The customer experience game

Bridging the gap between management vision and employee engagement in delivering customer experience Successful companies around the world are focusing on driving a better customer experience to increase sales, improve customer satisfaction and manage customer retention. In line with this trend, management teams have worked tirelessly to create customer experience strategies, only to find employees failing to deliver on them. The gap between vision and delivery is causing frustration at all levels. This isn’t necessarily because employees don’t want to deliver an improved experience, it’s often merely a lack of understanding, with employees seeing it as just another marketing or promotional campaign. Without clear communication and a healthy dose of motivation, employee engagement in the delivery of an improved experience is unfortunately destined to fail. Employee Engagement is arguably one of the most critical factors in the delivery of a customer experience strategy and leadership teams everywhere are seeking innovative ways to motivate employees to fulfill brand promises and deliver improved experiences. According to Tempkin Group, the 5 keys to increasing employee engagement in a customer experience strategy are: Information – explain why employees should get involved in the customer experience campaign. Instructions – tell employees how to deliver on it. Inspire – employees to get on board with the customer experience strategy Involve – employees in the design, delivery and measurement of customer experience strategies. Incentivise – make customer satisfaction a part of employee KPI’s. Lynn Baker is a professional speaker who recently attended the Disney Customer Experience Summit 2018 in California. She has also secured the rights to the ‘Customer Experience Game’, an interactive board game designed to raise awareness and educate staff of all levels about customer experience. The Customer Experience Game focuses on three important topics: • Voice of the customer • Brand delivery in the customer journey • Employee ambassadorship. The Customer Experience Game lasts 3 hours and can be run at a conference, meeting or in-house. Designed to be fun and interactive, employees are split into teams and each team is required to answer questions and do assignments based on the current customer journey. The team that comes up with the best answer, wins a “Happy Customer”. The team that finishes with the most “Happy Customers”, wins the game. But beware, there are ‘Unhappy Customers’ as well! Although the game includes standard questions and answers, Lynn is also able to tailor questions and assignments to your relevant business or industry. Examples of the questions and assignments include: • Find a positive customer comment on Twitter about your company – the fastest team wins. • Make a 30 second video during which you answer a question that was asked on social media. • What are all the channels that customers use to communicate with your company? • What is the biggest dilemma your customers currently face? As a prelude to the game, Lynn delivers her fascinating 45-minute presentation on customer experience, which explains the difference between customer service and customer experience, as well as the importance of employee engagement in the customer journey. To illustrate the value of a memorable experience, Lynn shares stories and dynamic videos of how Disney, Amazon, The Ritz Carlton and other top companies are using customer experience to drive sales, improve customer satisfaction and increase customer loyalty. She challenges every member of the audience to consider how they can add further value to their customers journey in the future. Imagine the impact, if every employee in your organisation found one way to contribute to a better customer experience? The Customer Experience Game LYNN BAKER PROFESSIONAL SPEAKER ON CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE Proudly represented by Unique Speaker Bureau.

About Us

The Northern Business Review is a business community newspaper that provides a platform for businesses to market their products and services, as well as build their brand, but equally important the publication provides information, advice and topics of interest, including business, entrepreneurial, economic reviews and simple ideas to grow your business. The publication has a primary objective to “uniquely” represent businesses to a wide audience across the community as well as provide a media platform of business articles and information that affect, influence and uplift the business environment within our defined geographical and cultural community.

