My husband, the love of my life, had brain surgery earlier this year.

The anticipation, wondering if it was benign or cancerous (it was benign and he is almost fully recovered), praying that the neurosurgeon would not suddenly get the shakes, being in a hospital away from home and having no family nearby all added up to make this one of the most stressful experiences we’ve gone through in a long time.

And while we were in the hospital, waiting for Marco to be admitted, something occurred to me.  This was a great opportunity to observe corporate culture. First, I would experience it from the perspective of a customer (instead of as an corporate leader or HR pro or business coach). Second, we would be exposed to all levels of employees: janitors, nurse’s assistants, charge nurses (responsible for all the activities in their unit during their shift), staff supervisors and doctors. Third, we were going to be there for three nights and four days, 24/7. It was the perfect incubator for observation. Would the corporate culture the hospital spent thousands of dollars and many man hours to create, translate into a consistent experience?

Meet Megan. In the ICU unit, we had a nurse named Megan. Megan was a gift and the epitome of the hospital’s mission:  “Serving Humanity to Honor God.”

When Megan met us, she wrote her name and hospital cell phone number on the wipe-board so we would know who she was and how to get in touch with her.

She explained everything to us. I’m not overstating this. From how each medication was going to help Marco heal, to showing me how to set the locks on the sleeper chair so it wouldn’t roll away and everything in between. She made sure we were as knowledgeable about Marco’s situation as she was.

She apologized for having to wake Marco up every hour.

When I asked her where the soda machine was, she asked me what I wanted, left the room and brought a Diet Coke back to me so I wouldn’t have to pay.

When my husband was in pain and he couldn’t have more pain killers, Megan lovingly patted my husband’s head.

She brought extra blankets and pillows before we asked for them.

Watching Megan attend to my husband left me feeling comforted, safe and reassured. That was because of two things: She knew what she was doing and she genuinely cared about my soul mate.

Toni & Company:

Toni was our nurse when we transferred from ICU to a regular floor.

In her first introduction to us, she wrote her name on the wipe board while explaining this was not her regular floor and that she was on loan from another floor. She didn’t write down her phone number.

We were transferred right around lunch time and my husband was ravenous. I asked Toni when we could expect lunch and her answer was “soon.” Two hours and two reminders later, Toni finally said, “I suppose I’ll have to go to ICU to get his lunch.” More time passed before we finally got his cold lunch.

Megan from ICU told us that if Marco got thirsty, extremely thirsty, we needed to call the neurosurgeon right away; it meant danger. The thirst happened during Toni’s shift. We told her five times over three hours what was happening, we told her the neurosurgeon wanted to be paged immediately if it happened. Each time I went to look for her (she didn’t come to us) she said, “Oh. Okay. I’ll call the doctor.” Finally, after 3.5 hours I went to the ICU floor, looked for Megan and told her what was happening. She immediately broke all protocol by leaving her floor to see Marco. She asked him several questions and I watched the color in her face progress from pink to bright red. She told us she was going to page the neurosurgeon right then. Five minutes later a sheepish Toni walked into the room ready to take care of my husband. She also told us that the neurosurgeon yelled at her on the phone.

It wasn’t just Toni either. None of the nurses on that floor wrote down their hospital cell phone numbers. When Marco got extremely thirsty he asked for Gatorade and the response was, “I’m sorry we don’t have any on this floor” and she left the room. I asked several people if I could have a sleeper chair and the consistent answer was an non-committed, “I’ll try.” The apathy on that floor was palpable.

Organizational Consistency:

Being on the ICU floor was like being at a Ritz Carlton. I imagine that the last three days of his stay was like being at a charge-by-the-hour motel.

What happened?  It was the same hospital system. It was the same building. Each floor had the same motivational employee bulletin boards which reinforced the “competency of the month.”  The protocols for responding to patient’s needs were the same on each floor.  And I’m sure they were operating from the same employee handbook.

Shouldn’t every employee take patient care seriously?

Obviously, the answer is yes. Yet I think one of the hardest things for organizations to nail down is consistency across their enterprise.  What happened last week reinforced three things every leader needs to understand and do something about:

What Leaders Should Remember:

• An organization can have all the technical tools in place to create an incredible customer experience, but that is no guarantee that employees will use them. Leaders must follow up.

• Leaders, Recruiters and HR pros need to continue to focus their recruiting efforts on the technical and behavioral skills candidates present. One without the other is disastrous.

• Great tools and skilled employees mean nothing without front line supervisors who know how and have the courage to hold their employees accountable to do their jobs.

It’s a three legged stool. Or is it? What other factors should be considered in creating a consistent experience and corporate brand?

