NEW: Customer Is King: How to Exceed Their Expectations - New Edition

Customer Is King: How to Exceed Their Expectations 

(Virgin Business Guides) [Kindle Edition]

STOP PRESS - new 'updated' edition just out - this week...

What happens to your customers when you do business with them? 

Customer is King helps you to approach the problem from the point of view of the clients and work towards the level of customer satisfaction that makes them come back to you again and again.

Practical and packed full of easy-to-understand advice, you'll find:

• checklists and worksheets
• case studies of real businesses
• frequently asked questions

Sir Richard Branson says:

"In Customer is King, Robert Craven says that 'your whole business hinges on what your customer gets from you'. 

I agree wholeheartedly. 

Customers and customer service have long been essential to Virgin - from customers to customers who have been with us for years - but, as every business should, we want to build on that. 

Whatever our official job titles, we work in customer service."

Now available at Amazon:

Why You Are Probably A Negligent Director

The on-screen PowerPoint boasted “record sales and profit growth”. Charts screamed success. The MD punches the air: “onwards and upwards… The elephant in the room is…” You could see the success writ large, hear it in the voice and feel it in the room. Or so it seemed.


That was a year ago with a FTSE100 multinational. Then Groundhog Day: the next conference I attend (for an entirely different company) is identical but this time a thrusting, growing business. 


But all was not as it seemed. Today both businesses are writhing around on the floor, twitching in their final death throes.


Both boardrooms displayed similar psychotic tendencies: incapable of reading or interpreting the world around them they made the wrong decisions. They were incapable of acknowledging what was really going on internally and externally. The consequences became inevitable. 


The multinational blames the bank for pulling the plug... Pardon me but how about identifying the inevitable, terminal decline of a product that was out-of-date, dull and inappropriate for today’s market? I think they missed that one! 


Talk about “elephants in the room”. The growing business had ignored collapsing customer demand by a factor of about ten.


These two stories of how the board can get out of touch need a little reflection.


You ask what the role of a director is and most start mumbling about the board and responsibility for the business and share options and so forth.  Like parenting, you are not given a manual and most make it up as they go along. At all levels! Pathetic.


The board is the business brain – it links the short term and the long term; it links the external and the internal perspective (focusing on policy formulation, strategic thinking, supervision of management, and accountability).


Our boards failed to deal with the most basic of ‘directorial dilemmas’:

• To simultaneously be entrepreneurial, driving the business forward whilst keeping it under prudent control
• To be sufficiently knowledgeable about the workings of the company and yet stand back from the day-to-day management and retain an objective view
• To be sensitive to the pressures of the short term and yet be informed of the broader trends and competition
• To be focused on the commercial needs of the business while acting responsibly.

Both boards were irresponsible. Incompetent. Negligent.


What about you?

BRIGHT MARKETING ACADEMY – TESTERS WANTED till 10th October

BRIGHT MARKETING ACADEMY – TESTERS WANTED

till 10th October

What we are looking for?

A group of testers to check, proof-read, validate, and give feedback….

What do we want testers to do?

Sign in and explore as much or as little of the programme as you wish…

then send us your feedback and score the programme.

Who?

People who want to “find, win and keep” better customers.


Why?

You road-test a fully working £120 programme for free; we get your feedback.

When?

We need your feedback ASAP. Ideally by 25^th October.

How much?

Nothing. (The RRP is £60, rising to £120 after 6 weeks.)

What is the Academy? (The ‘Pitch’)
This no-nonsense course will help you decide what marketing means in your business... how you can make your marketing more effective... and how this will help you make more profit.

Based on the best-selling book and workshops, Bright Marketing works by helping you to see your business through the eyes of your customers.

The programme combines: video lectures, excerpts from the Bright Marketing book, audio interviews, case studies, workbooks and articles. Most delegates will complete it in 3-4 weeks (at 10 hours per week). Testers should spend as little or as much time as they wish.

Content and Goals

·         Understand why people should buy from you

·         Craft a compelling sales message

·         Understand which channels to use to market and sell

·         Make more sales (and more profitable sales as well!).

