Management Training Thailand - Talent Technologies » Customer

6 key sales talents

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 06:45:38 +0000

Working with over 2,000 sales teams in numerous countries, using both qualitative and quantitative interviews and assessments, Derek Gatehouse knows a thing or two about sales teams.

His book, The Perfect Salesforce, is a great summary of his research and well worth the read.

One of the themes of the book is that high-performing sales teams have one thing in common: they play their salespeople to their key sales talents.

Talents are those things that we are born with and can do little to change, so it makes sense to identify them and work with them. Ignoring them usually leads to serious performance issues. Affirming them is the surest route to success: especially in sales.

The 6 key sales talents

The six key sales talents identified by Gatehouse are:

Quantity vs. Quality sales. Salespeople broadly fall into two types: those who thrive in ‘quantity’ sales – where the selling is often repetitive & structured; and those who thrive in ‘quality’ sales, which usually involves fewer clients and where near-perfect performance is required.
High pain tolerance / threshold. A key driving talent in sales is the ability to be able to do things many others do not like. Being able to handle rejection, for example, is vital; in most cases this is something not learned but born with. In the words of Albert Gray ‘Although hard work, good luck and astute human relations are all important, the successful person has ‘formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do’.
Advisers vs Pleasers. This is critical in persuasion. Some people are born ‘pleasers’ – which is on the whole ineffective in the field of sales, while other people are born ‘advisers’. This latter group use their persuasive talents to close effectively.
Executive Rapport: High vs Low. Some salespeople bond instantly to the ‘common man’; others are more naturally suited to ‘high-level’ executive sales.
Need: created versus established. Some salespeople do poorly when creating a need but excel when it is already established. Others thrive on the challenge of creating need. It’s critical to put the right type of salespeople in the role that plays to their strength.
Obvious vs. Concept. The last sales talent is the inclination for some salespeople to be better at selling a tangible good (‘obvious’) or an intangible Concept. Again, it’s critical to get your salespeople in the right role.

Top sales teams learn the rules of human behavior; they understand that it is the conditions that create the desired behaviors, and that by establishing the perfect performance conditions in the sales department they automatically create an autonomous growth machine.

Derek Gatehouse, The Perfect Salesforce

Getting your sales team playing to its strengths

Getting your sales team playing to its strengths is a critical (but just the first) step to developing a high-performing sales team.

If you would like to get your sales team playing to its strengths and performing at its best, feel free to contact us here and we will be delighted to help!

Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-EastAsia

A Complaint is a Gift

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:24:20 +0000

Are your service complaints getting through?

If not, it could be because your front line people are treating customer complaints not as an opportunity, but as a threat.

Research conducted by the customer service company TARP has found that 50% of customers don’t complain when they encounter a problem. More alarmingly perhaps, the complaint handling process of the other 50% who do complain is poor. Few of these complaints are reported to management.

This has a catastrophic effect on business value drivers such as customer loyalty and advocacy. Poor customer service experiences (and especially service recovery) destroys brand value and severely impacts company profitability, as the report shows.

A copy of the report is available in pdf format here.

If you would like to improve the customer service at your company (including service recovery), then look no further than our Frontline Platinum training solution.

If you would like to set up your system for success, creating a memorable customer experience, then you may be interested in Customer Experience Maximisation.

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Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia

What retailers can learn from latest UK consumer survey

admin — Fri, 28 May 2010 07:03:27 +0000

“My daughter… is a brilliant customer service assistant and was recently reprimanded for spending too much time with customers!!! Not much else to say really is there?”

That’s just one of the comments made by a parent whose daughter works in one of the ‘worst retailers’ as voted by over 14,000 consumers in a recent Which? magazine survey.

One interesting finding from the survey is that all those companies rated the worst for customer service have large customer-facing workforces – while all those rated the best have small ones.

The conclusion from the article is that ‘small chains good, big chains bad’. However, the author then goes on to add… ‘Which is fine… until you start to ask how the big chains got to be so big and profitable in the first place.’

A conclusion not shared by us here, as we shall see…

**Retail has Sunrise and Sunset industries too!**

The first misunderstanding made by the author is that those at ‘the top’ – the ‘smaller scale’ operators – are less profitable than the ‘big boys’ at the bottom. But looking at the data, this is simply not true.

