Entrepreneurial News®

Customer Service Follies

Customer service seems to be taking a turn for the worse, except in small businesses.

Worse yet, initial contact would make you think it’s not bad. Lots of numerical options, friendly voices.

But there’s a bad side: you can’t in some cases get out of the loop.

ATT sounds good, but the last number you hit to change carriers doesn’t work. When they get the switch notice from Cox, they call again, sweetness and light. Why not do it right the first time?

Century Link, of course, is bad to the bone. Our landline is up maybe 80 % of the time, and they can’t or won’t fix it. So, we’re moving our entire account to Cox.

Cox isn’t entirely clean, either. After accepting the account, worth about $225 a month, they want a deposit from a person with an 840 credit score. Go figure.

And Equifax won’t release the credit report without four factor authentication which doesn’t work for some reason.

The good news is that small business isn’t falling for these trends.

So, What’s AI Good For?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around since about 2020, but has really hit prominence only in the last six months or so, with the introduction and use of Chat/GPT.

And, Elon Musk is introducting his version, called x.ai.

You may be wondering how you can use this new tool. Courtesy of our colleague Kelli Waxman, who pulled these ideas from Chat/GPT, here are some possible uses:

  1. Data Analysis. Lots of information is stored, and can be analyzed, to develop marketing programs, for example.
  2. Customer personalization. You can tailor website experiences to persons. such as recommending personalized products or services.
  3. Customer support personalization. You can see this now, in chatbots, but frankly they’re not very good. Big area for improvement.
  4. Pricing optimization. Prices can be adjusted locally, based on data you glean from local databases, but you have to be careful in asking Chat/GPT a question that will give you what you want.
  5. AI can automate a lot of repetitive tasks, such as customer lookups.
  6. Use of AI can, at least for a while provide a competitive advantage, by making your company quicker to respond to customer wishes.
  7. Automation of sales and marketing lead generation; we have used this for Solutions Forum and, so far, it hasn’t been cost effective. But we may not be crafting optimal marketing pieces or lists.

And, there’s more out there, I’m sure.

Doctors, Heal Thyselves

Most medical practices need to do a better job of patient care.

I recently had a situation where my GP made a diagnosis but wanted a confirming diagnosis from a gastroenterologist.

So, my GP sent a request to my gastroenterologist, Arizona Digestive Services. They originally said they’d set up a telemedicine appointment, but after two days, failed to do so.

Arizona Digestive Services then referred me to another gastroenterology practice, who did call, but said they couldn’t treat me until January, since I was a patient of Az Digestive Services until then.

So, I remain with my original problem, with no solution. My dear wife came up with a solution, which we’ve adopted for the time being.

I’ve never heard of such an arrangement, and I hope that the State of Arizona regulatory authorities will look into it.

Or, someone at the two gastro practices should display a bit of entrepreneurial initiative and reach out to solve the problem.

I’m not holding my breath.

 

Don’t Burn Yourself Out, Or Let Your Employees Burn Out

This topic of burnout came up during one of our Solutions Forum meetings, and we think it’s important enough to cover in Entrepreneurial News.

All of the entrepreneurs in our groups are experiencing burnout at the moment, which is why we covered it, and we’re still covering it to see if our solutions worked.

We think the signs of burnout are:

  1. Not wanting to lead your company, or in some case, have anything to do with your company. And not wanting to turn over decision making and operations to someone else.
  2. Not wanting to make the occasionally tough decisions that need to be made.
  3. Not caring about your employees.
  4. Not noticing when your employees are experiencing burnout (their symptoms might be the same as yours).
  5. Not wanting to even investigate the origins of burnout in yourself and your employees.

There are probably more signs, but the ones above should get you thinking.

There aren’t apparently a lot of ideas on how to cure burnout. Probably because most owners don’t want to admit that they’re burned out, which they think is a sign of weakness.