Alicia Arenas is a business consultant and corporate trainer. She learned the business ropes working as an accomplished HR leader in Fortune 100 and 500 companies for 15 years. She decided to leave the corporate world and opened her highly acclaimed consulting firm, Sanera, The People Development Company. Alicia’s mission is to  equip leaders to make sound, game-changing, revenue-bursting business decisions and focus employees on being more productive. She also runs  a business boot camp. Alicia is based in San Antonio, Texas and consults with companies nationwide.

Related posts:

• Is Your Cup Cracked? Customer Experience
• Why You Should Be Like the Vampire Edward Cullen
• Why I’m Shredding Your Business Card

Photo courtesy of Fotos Gov/Ba via Flicker.

I visited a client the first week of December. I walked into his office and sitting on his desk were boxes of cookies, candy, pretzels and Harry and David. You know what he said to me? “I’ve got a ton of this stuff. Take whatever you want.”

Stuff?

Someone spent their hard earned money buying him one of those gifts. Those could have been your dollars he was giving away. But because there was so much, most of it the same as everything else, none of it was meaningful to him.

The Best Business Gifts

Thank you gifts are important for business owners.  Your clients have honored you with their money and trust; it’s right to thank them. Gift giving is also a tool to keep you front of mind with your clients.

The best business gifts do a couple of things. First, they make your customer feel appreciated, or better yet – lavished upon. Second, the best business gifts will evoke a strong, positive emotional response from your customers. Anytime a client feels something positive about you, you are imprinting yourself (and your brand) in your client’s brain. The stronger the emotional reaction, the stronger the imprint. This is what neuromarketing is all about.

Here are some tips to giving extraordinary gifts.

1. Make Your Gift Personal

   Giving an extraordinary gift starts with knowing your clients. What do they like? Better yet, what do they love? Do they have children? Or are their kids furry (pets)? Are they movie-goers, golfers, hunters or book worms? The more personal you make your gift, the more they will love and appreciate it. Sure it’s easier to go to a catalog and order 100 of the same thing to have on hand throughout the year. But that puts you in the category of being generic. Is that really what you want to be?

2. Give an Experience
   

   A consumable is something that is used up such as food, wine or bath/body products; these are the most common business gifts given. A non-consumable can be anything from a desk clock to a piece of equipment. In general, consumables are better than non-consumables because consumables usually touch one or more of the senses: the sense of smell, taste and sight. These senses are a potent way to imprint your brand in your clients.

   But an experience? That is an altogether different, dare I say, extraordinary thing. An experience is something in which your client participates. An experience creates memories.  That is what turns your gift from a generic commodity to something truly special. You’re going for the WOW factor with experiences.

3. Give a Gift in the Off Season

   The beauty of sending gifts during unexpected times is you have a chance to surprise your client with something special. To avoid being lumped in with all the Holiday gift givers, don’t give a gift at Christmas. Send a card, a beautiful, personalized, hand-written card instead.

4. How Much Should I Spend on Business Gifts?

   If you search the internet, you’ll see a range of $20 per client up to 15% of what they paid you during the last 12 months. Before I share my recommendation with you, may I state the obvious? Check your finances! If you can’t afford to give all your clients gifts – don’t. If you are up to your eyeballs in debt with the bank, you are not in a position to give expensive gifts. I’m not trying to insult your intelligence here, but you’d be surprised how many entrepreneurs I talk to who haven’t paid themselves in 7 months yet they put client gifts on their credit cards.

   Assuming your finances are in order, I recommend you spend between 4% to 7% of the revenue they generated for you in the previous 12 months.

What do you think? How do you decide who gets gifts and how much you should spend?

First, let me just say I can’t believe I have to write this post. But it appears I must, so let’s get after it.

I was at a networking event recently and received a bunch of business cards. See the woman in the picture? That’s me as I look at these cards on my desk. Here’s what I’ve got:

1.  An artist’s card who thought it would be… artistic to have one of her paintings dominate the card and then make it nearly impossible to reach her – the font is tiny.

2.  I am actually holding in my hand a business card for an established salon that has no email address on it. Wow.

3.  Here’s another business card with the person’s name, bright & bold and her contact information is easy to read. Yet, there is no company name or a description of what she does. She may be someone I would like to get to know, but how do I know if she is or isn’t?

4.  This is unbelievable. Now I have a business card with everything on it except the person’s name. The person’s name is not on the card!

5. I’m looking at another one where the business owner has provided me with a ton of information and multiple ways to get a hold of him – which is great. However, the font is a 3. Literally. Sadly, he has lots of unused space on the back of his card which he could have used for some of his contact info in a bigger font.

People, when was the last time you looked at your cards?I am all about being memorable. But being memorable doesn’t matter if  I can’t reach you.

