Home again!

I arrived home late last night from an amazing trip to Egypt. I am still a little jet lagged after our 24 hours of traveling home, but it was well worth it. My good friend Kim and I had a blast, and I expect to share some stories from our journey.

Please stay turned.

Customer service

Good customer service is something close to my heart. I think that most companies could probably do a better job if they thought a little more about what they say and do. A recent posting by Jackie Huba on “Church of the Customer” is a good illustration of how to connect with your customers by using key words.

Jackie makes a good point about creating an emotional connection by using less formal language. I would agree with her there. While it is important to speak the language of your customers, it is also important to communicate your passion and enthusiasm about your company and its products. If you don’t believe in them, who will?

Sometimes, the formal prose of business is too stilted to evoke any emotion from your customers. Translating your company’s passion in your products into the language you use to communicate with your customers can increase the emotional bond you make with your customer, which in turn could translate into increased sales.

How this applies to your company will depend on the business you are in, but almost any company will benefit from a sense of fun and enthusiasm mixed with a professional approach.

Customer communications

Only 8 more sleeps until I leave for a 3-week holiday to Egypt. I LOVE to travel so — as you can imagine — I am very excited about my trip. With travel on my mind, I thought I would take this opportunity to talk about customer communications, with a focus on some of the newsletters I receive from various adventure travel companies.

I must say that I am a big fan of “Intrepid Express” from Intrepid Travel (HQ in Sydney, Australia). I have been a subscriber since 2004 and I enjoy their weekly newsletters so much that I have kept almost everyone of them!

So what make Intrepid Express so good? They follow some “best practices” that help me get the most out of their email. For example:

• Subject line — each subject line starts with “Intrepid Express” which tells me that it is the newsletter and not some other correspondence from Intrepid.
• Topic — each week, there is a short intro from the editor (Sue Elliot) which is always interesting and well written. It gives me an idea about the content and helps me make the decision as to whether to read further.
• Quick links — at the top of the email, there is a section labeled “In this issue” with links to each section of the newsletter; a fast way to get to the sections that interest me the most.
• Sections — each issue has many articles, with several them on recurring themes such as: “Top Trip”, “Local Know How” and the latest contest.
• Side bar — Intrepid uses the sidebar promotes upcoming trips or deals with links to their website.
• Timely and relevant — the newsletter arrives every Monday, like clockwork and, even if I’m not planning a trip, the content is fresh and interesting.

The tone of the writing is interesting and informative, but never heavy with a sales pitch. That may be why I like the newsletter so much — it feeds my passion for travel, giving me ideas about where to go next, but doesn’t pressure me into buying.

Intrepid Express is not the only travel company e-newsletter that I receive, but it is my favourite. Long before I became an Intrepid customer, I developed a high affinity for the company, due in part to the “relationship” created through this single form of communication.

I’d also like to give a big shout out to Sue Elliot, who has been the editor of Intrepid Express for many years: thanks for keeping me hooked all these years.

Want to learn more about Intrepid and see what trips they have to offer? Start with their home page: www.intrepidtravel.com.
Ready to sign up to their weekly newsletter? Go to:
http://www.intrepidtravel.com/inspirations/expresssubs/

Goal setting for your career

Every month, I write a blog entry for the Outdoor Industries Women’s Coalition blog, based on the monthly professional development topic. The focus for April is “Planning Your Career Path”, a relevant continuation of my own blog entries from January on Goal Setting.

Since access to the OIWC blog is considered a member benefit (so it is located on members-only pages of the website), I have included an edited version of the entry here.

I encourage you to learn more about this amazing professional development and networking organization for women at: www.oiwc.org. [Full disclosure: In addition to developing content for the site, I am on the Board of Directors and sit on the Professional Development and Marketing/Branding committees.]

Get started on planning your career path
You’ve thought long and hard. You know what you want to do. But now what? How do you make your dream a reality? As Stephen R. Covey says in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, "Begin with the end in mind."

With the end in mind, you can start planning how to get there. You would do this if you were driving somewhere, so why not do it for your career. Since a career goal is not on any map, you will need to do a couple of things. First, determine your destination and, second, set some milestone goals. To increase your chances for success, your goals should be SMART — Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.

SMART goals will help you develop a plan that is realistic and achievable. And, as you create these goals, be as detailed as you can. This will enable you to clearly understand how you are doing as you work towards your end goal.

Not only are SMART goals important, but so is timing. Make sure you check on your progress at regular intervals and consider: How close are you to achieving your goal? What is helping you be successful? What is getting in your way?

In addition, there is nothing that says you have to stay true to your original plan. As you evaluate your progress, consider making adjustments based on what you accomplish — or did not accomplish — so far. Did you set your goal too high? Will it be difficult or impossible to achieve? Did you learn something that changed your mind about what you thought you wanted? Is there now something else that you would rather do?

Don’t be afraid to change direction. Use your knowledge and experiences — as well as the knowledge and experience of others — to shape your goals and your career path.

Get inspired!

You hear a lot about Zappos.com — customers love their shoes and service, they have an interesting corporate culture, oh yeah, and they have a billion dollars in sales — they must be doing something right.

I first heard about Zappos, a few years ago, from a friend who loved shopping on their site. I personally don’t have the nerve to buy shoes online, but she was very pleased with her purchases — and the ability to return them easily if they didn’t work out.