Here are some of the ideas on curing burnout that we’ve uncovered:

  1. Take some time off, preferably about a week or more, turn over decision making to your #2, and don’t think about the business. In the short term, go have a sandwich in your favorite spot and spend all afternoon there.
  2. While you’re taking time off, spend some time with your wife/partner/significant other, and don’t talk business. Focus on them.
  3. Take your kids to Disneyland (seriously) or some other theme park, or multiple theme parks. Don’t even think about the business. The business will call you if something serious (like a fire or flood) has happened.
  4. If you have a hobby, go do that for a week or so. At Ford, racing cars was my form of coping with burnout, but my boss, the President of Ford Credit, wasn’t too fond of the idea. Jim Farley would probably let me continue racing.
  5. Don’t get wasted just ‘to let off steam’. Yes, steam gets let off, but there might be adverse consequences, such as a DUI. Fortunately, there’s Uber and Lyft. Nothing good ever happens in a bar after 1 am.

So, there are our burnout signs and methods of coping. They’re certainly not exclusive, so we’d like to hear from you readers.

Don’t Dig a Hole

Loren Feldman of 21 Hats has presented me with another topic: What do you do after you lose a couple of large clients in a row?

The first thing is don’t get down on yourself.

The second thing is analyzing why things went wrong and you got fired.

You lost them for a reason, possibly a not very good reason, but you need to do some soul searching.

  1. Were your fees too high in relation to performance? If so, what could have been done to improve performance? Did the assignment generate more in profits (or will it) than its cost? Does the client understand this?
  2. Were you a good fit in the client’s culture? Did you work well with the people in the company that you were supposed to?
  3. How receptive was management to what changes you were proposing?
  4. Did you do an ‘after action’ debrief with the client to find out why they fired you?

There are probably more questions that could be asked, but it’s key to get back up on the horse and ride. Don’t fall in the pity well and not recover.

You might have to make changes in your outlook for example, when I started marketing consulting, I did lose  two large clients in a row. One for financial reasons, one because the CEO was difficult to work with and had underestimated how much capital he needed to launch.

I determined several things:

  1. Broaden my consulting focus towards smaller companies;
  2. Don’t do startups, which may not take your advice and may be underfunded;
  3. Broaden my consulting services to, in my case, owner consulting, which because the major focus of my practice for 20 years and was more successful than the marketing consulting, because I was able to pioneer a market in Phoenix, rather than be an entrant in a already crowded market.

So, go out and have a margarita for lunch and think about what happened, why it happened  and what positive things it portends.

Accentuate the positive.

Dodging WalMart

Loren Feldman made the point that business owners are burning out trying to compete with WalMart.

Might be right.

You don’t want to pick a fight with the WalMart big dog, or possibly the Target big dog, either.

If anything, and we have a pending project to do this, use WalMart as a benchmark for products and services because, as large as they are, they’re pretty nimble. And then we reverse engineer.

So, we say develop products and services that WalMart (or Target for that matter) doesn’t carry. In the process, you get unique offerings that will stand out from WM, and even the rest of your competitors.

For example, we have a client who has a water-saving hose nozzle under development, which won’t be found at WalMart unless they approach him with an offer (I’ve seen it happen) at reasonable price points. In his case, we might dodge big dog Ace Hardware, too, although they’re pretty easy to deal with.

We plan to use internet and social media to publicize the nozzle (the domain is already registered) and a prototype GoDaddy site is parked with GD. I plan to personally test it, given the size of my water bills.

So, if you have a product idea, use WalMart for reverse engineering and a competitive survey of what’s out there,

Do a focus group over lunch at a restaurant and invite some people you know who might be interested.

But don’t panic over a little incoming, gang.

Hammer Down

With apologies to some of my racing buddies, whose term the title is, we are advocating that you keep the hammer down on your marketing and sales efforts, despite a little tick upward in interest rates.

And my former finance professor at Wharton, Dr. Jerome Siegel, also said that the downgrading of the US debt ought not have much, if any, effect on your expansion plans.