Besides avoiding all of the above, here are some positive suggestions:

Business Card Do’s

1 – Want to be memorable? Put your picture on your card. And for Pete’s sake, use a picture that looks like you.

2 – Use heavy-weight paper. Flimsy cards say flimsy business.

3 – One of the things I teach in my business boot camp is how to engage the senses at all points of the customer experience. To that end, make one side glossy and the other side matte. The glossy side feels good to the touch. The matte side allows people to write on the back of the card.

4 – Need some inspiration? Check out The Most Creative Business Cards from 2010.

Got any crazy business card stories? Any pet peeves? Any suggestions?

Evidently, people need to know.

Related Posts:

• How To Create An Irrelevant Brand
• Mirror Mirror on the Wall – How to Create Your Brand
• What You Need to Know About Your Competition

Alicia Arenas is a business coach and corporate trainer. When she’s not singing or song-writing, she helps her entrepreneurs increase their sales through coaching and her business boot camp. Alicia is located in San Antonio, Texas, but coaches people nationwide.



Photo courtesy of Evil Erin via Flickr.

My husband and I went to see a movie recently and in the middle of it a baby started screaming. Heads turned and a wave annoyance swept through the theater followed by the sounds of “Sheesh,” sighs and cursing.

Have you ever stopped to consider why most of us find that so irritating?

A lot has to happen to pull off a blockbuster movie. You need a great script, phenomenal actors, a director who can translate the written word into something visually compelling, brilliant programmers who push the boundaries of technology to make what doesn’t exist real to our eyes, editors who remove the non-essential and marketers who distill the essence of the movie into 15-30 second sound bites that make us want to rush to the theater.

Think about the theaters. The seats are arranged so that everyone has an uninterrupted view of the screen. The theater goes black, protecting our eyes from distractions around us. The sound systems and placement of the speakers support the fantasy that we are with the actors in the scene. Our sense of smell and taste are activated by the goodies we eat.

In short, we are immersed.

Then the baby cries or the cell phone rings or a teenager kicks our seat. And the illusion that thousands of people helped create, dissolves like sun-kissed morning mist. We are back in reality.

What Is Customer Experience

In my business boot camp, I teach the Recruits (attendees) all about customer experience and how to create one that uniquely fits your products, model and sales goals. Here’s how I define customer experience in class: The accumulation of experiences that cause your customers to be loyal and long-term or to look somewhere else to spend their money.

It is a continuum of experiences beginning with the moment a prospect hears about you through their last interaction with you. To look at it another way, one beautiful moment in a movie cannot make up for bad acting, bad animation and a shoddy script. What makes a good movie is what happens from the opening credits to the moment when the lights are raised.

My question to you is this: What happens in your customer continuum that reminds your clients they are back in reality, dealing with another company that just doesn’t care? You’ve got a least one thing that interrupts their beautiful perception of  who you are and your value proposition. Perhaps it is the time to ship, the way your employees answer the phone, the lengthy response time to customer requests, a website that is too difficult to navigate, your invoicing process or cutting remarks made in social media.

Creating a rich customer experience is as much about what you proactively do as it is about eliminating distractions. Business owners, it is time to get radical about identifying the distractions in your customer experience and eradicating them.

Click the link to get more information about business boot camp or follow us and all the graduates on our Facebook page. A new class is opening in January.

PS – On a personal note, when you come home from a long day of work, are you the “reality” or do you create an environment in which your family can relax and immerse themselves in love and nurturing? Food for thought.


Photo © we are dc; courtesy of we are dc via Flickr.

My husband supervises mostly women and after work one day he asked me, “What is it about the Twilight movies?” I immediately thought about Edward in the first movie, desperate to save Bella’s life while struggling to control his thirst. I remembered when he told her she was everything he had searched for in 100 years; how romantic! I thought about Edward deciding Bella would be safer if he was gone…

My husband interrupted my dreamy state by saying, “Great. Now you have the look on your face that every woman at work gets when they talk about Twilight.” I had to laugh because he’s right.

His question really got me thinking though. What is it about those movies? Why is it that hearing the word “Twilight”, causes many women to get a dreamy look in their eyes? The answer to that question has big implications for business. After all, don’t we want our customers to have “dreamy” looks in their eyes when they hear our names?

That’s when I realized, we can learn some lessons from Edward Cullen. Granted, we don’t have vampire persuasion, we can’t read thoughts and we’re not immortal. Nonetheless, we should all treat our customers the way Edward treated Bella:

1. Treasure Your Customers

This is different from taking care of your customers. Taking care of customers is doing what needs to be done. Treasuring customers is doing more than what is needed. How does this translate into your business? It means providing an unexpected level of meticulous concentration on their well-being. Treasuring clients is delivering a level of attention that causes your customers to feel incredibly important to you; so important, in fact, that they doubt you have any other clients. It means anticipating the questions your clients and candidates will have and giving the answers before the question is ever asked. Treasuring your clients means communicating with them via the platforms that work best for them, not what works best for you. The bottom line, treasuring your clients means making them feel special.

