Tag Archive for: sustainability

Using Mystery Shopping to Keep Up with Technology

As we’ve seen over the past few weeks, in the business world, keeping up with technology can be challenging. It is also vital. There’s no escaping the future, and apparently the future is all about technology. The question now is: how can businesses stay up to date with the ever-changing landscape technology creates for the customer service experience? One suggestion? By using mystery shopping.

Between 2012 and 2015, I owned and ran a small cafe in the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges in Melbourne, Australia. Quaint little town, homey little cafe. The majority of customers were members of the community. It was all about foot-traffic and locals, not so much about tourist travel or city-folk visiting the Hills. That sort of clientele was reserved for the more ‘touristy’ towns further into the mountains, like Belgrave or Kallista.

In the first year, I had a pretty good handle on our customers. We knew what they liked, what they didn’t like, and how best to deliver it to them. By the middle of year two, however, the demographic was changing, the older generation that had made up my customer-base was moving away and being replaced by young families buying their first home. I was lucky, I caught on pretty quick, but two other cafes in my street didn’t, and they were gone by 2013. Tragic, because they were great little hideaways. Our survival had been simple, and I still put it down to one thing: the introduction of free wifi.

Nowadays, it seems like such an obvious thing: don’t all cafes have wifi? But we were the first in our community. While the original demographic didn’t see the need for it, the new one did. They appreciated that we understood – and answered – their need to be connected. This was our survival tactic, a simple adaptation to the change in our customers’ technological needs.

We were lucky, having only a tiny staff and not much of a set-in-stone strategy; the cafe wasn’t a big enough business to be difficult to change. Other businesses – hospitality or otherwise! – don’t have that luxury. Staying ahead of the times, or at the very least keeping up with them, isn’t as easy for everyone as it might be for a small family-owned cafe.

Which brings me back to the question: how can businesses keep up with the constant technological development?

Customers do it. Especially the Millennial customer with his/her latest smartphone and/or tablet. For the most part, customers are keeping abreast of technological changes quite easily, but that makes sense, they’re only one person. A business can’t just upgrade its systems at the drop of a hat, that sort of stuff costs money. Any business worth its salt will likely look at these changes and go ‘fine, we respect that we need to make some changes, but we can’t change everything, what are the priorities?’. This is a practical approach to a very complicated problem.

For businesses, using mystery shopping to keep regular tabs on their customer demographics is an option to stay on top of this. Mystery shoppers are ‘real’ people, so to speak, and they can judge our customer service and experience on a variety of things, including whether or not we are meeting their technological requirements. By using mystery shopping, businesses gain insights into what the ever-changing customer demographic expects to find in terms of technological ‘upkeep’.

/by

[Intern Insights] Digitolution: The impact of digitalization on the future

That the Internet, digitisation and digitalisation have changed the way people live and do business is old news. Those changes won’t stop.

To clarify, the differences between digitalisation and digitisation: digitisation is the process of converting information into a digital format, whilst digitalisation is the way many areas of social life are restructured around digital communication and media.

The big question mark giving business leaders headaches and sleepless nights is how these changes will evolve. As things progress, the impact on businesses and society and the implications for the planet change too.

We know that the future is uncertain. This is why businesses always need to stay on the edge. Walking the path between stasis and forward momentum allows businesses to avoid complacency.

Digitalisation makes sticking to a business strategy much harder. In the blink of an eye, all success can vanish because of a new digital innovation that seems to have miraculously popped up overnight. Digitalisation innovates entire systems, not only a product or service.

In an article for Forbes, Rich Karlgaard compares digital technology to a Death Star. At first, it pulls a company into its orbit and wipes out the old and well-established business model. Its next step is to force the business to adapt to the new digital environment laws of the game. Not just once, but over and over again. These “orbits” are unpredictable and can change societies in ways we can’t even imagine. Digitalisation and technology affect all aspects of our daily lives and are not only related to one area. They range from nanotechnology to 3D printing and all the interplay between. The combination of all these makes digitalisation an unstoppable force.

Most businesses are aware of the constant need to adapt to digitalisation and its changes but few realise how little time they have to do so.

The pace of digitalization is increasing exponentially. However, due to the – mostly useful, but in this case, not so much – inherent survival instinct, people think in linear growth.

To highlight the exponential growth and speed of those changes, just think back 10 years and see how much the world has changed.

10 years ago, I bought my first very low-resolution, colour mobile phone with a side-kick alphabetic keyboard. I was sad that I could no longer play the game Snake, which I had had on my previous phone. The media predicted what the first iPhone would look like. I imagined a kind of an iPod phone with a big round wheel to navigate; it took me a while to understand the concept of an application.

To buy this phone, I had to travel pretty far. I also entered several different stores to get different advice on which phone is the best and where to get it for the best price. Today, comparing and ordering can be done conveniently online – with a phone.

Terms such as Social Media, Facebook, YouTube and so on – the list is endless – were fairly new back then. Nobody could have imagined how those inventions changed the way people today interact, socialise, communicate, and work with another.

