Bailout Mistake!

Our economy could be on the verge of several months (or years) of economic trouble. Is your business ready? Most people realize that in any recession there are many businesses that fail along with resulting job losses. Did you also know that during those same periods (and even during the great depression) smart businesses thrive, even flourish and strengthen their customer base?

What makes the difference? Marketing – not advertising, but marketing – the ability to understand what our customers are looking for or need and to provide that product or service in a unique way that makes our competitors non-relevant and to maintain and nurture those customer relationships.

What does that mean in real life? Everything that you and I do as employees or owners is ‘marketing’. We either add positive points to our customer’s (or potential customer’s) opinion of us or we add a negative point to that perception of us. Even things we normally wouldn’t consider.

Negative things like:

• Following someone too close and then zipping into the company parking lot because we’re running a few minutes late for work.
• Leaving someone on hold for a little longer because we’re finishing up another project or don’t really feel like taking a difficult call right now.
• Talking negatively about your work environment or worse yet, about a client when we’re out in the evening with friends or family. Not only do your friends and family start to formulate negative impressions about our company but possibly anyone else that happens to hear the conversation.
• Not returning a difficult phone call and diffusing a situation before the client has time to allow the anger and or misconception to spread.

Or positive things like:

• Staying later or coming early to meet a client at their convenience.
• Returning a smile and politeness when a client is rude and inconsiderate – they may have just finished up with the divorce lawyer before they came here and are taking their frustration out on you. Don’t take it personally.
• Using language that diffuses bad news. Instead of using You and Your directly, e.g. “YOU don’t qualify for our preferred rate” which in a sense attacks them personally we find a way to remove the personal attack, “Unfortunately, your claims history doesn’t allow us to provide the preferred rate”. It’s the same message, it just doesn’t hurt quite as badly.

Do things like this really make a difference? I think they do. Studies show that 68% of customers leave a company because of a perceived attitude of indifference. The company or it’s employees may not have been trying to be indifferent but was perceived to be indifferent. Not to mention that they tell all of their friends what a terrible experience they had. It’s never OK to lose a customer, but when the economy is good and business is easy we may be able to get away with it and still survive. In a bad economy it can be the difference between whether or not we put food on our tables tomorrow.

On the other hand, a WOW experience – finding ways to provide our clients with service beyond their wildest expectations so that they are just blown away by dealing with us will make them customers for life. WOW experiences are so much different than people are used to it will cause them to tell their friends, bringing referrals that can be converted to more customers for life.

I’m in an industry that has already suffered a couple years of downturn only to now be faced with the possibility of more difficulty. WOW experiences for our customers can mean the difference between not surviving or downsizing during difficult times vs. not only surviving but thriving and gaining market share during the next months or years.

What are ways you can increase the WOW experiences for your clients?

Heresy you say? How could a recession ever be a good thing? Especially given that our government seems to want to bankrupt itself just to prevent one. I will show several specific reasons but in a general sense it helps to focus us on what’s truly important, forces us to become mentally tough in order to survive, encourages us to be innovative and helps us to look beyond our current world view for answers that will prove helpful later in life.

Our modern society has become so accustomed to having a cure for everything and a drug to kill any pain that we don’t realize the value in actually toughing it out through a difficult situation in order to become stronger for the next one. Just as our body uses fever to kill infection and pain sensors to keep us from holding our hand on a hot stove, we need difficult financial, relational and spiritual situations to bring us back into a proper focus. Let me illustrate.

How Can a Forest Fire be Good?

I wasn’t around back then – but history shows that the pre-settler American Indians would use controlled fires to thin the forests of dead and diseased wood – leaving only the largest and heartiest of trees to stand. As Americans began to settle the west they of course needed wood for building and stopped this practice but their sometimes radical clear-cutting infuriated environmentalists who in the 1960’s and 70’s managed to limit both logging practices and influence the forest service to fight the smallest forest fires to protect the trees at all costs.

This proved to be disastrous when in 1988 over a million acres of forest was destroyed in Yellowstone by a combination of many years of protecting the forests from fires (building up dead and diseased wood) and then realizing that was a bad idea so changing the policy to “let it burn” which caused a huge conflagration on the accumulated tinder box.

I contend that the analogy can be made to our current situation – only we have even better hindsight than the forest service had. We can see the excesses that caused the current credit crunch. Instead of allowing that crunch to root out the “dead wood” in this scenario (bad loan decisions, greedy wall-street execs, completely incompetent home buyers) we want to prop up the system so that we can reduce the pain.

Unfortunately, the “pain” cannot be reduced – it can only be postponed and in so doing intensified on the next generation. Unfortunately, in our fast-paced society, we can’t push the pain an entire generation away. Just as in the great depression – as the government tried to prop up wages and pricing to prevent a recession it only served to push the entire country into an economic abyss.

Unfortunately, nobody of consequence and power will read this article – so nothing of import will change.