@NsabasiNBR

Designed by Nsabasi Publishing©2020

Small is the new big

Bev Hancock: Business Strategist & Team Building Specialist Bev is a futurist who joins the dots between people, strategy and culture in the future world of work. She invites audiences to think differently and gives practical strategies for building trust, accountability and leadership into the daily fabric and leadership of the organisation.  Ever since David and Goliath, the idea of the little guy with limited resources taking on the giant and winning, has been a popular story.  Where as the giant will always have the advantage of strength, resources and economies of scale, it is David’s agility, innovative use of everyday resources and courage to take on the impossible that give him a distinct advantage.  The digital age has presented small businesses with an unprecedented opportunity to gain competitive advantage where small and agile is an advantage. According to Deloittes Tech Trends (2016) competitive dynamics are driving change.  Small businesses, who are not hampered by complex legacy systems, are able to innovate faster. As the demand for online and cross-border trade increases, brick and mortar businesses are losing their advantage to agile, digital, cloud-based start-ups.  More and more, consumers are using their mobile devices to communicate, market, sell and trade.  According to the World Economic Forum (WEF) Kenya reports that more than half the population makes mobile payment. So why are we not seeing small businesses rush to gain this competitive advantage?  The World Bank reports that despite these trends, only 9% of small businesses and 16% of medium sized businesses sell online.  Even in upper-middle-income countries, less than 30% of small businesses and less than 40% of medium-sized businesses sell online.  Develop a digital mindset There are many free tools from top technology companies who offer free digital readiness.  To slay Goliath, David had to prepare himself both mentally and physically.  You can develop this mindset by immersing yourself in the available technologies, many of them free.  Don’t just research their benefits and risks, experience them and get a clearer understanding how they can transform your business into a cross-border marketplace.  Take advantage of scale in the cloud When choosing his weapon, David started with what was immediately available and something he knows well.  Cloud business models often start with a basic “freemium” model which allows small business to use the technology either for free or at a limited cost.  This allows small business to gain valuable digital skills and access to limited markets.  By combining these with free social media marketing tools, businesses can achieve a substantial amount with minimal layout.  However, the aim of freemium is to upgrade customers to premium and many small businesses are resistant to paying for these services.  There does come a time however, when scaling to a premium model is good business.  Work collaboratively to gain competitive weight Whilst David had the courage to take on Goliath singlehandedly, there is power in numbers.  The SME mindset needs to shift from competition to collaboration to have the best long-term success against the giant.  Through connecting to collaborative economy, business do not have to be experts at everything.  Through strategic partnering, using the sharing economy, accessing smart platforms and engaging with the SME ecosystem, business can overcome some of the traditional barriers to entry. Small businesses need access to digital financial, technological and logistical tools that can help them enter global markets. Through partnership, we can make these tools more accessible. Sonny Fisher, CEO of FORUS who launched the public utility blockchain digital exchange in Port Elizabeth recently believes that, “Through collaboration, we can democratise access to mobile commerce capabilities, expand access to affordable financing and equip businesses with the tools needed to compete on the global stage.” To achieve this, we need more Davids. Bev Hancock – Speaker, Strategist and Leadership Coach at Unique Speaker Bureau

About Us

The Northern Business Review is a business community newspaper that provides a platform for businesses to market their products and services, as well as build their brand, but equally important the publication provides information, advice and topics of interest, including business, entrepreneurial, economic reviews and simple ideas to grow your business. The publication has a primary objective to “uniquely” represent businesses to a wide audience across the community as well as provide a media platform of business articles and information that affect, influence and uplift the business environment within our defined geographical and cultural community.

