September 5, 2017 · 9:51 am

Getting Fitted Correctly

I hope you all had a relaxing Labor Day and were able to indulge in one or more of your favorite activities. I did, and doing so reminded me of some very basic things each of us needs to keep in mind as we leave Summer and get back to business.

I spent $99 for a process known as a full bag fitting. Yes, it’s golf-related (hey – you write what you know, right?). It’s a process in which you go through the various types of clubs in your bag while hitting balls using a launch monitor. I’m not going to get technical but it’s basically a tool that shows you everything you’d ever want to know about how the club is performing and allows you to change club brands and components to improve the results. My fitting was scheduled for two hours with a wonderful Irish golf pro named Martin. Here are some of the things I noticed that apply to you and your business.

  1. Go beyond expectations. I’ve gone through this process before and it was fairly clinical. Hit the ball, watch the result, change the club a little, rinse, repeat. Martin was personable and non-judgemental (there were quite a few horrible shots). Where he really went beyond expectations was in giving me little swing tips as we went. A minor grip change and a slight change in my address position had me striking the ball more solidly. I went to have my clubs checked and fitted and he went beyond that by checking me too.
  2. Be human. We hear a lot about bots – automated processes – taking over a lot of tasks these days, particular customer services. I suppose as I think about it, this process could have been fairly automated as well. The bot could have used the numbers to have me change out club shafts or heads until the numbers were optimized. What it couldn’t do was give me the feedback Martin did. He ignored data from what were occasional bad swings and only used the numbers from the normal ones. Most importantly, by the time we got to hitting driver, the last type of club left, I had hit close to 300 shots. I was tired and my swing was breaking down. Martin saw it after I was unable to hit anything normally. Rather than continue and give a good analysis of a faulty, tired swing, Martin suggested I go away for a couple of hours and recover. At this point, we were already over the 2 hour time but he said we’d do the driver analysis later for no charge. That’s something no bot would suggest.
  3. Communicate effectively. The monitor spits out a lot of very complicated data. Even though I know what most of it means, Martin took the time to be sure that I was interpreting the data correctly and understood how the changes we were making were improving the result, even when the visual representation of the ball flight looked off.

After two trips to the monitor bay and a total of three hours, I left with a list of club specifications that will hopefully translate into better play. More importantly, I left with an appreciation of how any of us can keep customers happy and solve the cost/value equation. Make sense?

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September 1, 2017 · 9:23 am

Weenies!

It’s the start of the college football season this Foodie Friday and that means weenies. You may call them pigs in a blanket but my daughter and I, who are aficionados of them, refer to them as weenies. One football Saturday several years ago we heated up a tray to watch our favorite team play (Go Blue!) and have never looked back. They are a staple of our game day experience and we’re so serious about them that we have tried just about every brand we could find. We learned a few things, some of which have to do with your business as well.

The first thing we learned was that these are one of those foods that are just as good bought frozen as making them yourself. It’s not that they taste appreciably better from the store but the effort required to roll out the puff pastry and properly size either the cut pastry or the hot dog doesn’t yield a dramatic improvement over the best of the store-bought products. That’s an important business thought as well, as we return to the old cost/value equation. For consumers to choose to use your product or service to solve their problem, you need to provide a better return on their investment of time and/or money. In this case, the final results of our homemade weenies took a fair amount of effort that wasn’t a significantly better solution.

Next, we learned that not everyone’s concept of what a weenie should be is the same. We bought versions that were bland hot dogs in buttery puff pastry. Some pastry was dense, almost biscuit-like. Some had parmesan cheese rolled in. Some folks even try to pass off a bagel wrap as an acceptable option. Ha! None were perfect. We found that we loved one brand’s hot dog and another brand’s pastry. Yes, it crossed our minds to buy both and combine the best parts, but our top choice has decent enough pastry to negate the Frankenweenie from happening. But the business point is that you can call your product whatever you want, even a fairly common name, but not everyone is going to think of it in the same way. I think the IHOP even calls sausages wrapped in pancakes pigs in a blanket. That’s definitely NOT what we have in mind to munch whilst watching college football.

Present your product clearly. Excel at solving the cost/value equation from the consumer’s perspective. That’s a dish worth eating every time.

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August 30, 2017 · 10:27 am

You Can’t Be Half Pregnant

It’s nice that more companies are paying attention to what’s going on around them in the digital world. Many more brands are becoming actively engaged in listening and responding to consumers. Unfortunately, just as many brands are paying lip service to doing so, and that’s a real problem. Let me rant about a couple of examples I’ve seen lately and you’ll see what I mean.

First, some research. A recent study by Sprout Social found that:

When we asked how social has driven that accountability, people highlighted the power dynamic between individuals and brands, with 80% saying that social helps uncover instances of businesses treating people unfairly and 65% noting the power of social to amplify issues, not only through posting your own complaints but through sharing others’ posts.

In other words, social media makes consumers feel empowered. They can stand up to the man! They can rain fire and brimstone on brands which they perceive have wronged them in some way. I suspect that isn’t news to you, either personally or professionally. After all, who hasn’t posted a review or commented on a friend’s social post about a customer experience, either good or bad?

So brands have learned to respond. The problem is that the study also found that :

An unhelpful response from brands is sometimes considered worse than no response at all. In fact, 50% of those polled said they would never buy from a brand again if it responded poorly to their complaint. Nearly as many said a bad response via social media increased the possibility that they would share their experience with friends.

Let me give you a couple of examples. I was recently researching a vacation. The place I had under consideration had many recent reviews, mostly good. The GM of the property has taken the time to read each one because he responded to them. Unfortunately, he seemed to have two canned responses – one for good reviews and one for negative reviews. On occasion, he’d go a little beyond the basic comment but for the most part, there were two responses. Had I received one of those, it wouldn’t have taken me long to notice everyone else got the same response. I would not be happy.

On the other side of the fence is a company (OK, a bank) with which I had an issue. I posted something on social media and got a response within 10 minutes. They asked me to send them an email address and a phone number, and they called within half an hour. We discussed my issue and I received a detailed email resolving the problem later that day.

The first company is half pregnant in social; the latter one is fully engaged. With which one would you rather do business? More importantly, which company are you?

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