This year, 800-CEO-READ became painfully hip. We really didn’t mean to, it just sort of happened that way. You know how it is…just minding your own business and suddenly you’re thrust in the limelight. Sort of like being asked one of those problem solving math questions in 6th grade and getting brought up to the blackboard. Well, in this case our “black board call” was Fashion Week. Yes, you heard correctly: we were picked to provide materials for goody-bags at Fashion Week. It does not get more chic than that, right? I took the call about a month or so ago, thinking they were just a regular customer checking to see if we handle bulk orders. “Of course we do,” I assured the client and that we can get them during a certain week in New York. I wasn’t sure of it but by the time they ordered the book that they wanted: The Grown-Up Girl’s Guide to Style – Instinctively I thought that this wasn’t the regular business convention or author signing. It turned out that we were to be part of a popular woman’s magazine package that they were handing out to some elite individuals of the fashion world.
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 have eaten at some incredible restaurants on this trip. Yesterday was Balthazar for breakfast and Bouley for dinner.

I had to take a break from all that fine dining and eat lunch today at the Shake Shack. This is another establishment run by Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality. The burger joint is located in Madison Square Park and was quite popular today with the sunny, 80 degree day we are having in New York City today. I waited in line for 30 minutes to place my order and waited another 15 minutes to get my Shack Burger, Fries, Coke, and Strawberry Custard Shake. It was really good.

P.S. It was awesome to see Milwaukee-based Usinger’s bratwursts (aka Wisconsin Bratwurst) on the menu.

Tom Markert, the author of You Can’t Win a Fight with Your Boss, yesterday came out with another little book of encouragement and advice, this time for the hard workers who deal with keeping clients satisfied. It’s called You Can’t Win a Fight with Your Client: & 49 Other Rules for Providing Great Service. Each “rule” is a short entry on how to manage your relationships with clients – large accounts or small.
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.

The folks over at execuBooks spend each week talking about a book on their blog. They normally bring in a guest writer to ponder a variety of aspects about the book. This week they are talking about Fred Reichheld’s book The Ultimate Question.

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?

My goal is to make it easier for customer zealots and leaders to do this work and to advance the cause for customer experience and customer profitability. If you go to my website www.customerbliss.com, youll find a toolkit that outlines the key things Ive learned this past 25 years of pushing the rock up the hill. And if you click on Reality Check Audit, Ill send you a complete summary of your to do list for driving customer focus and customer leadership. Its an audit of the actions your company should be taking to drive the action. You can take it yourself, have your leadership take it and your companyand in doing so find out where to begin your quest, identify the potholes and get the action moving.

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

Please check out my book: Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action. It is packed with real-world experiences youll recognize and practical and realistic actions you can t ake right from the page to action.

Also take a look at Fred Reichhelds Book – The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth. Reichheld advocates using the Would you Recommend? question to customers as a key indicator of driving profitability. Youll find th at my book complements and agrees with his conceptand puts forth some concrete ideas on how to execute on the concept in the real world of the corporate machine. For example; one thing to watch out for is to ensure that you dont just use the referral question to get a good Net Promoter score. My concern is that companies are already getting precariously close to using this powerful tool to game the system and work for the score rather than where it should drive companies to improve and change. Asking the question without going back and clarifying the issues with customers on why they did or did not or would not recommend you wont get your company to change. Im already hearing of companies out there who are starting to prod their customers, call us if you cant say youd recommend us. It would be a shame for this to fall into another number thats gamed rather than used to get the company to drive action for customers.

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.

Some CEOs are considering the creation of a C-level position to drive the action for customer experience and customer profitability. However, beyond the notion that its a good idea, not many know how to structure the Chief Customer Officer role and its place in the organization. Here are some thoughts to help you proceed.

Suggesting a CCO may seem frivolous to leaders who believe they already focus on customers. Theres often a proliferation of tactics and projects underwaythe problem is they dont 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. Im sure that youve 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, theyre 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: lets 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 youll drive the customer work and measure progress? I didnt 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 dont 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. Theres 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 its no ones 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 peoples 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 wouldnt refute that any of these actions are important. They want them to happen. Theyve 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?