Disney Secret for Small Businesses
I just took the kids to Disney World. It was a full week of Emerson into a whole different world – each day we’d wake up and figure out what park to go to, what rides to experience, and where to eat. If you’ve visited Disney World, you know how all the details have been taken care of. You arrive at the airport, sign in, and everything is taken care of. We didn’t even need to get our luggage (it just appeared in our room a few hours after we arrived).
It doesn’t take long to figure out why Disney is such a success. It’s clean, organized, and the experience is unforgettable. I heard comments like, “They [Disney] just know how to do it.” There’s a reason Disney is successful. It’s not luck, or circumstance, or a “good business model.” Importantly, the same underlying principles that make Disney successful can make any small business successful.
Seeing the multitudes of people happily move through their day as Disney reminded me of Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s. Next time you go to McDonald’s step back and watch the order. The number of people, the location of each “station,” how the drive through orders meld with the orders coming in from the counter. Ray Krock spend years perfecting the operations underlying the overall McDonald’s experience, and it was this eye-to-detail related to the customer experience that propelled McDonald’s to one of the most successful franchises in history.
It’s not enough to have a good product or service. Small business owners need to focus on two key elements:
- The overall experience
- Delivery of that experience
How do your customers interact with your company? Put yourself in the place of a customer, step away from your business, and walk through what a customer would experience when dealing with your company. Take notes about things you’d change, add, stop doing. Develop an overall experience that a customer would have. Did they receive a thank you note? Did they have a positive initial contact? How did they find out about your company?
Now that you’ve developed what that experience may look like, begin to systematize the inner-workings of your company. Make sure each customer has a consistent experience. One way to do this is through technology and thanks to “cloud computing” (a.k.a. Software-as-a-Service) any small business can have access to a state-of-the-art customer relationship management system.
A few years ago I worked for a financial service company. We developed a system that made sure each client was contacted at least each quarter. We used the leading Software-as-a-Service application, salesforce.com, to create reminders of these interactions and used HTML emails with merge fields to send customized communications. We were able to create a number of automated workflows which resulted in a consistent customer experience. Not surprisingly, the assets under management grew over 300% in 18 months.
Step back and look at your company through the eyes of you customers. Determine the optimum experience and try to replicate it over and over again using the latest technology. It’s not rocket science, but it does take dedicated time and energy, and it will require you to get out of the day-to-day operations on a consistent basis.
