Tag: Customer Centricity

The Crazy Secret of the Worlds Top Five…

Hey Hey!

I just wanted to reach out, so you don’t miss out on this limited time offer on my new book Outside-In The Secret of the 21st c. leading companies.

You might be thinking, what is Outside-In?

To sum it up, ‘Outside-In The Secret’ reveals the fundamental difference between the top-performing companies and the failing also-rans. It is a massive shift in perspective that revolutionizes work forever.

The insights shared are based on my work and research with companies like BMW, Emirates, Zara, Zappos, and Amazon over the last two decades.

But hey, don’t just hear it from me…

So, I have codified the learning and the ‘Secret’ approaches, tips, tricks, and hacks to make them accessible to all. Initially published in 2010 and it is now wholly updated as Edition 10!

My colleague and BP Group co-founder says this…

Why You Should Read Outside-In The Secret

You may be wondering why you should invest your precious time reading this book. With all the pressures of the current business climate, why will this investment be worthwhile?

I’d like you for a moment to think of ‘high jumping.’ This is a sport that has been pursued actively from the Ancient Greeks in the original Olympics to modern times. And for nearly 3,000 years, people jumped using similar techniques. Then an innovator, Dick Fosbery, thought of a new approach that was incredibly simple and yet at the same time delivered ‘breakthrough performance’ levels enabling him to win the gold medal in the 1968 Olympic high jump bar. He leaped over the bar backward, overturning thousands of years of ‘best practice.’

So I would like you to give yourself permission to consider that you, too, can achieve ‘breakthrough performance’ in your own business endeavors. In this book, ‘Outside-In,’ Steve Towers will introduce you to some remarkable concepts that at first seem simple and obvious, and yet when applied, will allow you to win the gold medal in your own field of business.

John Corr, Director, Alix Partners, London, England.

And Guess What? Do you want something special?

It is FREE for a short period of time…

This is what you need to do RIGHT NOW to get your copy:

http://bit.ly/OI2021now

First — go to this website and let him know where to ship it to (you’ll have to pay a tiny shipping fee):

http://bit.ly/OI2021now

Second — you should probably post on FB, tweet, and let EVERYONE else you know about it ASAP (because this cool book promo will be over soon…).

http://bit.ly/OI2021now

This book will be sold retail in 2021 at $30, but you can get it FREE now.

Just go here to see what you need to do next:

http://bit.ly/OI2021now

But you MUST get your copy of this book now. The last time I made an offer like this, I ran out of books within a week ….

So go get your copy now:

http://bit.ly/OI2021now

To Your Success!

P.S. — this book is the real deal. James Dodkins said that it’s: “the map that will allow you to turn your specialized knowledge, talents, and abilities coupled with this new perspective into a way of working that transforms you and your company! This is one of the shortcuts of the New Stellar Performers.” — and TODAY, you can get it for free, right here:

http://bit.ly/OI2021now

My previous book, Dare! Became an Amazon Number 1 Best Seller in February 2020. This book Outside-In The Secret will also be… get your FREE copy here:
http://bit.ly/OI2021now



Call Centre Metrics are the Reason Customers Are so Unhappy (part 1)

Here are seven classic examples from a recent blog of someone selling Call Centre Services. No, I really am to polite to call them out. I thought I had travelled back in time 50 years, but I am appalled there are people still doing this?!

This hurts my Head

Why are these so Wrong?
Answers on a post card but Part Two Next week will provide more insight.

And then in Part Three we will explore the alternatives…

Call Centre Measures that cripple Your Customer Experiences
(the seven deadly sins)

Service Level – “The service level is the percentage of calls responded in a particular time limit. It assesses the skills of agents to deliver the service as per the Service Level Agreement (SLA) given to the clients.”…. It is a significant way to judge the performance of a call center.

Average Call Handle Time –  “This KPI measures time an agent needs on a call.”

Average Queue Time – “To assure that the wait time of callers rests in the fair scope and the patience of customers should not be tested”

Call Abandonment – “It is a usual experience in the call center that clients disconnect the calls before even connecting to an agent.”

First Call Resolution – “The client is frequently in a rush. Thus, he requires that the concern of the caller must be fixed in the first call”

Occupancy Rate – “It is completely about the ability to complete the work within minimum time.”