An uptick in interest rates might adversely affect profitability, but not enough to alter your long term strategy.

You might have to rerack your projects based on higher interest rates, but that’s just an annoyance.

Remember, your competitors are probably doing the same thing, and you don’t want to do what they’re doing, and you don’t want to pull in your horns.

Keep the hammer down, folks.

Should You Yell at Your Employees?

Loren Feldman of 21 Hats thinks one should never yell at your employees. We reserve judgement.

I’ll also say that I can’t remember the last time I caught one of my clients yelling at employees. But they’re on their best behavior when I’m around.

We say it depends on what the reason for the yelling was, the toughmindedness of the employees and what they expect from you as their leader.

Let’s start with your leadership style. We advocate being a situational leader, one that uses either authoritarian, coaching or situational leadership. We prefer situational leadership, because you can lead with the style the situation demands. Coaching might be preferred with younger employees who are more ‘fragile’ because they haven’t been in the work world long Or, you can be more harsh with veteran employees who know the right way something should be done. Lastly, there is a type of leader that yells all the time, possibly because he/she is passive aggressive and not confident of his/her leadership style. The Navy used to be full of them.

Personally, when I yelled at my employees, which was quite rare, they knew they screwed up and better fix the situation quickly. And, in the one case, I apologized to them, because I was tired and stressed, having just come back from a weeklong business trip and discovered some problems we caused with one of our large customers.

Secondly, examine your employees: have they been in their jobs a while, and should they have known better? Where there time pressures to complete a task? If you don’t often yell at them, they know that yelling is a special circumstance

As a leader, you have to control your emotions when you are in charge. But emotional intelligence is completely separate topic for another blog.

What Recession?

My uncle Dave Loehwing was editor of Barron’s, the financial newspaper for many years, and I recall that he used to say ‘if you think you’re in a recession, you are’, meaning that your negative talk and actions could force your company into a recession, when that need not be the case.

I see more and more financial pundits saying that we’re in a recession, but we don’t see it. We’re based in Arizona, which has been relatively insulated from recession by tourist and resettlement inflows, but things aren’t bad.

Despite our circulation, or impressions as we now frame it, we’re not going to made much of a dent in national media attitudes. If it bleeds, it leads, and that’s recession.

It’s time to ramp up your marketing and sales efforts, to stave off the recession and do some coaching of your staff to not thing negatively about things. If they have negative attitudes, they might transmit that to customers, who might not buy.

Keep looking at those new projects that you could do. Maybe you have to adjust the ROI down a bit, but do they still make sense?

Swipe a customer or two from your competition.

Add people where it makes sense; there seem to be a lot of good people looking to improve themselves on Indeed and Zip Recruiter.

The bottom line is that the Nervous Nellies will still be with us when we go up the right hand side of the pundits’ hockey stick, so just ignore them and do what you think is right.

Life After Capitalism

No, we haven’t capitulated to the Biden Bunch. That’s the title of a new book from George Gilder, of ‘Wealth and Poverty’ fame.

We looked forward to getting the book when it was announced on Amazon, but I must say that it hasn’t quite lived up to our expectations.

The problem, as we see it, is that Gilder doesn’t really get around to writing about the title until the latter 1/4 of the book.

Gilder’s solutions to life after capitalism are rather normal: stable government so businesses can invest, encouragement of entrepreneurs and information capitalism. The latter topic is intriguing, and gets into Chat/GPT, but not in depth. Let’s hope he writes more about this topic. These topics are covered late in the book.

Another problem is that Gilder gets into a number of other topics: The Meaning of Wealth, The Future of the Economy and the Time Theory of Money. These topics are covered early in the book, so one is left wondering if the title was dreamed up by the publisher (Regnery Gateway) to be catchy and sell books.

All of these topics are worthy of treatment in a book, but IMHO, not the same book. They all bear on capitalism, but not necessarily Life After Capitalism.

As always, Gilder is a very fluid writer, so even when he’s off topic, he’s enjoyable to read.