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Archive for the ‘Total Experience Design’ Category
Total Experience Design: In The Online World, The Little Things Matter Wednesday, May 16th, 2012
Creating an experience for your customers is a lot about connecting with them in ways that are unexpected. In the online world, people expect to see your business on social media and they expect you to have a website (even if you don’t have one!). While it’s certainly important to create a great experience for the people who visit your website or follow you on social media, when it comes to total experience design (TXD), the little things matter.
One of the little things that gets overlooked by businesses online is what do with users who happen upon a 404 page error on your website.
Here’s what that experience typically looks like:
A 404 error happens when a user tries to visit a page on your website that isn’t there. This could be because you moved it or it never existed. Rather than leave your clients at dead ends, what if you used this dead end as a tool for engaging your client base at a deeper level?
Renny Gleeson talks about this very thing in a recent TED Talk that he did. Great talk and a great lesson on how companies are doing the little things to build an engaging experience for their audience.
Enjoy the short video and look at how you can incorporate some of these ideas into your own experience.
Experience Design Affects All Aspects Of An Organization….-Manifesto Point #5
Thursday, March 29th, 2012
From Finance to Philanthropy, Are All The Areas Of Your Business Committed To The Experience?
From Finance to Philanthropy, Are All The Areas Of Your Business Committed To The Experience?In point #1 of the Total Experience Design Manifesto you learned that everyone creates an experience whether they know it or not. Point #5 expands on that idea and gives some specific areas where this point is represented.
If you still don’t have the manifesto, you can get it here.
Listen to today’s podcast and make sure you leave us your thoughts.
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Internal Culture Is The Caretaker Of The External Experience- Manifesto Point #4
Thursday, March 15th, 2012
Does Your Internal Culture Align With Your External Voice?
Does Your Internal Culture Align With Your External Voice?If you have ever tried to brand your business, the whole concept of what a brand is and how it looks for your business can seem confusing and in some cases ridiculous.
Branding in some cases feels like the girl in high school who doesn’t get enough attention so has to act outrageously to get the attention that they so crave.
We argue that branding starts with how you handle your business and the experience you deliver goes hand in hand with that.
Before you can give an outstanding client experience, you have to have the internal culture in place to support it.
That’s what point #4 of our Manifesto on Total Experience Design covers.
Today’s podcast deals with how you can do that effectively for your business.
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Experience Springs Forth From The Core Purpose Of The Organization- Manifesto Point #3
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
Your Organization Has A Purpose, Are You Committed To It?
Your Organization Has A Purpose, Are You Committed To It?Moving beyond the corporate buzzwords of mission, vision and values lies a powerful tool that can’t be underestimated for your business.
Businesses that have a defined mission and a shared commitment to that mission. This is not only important for you and your team but is also important to your customers. They want to know that you are in alignment with their values and beliefs as well.
Take a minute to assess your organizations mission and ask yourself how clear it is. Also, determine how committed your team is to your mission as well.
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Focusing On Delivered Experience Will Have More Impact On A Business…Manifesto Point #2
Wednesday, February 15th, 2012
Focusing On Delivered Experience Will Have More Impact On A Business…Manifesto Point #2
Focusing On Delivered Experience Will Have More Impact On A Business…Manifesto Point #2How good are you are focusing on important areas in your business? If you’re going to put your focus somewhere, then make sure that it is on the experience that you deliver.
By focusing on the delivered experience, you are really focusing on all of the different systems and processes that go into putting that together. Business owners who focus on the experience have more satisfied clients and employees.
This episode focuses on the Total Experience Design Manifesto Point #2.
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Everyone Delivers An Experience Whether They Know It Or Not- Manifesto Point #1
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
This week the My Business World podcast dives into the Total Experience Design Manifesto. Today’s episode focuses specifically on point number one.
We will focus on the one point that business owners seem to neglect with regards to the experience that they are generating. Specifically, business owners have a bad habit of taking their experience for granted and not being intentional with how the team is interacting with that experience.
Who’s responsible for creating the experience on your team? Everyone.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Creating Products For Your Service Business Is Easier Than Ever Wednesday, January 25th, 2012
Products and business go hand in hand. You can’t have a business if you don’t have anything to sell. Now that I have earned my master’s degree in stating the obvious, what I really want to do today is inspire you to keep creating for your business. Especially now that creating products for your service business is easier than ever.
Despite the fact that creating products for your service business is easy, there are still a lot of businesses not creating for their business. By not creating new products, these business owners are missing out on the opportunity to engage with their clients at a deeper level, tap new markets and grow their business in the process.
What’s the reason for the neglect? It could be the usual suspects:
- Time
- Money
- Don’t have the right players on the team
- Not sure how or what to create
- Maybe you even think you don’t have any good ideas
Do these sound familiar? Business owners are notorious for using them.
