In 2008, I blogged about work/life balance in response to the topic being wildly covered in the press with tips and strategies claiming to help us achieve balance. The topic has evolved with many of my coaching colleagues addressing the myth. Here is a reposting of my 2008 blog explaining my take on this myth; offering an alternative view of “integration”; and explaining the distinction between balance and integration.
How often do you hear about people trying desperately to achieve balance in their lives?
The topic of work/life balance is covered in the press almost daily: radio; television; newspapers; magazines; and last but not least, e-newsletters and blogs. Because of the timing and overwhelming focus on this topic, most of us have bought into the notion that a “balanced life” is actually attainable.
Experience and observation has taught me that a “balanced life” simply is not attainable. Just think about this for a moment. Balance in any context is delicate. Anything that is balanced (think of a scale) can become unbalanced with the slightest pressure from any direction at anytime. An enormous amount of energy is exerted and depleted trying to keep something in balance – including your life. Can you see how incessant focus on achieving a balanced life affects the quality of your life? The effort is actually counter-productive. I have come to appreciate how “integration” rather than “balance” can be the key to maintaining quality of life and actually thriving. Understanding this distinction has a profound effect on sustaining your quality of life and basically, staying sane. Here is my interpretation of the distinction between integration and balance.
“Integration” implies acceptance, assimilation, and sense of continuous flowing energy. As something is added, it is embraced but it does not take over. When something is deleted, the gap is filled in just the right proportion without losing sight or appreciation for what was removed or lost. Wholeness is maintained. Our sense of being whole gives us strength to flow through the transition. We attract the best. We go with the flow.
“Balance” on the other hand implies struggle to achieve and maintain. Any addition or deletion from the equation causes upset or feeling of being “off balance”. Again, think about the scales. When something is added or deleted, there is a compensating reaction. Under or overcompensation fuels the imbalance. We feel fragmented along with a gamut of other feelings and fears that tear at our sense of being whole and compromise our strength. We focus on the hurdles, we trip, and we lose the flow.
Here is my call to action. Stop the Balancing Act:
- Examine your distinction between integration and balance.
- List what is most important to you at this very moment. Be as detailed as you feel is meaningful for you to benefit from this exercise.
- Use my distinction and/or your own regarding “balance” to determine how well (or not so well) you are currently “balancing” or “juggling” what is most important to you. How do you feel when “A” gets more attention than “B”? Or, when you add “C” which forces you to eliminate “B”? What is this “balancing act” costing you?
- Now explore the shift to “integration”. Can this shift allow you to give the appropriate amount of attention to “A” and “B”? Can you accept and assimilate “C” without total exclusion of “B”? If the unexpected comes along, will you be able to accept it with ease and maintain the flow?
I would love to read about your experience in stopping the balancing act. Please post your feedback.
Customers for Life – Making the Investment
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Customers for Life – Making the Investment
Customers are the people who put their hands in their pockets to pay the dealership and in turn pay YOU! Customers are our source of revenue and therefore, it pays to think of them an investment. Investing with the intention of return – a good return – requires planning, measuring, and nurturing growth over the long term. Adopting the ‘customers for life’ and ‘investment’ mindset can cause you to make better decisions in the moment and to care for your investments (customers) as you would your own money.
Focus on the lifetime value of the customer to you. Adopt an investment mentality.
Create Customers for Life!
4 ways to treat your customers as investments
- Focus on the lifetime value of the customer to you. If you treat customers on the basis of their last purchase or their service history value, you will inevitably make poor decisions about how much time, effort, and money you spend to attract and acquire customers, and how much you invest in the on-going relationships to keep them. No doubt, the initial cost of attracting and acquiring customers is important. However, we also need to consider the long-term potential of each and every customer. That is, what we can expect from them on an ongoing basis, not just their first purchase.
- Create your plan for customer retention. On the dealership level, great effort and expense goes into generating traffic to the dealership in order to generate new business. Statistics support the wisdom of complementing new business generation with strategies for keeping the customers that we have. Loyal customers are a wise investment for several reasons that contribute to business growth. They return for regular service, purchase more vehicles, spend more, and are typically more fun. They are a critical part of our outreach to new customers through their word-of-mouth efforts. Loyal customers promote the dealership and promote you personally. They are basically free advertising and an effective part of our sales team. Hence, it makes sense that each department and each employee takes the opportunity to develop a customer retention plan.