@NsabasiNBR

Designed by Nsabasi Publishing©2020

Think and work differently 2018

Michael Jackson is known as “The Change Guru”, and with 30 years’ experience in predicting where future shocks to business and marketplaces will come from, the title is well deserved. This strategic business thinker, who has a combined tally of 7 years of full conference days under his belt, is regularly sought after as a professional speaker in both South Africa and abroad. Combining his speaking and writing talents with a passion for meticulous research, Michael is uniquely positioned to show companies where the market is, as well as where the people are and how the business is going. He helps “fire up the troops” to perform better in a fastmoving world of change. We’re used to hearing that the pace of change is far greater today in a business sense than it ever has been before; but what exactly does that mean and how do we cope better? According to the Boston Consulting Group; business today is now some twenty-five to forty times more complicated than it was for companies in the 1950’s. Today we’re suffering from greater demands in areas such as policies, procedures, business layers and interfaces and these have all resulted in greater than ever demands upon us and our time. We’ve ended up doing the business of business more than actual business requirements themselves. Such unbridled pressure and its resulting urgency is quite simply counterproductive to good business practice and is often extremely costly. Quite simply we need to approach business in 2018 in a much more sensible, thoughtful and practical manner in order to cut through the clutter. There’s another danger though; if you’re too slow and cumbersome today in business today (at the opposite end of the scale) you’re just as likely to be in difficulty, caught flat-footed and miss opportunities, so we need to carefully avoid extremes in any direction. We need to better understand, think and focus on the right priorities whilst avoiding the routine, habitual and unconscious routines which have come to dominate the human thought process and caused much of the complexity in our lives. We usually get our priorities all wrong; whilst we clearly want to do the right things we usually and normally apply human cognitive bias to our decision making – merely using our existing knowledge which we then apply to business situations – leading to a lack of proper perspective. It’s much more sensible to apply and utilize cognitive diversity, yet this isn’t a state of mind which comes naturally to humans. Let me explain by way of a classic example. Cognitive diversity ought to have been applied by the American CIA from its inception. Founded to help America think differently to detect international threats after the end of the Second World War – it was sadly built instead with a cognitive bias mind set, and failed spectacularly at achieving its core mission as a result. The CIA was founded by middle-aged white Americans, and staffed by exactly the same dynamic; with people who hadn’t travelled, didn’t hold passports, couldn’t speak foreign languages and had no cultural diversity at all and as a result it suffered (and still does like far too many businesses) from being unable to differentiate between signal and noise issues, organisational dysfunction, typical bias and prejudice and was unable to predict such world shaping issues as the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the Iranian Revolution in 1978, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, the Twin Towers attack in 2001 and the Syrian Revolution of 2011 to name just a few crises! Cognitive bias is all too commonplace and has simply become the norm. Applying cognitive diversity, which simply means obtaining a more diverse group of perspectives rather than relying on the usual traditional dyed-in-the-wool thinking, would enable us to go further in our quest for a solution both for business as well as in our personal lives. The problem with cognitive bias is that we anchor ourselves to our experiences and circumstances, and whilst thinking this way normally worked – and worked well – in a period when change was slow to occur, it is no longer is appropriate today. We instead need to create a ‘functional bias’ in our ever changing and more complex world, instead of instinctively doing the ‘usual’ same things; where we stay the same, repeat old behaviours ad infinitum, do the same things repetitively and even proudly call it ‘sticking to our knitting’ – yet the world outside is now incredibly different and demands new and diverse approaches. With the ever-changing business environment, business owners who are adapting diverse practices, policies and strategies are the ones who are winning today. Had the CIA been composed of employees with varying characteristics including, but not limited to, religious and political beliefs, gender, ethnicity, education, socioeconomic background, sexual orientation and geographic location, it stands to reason it would have been much more successful in terms of its mandate of understanding and reacting to issues in the outside world. Yet how do we become more cognitively diverse ourselves and in business? Strangely enough, the answer may well lie in our approach to work and life itself. Say you have to take a big decision; the brain overloads, creating noise and stress, right? It’s time to stop sweating the stuff; changing your circumstances and environment – and this is where scientists have figured out that a relaxed brain takes and makes better decisions – which helps to explain why we often have great ideas in the shower, or whilst on vacation, but not usually in the office environment. It may be as simple as breathing and thinking differently through diverse approaches. Imagine you’re for example in a room with the staircase on fire on the 10th floor of a skyscraper. How would you evacuate safely? Conventional wisdom, or cognitive bias, would no doubt bring several and probably incorrect ideas to mind but using cognitive diversity could allow you to consider that the curtains might make a good parachute? At work it makes sense to literally ‘think twice’ and take 5 minutes before making decisions. Take a stroll. Get away from the desk and the usual workplace areas and focus on different things. You’ll be amazed about how easily the answer you need comes when you focus on it less. Success, by definition, doesn’t come easily in terms of the obvious: think Starbucks for a moment, which positions itself not on the coffee it provides but the meeting place it provides it through. Take Lego, the Danish export which found itself struggling in a world of new toy and play choices, but redefined itself as selling models which were original in driving curiosity. It doesn’t take a titanic effort to differentiate; just different thinking models. Which makes me think of the Titanic itself; and we all know the tale of the disaster it represents. Conventional thinking and cognitive bias caused the loss of life in that instance, where a ship with some 2200 crew and passengers with only 16 lifeboats on board allowed just over 700 people to survive. Could there have been a different outcome and a better solution? The iceberg the ship hit was 400ft long with a flat spot big enough to accommodate all the passengers and the lifeboats could have been used to ferry the passengers there to await salvation. In fact in 1849; the Hannah did just that after hitting an iceberg and sinking in the Gulf of St. Lawrence allowing 127 of 176 passengers to live. Thinking differently has allowed Carlsberg beer to be produced in paper, not plastic bottles – as the company was made aware that the amount of waste plastic in our oceans is greater than the combined weight of all the fish! So how do you think differently? So how do you think differently – as well as changing your thought process from passive into dynamic? We have to learn to stop relying on ‘instinct’. We suffer from both automatic and instinctive systemic thinking (why you ‘automatically’ swerve to avoid a car crash) – as well as instinctive defective thinking (from not asking for enough information or our inherent natural bias). Instead we need to consciously specify, visualise and collaborate in our thinking instead; where we Specify what we can directly influence, Visualise what you can see around or through an issue and Collaborate with those who can best assist you in diverse solution creation. It’s difficult and doesn’t come instinctively which is why we find ourselves today drowning in too much paperwork, too much email, too many policies and procedures and way too much background noise. Change needs to be mastered. Allowing it to happen unconsciously is unquestionably the wrong approach. We need to much more consciously think our way through the complexities of life. Michael Jackson – Change Guru at Unique Speaker Bureau