In today’s day and age, there is no excuse for not creating products for your service business. Take a look at some of the traditional product creation vehicles and how easy and inexpensive they are to use today:
- Video- It used to be that you needed a ton of expensive equipment. Digital format for videos wasn’t invented until around the early 90s. Since that time, creating a video is as easy as pointing a camera where you want it and start creating. With equipment like flip cams you can record a video and plug it straight into your computer to start editing. Apple computers has made editing videos easy as well. Don’t have a video camera. Use a service like Camtasia to roll a slide show that you can talk over and put music to.
- Audio- You don’t have to have a professional recording studio to record professional sounding audio to use with products and podcasts. Microphones like the Snowball make creating audio as easy as plugging the mic into your computer. Free services like Audacity make editing simple as well. You can use an inexpensive program like Reaper to capture your audio as well and lay multiple tracks.
- Workbooks- You don’t have to spend a fortune to have a professional looking workbook laid out and designed for your products. Places like Elance make it easy to find solid professional designers to out together great looking material at a fraction of the cost.
- Books- Whether you are creating an e-book or self publishing, creating a book is easier as well. Not only is it easy to create content through channels like a blog where you can literally blog your book. You also kill two birds with one stone by not only creating content to engage your following but you are also working towards a finished product of a book. Amazon has a number of options to help you put out a finished product that can be used as an e-book, physical book or is compatible with their Kindle reader as well. They will find editors, designers, etc.
- Home Study Courses- Do you have a service or process that you take clients through? If you do, are you missing out on the opportunity to capture that in the form of home study course? A home study course will incorporate a number of the elements that I talked about above. Videos, audios, a workbook, etc. This is a great way to show people what your service is all about at a lower barrier to entry. You can offer this as a physical product or make it strictly digital or even do both.
As you read through this ask yourself the following questions:
How good is your business at creating new products?
What holes are missing that need to be addressed with products?
To get you started and help you overcome some of your product creation obstacles, here are some of my most critical tips for getting more product created:
- Have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish with each new product you create. This seems fairly obvious but it’s easy to not articulate this upfront and then lose sight of what it is that you are really trying to accomplish. Keep your end user in mind.
- You have time here’s how to use it. Creating new products for your business is about setting aside the time. It’s all about creating the time and the space in your calendar to do this. I would set aside time in your calendar each week that is focused on product creation and idea development. If you don’t create the time on your calendar and stick with it, it will never happen. It’s about creating a rhythm that you work in.
- Holes that exist in your knowledge. You may have avoided creating because you don’t feel like you are “tech savvy”. I hear this a lot about entrepreneurs but the great thing about tech savvy people is they don’t come out of the womb knowing how to code in HTML and PHP, they learn it. Granted some people have more of an interest in these things than others. If tech ignorance is getting in the way of you growing your business, then you need to get over your fear or dislike of technology and make it your friend. If you need help, then find it. There is a lot of talented, inexpensive help out there. They may already be on your team.
- You don’t have any good ideas. I don’t hear this a lot from entrepreneurs as typically I am trying to get them to rein in the “good ideas” but there is a decent percentage of entrepreneurs who feel stuck or are down on their abilities to come up with good ideas. My suggestion here is to create quiet time for yourself to create in a location that is not work. We call this time a “power hour” and it happens before we do anything else in the morning. Having some quiet time to work-out, brainstorm, read, meditate or pray is a great way to get your creative juices flowing.
You know what to do and how to overcome obstacles, now it’s time to go out and do it. Take a minute right now and put some product creation time on your calendar and stick to it.
Are You Missing Out On These Product Creation Opportunities? Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
Whether you are a coach, a dentist, a chiropractor or you run a yoga studio, at some point, you have run into the challenge of the time for dollars game. How to overcome that challenge? One of the best ways to make your business and your life more efficient is through creating products for your client base to consume that doesn’t require your time.
Before I get into the different product creation opportunities, let me touch on the concept of the time for dollars trap in case you aren’t familiar with that already. One of the main challenges for service providers who work with people on a one-on-one basis is that their income is tied directly to the time they spend with their clients.
The dilemma then becomes, how do we get paid more once our calendar is full? Ahhhh.
Business owners who are faced with this dilemma may scratch their head for a minute and then come up with one of two simple strategies to make more money once they have maxed out their calendar.
Here they are in no particular order.
Idea #1 They get more efficient. Meaning that they see more people in the same amount of time but figure out ways to leverage their time better.
Idea #2 They work more hours. Ouch! No one wants to do that save for a few very sick individuals. (Please get help.)
There is perhaps a third option that business owners employ which is a hybrid of the above two concepts. This is still not going to cut it.
There is another option for business owners to make money.
It comes from leveraging the most important asset that a business owner has at his/her disposal. That asset is time.
The way you leverage that asset is through the creation of physical or digital products.
Some business owners get a little nervous about the concept of creating their own physical products and services. I have found that the root of their nervousness stems from a lack of knowledge on how to best get these products and services produced.
Here’s the great news.
You are already doing a lot of the things necessary to put products and services together, you just haven’t realized it.
Let me give you an example.