Agent Turnover Rate – “It measures the rate of agents who switch the job. It not only causes customer service conflicts and delays as well as it also creates many issues.”

A person once said this to me… “If you pay people for doing dumb stuff they will get really smart at it”

A Very Wise Women

In Part Two we will review why Call Centre thinking is so BAD and should be BANNED.

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Uncovering the Secrets of the Top Influencers

Who are the best and what are their secrets?

I revisited my lists of sources, contacts and influencers, brought them up to date (the last two years or so) and collated the best across the domains I operate in. I included the recent Award winners acknowledged for their contributions to business. The result you can access below which contains the people, their LinkedIn connections, their best videos and in some cases additional resources.

My work takes me all over the planet and I get to meet some awesome people who are generous with their time and ideas. I then test, optimise and codify these great ideas into techniques and approaches we can all access.

Dare! Amazon Number 1 Best Seller (2020)

I was relating this approach at a keynote in a conference in Romania recently following the publication of our new Amazon best selling book Dare!

The keynote went well (see the extract version below) and everyone adjourned to the bar to relax and network.

At that drinks reception several people wanted to know my sources of inspiration, so naturally, we started trading names, some well known and some not yet so. As I was doing this it struck me this was one of the most commonly asked questions whether I am talking or working with some of the leading companies on the planet. So an idea was born…

Steve’s keynote in Bucharest in February 2020

Who are the best and what are their secrets?

I revisited my lists of sources, contacts and influencers, brought them up to date (the last two years or so) and collated the best across the domains I operate in. I included the recent Award winners acknowledged for their contributions to business. The result you can access below which contains the people, their LinkedIn connections, their best videos and in some cases additional resources.

So the next time someone asks me a question about influencers I am going to point them here!

All the Best, Keep safe and well,
Steve

Customer Experience, Customer Service, Leadership and Operational Excellence

Click the image to access videos, books and other resources!


The pioneer of all things Outside-In?

Who started #customerexperience ? Well, there has always been a customer experience, however, it is only in the last 20 years that companies have realized the need to get scientific about shaping and innovating #CX. Who was the pioneer that did that first? And in doing so shifted the emphasis from Industrial Age thinking to Outside-In practice. Let’s jump into the time machine and rediscover Steve Jobs back in 1997.

Moving from Product to Customer-Centric

Back then it wasn’t understood that designing Customer Experiences and delivering Successful Customer Outcomes went way beyond being product-centric. Steve Jobs anticipated this shift towards customer-centricity, and evolved Apples approach to rapidly shift to Outside-In strategy and operations.

Many of the concepts we accept, such as defining the customer experience from the customers perspective, and not the organizations, were developed in the cauldrons of Apple mountain. In fact, one of the key techniques within the CEMMethod™ was initially referred to as the ‘Apple Innovation Approach’.

Why so many still get it wrong

Here’s a great mini video explaining the difference in viewpoint Inside-Out v. Outside-In.

The CX Rockstar tells us why many get the definition of CX wrong.

James Dodkins aka CX Rockstar has many similar takes over at rockstar.cx

We saw that at work in Outside-In design of products like the original iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Now taken for granted the last century was a mish mesh of competing chunks of technology (think the early MP3 players) that often required an MSc to understand the menu system and driver updates.

It isn’t what they want, it is what they NEED

Nowadays the major consumer product companies understand the requirement to articulates the needs of customers, and only then design products that meet those needs. That is Outside-In in action.

You would be right in saying he was the pioneer of Outside-In.

If you would like to dig deeper I talked about the difference in approaches of Industrial Age v. Customer Age/Outside-In in this article.

This item has caused quite a stir over at LinkedIn, you can join that discussion here.

Other Outside-In resources to Explore


What is & Who is Outside-In? (interview by James Dodkins)

Two-minute bite-sized chunk provides the answer.

 

What do you mean when you say ‘Outside-In’?

Outside-In is a regular theme during most of my keynotes, not least this last week here in Florida. A question asked from the floor related to the 30-second elevator test “can you explain to the CEO what this stuff is, why it is different, and how it reframes the work we do?”. I guess I was about to fudge and say this needs more than 30 seconds, and then remembered my two-slide explanation!
So, for those guys looking for a simple explanation, these two slides will do the job. I have put a bit of narrative in there also.

