The Business of Kindness

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Lately, while listening to an NPR program, I heard a group of business people discussing kindness.

Kindness – not a word historically associated with corporations, those bastions of male verve – is now being equated with the bottom line. How times have changed. In the 90s when I gave keynotes titled ‘Sales as a Spiritual Practice’ I would get asked: “Yes, but how would we make money?”

Imagine embracing the desire to be helpful and considerate, compassionate and generous as part of accepted business practice. We all know what happens when it’s ignored. We know how workplace issues grind people down, and how infrequently those below the top tier get asked their opinions. We know we lose more good employees to treatment issues than to pay issues. We know that 70% of buying decisions are made by women.

And yet we continue assuming the bottom line is about minimizing costs and maximizing profit.

How Kindness Can Effect Our Bottom Line

The costs of degrading and ignoring employees and making customers conform to our money-saving practices cost us high turnover, a paucity of fresh ideas and new leaders, and the need to hire more supervisory managers to handle the fallout. I know a company here in Austin with a reputation of treating employees so punitively that only naïve out-of-towners apply for the many available jobs.

Research has shown kindness actually increases our bottom line:

  • When employees are asked their opinions, treated respectfully, given jobs that enable them to exhibit excellence regardless of their pay scale, they are more creative, responsible, and loyal. They adopt leadership roles, put in longer hours, and have fewer sick days.
  • When we treat our clients kindly we keep them longer, hear about problems (rather than lose them to competitors), are offered new ideas to monetize, and have brand ambassadors to offer free marketing to connections who may become clients.

Here are a few of my personal experiences of monetizing kindness:

1. Kindness with customers:

a. In Portland recently, I couldn’t locate my correct bus stop. I called the Transit help line and a person answered! And he stayed on the line until I got to my destination!

  • Takeaway: the random acts of kindness I found throughout Portland have led me to prepare to move there.

b. After not receiving my NYTimes for four Sundays, I made two angry calls. The first woman said I would need to speak with a supervisor on Monday; the second woman not only called my local delivery folks, she called back to tell me when the paper would be delivered, called again to make sure I got it, and then left me her cell number in case the problem occurred again.

  • Takeaway: I won’t cancel my subscription.

2. Kindness with employees:

a. In the 80s I ran a tech support company in London with 48 tech folks. Annually, I gave them $2000 to take a week off to renew themselves by attending any course they wanted (photography, cooking). I also required them to take off one day a month to do volunteer work. And at least four times I year went to their job sites (and they were not my direct reports), took them to lunch, and picked their brains on ways we could do better for them and for our clients. Their ideas were terrific. As a side note, I often ran into competitors at conferences who said they tried to hire my folks away yet couldn’t pry them from my grip. “What are you doing to those folks?” I was just respecting them.

  • Takeaway: there was no turnover in 4 years; the tech folks called us whenever they heard rumors of new business and I was in place by the time the vendor delivered the product.

b. I hired a full time ‘make nice’ guy whose job it was to visit staff and clients on site to make sure the relationships and programming worked efficiently, nipping problems in the bud. With no fires to fight I had nothing to do but grow my company.

  • Takeaway: revenue doubled annually; I had a 42% net profit.

The How of Kindness: Using Listening Skills Enhance Relationships

I believe the process of listening is one of the skills that will enable us to be kind. Not only do we need to set up client Listening Conferences and staff Listening Hours, we must hear what’s being said between the lines. My new book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? explains whatever we listen for determines what we hear. So rather than merely listen for problems, we must listen for the patterns in the problems: Lots of turnover? What are we ignoring that can be resolved? Bottom line decreasing due to competition? What are clients telling us that we haven’t been listening for?

Through the years, with clients and staff, coachees and colleagues, I have found the biggest obstacle to authentic communication is how imperfectly we hear others. Far too often we enter conversations with a bias and miss what’s being conveyed that falls outside the range of expectation. Imagine if we approach our conversations with the bias of kindness:

  • An employee is perpetually late with work assignments: is there something going on in the department, with other employees, with her work load, that is causing the problem?
  • Customer service folks must recognize patterns in complaints and become leaders in resolving problems rather than maintaining the status quo. I recently heard a rep say: “I’ve had lots of complaints about this. But there are no plans to fix it.”

How can we monetize kindness with staff and clients? It’s possible to make money AND be kind. Let’s begin the conversation.