- Track your investment in customer retention over time. Investments mature over time. Just like an investment in your personal life, you will only see the full value of your investment in customer retention over a long term. Not only will you see gains in loyalty and revenues from loyal customers, but if you’re getting it right, you’ll see the results of them telling others about you and becoming advocates of the dealership and of you. Maybe they’ll write a testimonial or post a positive review on the Internet.
- Pay attention to the Customer Promoter Score ( aka CSI) to monitor the success of your customer retention plan. You wouldn’t make a major investment in the stock market and then not check on its performance for a year. The Customer Promoter Score monitors customer loyalty and refer- ability. A single poor experience can be enough to damage a relationship and the only way you’ll know how your customers feel and how well your customer retention plan is working is to monitor and respond effectively to customer feedback. Remember that 90% of customers don’t complain – they simply walk away.
Adopt an investment mentality. Create Customers for Life!
Earning Customer Love
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Earning Customer Love by Providing Happy Moments and Extraordinary Experiences
What’s the difference between Promoter and Passive Customer?
Love!
Customer love is more than the warm and fuzzies.
1. Customer love is earned – Love isn’t bought and paid for. You can’t go out and buy a customer-love campaign — this is something you earn. It’s about happy moments and extraordinary experiences. It’s about putting your customers first and blowing their minds.
2. New love makes us talk – Nobody talks more than a teenager in love, a child with a new bike, OR a person with a new car. This moment of new love is a powerful EXPERIENCE. The moment of TRUTH. This is the moment when a little word of mouth marketing can scale it, extend it, expand it, and get everyone talking about you.
3. Love breaks the relationship between marketing and money – If you want people to talk about you, you have two choices: You can pay them (media and advertising), or you can inspire them. When you buy ads, you pay every time, forever. But when you make a fan fall in love, the relationship is sustainable, renewable, and it grows with use instead of getting used up.
Based on Word of Mouth.org article written by Andy Sernovitz. www.wordofmouth.org
Making the Shift to Providing Total and Positive Customer Experience Across All Departments
This does not mean great or improved customer service. It’s about a major shift in the way we interact with customers from pre-sale queries to post-sale support, service, and more.
Total positive customer experience starts with a great product or service (Chrysler Soars to No. 1 in Canada. http://www.windsorstar.com/cars/Chrysler+soars+Canada/6235949/story.html)
It continues with easy transactions for the customer. And—most importantly—it is made satisfying by personalized interactions with dealership sales and service representatives, and other knowledge workers across the departments.
These three things—a great product, easy transactions, and valuable interactions—add up to the total positive customer experience.
Love Your Customers. Treat Them Well
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The Basics
Love Your Customers, Treat Them Well, Develop Partnerships
“Customers admire the beloved companies for how they are treated, not for how they are handled. And they love these companies because of how they feel when they come into contact with them.” (Janine Bliss)
Check out the YouTube video “Customer Love Movie” www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu5Twqo71os
ExtraordinaryWomenTV Interview
By · CommentsPatricia Muir is interviewed by Shannon Skinner of ExtraordinaryWomenTV.
Creating Your Plan for Customer Retention and Your Business Reputation
When a customer is not confident in our knowledge of our own product and options or when we take too much time to deliver their product or service, the customer is likely to feel that we are “hard to deal with”. When the feeling is perpetuated by their perception of negative treatment and poor quality of work, they are likely to take their business elsewhere.
This affects the future sales and service. It is reasonable to expect that these customers will not refer business to your either. In fact, they may spread negative word-of-mouth and post negative reviews on the Internet affecting the dealership’s reputation.
Most likely, great effort and expense goes into generating traffic to your business in order to generate new business. Your business’ good reputation is priceless in and beyond the immediate community. Because loyal customers cost less and spend more, there is good reason to have strategies for providing an exceptional sales and service experience to keep them coming back.
Loyal customers are a critical part of our outreach to new customers through positive word-of-mouth. They promote your business and promote you personally. They are basically free advertising! Hence, it makes sense for each department and each employee to develop a customer retention plan.
