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.
June 29th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Thanks for your well-written post. Here’s a tip for getting started. Consider breaking down your sales cycle (which is also relevant for customers/clients since they are also prospective repeat buyers) into discrete steps. Then, think about who is involved at each stage of the sales cycle–and what’s important to them. Then, you know who you need to impress with a positive experience and what that experience should be. In the process, you’ll also develop a compelling value proposition and increase sales productivity. As a business-to-business marketing consultant, the prospect’s and client’s experience is at the heart of my work. It always goes back to who’s involved and what matters most to them.
June 29th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Interesting. Both great examples. i really should jot down the process of adding value to prospective and past clients by way of keeping in touch. Its essential. Just to share an anecdote from my company, we too have tried to perfect the service and create a process. For that we used Deskaway – a project and process management tool. So every project my employees do there is a set process with some amount of room for creativity and input (because its a service). So effectively we too are looking to create something that will be appreciated over time.