The Customer Mission Podcast with Andrea Belk Olson

While RevZilla uses a variety of tools and platforms to manage their customer communications and track purchase behavior, their engagement strategy is what puts them in a category that rivals the well-known Zappos.

I recently had a conversation with a local retailer, struggling to generate sales through this pandemic. They were exhausted and stretched thin. They had been through the ups and downs of managing cleaning, metering patrons, to having to move their entire business online. Still, sales were continuing to slump. Knowing that survival depended upon having an online presence, they went all in. They se...

We often think a lot about what helps us connect with customers, and focus on marketing messages and communications that relate to and draw in customers. What we overlook is often the most obvious. Humanization.

There was a great book published back in 2001 called "Positioning" by Al Ries and Jack Trout. It emphasized the importance and impact of companies taking a unique position in the market, albeit through now outdated examples. However, the principles of this idea have gotten lost over the years, and the time is ripe to bring the concept back.

Dutch philosopher Alexander den Heijer said, “When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” Not surprisingly, many organizations try to fix the flower. This happens all the time with culture-change initiatives or even brand strategies, where the veneer is the focus of change and not the behaviors that underlie it.

Usually, when a company identifies an initiative, it's clear what needs to be accomplished. Team members then dive into the implementing tactics, measuring progress along the way. Ideally, the project gets completed on time, and on budget. So should we consider that success? The better question is, did we get the most out of the initiative itself?

A value proposition's job is to gravitate your prospects towards your business. To stand out. To connect and resonate. Customers are constantly looking for unique benefits and advantages they can capitalize on - but too many organizational value props are focused more on the company than the customer. They aren't framed through the eyes, perspective, and context of the customer's needs, wants, and...

Companies are consistently looking for new ways to grow. Every organization is trying to discover new innovations which will catapult revenue, and build a bigger gap between them and the competition. However, many of these organization's leaders are making business decisions they can defend, rather than what will truly make an impact. It's driven by a fundamental psychological bias we all face - l...

The nature of productivity is to identify what needs to get done and make sure it gets done in a timely fashion. However, there’s a big difference between being busy and being productive. Today, too many organizational leaders get wrapped up in proving their department's worth by the number of accomplishments, rather than the value of those accomplishments.  There is a dif...

The popular Progressive commercials with Dr. Rick tend to hit a bit too close to home sometimes. Focused on the concept of "helping new homeowners avoid becoming their parents", it's also very relevant to us as organizational leaders. When we are young and starting our careers, we are aspirational. We embrace change and learning. We are humble enough to learn from our mistakes and are bold enough...

I heard the oddest thing, and I've heard it multiple times over the course of my career. Companies that are afraid to ask their customers what they want. Or ask them how the organization is performing. Or involve them in a new product or service creation.

Companies fail for a variety of reasons. And more often than not, we don't want to admit it occurs most frequently because of our own actions - or more importantly - our own inactions. Even though we can argue issues like cash flow, pandemics, disruptions, and the inability for teams to innovate - organizational failure actually boils down to three core killers.

Every organization wants to stand out from their competitors, but very few are truly successful at it. Outside of the frequently lauded names such as Apple, Amazon, and USAA, companies continue to do a lot of 'talking about' and 'studying', yet struggle to capture the same magic. The problem is these same organizations are using an old set of tools for a new set of challenges.

Most companies believe they understand their customers, but a recent study conducted with 50 CEOs across financial, insurance, and manufacturing industries indicates otherwise. The study, conducted in June of 2020, examined the connection between the perception of understanding customer needs and actual organizational behaviors. The overarching conclusion is: even with the widest variety of tools...

In 1928, American sociologist William Isaac Thomas theorized, "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." In other words, a consequence will come to fruition based on how one interprets the situation. This concept came to life only a few years later, with the fall of the banking system during the Great Depression. Between 1931-1933, those banks that were on strong fina...

In Italian, consigliere means "advisor" or "counselor" and is still a common title for example for members of city councils in Italy and  Switzerland . The word was popularized in English by the novel and subsequent movie,  The Godfather  (1969). Despite its cultural connotations, the true definition of a consigliere is a close, trusted friend and confidant. And if financi...

It was a meeting of the executive team at an $800m company. The team spoke about the changes the organization needed going into the next fiscal year. Nothing which was brought up was a surprise to myself or the group. Actually, the changes discussed were the same changes that had been discussed the year prior, and the year before that. A companywide survey had been conducted, validating the import...

Many of the major problems that we see which impact the success of organizational change efforts are coordination failures. In short, any organizational problems are only solvable if everyone can agree to do the same thing at the same time. When a team is tasked with implementing change, oftentimes, individuals will not necessarily choose what's best for the group, but for themselves.

Lean is all about simplification, streamlining, and eliminating waste. What could be bad about that? Lean has been found to not only improve consistency and operations but also save a lot of money. Every company likes that. But too lean can be just that - too much. And too lean limits the organization's resilience to forces outside the consistent pattern of business - just like this pandemic.

Organizations have continually sought quick and easy solutions to some of their most challenging problems. Whether it be employee attrition, product adoption, generating new revenue streams or increasing organizational innovation, leaders look to find that "silver bullet" to turn things around. They seek out expert advice, examine competitor's offerings, and explore plug-and-play technology platfo...

Why is it that once you roll out a new product, customers don't use it? Or a new service that you developed specifically based on customer feedback, yet it languishes with low adoption rates? It's a struggle that organizations deal with almost on a daily basis and often try to tackle with anything they can, whether it be creating sales team incentives, investing in a big marketing campaign, or ext...

As organizations try to implement change, whether it be a new project management platform or a company restructure, they are often met with significant resistance. There's a portion of the organization that wants to maintain the status quo and another portion that's ready and willing to change. So leaders often take a variety of approaches to get the other half on board, whether it be taking a har...

So now that we live in a virtual world, almost everything has moved online. Zoom meetings and webinars have now become the norm. Many organizations are also translating their educational programming and training (whether internal or external) online. However, it's not as easy as taking what you do today and simply doing it "digital". Creating an effective and truly results-generating digital train...

There is something you can’t see that is getting in the way of moving your business forward, even in these unprecedented times. It is hidden from view, but it raises strong emotions in your team that make them resistant to change. Buried deep beneath all that grey matter that deals with creativity, intelligence, collaboration, etc. (the neocortex or ‘human brain’) is a small evolutionary building...

There's something about KPIs that brings about almost a fervent obsession. Having a dashboard with a series of numbers and graphs that are intended to reflect the "health" of the company. KPIs have been long lauded as a critical tool for executives and leaders, and are frequently utilized as a "simple and digestible" way of understanding how the organization is performing. However, KPIs can often...