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is a visionary, original thinker, and thought leader in change management and decision facilitation. She works as a coach, trainer, speaker, and consultant, and has authored 9 books including the NYTimes Business BestsellerSelling with Integrity. Morgen developed the Buying Facilitation® method (www.sharondrewmorgen.com) in 1985 to facilitate change decisions, notably to help buyers buy and help leaders and coaches affect permanent change. Her newest book What? www.didihearyou.com explains how to close the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She can be reached at [email protected]

Build Relationships that Last for National Entrepreneurship Month

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It’s only natural that we have the holidays on our minds this time of year, but I’ll admit the event I’m thinking of most may not be the same one you’re focused on. November is National Entrepreneurship Month and, as someone who works with small business owners on a daily basis and knows how hard it is to grow a business, I can’t overstate how much I appreciate the creativity, innovation and hard work of today’s entrepreneur. For me, November is synonymous with these self-starters who are following their dreams and doing business their own way. There are plenty of ways we can celebrate these entrepreneurial risk takers, and I think the best way I can show my appreciation is to provide a few tips for developing sustainable customer relationships that are critical to long-term small business success.

Starting your own business requires perseverance and determination. You are doing everything you can to increase visibility, and the next step is capturing the hearts and minds of your customers. The best way for you to grow your business into a healthy and sustainable future is by finding and retaining customers. A report provided by Bain & Company showed that increasing customer retention by as little as 5 percent boosted profits from 25 percent to a whopping 95 percent. Here’s what you need to achieve similar success.

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About the Author

H. John Oechsle joined Swiftpage in July 2012 and currently serves as president and chief executive officer. John came to Swiftpage with a 30 year track record of building highly profitable and sustainable revenue growth for emerging companies and established global leaders. John is an advocate for technology and education in Colorado and has been an active contributor to the Colorado Technology Association (CTA). He has been recognized several times for his involvement in the tech industry. In 2006 and in 2009, John was awarded the Technology Executive of the Year, and the Titan of Technology awards by the CTA. John was also awarded the Bob Newman Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Community by the CTA in 2011.

What Should Coaches Be Listening For?

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A coach’s job is to facilitate potential change, usually by asking questions to identify the components of the problem and decide between solutions while reinforcing the changes and maintaining a trusting relationship. To achieve the excellence that all coaches seek, it’s necessary to avoid the listening filters that could prejudice the interaction, such as:

Bias. By listening for specifically for elements of the stated issues – problems, hopes, missing skills or motivation – a coach will merely hear what she/he recognizes as missing. If there are unspoken or omitted bits, if there are patterns that should be noticed, if there are unstated historic – or subconscious – reasons behind the current situation, the coach may not find them in a timely way, causing the coach to begin in the wrong place, with the wrong timing and potentially creating mistrust with the client.

Assumptions. If a coach has had somewhat similar discussions with other coaches, it’s possible that s/he will make possibly faulty assumptions or guesses that do not take into account the coaches specific, historic, unconscious, and certainly idiosyncratic challenges.

Habits. If a coach has a client base in one area – say, real estate, or leadership – s/he may enter the conversation with many prepared ways of handling similar situations and may miss the unique issues, patterns, and unspoken foundation that may hold the key to success.

As I write in my new book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? the problem lie in our brains. Once we listen carefully for ‘something’, we restrict all else that’s possible to hear as our brains interpret the words spoken according to our bias, often missing the client’s real intent, nuance, patterns, and comprehensive contextual framework and implications.

To have choice as to when, whether, or how to avoid filtering out possibility, we must disassociate – go up on the ceiling and look down – and remove ourselves from any personal biases, assumptions, triggers or habits, enabling us to hear all that is meant (spoken or not). In What? I explain how to trigger ourselves the moment there is a potential incongruence. For those unfamiliar with disassociation, try this: during a phone chat, put your legs up on the desk and push your body back against the chair, or stand up. For in-person discussions, stand up and/or walk around. [I have walked around rooms during Board meetings while consulting for Fortune 100 companies. They wanted excellence regardless of my physical comportment.] Both of those physical perspectives offer the physiology of choice and the ability to move outside of our instincts. Try it.

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is a visionary, original thinker, and thought leader in change management and decision facilitation. She works as a coach, trainer, speaker, and consultant, and has authored 9 books including the NYTimes Business BestsellerSelling with Integrity. Morgen developed the Buying Facilitation® method www.sharondrewmorgen.com in 1985 to facilitate change decisions, notably to help buyers buy and help leaders and coaches affect permanent change. Her newest book What? www.didihearyou.com explains how to close the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She can be reached at [email protected]

What investment in your business are you REALLY making?

