Welcome to the latest edition of ‘The Emmet’ - a free newsletter for Knowledge Workers anywhere.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
💁🏻 💁🏻 💁🏻 The Fine Art of Being Persistent (not Insistent) 💁🏻 💁🏻 💁🏻
The sales support person is an advocate for the customer and the sales team.
ℹ️ ℹ️ ℹ️ The support person seeks to resolve issues by engaging with the relevant department. It may be a delivery issue, a credit issue, a product issue.
📞 📞 📞 The support person works with the transport department, the credit department or the merchandise department to seek a resolution.
They represent the customer’s interests to each of these departments.
🤝 🤝 🤝 The team member’s influencing skills need to be finely tuned. While there are rules, guidelines, processes, and protocols in any business, it is not unusual to overlook or work around these at times.
Just to get stuff done.
A team member’s ability to seek a resolution with their colleagues that suits the customer often depends on their influencing skills.
Characteristics of a person with strong influencing skills are:
- A working relationship with a wide range of internal team members is in place,
- Skills of persistency (not insistency) are regularly used.
The team member with strong influencing skills rarely uses the following:
-Defers to a higher authority in the first instance
-Refers to the business rules in the first instance
........ These characteristics are examples of being insistent.
OPINION
….. and while we’re talking about ‘-sistents’
I only know of one superpower, but it applies to everything: consistency. Do anything consistently for a period of time, and you’ll be good at it.
Quality comes once you’ve mastered the ability to be consistent.
Ten minutes of stretches and exercise every day beats a well rounded free weights routine that only gets done twice a month. Writing something every day beats writing once every few months when you have a brilliant insight.
This doesn’t mean quality doesn’t matter. It’s “quantity, then quality.” Consistency builds excellence, not the other way around.
The trick is to find out what you are happy to do consistently.
PREDICTION
Goodbye Bad Customers
By 2025, 75% of companies will “break up” with poor-fit customers as the cost of retaining them eclipses good-fit customer acquisition costs.
Organisations often accept poor-fit customers into the sales pipeline and attempt to retain them without adequately considering how costly those customers are for the organisation. It costs time and money to satisfy poor-fit customers: for example, to customise offers or design solutions to suit them. As leaders understand more about those costs, they’ll become more comfortable with letting go of unproductive customers, given the drain on brand and long-term profits — not to mention the emotional toll on employees.
Source: Gartner
“First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three down.” - US Pentagon General
LEADERSHIP
The Connector Manager
A Gartner study identified that the manager-type Connector Manager improved employee performance by 26% and tripled the likelihood that their direct reports were high performers.
HUMOUR
Pitching The Office
RICKY GERVAIS (U.K. Office writer and co-creator and “David Brent”): When we were pitching our version of The Office to [BBC producer] Jon Plowman, he said, “I’ve got one question. This guy who’s the boss, if he’s so terrible at his job, how does he keep it?” and I said, “Let’s take a little walk around the BBC, shall we?”
LINKS
Randoms
Psychological Safety for your Team