THE CHICKEN OR THE EGG? WHY NURTURING EMPLOYEES AND CUSTOMERS IS THE KEY TO RETENTION
Starbucks is a great example. Even with thick competition, they deliver consistent service and quality products to customers, whether in Oregon or London. And they do this by providing competitive wages and benefits to their employees along with training and learning opportunities. Employees who are knowledgeable and excited about what they are offering pass their enthusiasm on to customers. OWN UP TO MISTAKES. Even the best businesses make mistakes. When it happens, own up to it. There’s probably been a time when you put in your order at a restaurant, only to receive the wrong thing. How did the business handle it? Did they admit their mistake and offer you a new meal? How a business treats customers when things don’t go smoothly is a good indication of how they’ll handle adversity in general, and that reaction starts with employees. Set the precedent for employees that a mistake is their opportunity to go above and beyond. A transparent environment will make employees feel more comfortable, which will make customers excited, rather than apprehensive, to engage with your business again.
Who comes first: employees or customers? When posed this classic business question, Southwest Airlines co-founder Herb Kelleher had an easy answer: employees. “If employees are treated right, they treat the outside world right,” Kelleher explained. As Kelleher knows well, employee-customer relations are a cycle — one that fuels recurring business. Engaged employees deliver service that converts to sales, a fact backed up by a Gallup report. Gallup cited a 20 percent increase in sales as a result of this process. Even as you’re courting leads, you can’t ignore your existing customers. Likewise, even (and especially) as you grow, you have to nurture your employees. The cost of losing either is too high. In the holiday rush, it’s important to not lose sight of your priorities. GET THEM HOOKED ON YOUR SERVICE. Have you ever asked a client why they return to your business? Do you think it’s because they can’t find your product or service anywhere else? Probably not. Think about the last time you returned to a restaurant. Was it because it’s the only place in town that makes amazing Thai food? Maybe, but it’s more likely that you enjoyed the welcoming host, attentive waiter, and positive experience you had there.
WHAT I LEARNED FROM MY NEWSLETTER CAMPAIGN THE 3 STEPS TO EFFECTIVE GOAL SETTING
all had to be on board and identify the newsletter as a priority to materialize it.
written down motivated us to create the infrastructure to act on it. From there, we put the internal systems in place to make our newsletter happen. 2. MAKE IT A PRIORITY Why is this project at the top of the list? It starts with team buy-in and defining a compelling reason why the goal should be achieved. Until we identified our newsletter campaign as a priority, we weren’t going to take the time to develop a plan and execute it. After writing our goal down, I finally decided I needed to delegate the project and identified the person on our team who would be able to accomplish it best. Of course, it helped that our team had grown and we had more capacity to take on this kind of project. Even with delegating, though, it was a team effort, and we
Did you know that when people write down their goals, they are 42 percent more likely to achieve them? Isn’t that an incredible number? I found this to be true when we set out to mail 12 newsletters in 2018. We talked about doing a newsletter campaign for years but had never made it happen — until this year. I’m happy to share that we reached our goal this month, and in the process, I learned three steps that are crucial for creating effective goals. 1. WRITE IT DOWN Our talk of doing a newsletter was just that until we wrote it down. That action turned our fleeting idea into a solid goal. Writing down our ambition once wouldn’t do the trick, either. We continued to identify the newsletter as a goal on meeting agendas, spreadsheets, and lists. Seeing it
3. MAKE IT SPECIFIC AND EASY TO MEASURE Sending out 12 newsletters was a big enough undertaking that we had to put a plan in place to achieve it, but the project wasn’t so daunting that we couldn’t succeed. We achieved it by making this goal specific and easy to measure: to procure and send out 12 newsletters over the course of 2018. Each newsletter mailed brought us one step closer to reaching our goal. Getting to number 12 feels great! As you discuss strategy and goal- setting for 2019, I encourage you to use this list as a guideline for creating goals that are effective. I wish you the best in your endeavors!
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