How to Manage Unhappy Customers

In this Dynamic Communication interview, author Jill Schiefelbein chats with Eric Yuan, CEO and founder of Zoom, who gives a tip that can help you manage your business. Perfect for entrepreneurs, small businesses, sales teams, customer service departments, project managers and more.

  • How do you deliver happiness to your customers?
  • How can a CEO listen to his or her customers and respond to concerns?
  • What are some best practices for managing feedback?
  • Why might getting rid of project managers be a good idea for customer service?

See the interview video clip at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/video/289427

Eric’s interview is one of 27 featured in Jill’s latest book: Dynamic Communication: 27 Strategies to Grow, Lead, and Manage Your Business available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iBooks.

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Communication is more than words. Successful, DYNAMIC COMMUNICATION is measured by the actions and results that you generate—not the messages you produce.

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Strategies to Accelerate Your Business

8 Parts. 27 Strategies. 100% Action.

The Bare Basics

Things you need to understand about communication

Sales Machine/Ninja/Badass

Providing service and growing sales

Marketing that Educates

Creating value-filled, magnetic marketing

Oh the Humanity!

Public communication strategies that help you connect

Speak Out, Speak Up

Giving presentations that inspire action

Inner Workings

How to manage teams, meetings, and get buy-in

Like a Boss

Leading and managing so people want to work for and with you

Retain, Innovate, or Die

Strategies for employee retention and development

Communicating with Millennial Employees: Four Strategies for Success

Communicating well takes effort. You need to understand the backgrounds of all parties involved, establish expectations, present the message in a way that your audience will understand, and motivate people to act. Many leaders and managers are good at the middle two portions, but having the finesse and understanding to not only understand the people you are communicating with but also how to motivate them is quite the challenge. And within the growing workplace Millennial population, many in senior positions are struggling to understand inter-generational differences. In February I had the pleasure of attending a panel on retaining millennial talent produced by Grovo–a cool company that focuses on learning and employee development. Combining the knowledge from the four panelists (all quoted in the article) and my own personal experiences teaching, I created 4 Strategies to Connect with Millennials.

In 2020 millennials will account for 50% of the US workforce. On average, millennials stay in a company for two years. This high turnover cost is negatively impacting many organizations’ bottom line.

Original article published April 21, 2016 on entrepreneur.com https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/270658

Millennial Employee Retention Hacks: Equity is Important

Companies of all sizes and industries face turnover costs. With the growing number of millennial employees in the workforce, many businesses are feeling the impact of the decreased average tenure this generation brings to the table. In this article for Entrepreneur.com I explore how you can better retain millennial employees through a framework of workplace equity. Understanding these principles will allow managers to communicate more effectively to this generation and also engage them more meaningfully.

Retaining top talent starts with creating an equitable workplace.

Instilling workplace equity involves cultivating an environment where employees are treated fairly by management and, in turn, employees treat management fairly. It seems obvious. We’ve heard something similar since childhood—The Golden Rule. But what may seem obvious in principle is often not so apparent in practice.

Published August 14, 2015 on Entrepreneur.com https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/249548

Developing Employees on Different Paths: The Principle of Equifinality

The idea of equifinality means that there are many paths to the same end—there are multiple ways to reach a final goal.

Think of navigating in New York City from Times Square to Lincoln Center. There are many different ways you can get from point A to point B, and many different methods of transportation to get you between points. Depending on traffic, subway schedules, weather, and other assorted factors, one way is likely faster than the others.

By choosing to take one way over the other—say on this given day it’s a taxi—you’re missing out on many other possible discoveries and observations that walking or taking a bus or subway would have presented.

If you’re focusing on cultivating a culture of innovation and developing your employees, those potential discoveries and observations are key to growth.

A fatal flaw that many managers make is assuming that their ideas or processes are always the best—the most efficient—and therefore need to be continually executed. This assumption (and acting on it) kicks any type intrapreneurial thinking to the curb. In doing so, you’re likely to lose top talent and have trouble retaining employees, especially millennials.

In organizations there are many ways to accomplish a single task. The concept of equifinality is alive and well. Yes, some processes may be more efficient than others, but often times in allowing employees the freedom to chart their own path, new efficiencies emerge.

An employee’s learning process in accomplishing a task is just as important as the task itself.

Here’s an example that applies to sales teams in almost any industry.

Think of a speech, or sales-script, written out word-for-word. If you give this document to ten different employees and tell them they must recite this pitch to-the-letter during all sales conversations, you’d ensure that the words coming out of their mouths were exact. But in doing so you’d be missing out on significant opportunities to develop individual delivery skills, provide employees ownership over their scripts, cater to a customer’s unique needs, and cultivate sustainable relationships between your sales force and potential clients.