120+ in Florida at the keynote, 16 January 2018

Steve Towers Florida keynote
Florida keynote to top team of major global industrial corporation

The old, industrial-age traditional way of doing business.
We make products (and services). We look for the market to sell them in. We segment customers by circumstance and pitch our products to those segments. We add variations to the products to better fit certain niche segments. We build back-end systems and digital capabilities in this increasingly complex world. We are rigid, functionally oriented and abhor change.

Old Industrial Age thinking model

 

The new Outside-In customer-centric way.
We identify the customers we would like to do business with. We understand their needs (even when they may not know them themselves) and specific Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO’s).
We categorise customers by need. We then create the capability to deliver to these categories the SCO’s (both products, people and digital). Progressively we manage new and existing customer expectations to deliver success without exception. We are agile, innovative and attuned to 21st century needs.
21st century Outside-In business model

Let me know if this works for you.

Ciao, Steve

For the curious, the original slides came from a deck presented as a keynote in Sydney, Australia 3 years ago.
You can access that here:  http://bit.ly/SydneyPEX

The Shocking Truth about Customer Experience


The single biggest piece of advice I give to senior executives setting out on the Customer Experience journey is to STOP. Yes seriously, the vast majority of CX efforts are completely misaligned.

CX Efforts Misaligned

Don’t get me wrong the intentions are good. Unfortunately, it goes something like this:

  1. Top Team are listening and decide they need to get with this customer centricity/Outside-In/working backwards thinking.
  2. Senior Management makes noises that the customer is THE thing the business must focus on.
  3. The Executive engage the marketing and sales guys to get with it and start pushing the message.
  4. Functional leaders hear the noise and bluster. They start using the language, whilst thinking this is just more fluff and nonsense. They make the right noises for now but keep their heads down, because they know this will go the same way as so many other ‘strategic initiatives’.
  5. Fundamentally functional heads carry on working with the out of date reward system that promotes sub-optimal industrial age thinking and practice.
  6. The Executive see the usual inertia, results not coming through, apathy and indifference and decide their business isn’t really an Amazon.
  7. Top Team then reverts to just getting better at what we are doing, then when someone in ‘our industry’ proves it we will follow.
  8. Functional leaders breathe a sigh of relief and invest even more in industrial age systems and training. The illusion of doing something, in this case, is actually worse than doing nothing.
  9. The businesses failure is noted by customers who move to those who do understand and deliver Customer Experience success.
  10. The company becomes another footnote in the history books. Talked about at business schools and picked apart because of the failure to get the new Outside-In customer-centric mindset.

Making Customer Experience Successful everywhere all the time

This isn’t rocket science (unless you are NASA of course). Understanding that the structures and ways of working from the industrial age were NEVER designed to be customer-centric. They were established to make things faster by optimizing production lines.

And oh, don’t think because you are not in manufacturing you are OK. It is likely your complete ways of working will be making everything look like production management systems, with talk of leaning out, waste reduction, standardization, efficiency, productivity. Sound familiar?

Understanding this Customer Experience misalignment is fundamental.

I encourage doing three things before re-joining the CX road-march:

  1. Understand how big the gap is between what you are doing and what Successful Customer Outcomes you need to be delivering.
  2. Audit the current key performance indicators.
    Are they mostly about outputs?
    Usually, the balance will be 80% output metrics (like calls answered, Average Handle Times, Abandoned Rates, Projects completed on time to budget etc.).
    Meanwhile, the really important measures that tell you a Successful Customer Outcome is being achieved will only be a small proportion.
    What you measure is what you get and no amount of Customer Experience drum banging will work unless those measures of Outcomes become the most important.
  3. Create an awareness of what real CX success is all about.
    This isn’t just the stories. It is about the actual things on the ground that need to change. The WHY and the HOW go hand in hand. Often times upskilling a group of key players at all levels to make them Ambassadors for the Customer achieves way more than massive corporate investment in branding and image.

In conclusion, Customer Experience cannot be treated just like another corporate initiative. To achieve success requires a significant shift in mindsets, and when that is achieved the realignment of the Enterprise to Outside-In can really begin.

Want more guidance and tips like this?


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