What’s your plan?
How are your plan and actions aligned with the business’ overall plan for customer retention and business reputation?
Framework for Customer Promoter Success
By · CommentsFramework for Customer Promoter Success
Real breakthroughs in customer experience and dealership performance occur only when Customer Promoter (CPS) is woven into the fabric of the DAY-TO-DAY business. This means grounding Customer Promoter efforts in an operational model that engages the entire business in improving customer relationships.
Building Trustworthy Data: Customer feedback data is trustworthy when it’s accurate, reliable, and relevant.
How you can help your organization! Every time you engage with the customer on the phone, at the counter, or at any other touch point, confirm their full contact information including email. Your assistance in this basic communication makes it easier and more effective to contact customers and measure our refer-ability with the right customers who reflect our business and will help us grow our business. Business Development Centres and third-party follow-up teams can then ask the right questions to make all customer feedback actionable. Your goal is to collect trustworthy data that covers long-term and that most accurately reflects the customers’ experience. Customers change contact information on an average of every 2 years. Therefore, it is important to keep your records current. An accurate and up-to-date customer list is worth millions of dollars in future business growth.
Ask Yourself:
Are you collecting and confirming valuable customer contact information at every opportunity?
Excerpt from Net Promoter website and revised for the purposes of and relevance in the automotive retail environment and other service-related businesses.
Framework for Customer Promoter Success
Real breakthroughs in customer experience and business performance occur only when Customer Promoter programs (CPS, NPS, SSI) are woven into the fabric of the DAY-TO-DAY business. This means grounding Customer Promoter efforts in an operational model that engages the entire business culture in improving customer relationships.
Over the next few weeks, we will review the elements that deliver real breakthroughs and sustainable good profitable business.
Develop an EnterpriseRoadmap to Get Where You Want to Go!
When you go on a road-trip, do you have a vision of where you want to go? Do you use a map or GPS to help you get there? Without a roadmap or GPS, you might never get where you want to go. You will probably take much longer to get there with frustrating detours and delays. We are all on a journey to a destination of personal and professional success. The Customer Promoter program is our vehicle. An enterprise roadmap provides Vision and direction. It is recommended that your enterprise map includes a two to three-year horizon that combines operational quick wins and long term structural improvements to your business. Your roadmap should take into account critical customer interaction points, and an understanding of which ones have the greatest impact on loyalty.
Ask Yourself:
Do you know the critical customer interaction points and
do you understand which ones have the greatest impact on customer loyalty?
Excerpt from Net Promoter website and revised for the purposes of and relevance in the automotive retail environment and other service-related businesses.
What customers should you target? How?
If you say “the most profitable ones,” you’re only half right. It’s also important to attract buyers who will act as your business growth advocates, encouraging others to buy from you. By assessing customer profitability and customer advocacy, you can tailor your strategies and processes —and your investments ($$ and time) —by segment:
- High-profit promoters. These are the customers you can’t live without—your core. You want to design and deliver your offerings in a way that expands this group, and to target new buyers who share their characteristics.
- High-profit detractors. These customers, often as important a your “core,” are sticking around because of inertia or because they feel trapped. They are profitable, attractive to your competition, and unlikely to suffer quietly. Losing them can dent your bottom line and your market share. You need to find out what’s irking them and fix their problems fast.
- Low-profit promoters. These are diamonds in the rough—loyal customers whose current buying patterns leave money on the table. Tap into their advocacy by offering them additional products and services, but don’t alienate them with heavy-handedness.
- Low-profit detractors. You can’t please everyone. If there is no economically rational way to solve their problems, then help unhappy customers move to other providers.
Companies are routinely surprised by which customers are high-profit promoters, how much potential for cross-sell exists among low-profit promoters, and how many detractors lurk in their portfolio.
Ask Yourself:
Am I investing my time and efforts wisely to attract and retain customers
Am I referable?
Excerpt from Net Promoter Alerts and revised for the purposes of and relevance in the automotive retail environment, Chrysler CPS (Customer Promoter Score), and other service-related businesses. Original article written and posted by James Allen, Frederick F. Reichheld, and Barney Hamilton, Thinking Clearly About Customers.
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