Last year, Bill Taylor wrote about the company in his blog:

Every so often, though, I spend time with a company that is so original in its strategy, so determined in its execution, and so transparent in its thinking, that it makes my head spin. Zappos is one of those companies.

Bill Taylor wrote Mavericks at Work: Why the most original minds in business win, with Polly LaBarre, so I expect it must take a lot for his head to spin!

One of the things Bill mentioned was the fact that Zappos will offer new employees $1,000 to quit, after they have been with the company for only 1 week. The theory behind “the offer” is that if you take them up on it, you aren’t the right fit for the organization, so it is better that you go sooner rather than later. Interesting strategy — not one every company could adopt but apparently it’s working well for them.

More recently, I read about Zappos on the Church of the Customer blog where Ben McConnell wrote about the company's values.

Many companies create a vision, mission statement and corporate values. Most communicate them to their employees and some post them publicly on their website. Zappos does this and more — the “About Us” section of Zappos.com is extensive. In addition to the usual company history and executive profiles, it features descriptions (with photos) of almost 20 different teams at Zappos, links to a collection of blogs and detailed explanations of the company’s core values. Here they are, with links to each description:

1. Deliver WOW Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble

If you want to know even more about the inside of the company, you can buy a copy of their Culture Book, but be prepared — it’s 479 pages long!

So why should we care?
While it is not necessary — or appropriate — to copy other companies, it is useful to learn about what other organizations are doing. Inspiration can come from unexpected sources —sometimes a completely unrelated business will help you see things differently for your company.

The key is to be open to new ideas — you never know what will trigger a bright idea.

Organize your inspiration

During my recent magazine purge, I found a number of interesting articles. Rather than throw out the article with the magazine, I tore out a few to keep. As you might have guessed, I’m a bit of a packrat. But, I am an organized packrat — I’ve taken those “articles of interest” and filed them for future reference.

By categorizing the articles I’ve collected over the years, I can pull them out easily when I’m looking for ideas. They are within reach — in a desktop file caddy on top of my filing cabinet — so I don’t have to go far to find them.

If I am looking for inspiration on a particular topic, I can leaf through a file folder and see if anything stirs an idea. To keep it simple, the files are organized into categories that reflect my main areas of interest:

• Marketing and branding
• Business and innovation
• Sports and fitness

I also keep my “Inspiration Journals” close by so that I can look up “that comment I heard on the radio the other day” or remind myself of a contact that someone suggested to me. Keeping things simple and being organized means that you access the information you need without too much trouble — important for a packrat like me to put all the “stuff” to use.

Innovation inspiration

I must admit I am a bit of a magazine junkie. Over the past few months, I have build up quite a stack, thanks in part to dozen freebies I picked at the Winter Outdoor Retailer show (which I greatly appreciate!). Most of those were outdoor and travel related, but I have also acquired a collection of business magazines. In an effort to reduce the pile, I have been reading some of the older issues and discovered a number of interesting and/or inspiring articles.

One article I enjoyed was from the December-January 2007 issue of Profit magazine. The main article, called “Get Lucky” by Susanne Ruder, was a discussion of the book The Luck Factor: The Four Essential Principles by Richard Wiseman. [Please note, when I posted this entry, I had difficulty accessing the article. You can also try the Profit home page.]

The book was based a 10-year study, called “The Luck Project”, which focused on the characteristics and behaviors that made people “lucky”. The article expanded on the four principles Wiseman identified:

• Maximize your “chance opportunities” — lucky people tend to be extroverts who are good at meeting people, open to new experiences and like unpredictability.
• Listen to hunches — your first instincts are usually correct; they are based on what you’ve learned over time even if you are not completely aware of your knowledge.
• Expect good fortune — lucky people are optimists who persist in the face of failure.
• Turn bad luck into good — as your mother said, “look on the bright side”.

I also found a sidebar to the article, called “Innovation Calisthenics: Five exercises to tone your creative muscles”, provided inspiration for trying to see things in a new light. I have included the content here verbatim:

1. Get out of your rut. Move your watch to the other wrist. Leave your keys in a new place. Take a different route home. Force yourself out of one habit a week, and you’ll start thinking in new directions.
2. Record it before you forget it. Don’t leave home without a notepad, tape recorder or other means to record ideas as they occur. Then force yourself to add 10 related ideas.
3. Immerse yourself in fresh viewpoints. Explore books, magazines, newspapers and websites that are unrelated to your business or personal interests. Travel somewhere you wouldn’t normally go. Surround yourself with people from diverse fields whose new-to-you perspectives will expose you to opportunities.
4. Reimagine the old. Encourage lateral thinking by taking an everyday items such as a paper clip or a rubber band and brainstorming 25 alternative uses for it.
5. Take up a brain sport. Exercise pumps your brain with glucose, which increases oxygen delivery and nerve connections. Keep your mind sharp by participating in a strategic sport, such as football, hockey or soccer. And loosen up your imagination with a rhythmic activity, such as running, walking or swimming.

My favorite point is #2. I now carry a notebook with me at all times (and most of the time I have a pen with me as well). I use it to write down anything bright idea that pops into my head and I’ve used Post-It tabs to divide it into sections, so I can categorize my random thoughts slightly.

The notebook has been useful to record smart things I hear on the radio that I want to learn more about, dumb things that I want to comment on, business opportunities I think about, etc. I have it with me any time I meet with someone, so I can take notes. I even added a small pocket for business cards and a few bucks so it is all I need for a quick coffee.

The key is to be ready for inspiration because it can happen any time.