The top six retailers in customer hearts include Apple, Richer Sounds (selling audio equipment), and Lush (specialist soaps).

Of these companies (and arguably of every international retailer), Apple is the most profitable when you take into account the operating margins it commands on its finished products (not though the profit margins at the point-of-sale). At a time when Apple has overtaken Microsoft in company capitalisation, it can hardly be called a ‘small player’ in the retail space. But it does have a laser-like focus, as we shall see, on the one difference that counts.

Richer Sounds, meanwhile, regularly tops Profits per Square Foot, a metric we would say is a good indicator of overall retail effectiveness, while Lush is not far behind in both metrics.

Now let’s look at the companies nearer the bottom – big supermarket chains like Tesco, Electronics retailers like Dixons (ironically little different to Apple in terms of store staffing), and magazine and stationery retailers like WH Smith’s.

One characteristic these ‘big players’ (many employing 12,000 frontline staff or more) have in common: operating profits approaching half that of the top players.

The ‘big players’ may have been ‘big and profitable’ for a decade or more, but in the world of retail, this is changing – fast.

The One Thing the top players do to succeed

So what is this ‘One thing’ that the top players are doing that others – lower down on the list – are not?

In a nutshell – they deliver a branded customer experience.

Branded does not mean bland. It is clearly defined. Look at the photo of the Apple store above. Does it look familiar to you? Probably not. Because not all Apple stores are the same. Yet when we visit an Apple store, we know what we are not going to get – a visit to an electronics store. And we know what we are going to get – an experience unique to Apple.

A customer experience also means just that – an experience for the customers. Yet so many multinational (and larger) companies spend their time figuring out ways how to ‘standardise’ their offerings.

When you think about it, what they’re really trying to do is to make their own experience of managing the company and delivering profits easier… but in so doing they are really mediocritising their own customer experience, and destroying their company’s long term profitability as their brand is commodified!

This in turn usually leads to a low profitability ‘doom cycle’ where concepts and contexts reinforce each other in endless rounds of costcutting until all value is finally destroyed.

Instead, an effective ‘customer experience’ means localising your brand, understanding your customer on a local level, and working Outside-In (not Inside-Out) to create an emotionally-rich customer experience based on their preferences.

What you can do to become a more profitable retailer

Creating an emotionally-rich customer experience is a long-term investment worth making, as the payoff from doing so is returned in higher sales, higher customer loyalty, and higher customer Word of Mouth (or Say – Stay – Spend as we call it).

The process begins with identifying the emotions you need to evoke in order to solicit the above behaviours. It does not matter how big your company is. What makes the difference is being able to personalise at every touchpoint.

Would you like to find out more? Then simply check the ‘customer experience’ box of our feedback form here.

Talent Technologies helps Thai and Asian companies create outstanding customer experiences, in a way that can be empirically linked to top-line sales.

The 3 key people ingredients Virgin Air looks for in creating great service experiences

admin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:42:49 +0000

What do you need to look for when hiring people you need for customer-facing positions?

Of course, every business has its own set and segments of different customers, but we feel this article outlining Virgin America’s strategy offers some much needed guidance when too many companies are risk-averse in their hiring strategies: trusting resumes rather than real ability.

Eschewing the ‘softly softly, safely safely’ hiring strategy of going for experience and qualifications, Virgin America has understood that this does not deliver a differentiated customer experience. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is, as we have been saying for some time, the key element to brand equity in a service business (and with it shareholder value).

Instead, it has identified three key elements that work for it:

1. Find ‘independent-minded extroverts’. People who are not afraid to break the mould (try getting that past your HR!)

2. Build a culture of resourcefulness. This is essential for getting their frontliners to personalise the customer experience.

Does your company do this for its induction?

3. Stress-test your employees and then let them break the rules. This includes training to manage conflict as well as deal with typical (but often unforeseen) circumstances.

The proof’s in the pudding!

