Service

Moments Of Disappointment And Delight

Garth Beyer

Moments Of Disappointment And Delight

There are plenty of moments during a customer’s journey that you can either disappoint or delight them.

First there are the expected moments you put the most attention in, often around the moments of service or transaction.

Then there are plenty of given moments that happen without you remembering you planned them: forms, feedback sheets, notifications, letters, and the alike.

Lastly, there are the moments of priming. This is the giving you do before you ask. It’s top-of-mind for you because you’re always working to get new customers.

With these three monumental factors, any slight error can lead to disappointment and I’m going to tell you where it often occurs: the basics.

The givens, the planned items, the situations that have been set into a routine are often the moments of most disappointment for customers. Why? Because owners think that there are pieces of the customer’s journey that they can set and forget… and that’s simply not true.

The second moment that creates disappointment is in the moments of priming. For some reason, we get so much more excited about trying this clever widget or offering that neat discount for new customers instead of getting excited about investing in the lifetime value the existing customers.

As result, the existing base feels jipped. They feel that they’d rather give their money to someone who wakes up and works to win their hearts (business) every day.

The resolution is as obvious as you would imagine: listen.

 

Stay Positive & It’s Easy To Delight When You Listen To What Disappoints

Photo credit

The Inevitable Scarcity Effect

Garth Beyer

If you think the scarcity effect doesn’t play a role with your product or service, you’re wrong.

If there are two cookies left in the break room, we’re unconsciously motivated to desire one even if we didn’t want a cookie to begin with. Have you ever heard someone say “I had a sweat today and I’m not even sweet-tooth kind of person.” Scarcity played them.

If only five people in your organization could try a new product out – one you wouldn’t normally use – you would still sign up to try it out.

There is a shortage of grapefruit La Croix in the office today and all the sudden it’s my favorite flavor La Croix. Damn scarcity effect.

People don’t have a choice but to be victim to the scarcity effect. Are you leveraging it?

 

Stay Positive & Make Your Product/Service Scarce In Small Ways

10 Ways To Make A Difference (Lessons From Cambodia & Thailand)

10 Ways To Make A Difference (Lessons From Cambodia & Thailand)

Garth Beyer

Cambodia

1) Smile at people until they smile back. Not much is more universal than a smile. And nothing so simple can change the day for someone.

2) Provide the most selfless service you can when you can. It’s one of the beauties about Cambodia. Unlike here where we have to work to be selfless, there it comes natural. Surely it’s something we can work toward and achieve.

3) Observe the little ways you can make the life of another easier. Sometimes carrying the luggage of someone else is all you need to do. It’s difficult to change someone’s life in a huge way. It’s quite easy to make a lot of people’s lives a bit easier. Let’s face it, we can all use a break with this or that.

4) Always suggest the scenic route. You won’t ever regret it. I mean that. They say let the fear of not doing something scare you more than it not going as planned.

5) Put yourself in a location where others are making a difference. It’s sometimes difficult to make a difference on your own, but if you go where the movers and shakers are, there’s no doubt you’ll make the impact you’ve dreamed of.

6) When in doubt, play. (Particularly with children) There’s not much explaining to this one. You’ll experience and learn why this is a way you can make a difference once you do it.

7) Give thanks to three things a day. If you’re thankful for something that involves someone else, let them know directly. Gratitude is the dictator of attitude.

8) Travel. Period. When you go out into the world, doors to making a difference open every minute.

9) Teach someone how to do something or fail at something new together. The deepest impact you can make with someone or yourself involves learning.

10) Keep an open mind while observing ways to give and receive love. Corny, yes, but ultimately underrated. Also, emphasis on the “receive” end of it. Those who only give and never receive deprive others the satisfaction of sharing an experience, of making a difference.

 

Stay Positive & Impact Others To Improve The World (And Your Own)

Before You Get Clientele

Garth Beyer

You obviously need to know what service you’re providing, what you can offer them and what you will charge them in return.

More importantly, though, you need to know what more you’re going to provide than what they are paying for. How will you manage to go the extra mile with each service you deliver?

It’s a hell of a lot easier to build the extra-mile into your strategy than to figure it out along the way.

 

Stay Positive & Think Of The Extra Mile As What Differentiates Yourself

The Worst Way To Get New Customers

Garth Beyer

is to tell people that they’ve been doing something wrong. Especially to tell them they’ve been doing it wrong all their life.

Doing It Wrong

Electric can openers don’t sell because their marketing team call people who use the hand-held can openers dumb.

Ipods don’t sell because they say people using Walkman’s don’t understand what it means to have music in their pocket.

Even pizzerias don’t get new people to try their pizza by advertising that people have been going to the wrong place.

If what we do, use or eat gets done what we need done, the how doesn’t matter and surely doesn’t make it wrong. Hell, some even take pride in their traditional ways.

Yet, over and over I see people advertising their product or service by announcing someone has been doing it wrong.

  • “You’ve been baking that cake all wrong! Read our step-by-step guide on how to bake that cake!”
  • “You’ve been doing it wrong all your life! Buy our ten-in-one tool!”
  • “Can’t sleep in hotels? You’ve been doing it all wrong!”

A lot of the products and services that use this marketing approach might be right, but saying someone is doing something wrong doesn’t scale.

What scales is telling a story, showing what the product or service does (letting the user choose if what they’ve been doing is actually “wrong”) and marketing the feeling that the user will have when they use the product or service. That(!) scales.

 

Stay Positive & Seriously, Marketers, You’ve Been Doing It All Wrong

Photo credit

A New Edge To The Publishing Industry

Garth Beyer

What I’m about to tell you is a fallout for publishing companies, sure. But the change occurring results in the thriving  publishing industry.

Brands are now publishers.

And for the sake of those who don’t consider themselves a brand: businesses, services, inventors, creators are now publishers too.

A product won’t sell well unless you provide a copy of the story of it.

A business won’t gather as many clients unless they first share their story with them.

A freelancer won’t get as many bids unless they pitch their story, not their service.

Stories are driving the economy, and the only way to get your story out there is to publish it*

 

Stay Positive & If You Don’t Know Your Story, You’re Behind (here)

Garth E. Beyer

*word of mouth storytelling, I’ve always considered a form of publishing too.

Those Who Lack Great Ideas

Garth Beyer

Japanese-Cooking-Style

As much as I believe that everyone can come up with great ideas, I do come across those that will tell me that they can’t. Instead of fighting with them and trying to convince them of what they already believe to be false, I side with them.

That doesn’t give them an excuse not to do anything.

If anything, it encourages even more action on their part.

My simple retort then is to find a business that you value, a model that you can see yourself implementing and then build that business in an area it has yet been built in. In essence, you’re taking a great idea and using it geographically elsewhere.

Sometimes I fall into the trap of believing that a restaurant in town that centers on entertaining the customers by allowing them to watch the chefs cooking and turning that into a show is the only restaurant that does that; that there are no other restaurants like that anywhere else.

This comes to the restaurant’s advantage – the belief of “the only one”.

However, after a moments thought, you and I both know there are more restaurants that carry this model of turning a dining experience into an entertaining experience, but that doesn’t make them less valuable.

This process works with any great idea, not just restaurant based ideas. Think of some product or service you love. Guaranteed you can find almost the save product or service elsewhere – not everywhere, but elsewhere.

Don’t wait to come up with a great idea. Others have already done that for you.

 

Stay Positive & Take A Great Idea And Bring It Back Home With You

Garth E. Beyer

Photo credit