2. Be Fiercely Protective of Your Customers’ Best Interests

If you’ve watched the movies, you know Bella’s safety was Edward’s priority. Even when she didn’t know he was there, he was watching her, looking for any danger that could approach. And when danger was there, his reaction was intense and immediate. What this means for you is identifying the potential traps your clients could fall into and warning them in advance. It means guiding them through the best course for their business. It means remaining vigilant in your customer care. It means…doing what is best for your clients even if that very thing is what’s worst for you.

3. Show Them Things They Have Never Seen Before

Edward opened the door to a new world for Bella.  He flew across the forest. He took her to the tree-tops to overlook the Pacific. What “tree-top” experiences are you providing your customers lately?  Folks, it is the experiences you give your clients that will cause them to rave about you. And I want them to rave. Don’t you?


Photo courtesy of Ezyan Y.

This is a big week at Sanera as I’m starting a third Sanera Camp (small business boot camp) class in two days. As I’ve been preparing for it, the idea of customer experience is in all my thoughts. Last December, my friend and blogger, Michael Long, asked me to write about this very topic. Even though you may not be Christmas shopping (or perhaps some of you incredibly organized people are), the lesson continues to be relevant and important for small business owners to understand. Enjoy!

As I was searching the web for Christmas presents, I came across this wonder of modern science.

Yes! For a mere investment of $9.98 you can purchase a microwaveable s’mores maker. This handy gadget will help you eliminate burned fingers and drippy chocolate.

And that is the problem.

You see, making s’mores is not just about the s’mores. It’s about the experience – your eyes burning from the wood smoke, taking your mittens off to break the graham crackers in 1/2, practicing your timing over the fire so the marshmallows are toasty but not charred, futily trying to get the marshmallow spread over the chocolate without breaking the graham crackers, laughing at your friend who has sticky, chocolatey marshmallow goo on his face.

What does this have to do with sales?

The Experience You Provide is as Important as the Solution

Quite simply, the s’mores gadget solves problems, but eliminates the meaningful experience.

“People make buying decisions at an emotional level and justify those decisions with logic.” Kelley Robertson

Every great sales coach will tell you that if you want to make money, you need to find people’s pain points and solve their problems. That is true, but it’s not enough. You must solve people’s problems and provide them with a powerful, positive, emotional experience. Each interaction you have with your clients, from the moment they visit your website or read your tweets to the moments after they purchase something from you is building a series of experiences. It is the accumulation of these experiences that will cause your clients to become loyal and long-term or to look somewhere else.

What can you begin to do today that will go beyond solving a problem for your clients and create an indelible experience that will generate customer excitement, word of mouth advertising and ultimately increased sales?

My husband loves Starbucks, a “Venti Carmel Macchiato upside down” to be exact; a drink for which he believed there could be no improvement. But then he was listening to a morning-drive radio program and the hosts described what it was like to drink their favorite Starbucks concoction from a mug, instead of the paper to-go cup. In all our time visiting Starbucks, we have never seen anyone drinking coffee from a mug. Even our cashier had not tasted Starbucks in a mug. With more than a small dose of skepticism, my husband tried it. The result?

My generally non-expressive husband (thank goodness we balance each other out) fell back in his chair and said, “That is incredible.”

Really? “Incredible?” I had to try it and I was surprised at how different and improved the coffee tasted. Here’s a picture of his coffee.

Notice the cup. Beautiful isn’t it? I just love the intricate pattern on it. Don’t you? The colors suit the cup perfectly and the logo practically pops off the saucer…

You’re not crazy, there is nothing there. There is nothing on the cup. And that is the point.

The customer experience is not about the cup, it’s about what is in the cup.

While I’m sure a Starbucks team scoured the earth for the best, plain, white, porcelain cup, the company spent thousands more hours and dollars perfecting the art of creating a Carmel Macchiato. The cup, while important, is not the main focus. The cup exposes and enhances the object of customer passion – the coffee.

Where is your focus? Are you devoting more resources to your cup (office decor, website, business cards, marketing materials) than you are to discovering and perfecting that thing for which your customers are longing?

Starbucks, with billions of dollars at their disposal and access to the best marketing minds in the world could have chosen any type, shape, color of cup they wanted. But they chose something unassuming. Why do you think that is?

For more information about customer experience, contact Alicia for a complimentary initial consultation or sign up for Camp Sanera, A Boot Camp for Small Business Owners.