And Virgin’s strategy has paid off. Virgin America is no.1 in its field as ranked by Zagat’s global airline survey, showing that the customers like what they’re getting. Virgin America continues to receive higher levels of customer word of mouth (read free advertising) and can support the ‘customer promises’ made in its bold advertisements with delivery of the experience.

What you can do if you want to deliver on your desired experience in Asia…

Does your company deliver on its customer promise?

If you would like to identify the desired customer experience or enhance your delivery of it, then do not hesitate to contact us for more details here.

How customer experience drives shareholder value

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 02:35:48 +0000

‘How can offering a superior customer experience add value to my company’s bottom line?’

Asked questions like this by our clients, we thought it would be useful to demonstrate how companies can link their customer experience to customer equity, and from there to shareholder value.

When embarking on initiatives companies, after all, need to be sure those initiatives will drive value.

For a long time companies have been vaguely aware of the importance of the customer experience, yet may be hesitant to embark on a realignment of their business around the customer experience when the benefits – financial at least – may be equally hazy.

This post will hopefully demonstrate beyond doubt that the customer experience not only impacts companies’ financial performance, but also does so in a big way.

Two views on customer behaviour

There are two views when it comes to the ‘customer experience’.

For one group of people, the view is that the customer experience is nothing more than a ‘nice-to-have’.

Customers buy on value (usually governed by the ‘4Ps‘) and that is that.

In this view, what matters is that companies simply deliver on the value proposition(s) and do so consistently. And that is the ‘customer experience’: getting something to customers as conveniently as possible, for the lowest price (and highest margin for the company). In this assumption, man is an ‘economic being’ who acts in his own self-interest.

Unfortunately for proponents of this view, an increasing body of research is showing that numerous customer segments aren’t behaving consistently with this definition!

Among these segments, many value ‘the journey’ more highly than ‘the destination’. And, given that Aristotle held that ‘man is a social animal’ all those centuries ago, this kind of makes sense too. People of course value the interactions on their way to the destination equally or more than the destination itself. It’s quite natural to expect that customers will turn their back on a service provider if they feel they have been poorly treated, no matter how much they want (or need) the product on offer.

How to reward your shareholders… and your customers

The US-based firm Watermark Consulting conducted a study of whether customers’ perceived experience (based on Forrester’s methodology) had any impact on a company’s stock market performance. Their results are below and are interesting, to say the least:

From the scores above, it’s clear that a pattern has emerged, in the US at least: companies offering ‘top-quartile’ customer experiences generally deliver double the shareholder returns in a year than their bottom-quartile counterparts.

This has recently been brought up to date by Usable Markets and the results are not dissimilar.

What this means in $ terms

If the above charts make the value of customer experience clearer in terms of shareholder value, we must bear in mind the value to the enterprise itself.

Over on the Forrester blog, Bruce Temkin has calculated that a 10% increase on their (very simple) customer experience score equates to a near 3% increase in sales.

This is useful because it can help companies calculate whether investing in their customer experience makes sense.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that (as Temkin himself accepts) this is not a precise science. From the data it’s clear that there is also a ‘tipping point’ where customer experience increases and decreases magnify themselves in terms of stock market performance.

Is Asia different?

We could take the view that Asia is somehow different, but our work with companies in the region indicate otherwise.

If anything, because the focus of most companies is to ‘roll-out’ into these fast-growing countries, the customer experience gets left behind.

Companies taking this approach are paying a huge amount in terms of loss of customer equity when they do so.

Because of this, companies that take time to design and deliver deliberate customer experiences will discover a huge competitive advantage in terms of:

• Pricing power and profit margins

• Reduced costs of customer acquisition (driven by ‘Stay’ and ‘Say’)

• Innovation to meet customer needs (driven by customer and employee engagement)

Talent Technologies offers you a simple solution

If creating an outstanding customer experience sounds like hard work, it needn’t be.

We offer companies a simple solution that combines the strengths of your organisation, people and product or service offering so that your brand can consistently deliver a stand-out experience.

Simply contact us here and we will be delighted to send you more details!

Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

Most companies failing to satisfy customers

admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:12:51 +0000

Forrester’s have released the 2010 results of their customer experience index and, while some improvements have been made, most industries are still failing to satisfy customers’ basic requirements.

