance, these three rules resonated with me:

Rule 10: Be a Client Advocate
Rule 28: Speak the Truth
Rule 36: Find Ways to Make Their Lives Easier

I especially liked the entry for Rule 46: Roll Up Your Sleeves.

There is no work that is beneath anyone. If a project needs to get done for a client and there is no one at the right level to do it, then roll up your sleeves and tackle it yourself. Jumping in on a project or task that is not yours demonstrates leadership and commitment.

Your staff will see you doing it and will take in a valuable lesson. And of course the client will have a better experience with the company because the work got done. Everyone comes up a winner.

And in the same style as You Can't Win a Fight with Your Boss, Markert ties in clever ways to present his message: Rule 13: Win Over Frosty; Rule 14: Be Switzerland; Rule 43: Get Sticky.

But Meyer is not giving advice to would-be restauranteurs: his book aims for a broader business audience. Whether his model of "hospitalitocracy" can expand beyond the service industry is hard to say, but Meyer certainly tries hard. This book wants to be a business parable of sorts--the kind populated by metaphorical parachutes, cheese, and sharks. Meyer apparently can't resist the genre: he thinks of staff members "not as servers, but as surfers"; he imagines businesses as moth-attracting light bulbs; and he refers to the press, somewhat predictably, as a shark.

Meyer is more persuasive and interesting, both as a storyteller and as a business adviser, when he sticks to concrete examples from his working life instead of spinning them into catchphrases that might work in PowerPoint presentations...When Meyers slips into generic business-speak, that all-important narrative gets lost.

In a post titled There is an even better question, Phil Dourado talks about the book and suggests a different query:

Fred's ultimate question is "Would you recommend us to a friend?" And it's a great question. He recommends scrapping all your satisfaction surveys and replacing them with this one ultimate question. Enterprise Rent-a-Car has done something similar, and to great effect.

But, it's still a question about intention. And customer intentions are slippery beasts.

I heard Chris Pilling, the CEO of the UK bank First Direct (highest levels of customer satisfaction for a retail bank in the UK consistently for the past ten years, the world's first telephone-only bank, some of the highest satisfaction ratings for a bank in the world...ever), say that they ask this question instead:

"HAVE you recommended us to a friend?"

We at 800ceoread are pretty big fans of NPS and The Ultimate Question. We use it weekly to find out how we are doing with customers. Our propaganda piece (i.e. marketing brochure) has two pages devoted to it.

Given Andrew's good question we decided to go to the source: Mr. Fred Reichheld himself. This is from an email Fred wrote me today in response to the post I sent him:

I agree that it is useful to gather the number of referrals a person claims to have made--but that is looking in the past, while growth is about the present/future. Someone who made six referrals over the past year but recently had a lousy experience (or found a better supplier) is not a promoter. I think the top priority should be to focus learning on the current (or immediate past like last week) and the near future--thus, the ultimate question works best as it is formulated in my book.

This made me think about Pfeffer and Sutton's Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense. They say you should be careful of the past. It is amazing how quickly you color it with the circumstances of today. Use current data and constantly experiment rather than relying on what worked in the past.

I think that is what Fred is getting at as well.

Thoughts?

• A Leader's Legacy by James Kouzes and Barry Posner (Jossey-Bass) - This is a follow-on to the best-seller The Leadership Challenge; alot of people like Kouzes and Posner's take on leadership.
• Hoopla by Crispin Porter + Bogusky (Powerhouse) - Powerhouse has been doing the Lovemarks/Kevin Roberts books and I have been looking forward to seeing what they do with another ad agency.
• Success Built to Last: Creating A Life That Matters by Jerry Porras et al. (Wharton School Publishing) - Built to Last author Porras this time asks what people rather than companies need to do to find success.
• Bangalore Tiger: How Indian Tech Upstart WIPRO is Rewriting the Rules of Global Competition by Steve Hamm (McGraw-Hill) - The senior writer goes inside this Indian phenom to find out what has brought all the success.

