The Customer Mission Podcast with Andrea Belk Olson

It’s no secret that attracting talent is crucial to the success of your organization or business. However, getting the right candidate for the right job can be a daunting task. Unfortunately, no matter the amount of effort put in for a smooth process, it’s the smaller details that often make things to go wrong. Simple mistakes such as creating a rigid checklist of qualities and qualifications for...

It's really fascinating to speak with organizations about their personalization strategies. They speak often about things like "customized content" or "customized products", where a customer can select a unique product color, or filter specific content they want to see on your platform. But is this really personalization?

We all love metrics. After all, you can change what you can't measure, right? However, a company can easily lose sight of its strategy and instead focus strictly on the metrics that are designed to track its impact. For example, look to Wells Fargo, where employees opened 3.5 million deposit and credit card accounts without customers’ consent in an effort to hit their "metric numbers" de...

When an organization is seeking change, often there's a series of challenges identified, a detailed strategy developed, tactical plans outlining the approach, and a comprehensive schedule put in place with key milestones. Sounds fairly straightforward, right? Yet often times, change initiatives start to get bogged down, and even sometimes come to a screeching halt, only to be retooled at a later d...

I was employed as one of the first female executives in a male-dominated industry. To say this was a challenge is an understatement. While I was very experienced in my role, was provided a great team of 40+ direct and indirect reports, had an ample budget, and latitude to design and implement a new vision, it was still an uphill battle. The organization was fundamentally a "good ol' boys" club, an...

Every company has implemented a customer or employee survey at one time or another. Often times, a lot of time and effort are put into these surveys, only to result in a little generic input, ample complaints, vague feedback, and minimal insights or "ah-ha" moments. Why is this the case?

We had an organization come to us that was struggling with getting sales trajectories turned around - a common problem for many companies. Through extensive discussions, we identified a wide variety of issues, from bloated inventory to high-cost/low-return investments, to ineffective marketing strategies - all of which could be easily changed to get sales back on track. The team agreed that these...

This fourth of July, I enjoyed a game at our regional Single-A affiliate stadium, with sun, beer, brats, and great baseball. We also had the pleasure of sitting next to 2 scouts, who were clocking pitches, detailing the stats and performance of every player on the field. They had been following all the teams in the division and attending every game, including taking videos of key player performanc...

When a company decides to do something new, employees usually try several different ways of carrying out the activity. But once they have found a way that works particularly well, they have strong incentives to lock into the chosen process and stop searching for alternatives. Fixating on a single process frees people’s time and energy for other tasks. It leads to increased productivity, as employe...

I received an unsolicited email from a consultant, talking about their services and inquiring if I would be interested. Disregarding the fact that the email was littered with generalities about "successfully serving large clients" and "creating win-win" outcomes (which is a whole issue in itself), the big theme throughout was that they provided "value-added" services. Even worse, the contact's tit...

We have all dealt with it. Someone in the organization that's an Eeyore. Maybe it's someone on your team, or maybe it's even the head of your department. What is an Eeyore? In the story, he is generally a pessimistic, gloomy, depressed, and anhedonic character. Pessimistic, gloomy and depressed people usually wear their unhappiness on their sleeve for all to see like Eeyore. But outside of a diagn...

When we talk with companies about gathering insights about customers, often times there's a push for getting a ton of information. From interests to behaviors, companies want to understand each and every detail in the hopes of identifying that new thing which will create growth, increase customer retention or expand share of wallet. The problem is, it can be too much information.