Rated on three simple scales (‘Meeting Needs’, ‘Being Easy to Work With’ and ‘Enjoyability’), 9 of the 14 industries, on average, were still rated poor or below by their own customers.

While retailers hold top spot, high-margin industries such as banks, credit card and health insurance providers are collectively failing to meet their customers’ perceived needs.

This is in spite of the higher margins these industries can command and, by definition, the higher cost of each lost customer.

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The Villain of the Piece…

There is always a hero and villain of each edition of the index. Many of you may not have heard of Barnes & Noble (which came top) but are no doubt familiar with HSBC.

HSBC’s customer experience scores were nothing short of parlous and may come as no surprise to the numerous detractors the bank has here in Asia. HSBC were also the subject of a feature in The New York Times as one of ‘the least trusted banks in America‘.

As if to demonstrate that the malaise is not simply related to their US operations, HSBC continue to vie for the wooden spoon award on the Customer Experience Leaderboard, a global forum for customers to ‘vote’ on their experiences.

Will someone please tell these companies about customer equity!

HSBC and others lower down on the list will, no doubt, proudly point to their sustained record of profit growth over the last decade or so.

Much of this growth has, however, been achieved through expansion and financial management than through increases in ‘customer equity’, i.e. the willingness of customers to say, stay and spend with their provider.

Wells Fargo has this. HSBC patently does not.

Companies’ business models are ultimately unsustainable if they do not genuinely ‘create and keep a customer’ (as Drucker aptly put it) as opposed to simply trying to create a matrix of trap whereby they can suck out as much money from their customers as possible to meet their own y-on-y targets.

Citigroup had a similar approach and, while enjoying decades of unparalleled global expansion, failed to maintain their customer equity long before their ill-fated bail-out in 2008.

Customer Experience = Shareholder Value

As we see in this article here, the real determinant of sustainable shareholder value lies in creating a resonant customer experience evoking trust.

While the majority of companies pursue short-term, year-on-year profit growth strategies (often diminishing trust), this carries with it huge longer-term costs as the same companies have to embark on all manner of advertising campaigns, price promotions and competitive gimmicks in order to win back or replace customers they have lost through their short-termism.

So while they can massage one year’s results, the negative consequences then get commuted to another year’s P&L.

This partly explains why until 2008 Wells Fargo was able to boast higher Return on Capital Employed ratios than HSBC – despite being in a more competitive marketplace.

The Customer Experience can give you a serious competitive advantage!

It’s for this reason that getting your customer experience right can give you considerable competitive advantage. This is because you are able to create more advocates (‘Say’), keep more customers (‘Stay’) and encourage higher rates of Spend as a result.

Consider that every one complaint a company receives is heard by 1,560 other people! What effect does that have on the company’s brand?

To calculate the cost of each complaint you receive or hear about, simply compute the lifetime value of a single customer and multiply by 1,560.

What you can do to increase your customer equity

The above calculation is one simple measure to track the impact your customer experience can have on your company’s bottom line.

Talent Technologies helps Asian companies improve their customer experience ‘outside-in’ through our simple and effective process.

If you are interested in sustainably enhancing the customer experience in your organisation, feel free to contact us here.

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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Does the Customer Experience make a difference to your bottom line?

admin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 06:38:35 +0000

Ten years ago, a major US Hotel chain approached Tuck Business School with three questions: how many new restaurants should we open in our New York City hotels? How many should we reformat? And perhaps, most critically, How can we generate more profit from all of them?

These are questions many companies ask week-in, week-out. In the case of this client, Tuck Business School embarked on an in-depth study lasting over a year into every restaurant, eatery and even hot dog stall in New York City resulting in a data set that came to over 1,700 different outlets.

Tuck then mapped this data against a range of criteria including the 4Ps of Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

The findings could not have been more remarkable.

For one thing, the time-honoured adage (in retail) that success was about three things – Location, Location, Location – flew out of the window. The type of cuisine (‘Product’) also had little to do with profitability, which also came as a surprise to the hotel’s management team, and Price itself was only a very minor factor in overall outlet profitability.