Every part of our lives today is digitalised. Business operations, products, and even customers are digital. Nevertheless, business leaders often still don’t think in “digital terms”. They struggle with the loss of customer relationships and the need to engage with their stakeholders on a digital level.

What Charles Darwin said in the 19th Century about evolution is also what businesses need to keep it mind today.

“It’s not the strongest of the species that will survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

Today, the size of a business doesn’t matter, it’s agility and the capability to re-invent themselves that gives companies a sustainable advantage to compete in a digitalised world.Digitolution: Digital evolution is such a strong force, constantly reshaping the world with an incredible speed – affecting everybody’s daily life – that it deserves to be a word on its own.

This post is brought to you by one of AQ’s Undergraduates, Alexa V. As part of our internship programs, undergraduates and classic interns are encouraged to take part in company culture. Alexa’s primary focus is in digital marketing.

/by

Change in Business: Resistance is Futile

Change. It’s a part of nature, allowing for life to evolve. In essence, change is responsible for our survival. Change is what allows us to adapt to new scenarios, overcome obstacles, and grow as individuals and as societies. And as companies. In the same way that nature forces us to change as a species, change is business is not only inevitable, it’s vital to the survival of the business.

Last week, I talked about the risks involved with company pillarization, a symptom of growth without change. The article discussed how a mature company runs the risk of doing what it’s always done, because that’s the way it’s always done it. Think about those businesses who refused to embrace the Internet because they believed it was a passing fad and would never take off.

This week’s topic is specifically about the concept of change in business, and we’re starting with a favorite source, Vusi Thembekwayo.

“Change is nothing new.”

Change in business is a direct result of the changes happening in the world. Society changes depending on the development of technology.

“Technology is any time you are able to introduce a new variable to the same set of circumstances and create an exponential different result.”

The direct result from society’s technological development is change: change of needs, change of circumstances. And, as society’s needs change, businesses have to change along with it in order to keep up. Building a business to weather the future requires that business to understand the changes being made in the world around it – technological and social. This is especially important for larger and more mature businesses who have ‘settled into’ a way of life.

 

What Thembekwayo is suggesting – and indeed saying outright – is that change is disruptive, but it isn’t anything we haven’t faced before. The difference being, of course, that the more humanity advances our knowledge, the faster changes are forced upon us. Take social media, for example, businesses strive to stay ahead of the growing technology – marketing departments are told that they ‘should really look into that new platform that’s coming out’. Apparently, it’s no longer good enough to just be on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram – oh and Twitter, but that’s been ‘dying’ for a while now, according the experts.

A business isn’t an individual, who can take up Snapchat or Hyper (set to ‘explode’ in 2016 according to Forbes) on a whim and in the blink of an eye. The very nature of a business is that it makes choices a lot slower than a single person, no matter how motivated and enthusiastic the individuals powering that company. Change in business, like change in technology, is never perfect and often faces resistance.

And yet, change is inevitable because humanity is changing rapidly.

/by

Company Pillarization & Disconnection: Why Change and Adaptation are Vital to Company Growth

As companies grow, they change. It seems obvious, but it’s impossible for any business to stay in that ‘start up’ phase forever. As a company matures, its very nature changes, and often this can cause company pillarization. Originally a cultural and religious concept – based on the Dutch word ‘verzuiling’ – pillarization talks about systematic segregation and alienation of elements of society.

In history, this is best illustrated by the separation between Catholic and Protestant communities in parts of Western Europe after the reformation. Protestant families would only buy from Protestant grocers, while Catholics would only go to Catholic vendors. Society was split across its religious lines in such a way that that was as little interaction as possible between the two elements even though those elements were part of the same, larger community.

We start to see company pillarization in more mature companies. These businesses have developed strategies and policies in their start-up phase, or they have set down strategies and plans afterward. The result is that many of these businesses rely on strategies designed years earlier, based on scenarios and circumstances of that time. One of the problems that can arise from this is company pillarization.

Company Pillarization: The 3 Big Areas of Concern

Communication

One of the first things to break down in a company pillarization scenario. Pillarization creates a disconnect between departments, allowing them to grow distant and focus only on their own tasks. As a result, inter-company, cross-departmental communication is difficult and occasionally non-existent.

Responsibility

A direct result of the breakdowns in communication, keeping track of responsibilities becomes difficult. When company pillarization occurs, departments – and their individual team members – become entrenched in only their own tasks. Even as disconnection begins to occur in communications, a disconnection happens between the tasks and the bigger picture. That leads to a disinterest in taking responsibility or ownership over cross-departmental projects.

Engagement

When a department is disconnected from the company as a whole, the members of that department suffer from the same disassociation. People get drawn in, choosing ‘sides’ with their own department rather than with the company as a whole. This, combined with the breakdown in communications and growing sense of lack of responsibility leads to a downturn in employee engagement. Employees no longer feel connected with anything but their work, or, at best, their department and this impacts the company as a whole.

