Reliable, Competent, Excellent and Efficient (8)

Chapter 7

Must be reliable, competent, excellent and efficient

If a a person and/or a company commit to the four areas above, it would be very hard to fail in their pursuit of success service. All of the above, from the Biblical point of view, could be underscored by "quality service." Combined, that's what they represent when taken together.

We've talked a little about each of these throughout the book, but we'll take a closer look at each one of them to see how they work and blend together.

Reliability

Reliability is primarily a character issue. It has at its core the idea of no matter what is going on, you are a person and a business that can be counted on to do what they promised, when they promised, at the price given. It also includes with it the idea of surpassing expectations by surprising customers with service and prices that exceed expectations.

On the price side it doesn't necessarily mean cutting the price after it is agreed upon. It could mean that, and customers will appreciate it if you are able to do so. But what is really the thing that moves them the most is to add something of value to the product or service you didn't include in the promise or deal. Not only is the added value a bonus, but the surprise factor includes an emotional response, which is easy for customers to remember. People always remember how you made them feel, and if you do that in a positive manner which makes them feel important, you have won a customer for life if you continue to treat and surprise them in the same way as you serve them over time. That means part of reliability is consistency.

Another important part of reliability, but one that could easily be overlooked or undervalued, is simply showing up. By showing up I'm referring to physically, but also showing up in a way that reveals you're really engaged with satisfying your customers.

Showing up means being on time, being thoughtful throughout the process of the transaction with the customer, and making sure anything that needs to be done to bring them to trust you, is done.

A long time ago when I first started selling things on the Internet, I had someone buy something and almost immediately afterwords send me an e-mail wanting to get her money back. I sensed she was fearful, and so not only did I reverse the charges for her, but gave her a call to calm her down and let her know it was taken care of. I didn't have to do that, and it cost me a little bit to make the long-distance call, but I know if she ever wanted to do business with me again, or she knew friends or family that would benefit from the products I had to offer, there would be no hesitation to send them my way.

Within reason, we should treat all the people that do business with us that way. It sends out a signal that you're a person of integrity, and if there was ever any time they needed or wanted a product or service you offer, they'll remember how you treated them fairly and with dignity.

Reliability isn't just showing up for the game, but showing up at the various points of interaction with a customer where they need handholding. An example of that would be with products or services that require steps to assemble a physical product or something that needs to be done on the digital side, i.e., a learning curve.

Part of showing up in these cases is to have very specific and easy-to-follow instructions on how to engage the product or service. A surprising number of businesses don't even have videos to help those that understand better how to do things with visual instruction. Not only does that alleviate and head off frustration, but it, again, makes someone feel good about doing business with you and your company.

The bottom line for reliability is we have to empathize with and understand what it is like for our customers to work with our products or services. Those that anticipate the majority of possibilities where customers will need help, will be those that win their loyalty.

Competent

There are two parts of being competent I want to talk about in relationship to business. The first and most obvious is knowing the business we're in. That means being an expert in the field you've chosen to compete in. It also means understanding the market we serve and what drive them.

From being an expert in our field, the next step of competence is in knowing how to handle questions and concerns about our products or services. Both of these are vital to long term success.

At times I've heard some gurus encourage their students to fake-it-till-you-make-it. If that is understood to mean taking steps to get a business going or to accomplish a specific task or goal, I have no problem with it, as long as there isn't lying and misrepresentation involved. I've started some businesses where I had a good understanding of the basics, but when a person started talking about specifics, if I didn't know the answer, I would tell them, and mentioned finding out and getting back to them on it.

This happened a lot when I was operating a greenhouse business. I don't care how good you are with various things you sell in that business, the number of herbs, vegetables, fruits and flowers are so big, there is no way to know the answers to a person's questions on many of them. In that case I had resource books available to get general answers, but you also have to consider zones, soil types and other things that can affect how you best help a customer.

