Any organization that serves others must provide what is commonly called Customer Service. That is, when a customer has an issue, they need some one to call who will get the issue resolved. Here are some thoughts on providing excellent Customer Service:

1. Don’t give the customer any reason to call. That is, anticipate and fix problems before the customer ever sees their effects. We used to hold top level weekly meetings where we reviewed all unsolved customer service problems. More often than not these were new issues, often easily solved, but things the customer service people had not been trained to address.
2. Get rid of those extensive call director menus, and allow your customer to talk to a real person, quickly. I know this is a cost issue. My solution? Allow the customer to self select into a longer automated queue if they are comfortable doing so.
3. Have your Customer Service people take charge of the customer’s problem, lift it off of the customer’s shoulders, give your people a procedure for dealing with these things, and compensate them for doing so. Get back to the customer when a solution is provided.
4. Training, training, training. How can you expect your customer service people to know the answers to all the problems that might come up if you do not gather information company wide, craft solutions, and inform your people about them?
5. Compensation. Craft a structure to pay good employees for good work, as an incentive compensation plan laid over base wage.

Remember, you will not receive a call from your customer when he switches to your competitor.

Health Care Reform

It is interesting how the process of making public policy highlights so many of the business adages in my book Fortune & Freedom: The Entrepreneur’s guide to Success. Previously I wrote about the need to define the problem before you attempt to solve it, and noted that little of this had been done in the national debate on health care. Someone must have read my blog, because starting shortly thereafter all I have been hearing about is the goals of health care reform. Unfortunately, there has been little discussion about specifics that would address those goals.

So let me give you an illustration of a business fallacy titled “Oh no, you did exactly what I told you to do!” See the picture in my book of the man with anguish on his face? He has just seen the result of his hasty solution to a problem he has not taken the time to define and analyze. Will this be all of us after the Health Care Reform initiatives become law? Or, to say it another way, let’s go back to the issue raised above, define the problems we are working to solve (there are plenty of them), and discuss and agree on solutions to those problems.

It seems to me that most people agree on the need and the goals of health care reform. The problems lie in laying out solutions to specific health care problems, and discussing and agreeing on these solutions. Pretty much all the discussion I have heard to date is vilifying the other guy for not agreeing with you. You certainly could not stay in business if you ran your company that way.

In my book “Fortune & Freedom” The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Success”, I note in Part IV that identifying the problem before solving it is priority number one. I quote my middle school math teacher who said: “If I had ten minutes to solve a problem, I would spend eight minutes reading it.” So what is the problem we intend to solve with the proposed new Health Care Legislation? Is it covering people who do not have Health Care Insurance? Covering people who do not want health insurance? Or is it cost?

The President at various times says it is both, and that the present high cost of health care is caused by the profits of the for-profit insurance companies (not all providers are for-profit organizations). Some politicians such as Robert Reich assert that government competition to private providers will bring down the cost. (If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you – but back to the subject at hand). So what is the problem we are trying to solve?

And, of course, the above is only talking about the evidence of the problem, not its causes. So once we decide whether we are solving the problem of cost or coverage, we then need to identify the drivers, the problems that cause high cost or spotty coverage. Only after these drivers are defined and agreed to can we start to craft a solution.

Have you heard the phrase “A solution in search of a problem”? We need to be careful what we wish for. Our wish might be granted.

Jim

OUT OF WORK?

That question is being asked more often in recent months. If your answer is “yes”, then in addition to seeking your next job opportunity, you might consider working on future opportunities in general.

In “Fortune & Freedom” I talk about the need to accumulate “necessary skills”, whether you intend to become an entrepreneur or simply to improve your future job performance. Those skills include selling, learning how our political system works at the grass roots level, and others. (Take a look at the Table of Contents on the www.furtuneandfreedom.biz web site for the list of the five key skills I think are important).

So between job interviews volunteer in a political campaign (yes, they are going on even now), get a job selling on commission, or take a course in accounting. My book has a lot more detail on what I recommend. So go for it!

Jim

Let me make a couple of points. First, a credit crunch arises in an economy when a meaningful number of people come to believe that they might not get their money back from their bank, stock investment, etc. Given this, repeatedly telling people that they are likely to lose their investments and then jobs if they do not support a candidate or vote for bailout legislation, is the height of lunacy. No wonder we are seized by this credit crunch.

Second, people pay $3 million for a 30 second super bowl ad because by and large advertising on television works. Wouldn’t you thus think that several years of media bombardment telling us how poor the economy is might have a similar effect? We used to call it Bush bashing, then election politics, and now bailout, but it is all media advertising, and the message has been the same.

