Where’s your courage?

If there is one thing we lack today, it is courage. And when I say courage, I am not talking about performing a tightrope act without a safety net or skydiving. I mean the courage we all need in everyday business life, the courage to be different and to stand out from the rest of the field.

Just being different won’t automatically make you better than your competitors, but it is often enough to give your company the reputation of being innovative. Be different and better, is the motto!

For example, when you ring a company and there is no one available immediately to take your call, you will almost certainly be asked to wait, with a canned version of Verdi’s ‘Four Seasons’ playing in the background, or alternatively, a monotonous voice intoning the dreaded words, ‘Please hold the line... Please hold the line... Please...’. Why not play a comedy CD instead, so that if your customers do have to wait, at least they will have something to laugh about?

In my company, we have been using a comedy CD for quite some time now to make waiting a more pleasurable experience for our customers, and quite a few companies have already copied the idea. Imitation is a form of flattery.

I admit that the idea might not exactly be ingenious, but it is certainly courageous. When I tell people about it, they can usually think of numerous reasons why this idea would not work in their particular company:

‘That just wouldn’t work in our branch!’

‘Our customers might not take us seriously.’

‘What if they don’t like that particular comedian?’ and so on and so forth.

They can come up with a host of arguments against the idea, but none in favour. What a fainthearted attitude that reveals. Just be like all the others, don’t experiment, and never try anything new, because it might be a flop. I would like to tell you another story on the subject of ‘courage’, one that really did happen.

One beautiful autumn day, I met Heinrich Gruben, the CEO of Hightech, for lunch. I was very proud that this top-shot manager had expressed an interest in our services, and I had done my homework thoroughly before this, our first meeting. After the usual words of welcome, the waiter handed us the menu and we both began to study it. Suddenly, Mr Gruben said ‘Mmmm, they serve crêpes Suzette here!’ (Crêpes Suzette are flambéed pancakes.) He didn’t order them, however, despite his appreciative ‘Mmmm’. Our lunch went well, but without any direct ‘financial reward’ for our company. When I arrived back in my office, I opened our Customer Loyalty System (we deliberately don’t call it a database, as we don’t see our clients as data to be managed) and typed in: ‘Mr Gruben loves crêpes Suzette!’

And that, for the moment, was the end of the story. Nothing special. My notes only came into play about three months later. In mid-month, we always print out the list of clients who celebrate their birthdays in the following month. And one entry read, ‘15 January: Heinrich Gruben’.

In our company, I am the person responsible for the implementation of our customer amazement strategy, and so it was my job to decide whether we could amaze Mr Gruben and how. I switched on my computer and found various entries under ‘Heinrich Gruben’: address, position, phone number, comments. Under ‘comments’, I found the following:

Dresses very elegantly.

Smokes Davidoff cigarettes.

Drives a roadster.

Has two children (David, 6 and Lisa, 3).

Wife, Anja, comes from Sweden.

And then, right at the bottom:

Loves crêpes Suzette.

Three days before his birthday, I phoned Mr Gruben’s secretary and asked whether he would be in his office on 15 January. She informed me that he would be in a company meeting until 3.30 pm and then in his office until about 5.30 pm. I thanked her, dialled the number of the restaurant we had had lunch at – it is not far from Mr Gruben’s office – and gave the waiter the following instructions: ‘On 15 January I would like you to take your flambé trolley to the company Hightech and serve crêpes Suzette in the office of its CEO, Mr Heinrich Gruben.’ At first, the waiter thought I was someone from the local radio station playing a joke on him, but with the help of a 10-euro tip and my considerable powers of persuasion, I managed to talk him into carrying out this, as he put it, ‘unusual order’.

I didn’t have to wait long for a reaction. After carrying out my instructions, the waiter phoned me, bubbling over with enthusiasm, and told me what had happened. He created quite a stir from the moment he entered the reception area of the office building pushing the flambé trolley loaded with pans and all the necessary ingredients. ‘Who do you want to see?’ ‘Where are you taking that?’ ‘To the boss?’ Eventually, he entered the lift, pressed the button for the managers’ floor and soon found himself face to face with an amazed Heinrich Gruben.

