Don't Do In Rome As The Romans Do In Customer Service - Exceed The Romans!

You just cannot succeed in today's business world by doing what everybody else is doing, you have to be completely different. My my one-time neighbor opened a restaurant years back and I was invited to attend the "launching." I noticed that within a mile radius of my neighbor's restaurant were not less than twenty other restaurants, fast foods and nightly eateries including Mr. BIGGS, Tantalizers, Sweet Sensation and Tastee Fried Chicken. My neighbor believed at the time her culinary prowess would enable her succeed and thrive but I doubted she would survive. I hinted at the time the odds of her surviving and thriving were one in ten or slimmer because what she was offering was not different from what all the other eateries around her were offering. Well, what I feared indeed came to pass and the restaurant went belly-up two years after.

Don't Do In Rome As The Romans Do In Customer Service - Exceed The Romans is about standing out from the crowd. What makes you distinctive? What have you done and continue to do day in and day out so that anytime the people that you consider as your target market want to do anything tangentially associated with the business which you have entered, they think about you first and no one else. This is called positioning as Al Ries & Jack Trout brilliantly captured in their best seller Positioning and further illustrated its application in The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. Have you positioned yourself so that you are the first in the customers mind at all times? Think about it. Why should I go to XYZ and not ABC? Because XYZ stays open till 12 midnight while ABC closes at 7.30 pm. That's why! Staying open as late as 12 midnight in a city that supposedly should never sleep while your competitor operates as an extension of a government ministry makes you a non Roman!

Carl Sewell, author (with Paul Brown) of Customers for Life, took his father's moribund car dealership to stratospheric success by refusing to do in Rome as the Romans do. Tom Peters and Nancy Austin graphically captured in Passion for Excellence what Carl Sewell did to turn Sewell Village Cadillac from an also ran to best-in- class. "When he took over the business, he asked, 'Who are the best car dealers in the country?'. He got their names and off he went. He visited, and visited some more. He listened, took notes." Carl Sewell didn't stop at visiting car dealerships. He visited restaurants, airlines, pizza stores, hotels, and just about any place he could get superior ideas to turn around his dealership.

The research aspects concluded, Carl Sewell went back and adapted what he learnt from pizza stores, airlines, restaurants, other car dealerships, until one day he became best in class. Carl Sewell never said what works in pizza stores cannot work in a car dealership. He did not say but car dealership is different from airlines. He did not say, this is the way things have always been done in the car dealership industry. He exceeded the Romans and this helped Sewell Village Cadillac to stand out a clear leader in an industry that is known for mediocrity and generally lacking in credibility. What will you start doing differently in your business tomorrow?

Paul Uduk is the Chief Executive Officer of Vision & Talent International, Nigeria's leading customer service learning and performance consultancy. He has published and consulted actively in the areas of service quality and design, and teaches in these areas locally and internationally, including for the UNDP. His best selling books include Bridges to the Customer's Heart (http://www.bridgestothecustomersheart.com) and The Gods of Quality Strike Back. Prior to setting up the Vision & Talent Group, he was a banker with one of Nigeria's top 10 banks. His current research interest is on forces that engender corporate enthusiasm, agility, and the will to prevail through service excellence. Reach Paul on visionandtalentltd@gmail.com or pauluduk@gmail.com.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/6755543

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