Creative Thinking, 2011-style

Here's a great comment by Michigan Govenor Rick Snyder, a former Gateway Computer executive and venture capitalist, made during his visit to the Detroit Auto Show.

“It is companies, it is innovators, it is entrepreneurs that are going to create a better future for Michigan,” Snyder said. “We are committed …to creating the very best environment in the world to create that environment for success.”

During the opening for the new Dali Museum, I had the good fortune to speak with an artist who rips apart old guitars to make new, better sounding and better crafted electric guitars. His goal: "I want to make guitars that kick ass."

Keep in mind, the former American icon, Fender guitar, is now made in China. That's as bad as saying Harley Davidson is now made in Taiwan. Good grief.

The only way to bring business–and jobs–back is to place your bets on young, brash artistic entrepreneurs like the one I met last night. And by the way, the very cool museum kicks ass, too.

Buy from a local artist. Visit the new Dali. Both decisions are a good bet on our economy and a great experience as well.

Forming a Great First Impression

Every Chef knows that how the food looks is as important as how it tastes.

LIkewise, you may be prepared to sell a service, but does your customer see preparation in your delivery? Or, does your customer see a wreck of a website or a nervous person sitting in front of them.

In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcom Gladwell confirms years of research into first impressions and then takes it one step further. He says our decisions occur much faster - instantaneously or in less than two seconds.

In Gladwell's research, he finds we do this whenever we meet a new person, or when we have to make sense of something quickly or encounter a novel situation. "Snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience. They are also unconscious."

When we meet a person, our primal instincts are hard at work trying to gauge if this person is a threat or not. We are unsure how to interact with them. We don't know their temperament and basically we want to figure out if they will hurt us or help us.

Our minds act with lightning speed, calling upon all of our senses during any first encounter. We listen to the timber and tone of the stranger's voice. Our eyes focus on movement and other non-verbal cues and our noses try to detect any foreign or threatening smells.

While our brains are busy sorting through all the input the other person's brain is doing the exact same thing. In the case of the web-based sale, emerging systems track customer movement and make recommendations to the administrator.

Although it sounds like a joke, that last sensory input (smell), may be the final frontier of the online experience. It's hard to imagine, but sooner or later, scent will become part of the online experience. I just hope it's not a two-way technology...

Listening to the Service Experience

Creating a great sales effort begins by hiring people that have the raw ability to learn and to:

* fully understand products or services

* effectively deliver presentations fearlessly and consistently

* care about their customer's experience by listening and learning.

How? Here are a few ways to listen and learn:

Live Chat

Eliminate phone tag and offer service on demand. Even if you run a small businesses you can provide real-time support for visitors to your website. Organizations like LivePerson.com, BoldChat and Live2Support.com provide outsourced support services at competitive rates.

On-Demand Consumer University

Learning isn't limited to employees. In fact, consumers can benefit (and appreciate) the same information you provide your team.

Video FAQ and How-to's

You Tube offers a video plug-in for your site, that gives you the chance to quickly and affordably post content, like how-to videos that can make life easier for your customers.

Social Media

Services such as Facebook help you connect to multiple communities. Tools like Visibility and Radian 6 allow you to measure the effectiveness of your outreach to those groups.

Staff profiles and Blogs

Customers want to follow the team members they talk to everyday, not necessarily the CFO or COO. Get over your need for control and let your people blog. Employees may pleasantly surprise you by attracting even more customers.

Independent Reviews

Customer reviews and feedback are part of a richer online experience. Some companies, like customerreviews.com, offer widgets that can enable a review function within your own site. Others, like tripadvisor.com offer 3rd party reviews for specific services, in this case, hotels and travel services.

How to hit "send" on your customer's button

During a visit to my local Publix, I counted 6 employees texting as they walked around the store, like zombies searching for brains online. Unbelievable. I came back with more than lettuce and bread. I brought home a lesson I learned from Disney, and other service giants.

Dear Publix: rows of neatly stacked containers do not make "shopping a pleasure", your people do that - or don't.

Dear Publix Service Employees, please:

1. Be fully aware of the people around you
   
2. Smile (at least try)
   
3. Always turn and face your guests
4. Extend an offer to help them
   
5. Ask their name, offer yours
   
6. Listen attentively, pay attention
   
7. Take immediate action on their requests
8. Thank them sincerely for their business
   

and... (an update even Walt could not have anticipated) please turn off your phone when you're serving customers, unless you're calling 911.

Attention Deficit Nation?

One more study that seems to suggest we have shifted from an experience economy (one that requires a certain degree of engagement to appreciate) to an attention economy (one that relies of increasing efforts to capture consumer attention for every engagement/experience).

Social learning (with leaders and followers) requires a significant amount of energy expended in an "attention attraction" function.

In this environment, there is growing evidence that workers do not actually manage the surplus of information (distractors). Instead of multi-tasking, they are responding to tasks with a focus deficit, or an increasing inability to focus on detailed topics or lengthy processes.

What does this mean for...Communication? Learning? Work? Relationships? There are certain to be pros/cons to all this. Here's the meat of this particular study. I'll keep chewing on this bone for a while.

According to a new study from Iowa State University, viewing television and playing video games each are associated with increased subsequent attention problems in childhood.

The study, published this week in the medical journal Pediatrics, examined 1,323 kids in "middle childhood" over a 13-month period.

My Experience Scorecard
Here are three simple questions to pinpoint learning / leadership opportunities, with a focus on the customer experience:

1. Where is the best customer experience to be found in this organization?
(learning, leadership, sales, service, or some other operational area)


2. What seems to be the source of these unexpectedly great experiences?
(one individual, a particular team, a leader, a process, a tool/technology)


3. How could this type of experience be created in other areas/departments?
(better learning, better process, better leadership, better communication, better tool, other)