October

• Mavericks at Work: Why The Most Original Minds In Business Win by Bill Taylor and Polly LaBarre (William Morrow) - Bill and Polly created business conversation in the 90's at writing Fast Company magazine. If you have missed that passion and energy, you'll love the book.
• Tough Choices by Carly Fiorina (Portfolio) - This is going to be a big book. The former CEO of Hewlett-Packard tells her rise to the top and what happened when she got there.
• L.L. Bean: The Making of an American Icon by Leon Gorman (Harvard Business School Press) - Word has it that HBSP has been bugging the folks at L.L. Bean for years to do a book; it finally here and expect to see lots of cross-promotion in other L.L. Bean communications.
• Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage by Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston (Yale) - This title shows how companies can use green issues as a competitive weapon.
• The Starfish and The Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom (Portfolio) - What do Alcoholics Anonymous, Napster, and al Queda all have in common? No one runs them. I love this book and highly recommend you check it out.
• Setting the Table: The Power of Hospitality in Restaurants, Business, and Life by Danny Meyer (HarperCollins) - Meyer knows something about delivering service. His restaurants occupy four of the top twenty spots on Zagat's.
• Tailgating, Sacks, and Salary Caps: How The NFL Became the Most Successful Sports Franchise in History by Mark Yost (Kaplan, Nov.) - This is about the business of football in all its glory.

I wish you all the best in your quest to drive the focus on customers inside your organization. My goal is to keep providing you with support and help and in that way – have my hand in the small of your back prodding you on.

Jeanne Bliss
Customer Crusader
Redmond, Washington

My other favorite book that complements and gives meat on the bones to the concept of customer profitability is Managing Customers as Investments by Sunil Gupta and Donald R. Lehmann.

If your goal is to take action to drive your company closer to customers …these three books click-together well to give you strong concepts, real-world advice and practical application for driving customer focus yielding customer profitability for your corporate machine.

Suggesting a CCO may seem frivolous to leaders who believe they already focus on customers. There’s often a proliferation of tactics and projects underway…the problem is they don’t amount to anything significant for customers. So first decide: will leaders be okay with someone (other than themselves) driving consensus on customer strategy and deliverables? You may be saying, “We have consensus now.� I’m sure that you’ve had some good meetings, but how much of it stuck? When they were over, did everyone return to their respective corners and business as usual? Getting company alignment is tricky. You may need someone full time to ensure it exists for your direc tion with customers.

What about sustaining the work? After the first and second meeting of what I call “the funky task force� on the customer work, people start to lose interest. You know these meetings. The kick-off has forty people at the table, some who clamored for an invite. One month later, six regularly show up. And the person who got the job to run the task force layered on top of his/her “regular� job? Well, they’re losing interest fast. Driving this work needs hard-wired participation. Do you have headcount and staff time commitments to drive it forward?

Now to the roadmap and action plan: let’s discuss the sticky wicket of “how� to move past the hoopla of meetings and empty commitments. Do you have a central roadmap that everyone follows on how you’ll drive the customer work and measure progress? I didn’t think so. How about consistent metrics everyone agrees to? We have metrics galore in our companies and of course the ‘customer’ is now on our scorecards. But these are typically neither clear nor connected down to the operational level. Roles and responsibilities and holding people accountable are a slippery slope in the customer work. This is about the hand-offs between the silos. Most companies need a task list that clearly states what each part of the organization will do and when to get the priorities accomplished. But most don’t have one. Do you?

Is funding customer projects like pulling teeth? This may be due to duplicate spending across the organization. Everything is pitched as an individual program from inside the silos. At planning time these investments are often vulnerable in the first round of budget cuts. Why? Because each project shows up as a one-off tactic. There’s rarely an annual plan for understanding and managing customers as a key corporate asset - determining how many were lost and why and pooling resources to keep and grow profitable customers. Why? Because it’s no one’s job to do this job.