If something is important, don't fake it. Answer to the best of your ability, and then find out the answers afterword. Someone that pretends they know will be considered dishonest and a fraud if they are discovered as being incompetent. That's not a good way to attempt to build long-term success.

Fake-it-till-you-make-it to me means you don't have to gather every bit of data exhaustively before you serve a market. Another example from a different business I owned was with a cleaning question. Even though I knew a lot about how to do carpets, which was what the question involved was related to, I thought I knew the answer and operated under that assumption while cleaning a big building.

Later I found out that even with my experience, I had made a mistake because I hadn't cleaned a carpet before with this type of problem. This didn't stop me from working in a business I knew, even though there were a lot of things to learn.

The takeaway is don't get paralyzed into thinking you have to know every thing there is to know about a particular business in order to serve customers in it. People that take-it-till-they-make-it  can at time enter a business they know nothing about, and can actually be a disaster for customers that are looking for answers to problems they need to have solved. This can happen if you buy a business, or if you hear about a certain type of business that can make a lot of money for you, and you don't take some time to at least learn the basics of it.

For those types of customers you would rely on for long-term profitability, the best ones will be those that are at least familiar with the area of service you offer, and appreciate the fact you have answers beyond their expertise level.

If a business is already operating and you generate enough revenue to justify hiring an employee, I would spend the money on buying the expertise you don't have, and spend your time promoting and being the face of the business.

Excellence

I differentiate between excellence and competence by looking at going beyond what we promise and customer expectations. Being competent relates more to meeting expectations, being excellent is exceeding them.

Remember that all four of these parts of success discussed in this chapter tend to overlap in general, and we're simply dissecting them to understand how they play a part in reaching the goals that will define success for us.

That doesn't mean someone can be competent and as a result are also excellent, because it isn't a guarantee. I only want readers to understand if they are providing quality service, the two should go hand in hand together. It usually doesn't work that way because people stop at competence. That's a mistake because those that go on to excellence will dominate the market they serve in.

Excellence in controlling expenses

We usually think of excellence in regard to service and our customers, but another form of excellence that is just as important once you get some revenue flowing is in discipline concerning expenses.

One way to compete is on prices, and I don't mean in the commodity way we already mentioned earlier, where only the lowest price creates a winner. Rather, what I mean is how customers view the prices you charge based upon how they value your products or services. You don't have to be a low-price leader, but the price you charge needs to line up with the perceived value you offer customers. That's the key.

As a matter of fact, if you're product or service is considered of high value, you could lose customers if you charge too low for it. The price would be a piece of information they consider is communicating to them that the value is low. Under those circumstances the price undermines your quality products and services.

This leads to discipline and excellence in controlling costs. There's a couple of things to consider here. First is what concerns the pricing I mentioned above. In order to provide a good price we have to have the room to experiment in a certain range to see where the price point people are willing to pay is. If we're not disciplined in our costs, it removes a lot of flexibility and ability to do some trial and error with pricing.

No matter where you are in business, most of you haven't heard before what I'm about to say: the price of a product or service is one of the most important pieces of information you can have. It's a form of communication by a customer toward you and your business. Your price tells them something, and their response to your price is their feedback to you concerning perceived value. There is probably nothing more important to a business than finding out where the price of a product or service generates the most sales. Keep in mind I'm assuming a quality offering here.

Let me give you an example of how this works. This is a true story. A young writer recently released a success book on time management. He communicated his frustration over how his "superior" book was being outsold by what he considered inferior offerings. On the surface it seemed true. His book was a massive one of about 350 pages. Competitors offered books in the same category of only about 20 pages, and they outsold him by a good margin.

Their prices were lower, and that was part of the story, but the other part I don't believe he ever understood. Think about it for a moment. He was selling a book on time management that was about 350 pages long. If a person is looking for a book on time management, the last thing they want is to have to sit down for days and go through a long book on it. They want a book they can get quick answers to because they are struggling with having time to do the things they have to or want to. Simple isn't it. But maybe most of us wouldn't have thought of that because we wanted to offer a high-value product. This is the perceived value side of the equation on price points. The value wasn't in the quantity of the pages in the books, but the books themselves being the first step in dealing with time management. That meant a short book was far more desirable than a longer book.