‘Mr Gruben, I am here to wish you a very happy birthday on behalf of NeumannZanetti & Partner and to serve you your favourite dessert in honour of the occasion.’ Mr Gruben was so delighted that he called his colleagues in for an impromptu ‘get together’. Over crêpes Suzette, they speculated about how NeumannZanetti & Partner could have known Mr Gruben’s date of birth and what his favourite dessert was. Some of the employees themselves wouldn’t even have known it was his birthday if it hadn’t been for our little surprise, let alone that he liked flambéed pancakes. (The answer is, of course, we acquired our information through active listening!)

The following week, we received a page-long letter from Mr Gruben describing how delighted he had been with our birthday gift. I really had succeeded in amazing this client, and years later, people would still ask me about it. Today, Hightech is one of our clients and Mr Gruben more than just another business associate.

The question I would like to ask you is: was this particularly courageous of me? The answer is: no!

It was not courageous, because I wasn’t just guessing that Heinrich Gruben loved crêpes Suzette: I knew! If it had been just guesswork, I might have been wrong, and then the whole operation could have been a flop. But since I knew he was partial to crêpes, I didn’t need courage. All I had to do was to put my knowledge to good use. And by the way, the whole campaign cost my company just 30 euros, including the ‘bribe’ for the waiter.

What would have been the alternatives:

a bouquet of flowers for 30 euros?

a bottle of wine for 20 euros?

no birthday present at all?

Decide for yourself whether it was worth it and how effective our little surprise was.

All successful companies demonstrate courage. You can’t be innovative without taking risks. If you aren’t innovative, customers will avoid you. And when customers avoid you, your company goes down the drain.

Dale Carnegie, asked about the motto of his life, once said: ‘Make a fool of yourself, every day!’ A motto well worth taking to heart, don’t you think?

Goodwill, or mutual liking

It is mutual liking that ensures that customers identify emotionally with a person, a product or a brand. It is mutual liking that compels us to return to a restaurant where we are on first-name terms with the waiter and where we can expect good service.

Mutual liking makes it a little easier for us to spend our money. We are inclined to be more generous to people who are friendly and, above all, our level of tolerance is higher when others are friendly. Even if mistakes are made, we remain calm and collected, provided that we like those we are dealing with. And it cannot be denied that it is a mutual liking that leads us to fall in love. Friendly and pleasant people are more attractive. They radiate warmth, energy and an aura of success.

If you want to buy a new car, you can choose between hundreds of dealers. If you compare, you will see that prices, even for a new car, do vary considerably. By haggling with the dealer, you can almost always knock the price down to the level of the cheapest dealer. But the question is: which dealer will you buy your car from if the price is the same everywhere? The answer is: from the one you like best!

In other words, what we need today is not experts on prices and policies, but experts on dealing with people. Why should you hand over your money to someone who is rude, is not interested in your needs and doesn’t even pronounce your name properly? To someone who is badly dressed and has no manners?

If you have courage, and if you genuinely like people, there’s just one more thing you need to make you an innovative amazer of your customers: consistency.

Consistency

Consistency is what you need to pursue your goal unwaveringly. Recently, a shoemaker who makes orthopaedic footwear told me how delighted his customers are when he phones them about three weeks after they purchase shoes from him and inquires whether their new shoes are comfortable and whether there is anything else he can do for them. His customers are completely amazed by so much customer-orientation and tell him that hardly anyone bothers to inquire how satisfied they are once a sale is completed.

Well, this shoemaker has proved that he has the courage to be different, and it is certainly a very kind gesture, but it is a pity that he doesn’t follow through and extend the same courtesy to all his clients. He told me that he only has time to contact about 30 per cent of his customers.

He is full of enthusiasm and proud of the success of this measure, which brings him a lot of trade as his customers recommend him to friends and acquaintances. Yet at the same time, he confessed that his business is struggling.

I am firmly convinced that he should extend this service to all his clients, as this would bring him even more satisfied customers who would advertise actively for his business. The question is not how much time something takes or how much it costs. The only legitimate question is: what’s in it for the customer?