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‘Return on Investment’ (ROI) in business is predicated on the ability of the company to deliver as promised in product, profit, and its accompanying service.

It’s amazing to me that everyone measures ROI to the penny, and no one measures ROS (return on service) at all.

Most companies are too busy pissing their money away on customer satisfaction surveys when they could eliminate the survey costs, and spend half of that money training people to improve service, and measure the only three things in business that matter: repeat business, profit margins, and referrals – all the rest of the ‘satisfaction’ process is an empty waste of time and money.

Let’s get real here, when J.D. Power gives the customer satisfaction award to an airline, what could the category possibly be? Least crappy?

The object of service is to be so amazing that one person tells another person, or one person posts to their Facebook account, or both. How’s yours?

The key to profitable repeat business and unsolicited referrals is to create genuine word-of-mouth, and word of mouse about the company, the products and services, and especially the people.

ROI REALITY: Do you want to deliver service that’s satisfactory or remarkable?
ROI REALITY: Do you want to deliver service that’s satisfactory or memorable?

Return on service can take place in any part of the business. Here are the most prominent examples:

  • Provide positive attitude training for everyone in the company
  • Provide specific and customized empowerment service training for everyone in the company (what is EACH employee allowed to do and say to a customer?)
  • The receptionist or telephone operator. This is the customer’s first point of contact and sets the tone for the entire transaction.
  • Ship an order error free and backorder free. Get them what they want fast and seamlessly.
  • The delivery and arrival of a customer shipment. Packaging determines image, and the condition of the contents upon arrival proves their worth to the shipper and the care of the shipping department. A HUGE part of re-order consideration.
  • The accounting department people. Accounting can play a major role in customer loyalty. The way they talk to an account, the frequency of error, their accuracy of invoicing, and the common courtesy they may display when someone is late making a payment.
  • Damned automated attendant. No one on earth wants to hear their telephone call answered by a computer, yet every major company in the world employs these godforsaken things. There has to be a better way, and the person that creates it will make billions.
  • The speed, accuracy, and outcome of handling a complaint. Complaints go WAAAAY beyond one customer. They go all the way to social media.

You must perform REMARKABLE or MEMORABLE service for:

  • Following up and thanking customers for an order
  • Following up and making certain that the service call went perfectly
  • Making certain that everyone on the inside of the company is well rewarded, and well thanked for a job well done.

And for those of you who still possess an ounce of skepticism about ROS after these truths, here are some additional ‘return’ elements to consider.

Many Happy Returns:

  • Return on training. Especially for front line people.
  • Return on morale. Internal happiness creates customer happiness.
  • Return on leadership. The leader sets the tone and the attitude BY EXAMPLE.
  • Return on friendliness. All things being equal, people want to do business with their friends.
  • Return on getting the job done ahead of schedule. Real profit created by exceptional team effort.
  • Return on wowing the customer. Priceless. Period.
  • Return on accuracy. Beyond a good feeling all the way to respect – and reorder.
  • Return on quality product. This is a given, but creates more word-of-mouth than any other single forum.
  • Return on positive social media posts. Social media is the new “satisfaction” survey or report.
  • • Return on value messages offered to customers on a consistent basis. Weekly value-based messages to customers create life-long desires to stay connected.
  • Return on using voice-of-customer in YouTube, blog, and Facebook video posts. When you say it about yourself it’s bragging. When someone else says it about you, it’s proof. Video proof is the new proof.

Big companies hammer their entire workforce to make certain that their customer satisfaction scores are high or higher, when they could be (should be) creating an internal training program that begins with the word wow, and progresses upward from there.

Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.

About the Author

Jeffrey GitomerJeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Sales Bible, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Black Book of Connections, The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Teal Book of Trust, The Little Book of Leadership, and Social BOOM! His website, www.gitomer.com, will lead you to more information about training and seminars, or email him personally at [email protected].

Customer Retention: Stop Rolling the Dice

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Banking on a steady stream of new business can be like gambling away your future. It’s a well-established fact that customer retention can yield a huge return—yet companies still struggle to make it happen. Doing things like creating a more positive customer experience right from the start and identifying the root issues that cause customer churn can ensure a stable and prosperous future.

Below is an infographic from Sparked that illustrates the dangerous mindsets companies have that ultimately lead to churn and a significant loss in profit.

BPM Process Methodology

Click here to view the complete infographic.