What to do…

1.   Go to https://www.udemy.com/bright-marketing-101

2.   Enter “ brightblog “ after you click the link ‘redeem a coupon’ 

3.   Sign in and get looking and learning.

Giving feedback – what we want…

We would love your feedback about any aspect… the more the better (typos, language, approach, length, level, broken links, what is missing etc etc).
Send it to rc@robert-craven.com when you are ready!

Please do rate the course at Udemy (when you are ready)…

 

THANK YOU!

Intro Video

PS Thanks for all your help... we have had nearly 100 people testing the programme and giving us feedback... the 'offer' is now closed!

Regards

Robert

Ten things big businesses envy in smaller businesses

Big businesses often bemoan their own lack of essential vitality and wonder what they could take away from smaller, more entrepreneurial business and incorporate into their own culture.


At first thought, the shopping list is negligible. After all, who would want all the hassle and grief of being an inconsequential price-taker without all the trappings of the corporate world? However, on second thoughts, there are a number of attributes that the bigger business is positively jealous of.

1. Passion and belief in the product.
2. Excitement.
3. Flexibility and ability to change direction, at the drop of a hat!
4. Responsiveness.
5. Speed of decision-making.
6. Communication, no silos; simple lines of accountability and control.
7. Commitment.
8. Closeness to customers and suppliers.
9. A feeling of being able to make a difference; in control of your own destiny.
10. Clear focus.

The reason that small businesses exist is to satisfy a dream or fill a gap or an opportunity that others cannot see.


Most of these attributes should also exist in the larger organisation. They just seem to get beaten out of people as control, stability, safety and security become more important in what can only be described as the corporate mindset.

Ten things big businesses envy in smaller businesses

Bright Marketing Academy - coming soon

LAUNCH DATE: 10TH OCTOBER

This no-nonsense course will help you decide what marketing means in your business..., how you can make your marketing more effective.... and how this will help you make more profit.

Based on the best-selling book and series of workshops reaching over 15,000 business people, Bright Marketing works by helping you to see your business through the eyes of your customers.

The course combines: excerpts from the Bright Marketing book, video lectures, audio interviews, case studies and articles.

Comprising 14 modules, most people complete it in 3-6 weeks (say 10 sessions of two hours each). It all depends on how methodically you wish to complete it.

Take this course if you are serious about growing your business!

Content and Goals

Over 69 lectures and 6 hours of content!

• understand why people should buy from you
• understand what makes you different form the rest
• craft a compelling sales message
• understand how to use which channels to market and sell
• make more sales (and more profitable sales as well!)
• understand how to significantly improve the effectiveness of your sales and marketing activity

Who should attend?

• business owners and directors
• new business owners
• marketing directors of independent businesses
• anyone interested in improving the finding, winning and keeping of clients/customers

LAUNCH DATE 10th October
To find out more contact rc@robert-craven.com 

How To Run A Brilliant Professional Services Firm (PSF)

Tom Peters, at the start of the century, spoke about the PSF (Professional Service Firm). He put forward a model for what these businesses should look like by 2010. Well, we’re past 2010 now and his PSF work continues to be challenging yet inspirational.

When looking at how the PSF might behave in 2010 Peters came up with a series of key ideas that are crucial to the growth of the business and could be encapsulated as follows:

High Value-Added Projects

You should only be doing projects that really do add value to the client, over and above the standard norm. Clients will return if you ‘go the extra mile’; they will not tolerate you doing ‘just enough’. Just enough is never good enough for you or for them!

Pioneer Clients

Don’t just work with the easy clients where you do repeat work that you have done before. It is the clients that really push you and get you to think about the solutions you are offering; this will improve the quality of your work. They may not be so easy to deal with, and you may hate them at times, but pioneer clients will stretch you to come up with unique solutions that other practitioners won’t have considered. And all this can be fed back into your everyday work!

‘Wow’ Work

At its simplest you need to be doing work that blows away your clients – if they don’t think that you are delivering ‘wow’ work, but just ordinary bog-standard run-of-the-mill stuff, then they may well spend their money elsewhere next time!

Hot ‘Talent’

Employ the best if you want the best results. The saying goes, ‘if you pay peanuts then you get monkeys’! 

Recently a (small) client said that they really wanted to grow the business so they literally sought out a ‘world-class’ managing director to take the business to the next level. And it worked!