How can you use the principle of equifinality to develop your employees? If you’re not sure, let’s have a conversation.

Note: In a previous blog I talked about three phrases that leaders should never use if they want to encourage innovation and participation. One of these phrases, “That’s now how we do things around here,” is very applicable to this post.

Bringing an On-Demand Mentality to Employee Development: How to Get Education to Employees When They Need It and Where They Want It

The training and development marketplace is flooded with sub-par providers. Institutions of higher learning are not adequately preparing graduates to enter the workplace and contribute in a substantive way. Brick and mortar models of classroom-based training and instruction do not allow for the innovation and collaboration that is essential for business growth. And needing to learn a skill for a project now, but having to wait weeks or months to take a seminar, is an outdated model.

Enter the growing potential of on-demand training and education.

Yesterday at Internet Week New York I attended a powerhouse panel with the CEO of Zeel, Samer Hamadeh, the GM of Pager, Toby Hervey, the COO of Handy, Alex Levin, a SVP at Postmates, Holger Luedorf, and a VP at Glamsquad, Amanda Rosenbergy. The topic: From On-Demand to In Demand.

Each panelist represented a different on-demand service niche—from massages to healthcare, from hairstyling to handymen.

The bridge that connects each of these businesses, though, is the realization that, within their respective verticals, they are bringing a service, instead of a product, to a client when and where he or she wants it.

My mind has not been this stimulated in a long time. I’m letting my geek flag fly.

I’ve worked in the online education space, in some capacity or another, for a decade. In that space I’ve witnessed significant changes about what constitutes learning, and numerous debates over the efficacy of synchronous versus asynchronous content delivery.

At the end of it all is the overwhelming understanding that there is no one best way to learn, and the simultaneous challenges that having the capability to deliver content through multiple channels, across various canvases, present.

I see universities and institutions of higher education struggle with delivering quality online instruction. I witness companies hiring trainers to come in for an isolated seminar given in a one-size-fits-all approach. And I see frustrated students and employees on both ends, because knowledge needs are not met.

Sure, we can go to YouTube and get information on any topic under the sun. But information doesn’t equal knowledge.

How do organizations bring the philosophies of on-demand services to employees in order to create a more engaged and productive workforce?

In the answer lies an opportunity.

Companies like Udemy, Lynda, Grovo and others are playing in this field with varying degrees of success, but I believe there are more possibilities to explore.

Here are three questions I see guiding the discussion:

How do we negotiate a person’s perceived self-efficacy on any given skill versus their actual performance?

The principles of on-demand service can apply easily to providing feedback. What mechanisms does your organization have in place to ensure that employees are getting feedback when they need it and when they want it? Are you giving feedback in a way that supports further learning, or is it obfuscated under the threat of essential improvement?

In general, we know millennial employees want more feedback than their Gen X counterparts. But how can we create the equivalent of a flight-attendant call button in the workplace to make sure the performance feedback needs are met?

How can we use principles of social proof and comparison to drive the desire for knowledge?

Social proof (a nod to the research of Robert Cialdini) goes a long way. Comparison and contrast can serve as a motivating force. When we can get employees to make the conscious choice to learn, of their own volition, organizations experience higher levels of employee engagement.

Think back to elementary school, before the time where “everyone is equal” in the classroom. I remember the giant chart on the chalkboard, with each student’s name and spaces for the gold stars for every book you read. Each week, when the stars were placed, I stared at that chart waiting to see if I had more stars than the other students. When I didn’t, I rushed home and begged my mom to take me to the library. If I lost one week, I ensured I wouldn’t the next.

I’m not advocating competition in all aspects of employee development, but if you create an environment where people are rewarded for improvement and recognized for contributions, you’ll have a workforce that is more eager to learn.

How do we feed training to employees in an easy-to-consume way?

People support what they help create. If you allow the employee to have some buy-in to his or her own personal development, you’re more likely to achieve sustained results that impact performance and productivity. I believe self-reflection and self-reporting are a part of this, as is the metric evaluation of learning, from both quantitative and qualitative methods.

I’m a big believer in what I (not-so-eloquently) call “digestible chunks” of learning. This philosophy led me to create a 52-video series called 60 Second Guru where I delivered subscribers a one-minute video, once per week, to help them improve their communication and presentation skills. This series continues to yield 25,000+ views each month. Organizations I’ve worked with often supplement my training or consulting with weekly videos delivered over a 6-26 week period with targeted questions that generate ideas pertinent to that person’s current position. In this way, I start to embrace the on-demand mentality. But I still have progress to make.