Overcoming Company Pillarization

Overcoming divisions in any organization can be difficult. Particularly if these divisions have grown subtly over time. The first step is always to recognize that there is a problem. This is something that companies can find difficult to admit; it may be construed as a failure in the eyes of stakeholders, but without this admission there can be no resolution.

In the end what it all comes down to is the disconnection between people, departments and the company as a whole. This can be the result of a number of things such as the company has outgrown its management, the company’s culture isn’t moving with the direction of its employees (in terms of socialisation opportunities), and possibly just the general style of work – perhaps the products that the company is now creating aren’t as interesting as they were before. The disconnection between the company and its individuals is the end result of all these issues.

In order to overcome company pillarization, then, companies have to reconnect with their employees and vice versa. It’s a two-way street.

One of the factors that can help address the issue of communication, for starters, is to take a look at the physical distances between departments. If they are housed on different floors or even different buildings, then face-to-face communication becomes less likely. While not always possible, bringing departments closer together has the potential to help resolve this issue.

Other tried and true ideas is to sit down and take a serious look at current HR Policies: do they reflect the current needs of employees or have things changed? If the company no longer has the best interests of its employees at heart then this is a good place to start looking. Similarly, it’s a good chance to give employees opportunities the chance to express themselves. This will generate information to help bridge the gaps on an individual level and will hopefully improve on issues of engagement and responsibility.

Onwards and Upwards

Many people compare businesses to sharks: when they’re not moving forward they’re sinking. This may not apply to every business on the face of the planet, but it’s often used as a generalization. It applies here too: if a business isn’t addressing issues that are causing breakdowns in responsibility, engagement and communication then what’s the point? It’s fair to say that while not all companies can be compared with sharks, it’s perfectly reasonable to argue any company not addressing its internal issues is heading for the  bottom of the ocean.

/by

[Intern Insight] Imagining the Future: The Limits of Customer Service Psychology

Customer Service Psychology: Splitting Hairs

Customer service psychology is an ongoing debate amongst the experts and amateurs of every industry. It is all about how you greet, speak and act with the customer. In order to better measure it you have tools such as ‘Customer Journey Mapping’, ‘Customer Emotional Behaviour Mapping’, ‘Customer – Employee Touch points Chart’ and so on. However, in our pursuit of a psychological understanding of our customers we’ve lost track of what they’re actually doing. The thought processes behind every decision a customer makes are all well and good, but once we over-analyse these decisions we forget that behind those choices there are some very basic business consequences.
In the course of designing my current project, a training application for the retail industry, I started by establishing the basic customer journey and the key moments that impact the experience. I definitely agree that this is the best way to initiate a thorough customer experience analysis. Mapping the customer journey is a powerful tool to provide accurate data. That said, I reached an impasse when trying to analyze each moment from a psychological point of view.

Moment Number 1

Let’s start at the beginning!

The customer must be greeted. This is the standard procedure. But how do you greet the customer? Should it be verbal or non-verbal or a combination of both? Are we actually aware when doing it or is it just a reflex? Are we on customer service auto-pilot? Do we take into account the cultural differences or the emotional impact? Are we subconsciously mirroring the behavior of the customer? Does that work in our favor or against us?

Moment Number 27

Somewhere along the way, we get to the moment where the customer decides to purchase. In this step, we are advised to escort him, talk with him, personalize the experience, and make sure he doesn’t change his mind. That’s the best practice – that’s ‘by the book’ in customer service psychology. However, does he even want to be escorted? How does the customer feel being constantly accompanied?

And about all that personalisation…? How personal is sufficiently personal without getting too personal?

The point is that we have these ideas of what the customer should experience in terms of ‘good service’, from the moment they enter the store to their point of purchase. At the same time, we want to measure and quantify it so we can keep track of what we’re doing wrong or right.

If we want to trigger certain behavior, the science of customer service psychology tells us we have to adopt certain attitudes. If we want to create a specific ambambiancee can use certain colors. Need something to look better value for less money? Just put 99 cents at the end of the price. And although we have so many theories and articles that discuss this subject, we still don’t have an accurate grasp on true customer service psychology.

Why is that?

Believe it or not, it’s not so easy to influence the human mind.
It’s not the new trend or the new sales technique that is so effective. The power lies in mapping the customer’s decision-making process. There’s a pattern that repeats itself. Do you buy the latest IPhone because you need it or because it’s new? The pattern of wanting the newest product as soon as it is available is one of the driving successes behind brands like Apple’s IPhone. The psychology behind it, however, can differ from person to person. The idea is that we are trapped in the inertia of our own decision process without even being aware.

There are so many reasons why customers decide to do what they do. In the ocean of all these ‘whys’, should we bother with customer service psychology when, as businesses, we could be focussing on the fact that they just do?

Food for thought.

This post is brought to you by one of AQ’s Undergraduates, Laura Susnea. As part of our internship programs, undergraduates and classic interns are encouraged to take part in company culture. Laura’s primary project focusses on training programs and eLearning and how best to adapt this to industries under pressure. 

/by