The other side was the pricing. Obviously the larger book was offered for a higher price, but it wasn't that much higher; possibly about double the price of the much smaller e-books, even though it had more than ten times the pages.

Here is a case of the price of a product giving feedback to a business. What the consumers were saying is the perceived value they were looking for were quick answers they could put into practice right away. They didn't mind paying a fairly good amount for a smaller book, even though the larger book probably had a lot more answers for them.

If it was me, I know I would have went the smaller book route as well. Not only would it take a long time to read through a book that big, but there would be additional time needed to search for specific answers, because of the large number of pages. Reading plus search equalled a lack of enthusiasm.

So consumers were willing to pay for books covering the same topic for about half the price of the larger book, but with less than a tenth of the content. What that tells you from the information conveyed from the prices of the smaller books, which when measured by the number of pages, were actually much more expensive, was the value was in ability to quickly access actionable ideas that could be immediately acted upon. The price told the authors that they had found the information their customers felt was valuable, and they were willing to pay far more per page of content than the much larger and more thorough offering.

Give people what they want and they're willing to pay for it. That's the takeaway here. The authors writing the shorter books may have finished them in a week. The one young man writing the longer book took several months to completed it. Pricing determined which was perceived as having the most value.

I went through this with you in detail to understand how to think about pricing when offering a specific product or service.

Efficiency

Efficiency is the best use of your capital or assets to achieve the desired results. It's more than being disciplined as mentioned earlier, it's also having the wisdom and knowledge to use your assets to leverage them to bring about what you're trying to accomplish in various aspects of your business. Simply, it's discovering the best way to use the resources at your disposal.

How do you know if you're getting close to doing it right? It's being able to fulfill what you promised to your customers. That includes what you promised, when you promised, at the price you promised. Those are the metrics to use to gauge your business and customer service progress.

This doesn't mean you are always throwing stuff around to see what will stick. That has a certain place in a business, but it shouldn't be the primary means of business. If everything is up for grabs, it means we don't really have a grasp on our business or understand what our customers want at this time.

Efficiency means we are learning how to narrow down our options to levels we can then try different things to see what works. It's controlled trial and error, not trial and error based upon lack of data. If we don't have the needed data, we need to get the best information we can and then try a variety of things to see what works.

This is the practical side of business. It's where we find the best and least expensive ways to make our vision a reality, without sacrificing quality.

What has to be watched for and guarded against here is the idea of having to have perfect knowledge or data before we go take steps to try things. Efficiency isn't perfection, efficiency is using the data from our research and understanding of our market to leverage our trial and error to get the most accurate feedback we can. From there we make adjustments to refine the process in order to reach the highest level we can.

Be careful not to mistake efficiency for perfection. If you do, you'll end up in a permanent state of paralysis, not willing to make a move because you always believe you never have enough information to act upon. That's a mistake. It may even be an excuse to use so you never have to take any risk. What being efficient does is shrink risk, not eliminate it.  

Only when we act upon the available information and data we have are we able to make adjustments to improve our products or services. If we never take action, we will be in constant stake of embracing an idea or theory that has no way of being proven one way or the other. To try something is to risk failure. The key to growing a successful business is to lower the impact of failure so you can survive to compete another day.  

That may sound scary, but it really isn't if you do your homework and take calculated risks. It doesn't guarantee success, but it does guarantee you'll learn a lot from your experience, and if you keep on and adjust to feedback, you'll eventually get it right.

In the end, it's about closely watching feedback from customers concerning sales and what they have to say about your products or services. Adjusting to legitimate responses is the key to improving your efficiencies, which will boost revenue and lower expenses, while keeping your customers happy.

Taking action based upon the best available data and information, accurately measuring the results and feedback, and adjusting accordingly, is how you improve efficiencies. It is efficiency.