The availability of information is like an all-you-can-eat buffet. But organizations can strategically position certain entrees on the spread to increase consumption. What is your business doing to cater to employee development needs? Adopting an on-demand thought process is a good place to start.

Making a Wireframe for Your Team to Maximize Talent Conversion: What Managers Can Learn from UX

User Experience.

In consumer businesses, UX is traditionally viewed as a way to analyze and produce experiences that drive consumers toward an end goal. The focus of UX is largely external. The motivation for investing in UX is conversion, and, ultimately, the bottom line.

Let’s flip UX on its traditional head. I believe that managers can significantly benefit by viewing UX as an internal measure.

Today at Internet Week New York (#IWNY) I attended a presentation by Sarah Blecher of Digital Pulp who presented a more advanced definition (based on crowdsourcing) of UX:

It’s the moment when content, design, and interaction come together and how the user feels about it.

Imagine that—users have feelings, and businesses need to pay attention to them.

The same is true for your employees.

Here’s how you can use the three core principles of UX—content, design, and interaction—to transform your team’s experience in the workplace to achieve higher productivity, enhanced morale, and accelerated conversion of talent to profit.

Content

In UX, content typically refers to the text, image and video elements on a site. When you’re dealing with the experience of your organizational teams, the content pieces are the task at hand and the available resources.

If you want to set your teams up to optimize employees’ creative capital, you need to make sure their experience is as seamless as possible. When charging a team with a task, make sure that all of the information members need to complete the task is in a central location.

Communicate the output expectations clearly, and present, up front, the resources available.

If you’re not sure what resources are available, provide parameters. Creativity thrives in the face of constraint.

Design

When most think of UX, they think immediately of design. Design, however, is only a part of the equation. In organizations, employee design is all about the environment—physical, social and emotional.

If you want to maximize human capital, provide an environment that is conducive to the needs and personalities of your team members. This is where a high amount of EQ (emotional intelligence) comes into play.

As a manager, you need to know the fears, stresses, and motivations of your team members so that you may design environments where human experience is valued over productivity.

By paying attention to the feelings of your employees, and recognizing individual and collective needs, productivity rises organically in a way that is sustainable and not forced.

When employees feel valued, empowered, and comfortable (not fearful of) presenting ideas that could fail, you’ve set up an environment to maximize talent conversion.

Interaction

The last piece of the UX equation is interaction—how the user interacts or engages with your content, within your design. When developers study patterns of interaction, they get feedback that they use to modify or solidify content and design.

Managing others and leading teams involves recognizing how each individual works, and providing the necessary feedback so the employee can develop the necessary skills to perform at a higher level. Especially with the growing millennial workforce, feedback—and the frequency of providing feedback—is increasingly important.

In looking at how people learn, studies show that one of the key factors in performance and knowledge retention is the interaction between the student and the instructor. The same parallel is true for the workplace.

Employees who have better relationships—better interactions—with their managers have higher rates of productivity, workplace satisfaction, and an increased desire to perform well.

Analyzing UX should not just be viewed as a consideration when it comes to analyzing consumer behavior. Retaining top talent IS based on “user” experience.

Make sure your leaders are creating experiences that will keep these key players on your team.

Acknowledging Feedback: What are Your Moving Bus Stops?

This year a particularly amusing phenomenon is occurring in China—the case of the moving bus stop. The latest victim to this menace, Xiaozuo, China—a village of 3,000—made the headlines in today’s Wall Street Journal in an article by Te-Ping Chen, In China, the Bus Stops Sometimes Take a Walk.

Villagers, not happy with the current bus stops, have begun digging up the signage and digging new holes (complete with pouring cement) in order to favor their location. Be it an aging community who feels the current stop is too far to walk or an advantageous business owner trying to shift customers in his favor, “walking” bus stops are causing havoc in transportation routes.

Transportation authorities are directing operators to continue to use the old locations, and have replaced signage in many instances. This works for village residents, who know where the original stops are. But for those who visit the area, you’re likely to end up flagging down a passing bus to no avail, because you’re at the wrong stop.

This is clearly a communication breakdown.

An obvious, and quick, solution would be to put stickers over the “moved” bus stops to communicate that buses will not stop there, and point patrons to the original location.

This is just a bandage on the wound.

Unfortunately this happens in businesses all the time.

Underneath the phenomenon of the walking bus signs is a systemic problem to be addressed—listening to feedback. Is there legitimate reasoning behind these moving bus stops? Should the transit authorities be paying attention? Would simply acknowledging the move help the situation? Or is this just the case of multiple pranksters trying to pull one over?