Adventurous Culture

Culture can be defined as how we do things around here. So how do you do things in your business? Is there a culture of adventure or is it all ‘business as usual’? Just how exciting is it to work in your business or to come into your business as a client?

Proprietary Point Of View (PPOV)

You need an ‘ology’, a way of doing things that belongs to you – you need it so that you have a systematic, measured approach to your work; your clients need it so that they have a sense of what it is that you do, how you do it and a sense of your uniqueness!


Work Worth Paying For

Heaven forbid that you ever do any work that is not worth paying for because that is the time to stop, pack up your bags and go home. We must only ever do work worth paying for!


And when should this happen? 

NOW!...

Score Yourself

Score yourself on a scale of 1 –10 where ‘1’ means ‘never’ and ‘10’ means ‘all the time’.

• We do ‘High Value-Added Projects’
• We have ‘Pioneer Clients’
• We do ‘Wow Work’
• We employ ‘Hot Talent’
• We have an ‘Adventurous Culture’
• We have a ‘Proprietary Point Of View (PPOV)’
• We do work worth paying for

So…

What can you to do create a better PSF? List five things right now.

And in Practice – A Case Study

The board of JWT, an internet marketing agency employing 125 staff, felt that the whole business had become stale and had lost the entrepreneurial sparkle, verve and excitement that it had when it was smaller. Everything had become a grind and, to be honest, they were churning out a lot of mediocre work to some pretty unremarkable and pretty unchallenging clients.

With their hands on their hearts the board could not give themselves a score of more than five out of ten for any of the “Score Yourself” criteria above. This was a sad moment – a time to admit that they had sat back and allowed their need for security exceed their need for excitement.

As the MD euphemistically said, ‘decisions were made to liven things up’. A few staff left but on the whole everyone loved the new adventure to push the scores up as high as possible.

This was not just some silly exercise to make things more fun; in fact, for ‘fun’ read the word ‘risky’. With their new focus, they started to seek more challenging clients and more challenging work which started to separate them out from the competition and it allowed them to do more perilous but more profitable work. Their reputation blossomed and so did their order book (up 35% on the previous year).  

Ryanair, 'worst' brand for customer service sees profits slump - WHY?

Ryanair, the low-cost airline, has the worst customer service out of Britain’s 100 biggest brands, according to the readers of Which? 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/10319838/Ryanair-worst-brand-for-customer-service.html

The magazine asked consumers to rate each company according to its staff’s knowledge, attitude and ability to deal with issues. Ryanair scored two stars (out of a possible five) for each category, producing an overall rating of 54 per cent, comfortably the lowest of all 100 firms – TalkTalk, the mobile phone provider, and NPower, the energy supplier, came joint 98th with 59 per cent.

“Passengers appear to agree with Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary’s open admission that price is a priority over customer service,” said the Which? report. “One said of his recent travel with Ryanair that he found it: ‘aggressive and hostile towards customers. Staff are rude and unpleasant’. Another flyer related their poor in-flight treatment, lamenting ‘rude air stewards who make you feel like a nuisance rather than a customer’. Others are unwilling to be treated badly, whatever the savings. ‘I now prefer to pay £50 extra for my flights and to be treated like a human being,’ concluded one of their experience.”

A Ryanair spokesman responded in typically dismissive fashion. "We surveyed over three million passengers on the Ryanair website last night," he said. "Only two of them had ever heard of Which? and none of them had ever bought it or read it."

"Ryanair’s survey conclusively proves that Which? magazine hasn’t got a clue about what air travel consumers actually do, because they’re too busy booking Ryanair’s low fare, on-time flights to waste time filling in Which? magazine’s tiny surveys.”

Next...

Ryanair's O'Leary to end 'abrupt culture' says the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24177834

Ryanair is to reform its "abrupt culture", chief executive Michael O'Leary says.

Speaking to shareholders at its annual general meeting, Mr O'Leary said: "We should try to eliminate things that unnecessarily" annoy customers.

Europe's biggest budget airline warned earlier this month that profits for the year may miss forecasts.

Mr O'Leary was responding to shareholder concerns that customer service issues were hitting sales.

In the long run, “Bad Customer Service = Bad Profits”?