"Customer experience is proactive. Customer service is reactive." This quote from Joey Coleman, author of the Wall Street Journal #2 Bestselling book Never Lose a Customer Again, has helped provide me with much-needed clarity regarding the difference between experience and service.
Having that context of one being proactive, meaning anticipating and creating the experience we want our clients to have, is impactful to our businesses. Why wouldn't we want to do that? And as he says, businesses routinely hire for customer service but only occasionally hire for customer experience.
Join us for a conversation about how simply understanding your customers can begin moving them from an occasional purchaser to a lifelong customer.
Brand confidence is the result of clarity and consistency.
In episodes 111 and 112, I share the value of being clear and consistent with all aspects of your brand and your business. And the end result of that is brand confidence, the topic of episode 113.
If you do a quick search on the power of consistency, you'll find articles about business, habit building, recruitment, personal success, and customer services - just to name a few. I'm going to add marketing and branding to the list.
Clarity paired with consistency are two important elements of building a brand. Clarity of who you are as a business and a brand contribute to clarity in marketing and messaging.
But clarity of branding and marketing will not mean a thing without consistency.
Clarity is critical for success in so many aspects of life - ranging from personal to professional. Are you clear on the purpose of your business? Of your life? Do you have clarity on what your brand stands for? Does your audience know and understand what your business can do for them - or that it is for them?
As Brene Brown has said - Clear is kind, Unclear is unkind. A lack of clarity creates more work for your prospective clients, your clients, and your team. Clarity guides decision making and ultimately saves you and your team money, and helps you earn more too.
This episode dives into the areas of marketing and branding where a lack of clarity may be hurting your business.
More to the point, where I've been?
Excellent question and one I needed to answer before I was ready to start releasing new content. I've done that - this episode will give you some insight into what I've been doing and why I haven't released a new episode since February.
"Am I crazy to have all these different business ideas?" A friend and client asked me this question over coffee recently. No, she is not crazy. She is just full of ideas – and those ideas all happen to be business opportunities.
As you think about acting on all those business ideas swirling around in your head, think about what connects them to the vision of your business. That connection is what I mean by a through line.
If you are feeling as though you have too many business ideas, concerned that people may not understand the connections, or maybe you haven’t recognized the connection yet…. I’m guessing it is there, hiding in plain sight. It’s likely already visible to those around you. You just need to step back and allow it to become visible to you.
My goal at the end of the year was to bring purpose to 2022. I paused production of the podcast, spent time with friends and family, and directed my creative energies to art and the opportunities that have come from it.
How have you started 2022 with purpose?
How hard is it to engage your customers in a conversation? For some businesses, it is easy. And for far too many, it seems to be quite challenging. But why is that?
Is it the desire to be more efficient? Hit a growth target? Achieve arbitrary metrics that may or may not impact the quality of the work or service we provide?
Or is it that we've become too focused on all the internal workings of the business that we've lost sight of the fact without customers, we don't have a business?
Honestly, I think it is a combination of all these factors. Bottom line, engaging customers in a conversation is good for business.
It was a Speaking Your Brand episode that inspired the primary focus of this episode. In a recent keynote address, Carol Cox suggested resistance comes with living your purpose. Resistance or tension comes with anything worth having and that includes living the truth of our purpose. And if we are not feeling one of those maybe we need to dig deeper into our search for purpose.
Resistance can come in internal and external forms. External examples might come from others criticizing or judging you and the way you lean into your purpose. Internal are obstacles we put in front of ourselves such as imposter syndrome, perfectionism, or people-pleasing.
What if I told you there were three steps to get better feedback? Three steps that would lessen the stress you feel when faced with a performance evaluation. Carole Stizza has developed a formula that will do just that.
When we go into a performance evaluation or ask for feedback from a client, we often start with a prescribed form. And as a result, we listen to the responses but neglect to ask questions. Carole shares this is often because we view an evaluation as a one-way conversation rather than an open dialog for questions and conversation. Her research lead her to realize when we did ask questions, the questions were too broad or didn't include the context of what would make the responses relevant.
What is return on relationship? The purpose of the relationships you have should be considered and reevaluated periodically. Especially after a year like 2020, when relationships of all kinds were pulled in various directions, aligning the value of the relationship with the purpose it serves is more important than ever.
How do you figure out where your relationships stand? Think about the purpose. Is the original purpose of the relationship still valid? Has it evolved over time? Has it diminished? Maybe the purpose or the value of it no longer exists?
In this episode of The Pursuit of Purpose, I discuss how to evaluate the return on relationship for a variety of key relationships in both our personal and professional lives.
Check out the show notes for a variety of resources and a valuable worksheet to assist in determining the purpose of the relationship.
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