And finally, does the hoopla have any chance of sustainability as things stand now? Are leaders committing to customers, but not changing the metrics or the motivation to realign business priorities? Is the back-up position still about counting sales but not counting customers? For what actions are the most “Atta-boys� doled out? The customer work will not emerge as a priority of the organization until people’s success and career paths are tied to their accountability for how their actions impact customers. How far along are you with this? Are you heading in the right direction?

Most leaders wouldn’t refute that any of these actions are important. They want them to happen. They’ve always wanted them. Their failure has been in assuming the company could miraculously defy the l aws of the silos to make them a reality. Separate motivation, the metrics and the mechanics have stayed firmly rooted in each silo. And they will continue to stay there until someone duct-tapes the silos together in a unified and executable customer plan. Is it time you established a Chief Customer Officer to connect your company for customers?

See if you recognize your company in this example: A home builder declared its mantra to be “customer partnership.� Customer revenue, it was predicted, would dramatically climb as customers would come to rely on the builder for services such as move-in support, spring cleaning, fencing, security and ongoing warranty and maintenance. The revenue upside and future rates of customer profitability were calculated. Only thing was - accountability metrics didn’t change to direct focus of customers and customer partnerships. They were still home sales, quarterly sales goals on upgrades and costs of running the business. Customers were lost in the shuffle.

Besides the standard sales goals, that home builder should have also been asking for the “Guerrilla Metrics.� That’s because the “Guerrillas� give CEOs five questions for driving the business toward customer relationships and customer profitability:

1. New Customers; Volume and Value?
   Ask about the volume and value of your incoming customers as often as you ask about sales goals. You may find that you are tracking incoming customers across a multitude of company areas - with conflicting definitions of what it means to be a new customer. The wild card here is if you have achieved alignment in how customers are classified inside your system. The part that’s not likely tracked is the quality of incoming customers.
2. Lost Customers: Volume and Value and Reasons
   The volume and value of lost customers needs to be paired with the new customer information to lay out the true situation for your company. You must reconcile “Customers In� with “Customers Out� to know how well you are doing with managing customers as an asset of your company. In addition to knowing which customers left, you need to know the reasons why they don’t care to do business with you anymore so you can drive change across the business.
3. Customer Renewals with Reasons
   For this to have relevance for your company, you’ll need to define customer behaviors that constitute renew or the commitment to continue doing business with you, according to your business model. The key is to understand patterns which indicate loyalty based on continuous purchase habits. You must ask for reasons why customers are staying with you to ensure that you personally know what you are delivering to customers that they value – and to ensure that there is awareness when these reasons shift or begin to erode, and actions are taken to reverse the trend.
4. Revenue and Profitability by Customer Group
   Getting to this classification of customers is not a trivial project. You need to understand the movement of customers from one profitability group to another so you can strategically lead the customer agenda. Your goal should be driving efforts that cause your costliest customer groups to decline and those most profitable to grow. If you are not demanding that the business be tracked this way and if you do not ask for accountability around these metrics in the regular language of meetings, it won’t happen.
5. Referrals by Customer Group
   If your customers are willing to stick their necks out vouching for you, they have become your marketers. Keeping these customers, growing them and developing other customers like them are the key. If you can track the rate of referrals in general and by customer group, you’ll know the strength of your ongoing revenue stream before you even spend another dollar on marketing. Companies completely focused on customer profitability will learn how referral rates differ by customer group and reasons for not referring.

This is the elusive CEO platform that’s missing for people after the big focus on customers is announced. These questions power the customer on to the corporate agenda. What do you think of the “Guerrillas?� Let’s talk about how they might work for you.