There’s always some truth behind every joke.

In some areas, the government put out advertisements in publications to encourage people to stop moving the bus stops, expecting the problem to slow—but it hasn’t.

Organizations are guilty of this, and often at the cost of profitability. When something goes wrong, we often seek the nearest bandage to stop the hemorrhaging. But what we fail to do is find out how the bleeding began in the first place. We fail to get feedback. And in the cases when we do receive feedback, we often fail to listen.

Asking for feedback means nothing to your employees or your consumers if you aren’t recognizing, or in some cases implementing, shared thoughts. In the same way having an “open door policy” is a waste of time, and a statement of hypocrisy, if you aren’t going to encourage challenges to the status quo and contrary opinions without repercussion.

I challenge you to recognize the feedback from your employees and customers. And not just with a thank-you. Respond, legitimately, to the feedback. If you don’t agree, let them know that you understand their desire to move the bus stop, but then show them how it is not feasible and explain why. This communication lets people know that they, and their opinions are valued. When you take time to have a conversation, they feel respected. And even if you don’t change the direction of your bus to accommodate their requests, you’ll have riders who better understand the system.

Employee Development: Through the Lens of Matisse’s Cut-Outs

Every time I view an art exhibit I go through with dual perspectives—the first an appreciation for the form, function and technique of the artist within a historical context. The second, to see what metaphors and analogies I can draw from the form, function, and technique to my personal and professional lives.

Late in his life, Henri Matisse’s health declined, and he found himself sanctioned to a chair or bed for the majority of his day. Instead of giving up on creativity, he found a new outlet, what he called “drawing with scissors” that enabled him to transcend his physical limitations and resulted in a new art form that is now on a glorious display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

What’s interesting about this art is the technique of overlay, non-waste, and maneuverability—a fantastic metaphor for employee development.

Overlay—Matisse took considerable time deeming any aspect of a cut-out complete. Since each piece cut was done from free-form, no two were alike. When he wasn’t completely satisfied with the performance from a piece, he would add subtle changes by pinning tiny cuts of paper to make the form just right. He didn’t discard the imperfect piece.

In corporations we often subjugate the imperfect—when all that is needed is a subtle shift or minor addition. We look at the short-term picture instead of the long-term masterpiece. Investing in correcting imperfections with minor additions instead of removing them all together and starting from scratch is a long-term strategy with unlimited potential.

Non-waste—Matisse used both the positive and the negative space with his cut-outs. When a piece of paper fell to the ground after the original form was cut, he evaluated the leftover and found a way to organically work it into his composition—or into future compositions.

With employee development, we often see only the final goal—the final product—without giving appreciation to the steps that were taken to reach that end state. The efforts that your employees exert to deliver the final result need to be recognized. Who knows—the steps that were taken along the way could result in a product of their own.

Maneuverability—Matisse used his walls as a living canvas. He would direct cut-outs to be pinned in one location, only to move them around multiple times after until he found just the right fit. Often, the right move of one piece would lead to the creation of an entire new work, or the placement of a piece into a new landscape.

With employees, finding the right fit is important. To be immovable is detrimental to organizational progress. A good leader will know how to figure out where to best place each employee, realizing that the initial intention—perhaps the initial job someone was hired for—may not be the right fit.

Inject overlay, non-waste, and maneuverability techniques into your employee development approach and see what masterpieces develop.

Proactive Communication: Are You Communicating About Your Turbulence Points?

I just landed from a flight that was the most turbulent flight that I’d been on in years. There were audible gasps from the passengers and concerned glances across the aisles.

And no communication from the captain.

On flights, turbulence isn’t uncommon. We know how to weather slight bumps in the air, and we don’t worry about them. But when it gets to the point where your stomach is dropping and passengers are concerned, the captain—the leader—needs to communicate and reassure.

“Ladies and gentlemen we’re going to be experiencing a fair amount of turbulence soon, so I’m going to go ahead and turn on the fasten seat belt sign.”

And when something is really a bit worrisome, “Ladies and gentlemen that was a pretty big gust we just ran into. There’s nothing to worry about. I’m going to drop up to a lower elevation to see if we can get under this system.”

These messages let us know what’s coming, and let us know the actions that will be done to remedy the situation.

Business leaders can learn from pilot communication. If a bump in the road is anticipated, communicate about it. If you’re going to take a corrective path of action to avoid conflict, let your team know.

Not communicating in these situations, like in my flight today, leaves a bunch of people in an awkward and uncertain position glancing around the cabin and drawing conclusions for themselves.

If you want to make sure they are the right conclusions, communicate.