From the findings it was clear that outlets could increase sales by cutting prices… but that did not make customers keep coming back. The inevitable consequence of this strategy was that their competitors’ did too, and profitability was eroded.

The findings also showed that customers were swayed most of all by one thing – the quality of the experience. When submitted to the hotel chain’s management, the findings raised more than an eyebrow:

Location accounted for 2.5% of the price variation

Cuisine accounted for 3.5% of the price variation

Customer experience (comprising decor, taste of food and service) accounted for 73% of the price differential

With the comparisons done on a like-for-like basis, it made the hotel chain’s decision for their strategy clear – whatever we do, we must create an experience, consistently

How you can profit from this study

Ironically, ‘price wars’ are the reality most companies are trapped in, especially in Asia.

They think that, in order to meet their sales numbers, they should cut prices, which in turn means they cut internal costs so that they can maintain their profit margins, and so on until they are in a death spiral where they ultimately erode the value of their brand.

Service becomes ever more lousy (because management hires by the numbers not by the kind of people the customers want); customers defect (because they have been mistreated); companies cut prices to woo them back (in fact creating fickle customers); companies blame customers for being fickle; customers blame companies for not caring – and so on… until the brand itself is finally commodified and pricing power is entirely eroded.

But it does not have to be this way. And not in an ‘ivory tower’ state of mind. But in reality.

This is because there are companies operating in Asia who refuse to be commodified and insist on taking a longer view (read 1-2 years) on creating a more deliberate customer experience and, through it, build relationships (especially loyalty and advocacy) which blow away considerations of price.

‘The purpose of business is not to make a sale, but to make and keep a customer’

Peter Drucker

Some high-end designer stores have cottoned onto this, but the example that really stands out is The Apple Shop. To take just one aspect of their strategy, the practice of hiring ‘slightly better’, training and developing their staff to a level the customer can relate to, leads to a markedly better human interaction where larger percentages of customers feel comfortable to come back to the stores.

Apple, in turn, do not dilute their brand value and continue to be able to command price differentials of as much as 140% against similar hardware and peripherals offered by their competitors!

A counter-example are the car dealerships, whose customer touch in Thailand especially has been so uniformly woeful. It’s little surprise in this instance when a consumer chooses one car over another based on the difference of 5,000 Baht, or blind chance that they have got a person to serve them at all.

Companies can profit from this market situation by creating a deliberate customer experience encompassing all the touchpoints customers encounter on their service journey.

Making the Experience happen

At Talent Technologies we have made this easy by separating the customer encounter into the dimensions of Stage, System and Service; and the Customer behaviours into Say (Advocacy), Stay (Loyalty) and Spend (Sales); the latter three based on researched emotions into customer behaviour.

Using this simple framework (even frontliners can understand, which is important), we are able to facilitate the brand experience that management wants to deliver on, outside-in.

Companies may not wish to use our approach. Nonetheless there is a growing realisation that the source of competitive advantage is not a new CRM system or loyalty card programme, both of which may help yet, as research has shown, deliver relatively marginal returns on the capital committed to them.

The real difference companies make, both to their customers and bottom lines, is to deliver a consistent experience going beyond the blandly functional that is so prevalent in today’s uninspiring marketplace.

Talent Technologies helps companies create outstanding customer experiences in Thailand and South East Asia. If you would like to find out more about creating great customer experiences, please check the box giving us your name and email here

Show clients that you love them!

admin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:22:00 +0000

A recent article from Wharton Business School has urged companies to show more love to their clients and customers… especially in these tough times.

While there is a strong temptation to reduce headcount as the recession bites, companies also need to maintain a positive stance, especially with regard to the customer experience.

As Jerry Wind, Professor of Marketing at Wharton, puts it: ‘Some consumers are feeling that they can no longer trust the traditional ways of doing business. This attitude will stay with us for a long time.’ He continues: ‘It’s an opportunity to build better and more trustworthy strategies with the customers — and now is the time to start.’

His colleague Olivier Chatain adds: ‘It’s an opportunity to show clients that you love them.’ He highlights building customer loyalty as being a central strategy for all companies in the current environment, where customers are re-evaluating many of their product and service providers.