Who is surprised by where we have come to?

Jim

Fortune and Freedom

Hi, I’m Steve O’Keefe, and I’m helping The Old Guy with his online marketing. I promised Jim Hirshfield I would add a post here once a week to talk about how we are approaching online marketing for his new book, Fortune & Freedom.

Jim hired me to do a Blog Outreach Campaign. During the campaign, my team will reach out to three blogs each day and ask them to tell their readers about this book. We did a few things in advance to increase the chances of success.

First, I read the book. You would be surprised how many publicists and marketers never read the books they are promoting. Even editors and publishers often don’t read the books they are publishing. In some cases, the authors have not read their own books! This happens with ghost-written books. Several times I have found authors completely unaware of what is in their own books!

The best ideas for marketing come from a deep understanding of the product and a deep understanding of the target audience. When you do your research on both sides of that equation, you can “find the lightning” that links your product and the target audience. For Jim’s book, time is the lightning.

“Time is the one nonreplaceable asset,” says Jim Hirshfield. If you’re not convinced of that already, his book will do the job. In marketing the book, we are focusing on saving journalists and bloggers time. We wrote a really short news release and a really short pitch, hoping journalists would reward us for our brevity by asking to see the book.

So far, so good. About a dozen journalists have asked to see the book already. Here’s what one top business publication said about our pitch: “The reason we said yes instead of no (like we have to every similar request we’ve ever had in the past) is because you kept it short. We like to support this sort of behavior.”

Besides a short pitch, we also save time for journalists and bloggers by providing a well-chosen excerpt in multiple formats: text, Word, PDF, and HTML. The excerpt, along with high-res and low-res artwork, is readily available through the Media Room on Jim’s web site or by request.

You can’t tell by this post, but we’ve learned the hard way that we get better results when we say less. Think of ways you can reduce your pitches, news releases, and business plans to the bare minimum. You’ll find people appreciate it and reward you with their full attention.

STEVE O’KEEFE
Executive Director, Patron Saint Productions, Inc.
Author, “Complete Guide to Internet Publicity” (WILEY)

A Writer’s Budget Take a look at the attached Word file link. It contains a budget worksheet for a self-published book. This information was no where to be found when I embarked on my writing project. Perhaps you will find it helpful.

Jim’s Post on the National Association of Realtors Leadership Lab Blog:

Volunteerism Builds Leadership Skills
Jim Hirshfield, author of Fortune & Freedom: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Success and the now-retired founder of cable company Summit Communications, shares his ideas on how to become a better leader.

Q. What makes a good leader?
Hirshfield: I define leadership as the ability to accomplish things through others. Those others can be employees, or they can also be peers or vendors. Getting vendors to cooperate is a better indicator of leadership than getting employees to do so. If people work for you, they’re supposed to do what you say, but getting vendors to go out of their way to help you, I think that demonstrates leadership.
Q. Can you learn to be a leader?
Hirshfield: I believe leadership is a skill you develop. And you should start at an early age. You don’t want to start to open a business when you’re 45 years old and have never worked on your leadership skills.
Q. How can you practice your skills?
Hirshfield: If you want to hone your leadership skills, my advice is work on getting a group of people who aren’t always that motivated to get a job done. You might want to managing a shift at a fast food restaurant, or volunteer to lead a committee at a charity or an association. All these positions give you a chance to try out and improve your leadership abilities.
Q. What does it take to lead others in a volunteer situation?
Hirshfield: To lead and motivate volunteers, you have to give them a well-defined task and set a time limit on both the number of hours of work you expect and when that work has to be completed. People want control of their lives, but they’ll give you a little piece of those lives if you define specifically what’s expected. What doesn’t work is just calling a meeting and then asking for ideas and input. Volunteers know then that they are going to be sucked in. You have to give them a specific timetable.

See the posting at

“http://narblog1.realtors.org/mvtype/leadershipacademyblog/”

“Almost everything we do involves making a sale.”

This point I make in Fortune and Freedom is never challenged. Interviews, presentations to supervisors, employees, parents, and community groups all require us to articulate a message and present benefits of doing something within a specific timeframe.

Yet selling to potential customers frightens people more than death.

Many firms have even decided that sales departments should not be referenced on their respective org charts.

“Business development” and automated systems designed to avoid contact with other human beings are popular. I find the most successful companies and business leaders still acknowledge that sales is a learned skill. Respect for this skill usually follows.

Jim Hirshfield

Author

www.fortuneandfreedom.biz