Those words are also good business advice. While Don't trip! is a powerful message, it can be ignored, even at a time when it's easier than ever to take a dive on the second step. When businesses trip, they often don't recover or remain badly injured.
Yet missteps can make us more aware of the dangers and how to avoid them. Here are examples of what to watch out for:
Never compromise credibility. Companies can't resist putting a spin on their actions, which only makes them look stupid or worse. Take what Bank of America's global strategy and marketing officer Anne Finucane said after her company pulled the plug on its $5 a month debit card charge in the face of a nationwide revolt led by a 21-year old part-time nanny. We were too aggressive. We were convinced given the environment, given the reaction, given the mood of the country that it just wasn't the thing to do, she told the Boston Globe. This is pure corporate spin, jibberish, and should be avoided at all costs. Always protect the company's credibility, which Finucane could have done by simply saying, We made a huge mistake and we're correcting it. We should have been better listeners. It was a good lesson.
Pay attention to details. Paychex, a national payroll company once sent its 401(k) plan customers an urgent notice detailing an action they needed to take by a specified date. There was one problem: they neglected to include the contact information. What does that say about the company?
A well-meaning company has a website promoting its annual clothing drive. Unfortunately, the dates of the drive were missing from the promo.
A highly regarded insurance company sends out email messages with grammar and spelling mistakes.
Minor matters? Perhaps. But it also fuels the way those companies are perceived by customers.
Saying it doesn't make it so. Just as more customers are embracing self-checkout at supermarkets, other operators are rejecting it. They maintain they want to interact with their customers, particularly in the checkout. Really? Haven't they noticed that many cashiers are less than engaged? Haven't they noticed how cashiers handle food, sometimes stuffing bread and tomatoes in the bottom of a bag? Why not give customers a choice?
Getting customer-friendly communication right. Who doesn't dial an 800 customer service number without trepidation, doubt and angst? Between pushing buttons, waiting for the call to be answered, then being transferred when you finally reach a human, repeating the problem and being told to call another number, what's there to love? For many consumers, it's more like anti-service. Such experiences establish terrible expectations and cause misery for those taking the calls. It's bad business, no matter how you cut it.
Not surprisingly, Apple does it differently. Not only do customers have a choice of how they want to communicate with the company, but they can also set the date and time they want to be called, for example. And it works because the calls start off with customers having a positive attitude, rather than with anger.
Getting ahead of yourself can put you behind. Whether it's announcing a new product, a major event or a new service, it's dangerous to put cake on display before it's baked. More often than not, it becomes a problem. The Chevrolet Volt is a good example. Several years of hype for a technological marvel led to extraordinarily high expectations from a company that, at the time, was on the ropes. Then came production delays, dismal sales figures, endless battery fire stories, the announcement that GM would buy back Volts, and, finally, the General Motors' president saying the engineers should lop off $10,000 in costs. What a negative PR scenario. This isn't a story about technological failure. GM created the perception that the old GM was back doing things the wrong way. It's another horrible example of getting up-to-speed before starting the car, a perfect prescription for fostering further doubt about the company.
Thinking outside the walls. Thinking outside the box is an overrated and useless exercise since it rarely occurs except, perhaps, in someone's fantasy. The real rub is failing to think outside the wallsthe company's walls. Even though Polaroid brought the first digital camera to market, it couldn't shake off seeing itself as an instant film company. That sealed its fate.
Now, Research in Motion flirts with a similar destiny as its market share dropped from about 50 percent at the end to 2009 to nine percent in the third quarter of 2011, according to Canalys, the London-based market research firm, as its attempts to overcome a push email preoccupation failed.
Getting it right starts with getting yourself out from behind the company walls.
Blindsided by belief. It's amazing how great companies make such foolish mistakes. In its CEO's unrelenting drive for Bank of America be the biggest, it swallowed Countrywide Financial at the exact moment when it was overflowing with toxic home mortgages.
Then, there's Netflix that based its success on making its customers happy. That went well until it came up with a 60 percent price hike and separated its DVD and video-streaming businesses, only to see 800,000 dues-paying members disappear.
Most dramatically, the famed Xerox research lab developed a blazing array of computer technologies in the 1970sthe Alto personal computer, the Ethernet, laser printing and the graphical user interfacebut the company, blinded by its imaging process, dismisses them as too risky.
How easy it is to trip when we're blinded by our beliefs. Unless we pay attention to the dangers inherent in our fast-paced business environment that are waiting to bring us down, it's easy to trip at the most unexpected moments.
John Graham is a marketing and sales consultant and business writer. He lives in Boston, Mass. and can be contacted at 617-774-9759 or GrahamArticle@gmail.com.
Current Issue - May 2024