About Us

The Northern Business Review is a business community newspaper that provides a platform for businesses to market their products and services, as well as build their brand, but equally important the publication provides information, advice and topics of interest, including business, entrepreneurial, economic reviews and simple ideas to grow your business. The publication has a primary objective to “uniquely” represent businesses to a wide audience across the community as well as provide a media platform of business articles and information that affect, influence and uplift the business environment within our defined geographical and cultural community.

@NsabasiNBR

Designed by Nsabasi Publishing©2020

Unique Speaker Bureau exclusive interview of Thuli Madonsela

Professor Thuli Madonsela Unique Speaker Bureau is thrilled to bring our very own South African hero who walks her talk – Professor Thuli Madonsela is known for her iconic leadership and contribution to the country in challenging times. Thuli has been recognized internationally for her influence, integrity, transparency, and commitment to truth and justice by Transparency International, the Law Society of South Africa, Forbes Africa and Times Magazine. As an advocate, she has a long history of service to South Africa. As Public Protector, her contribution to the country’s constitution, equality, human rights and good governance has been substantial and her courage an inspiration to us all. She has done so much to promote equality and overcome discrimination. She inspires her audience to step up and be part of the solution. Having grown up poor and faced with great social injustice she learnt to stand up for herself and others at a young age. Unique Speaker Bureau is proud to announce their representation with Professor Madonsela, who brings a thought-provoking and challenging message of hope. USB was honoured to have her on stage talking to Justin Cohen at the Cape Town Annual Showcase in January where she shared some of her insights as Public Protector and her vision for the future. The wisdom she shared was a combination of humility and courage as she paid tribute to her team and emphasised how fortunate she was to be part of a team that understood that they had a particular role to support and strengthen constitutional democracy. She believes that every individual is responsible for creating a society that you want to live in and encouraged the audience to recognise the power of the voice of civil society to effect change. She further explained that people are the key to achieve the sustainable development goals and the country’s National Development Plan, where integrity and social justice are at the core.   Thuli has taken up the position of chair of Social Justice in the law faculty at Stellenbosch University. The role includes some teaching but is primarily a platform for addressing contemporary social inequalities. Through the Thuli Madonsela Foundation she also seeks to build a civil society through its Social Justice Programme. On the conference stage she brings a powerful leadership philosophy of Ubuntu which she describes as: my humanity is defined by yours and the glue that binds us together is integrity, trust and equality. She asks the question “how do we use technology to advance a world that works for all of us? By taking advantage of the digital economy (the fourth industrial revolution) to create a world that works for all”. At the core of that world lies qualities that encompass the values of Ubuntu: human dignity, integrity, respect and inclusion
 

About Us

The Northern Business Review is a business community newspaper that provides a platform for businesses to market their products and services, as well as build their brand, but equally important the publication provides information, advice and topics of interest, including business, entrepreneurial, economic reviews and simple ideas to grow your business. The publication has a primary objective to “uniquely” represent businesses to a wide audience across the community as well as provide a media platform of business articles and information that affect, influence and uplift the business environment within our defined geographical and cultural community.

@NsabasiNBR

Designed by Nsabasi Publishing©2020