Common sense, right? Not so much. Because this is often the muck that’s stepped in as brave zealots charge ahead into the corporate fray determined to make things right for customers. I’m sure you’ll recognize this…

Every company has a power core. It is usually the strongest skill set in the company, the strongest strength of senior executives. Information Technology (IT) for example; is a central base of power in many organizations now because of the pull they have in defining the corporate agenda due to budget and how dependant the corporate machine is on what they deliver. So the way that IT prioritizes things will have an impact on where the ‘customer stuff’ falls on that list. Let’s say you have a product power core company. This is where product development is the most important – product resources and product leaders get the most play, the most glory, the most reco gnition and the most resources. Customers…well, sure they get the products. But are the products built from the customers’ point of view? Is the experience of receiving the product and the post-product experience the right one? A product power core may only be thinking of the product itself…not the customer who buys it or uses it or the field force who has to service or explain it or the operator who must field calls about it. The insular nature of the company power core often gets in the way of building an experience for customers that is meaningful.

Knowing what the company Power Core is and engaging those whose finger is on the power button is critical to driving and transforming a company to have lasting customer focus. Why? Because customer focus will mean tampering with the normal flow of priorities from the Power Core. Those leading the customer effort MUST ask the Power Core to the transformation dance. Heck, the Power Core has to take a lead in actively redefining the priorities of the corporation for the corporation.

Most people leading the customer charge don’t think this through. Often the customer effort begins when bad survey results came in, or the President decides it’s now (finally, at last, or once again) a major priority. This audible from leadership is assumed to be important enough to be the driving force to get people to line up and take action. But it’s not. Everyone will salute the flag all right. But real change won’t happen until the impact of how company priorities need to shift, how resources need to be reallocated, and how success needs to be redefined is agreed to by those in the Power Core who are currently calling the shots. And THIS is one of the maj or reasons why many, many customer efforts crash and burn. The Power Core hasn’t been asked to the dance.

In most companies the power core lies is one of these seven:

1. Product Power Core
2. IT – information technology Power Core
3. Sales Power Core
4. Marketing Power Core
5. Vertical discipline (such as doing the business of a bank, or health care, or insurance) Power Core
6. Customer Power Core

Let’s talk about your company Power Core and how it is impacting your company’s ability to focus on customers and customer profitability.

Executives and CEOs:
Use this book as a platform to evaluate your organization and your personal role in driving the customer agenda. You may be wondering why you just can’t get traction on customer management and customer profitability even though you’ve named it as a corporate priority. Through this book’s evaluations and outline of the issues, you can understand why the impasse exists. There is information to assist you in determining if the answer is a single position or a whole host of conditions, attitudes, and actions that must change in your organization. Hiring or appointing a chief customer officer will require a personal commitment by you. This book will outline what yo u need to be ready and willing to step up to doing before you put a name on that organization chart.

To the new and existing chief of the customer effort:
This is your comprehensive handbook packed with ideas on how to get this vital work accomplished. The tools, approaches, stories, and empathy contained in it will arm you with a place to start and a methodology for how to proceed in the first month, the first year, and those that go beyond when things really start to take hold. You’ll get ideas for how to manage across the silos, where to weave in accountability, and how to engage the commitment of top leaders in the journey. Most important, it will provide ideas on how to break the work into segments so you can advance the organization down a specific path of improvement.

Senior leadership and functional leaders:
You may be trying to crack the nut on how to deliver a comprehensive customer experience. You may be at the point where it’s obvious that all of the factions you’re trying to bring together to get that project done have different agendas. Or perhaps you’re the service vice president with vast amounts of customer information that could drive the company forward, but people just aren’t lining up to participate. You may have joined forces with another functional vice president to get the company to make some tough cross-company changes required to manage customer relationships. In your passion, you may have found yourself the de facto leader for this gnarly compa nywide effort. This book takes and translates the issues you’re experiencing but may not have had time to articulate. It offers tools to move the logjams you’re experiencing and tactics for how to proceed with your particular brand of challenge.

So let’s begin. What’s on your mind about how to get your president and corporation to focus on customers, customer experience and customer profitability? Hit me with your best shot…I’m ready for it! Heck, I’ve probably lived it.