Other take-homes are:

Companies need to get much closer to their customers in terms of encouraging their employees to build relationships that go beyond the transactional
So-called ‘CRM’ programmes, where customers are segmented and targeted in purely financial terms, can backfire because companies can be ‘buying disloyalty down the line’
Companies should consider innovating their terms of service (or policies) to focus on the anxiety consumers are facing (eg by increasing warranty periods).

The link to the article is here

If you would like to enhance your customer experience in Thailand, Talent Technologies offers companies a complete service from experience auditing, to customer experience design, to customer relationship maximisation training.

For further details, please feel free to contact us here or call our office on +662 6393550

It’s official: consumers trust word of mouth above everything else

admin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:21:38 +0000

The latest research into consumer attitudes conducted by AC Nielsen has yielded results that don’t surprise us… but show an increasing trend in consumer preferences away from traditional advertising and towards word of mouth (WOM).

In the study, conducted with over 25,000 participants in over 50 countries, word of mouth was shown to be nearly twice as effective at building trust than billboards, radio and magazines.

Which inevitably leads to the question… what creates word of mouth?

As we have seen in recent posts, the customer experience (as opposed to advertising or other forms of marketing) is fundamental to creating word of mouth.

This is also one of the most cost-effective places to invest right now.

If you would like to find out more about Talent Technologies’ Customer Experience maximisation, then please contact us here.

The secret of customer focus

admin — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 02:13:38 +0000

It was Sam Walton who said:

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

Yet it’s surprising how many companies have evolved into organisations where the customer is the least important person in the organisational set-up.

And as Walton’s creation, WalMart, goes from strength to strength, one of its chief competitors, KMart, earlier this year slid into bankruptcy. The difference between the two? At the end of the day, ‘customer focus’. WalMart has over the decades been able to understand what its customers want and when, while KMart has had to depend on endless discounting and price wars to lure its clientele.

‘Customer Focus’ explained

All companies go through cycles of growth. Behind this cycle there is a deeper pattern which the graphic below shows, where the nature of this growth changes the company focus from the customer (entrepreneurial stage) through to the company (mature stage).

If a company lets this progression continue, then it will lapse into decline (the final stage).

‘Customer Focus’ seems a concept most companies would seem to want to maintain. Yet, to a greater or lesser degree, as they grow their focus does become more internal and, as a result, customer service and the customer offering suffers, in turn affecting sales, profitability and revenue growth.

Customer Focus impacts the Customer Experience

The key differentiator between companies is less and less in the product they sell, or the service they offer, but in the experience their customers receive.

If a company’s focus is internal, the chances are that the customer experience is either haphazard or neglected. This kills customer loyalty, and with it, sustainable long-term growth.

Companies may try to address this by creating processes, checklists and competencies, but these gambits usually exacerbate the situation. Processes themselves are inside-out (company driven) not outside-in (customer driven). The fact is that processes are a poor substitute for a heart.

Intangibles galore

This leads us to the realisation that much of the competitive differentiation between, say, service provider A and service provider B, boils down to whether you like the person serving you and the way he or she does so.

This difference is emotional, and, since emotions seem so slippery, so difficult to manage, companies try to ignore them or replace them with ‘rational’ measures that have no correlation on the desired emotional outcome (like processes for example). This is something like trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver – it simply cannot work.

But these intangibles go on being intangible, and adding or subtracting vast amounts of money to or from a company’s top line. So what can companies do?

Experiences can be created

It’s interesting to note that experiences can be created, measured, and managed. Numerous companies globally are doing this right now. One thing these companies all have in common is that they are outside-in, not inside-out first. Their management teams have made a conscious effort to start with the customer experience and work backwards. Thus, in spite of reaching ‘maturity’ in the graphic above, they have been able to move their focus where it belongs – with the customer.

How to get your customer experience started

If you would like to find out more about how to discover the source of differentiation your company offers in its customer experience, then participating in our one-day Customer Relationship Maximisation programme is a great way to start.

In it you will discover how your company is really connecting with your customers at all its touchpoints, which emotions typically evoke which kind of behaviours (such as customer stay, say and spend) at the moments of truth, and the elements of experience industry leaders are able to create.

You’ll not want to miss it!