Weekly talks on health and wellness. Sounds good so far right?
Here’s where the wheels start falling off the bus.
Most of my clients never record their talks! Ever! These same doctors also give keynotes in other places as well where there are professional A/V teams there to record the talk and they don’t get the recording.
The lesson for you?
You are already creating content that can be used as a physical product or service, you just aren’t thinking strategically.
Here are the product creation opportunities that you are missing currently in your business:
- Speaking- If you work with human beings in a service business, you probably gives talks of some sort. Are you recording these talks? If you were, you could then do a brief edit. You have a lot of reasonably easy to use technology to edit and create video today. Use it.
- Your Process- Do you have a process that you take people through to get them the results that they are looking for? If you do, then you have a product. Here’s the funny thing about people. Not all people want to work with a human being to get the results that they are looking for. I am not saying that’s necessarily good or bad but some people just like to go it alone. Part of this is due to trust. They want to know if you deliver the goods before they plunk down $10k for your coaching program. Smart business owners create a do-it-yourself program because they get revenue from the program from work they already did and they get more people engaged with their service.
- The Components Of Your Overall Process- Here’s the real beautiful thing about being strategic about your product creation. You can break up the process that you use in your business and sell components of that to potential clients. Start by asking this question. What’s the best part of your process (besides you) that you can use as a gateway product to get people in the door? Why the best? You want to blow people away with what you can do and you have one chance to do that. The idea is to get them to keep doing business with you and to share their results with others. Only your best product will do.
- Writing- Have you ever written anything for or about your business? An article for a magazine or a newspaper? Do you blog? All of these vehicles can be used as further products as well. If you blog frequently, can you turn that into a book? You can take a key article that you have written for someone and use that as an introduction to your process.
Those are just four areas that you can look at that are right in front of you. You don’t have to do them all, you can focus on just one area if you would like. Here are some other things that you need to know.
The product doesn’t even have to be something that you charge for but simply makes your work more efficient or gets more people in the door. You can and should use some of your products as free entries into your business for the purpose of upsells.
The other problem that I have seen with clients is once they get the hang of creating products, they create too many. Good problem to have right? The answer is yes and no. In many cases I have worked with clients who were in a state of product overwhelm. Don’t create too many products too soon. You won’t leverage them properly nor give them the chance to be successful.
There are a lot of great opportunities for you to create value in the marketplace for current and future clients as well as increase the revenue of your business without you spending a lot of extra time to do it. It’s time to leverage your time effectively and make a lot more money and spend a lot more time with your families in the process.
The Second Question You Should Ask In Beginning Your Experience Process Tuesday, August 30th, 2011
Depending on the product or service that your business offers, the time that it takes to close a sale can vary. You have to have a process that take clients through your experience in a way that is intuitive and easy to follow. The second question in your process sets the tone for the rest of your process.
The second question to ask in your experience process is what’s the first step that your clients must take to engage in your offering. The first question? The first question is, where do you ultimately want your clients to go?
There are a couple of mistakes that businesses make with regards to getting an audience engaged in their offering from the start.
The first problem is that if their product or service is new or changing the rules of what’s been done before, it may not be easily understood right off the bat. The key is getting people to understand your business in as simple a way possible.
Problem number two is having a tendency to jump the gun with our potential clients. If we have a client even look at our business we turn into Night at the Roxbury and we are all up on them before they have a chance to breath. Slow down a little bit. Let the relationship develop.
The best solution for getting your audience engaged in your loop is to create an entry product that people must consume before they do anything else. The step must be easy to take and must engage your audience to take further action. This is the way that you present the second question of taking the first step.
Take problem number one mentioned above. We work with a financial advocacy firm called The Freedom FastTrack. Their message is counterintuitive to the traditional financial planning model of investing in a 401k. Here’s a video they created to help people understand the vision of their business. They illustrate the problem that their audience is facing and demonstrate how they can help.
Your initial product can be free like the video above or it can be a lower priced item. If you are looking to reduce friction, I would suggest a free product to get people engaged and make sure the product is good. Free does not equal mediocre.
Your initial product can answer the second question in your experience process in a number of different formats. DVDs, Audios, an e-mail campaign or a membership. You can offer hard copies of your product or keep it all in digital format.
Hopefully you have been thinking about what product or service can serve as the gateway to further sales in your business. Take some time and jot down some ideas right now. Figure out where you want to take your audience and then determine the best way to answer the second question in your client experience process.
Systematizing Your Client Experience Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011
A typical entrepreneur has a million different things coming at them at any given time. Because of all the different balls you have to juggle and the limited amount of time with which to juggle them, it can be difficult to make time to work on your business. Your client’s experience is one of those areas that get pushed to the back of our minds.
One of the reasons juggling tasks can be overwhelming is due to the proliferation of online communication tools that we have coming at us on a daily basis. The proliferation of e-mail through smart phones, social media, etc may have you thinking that technology is more of a curse than a blessing. What if you could turn this curse into a system that delivers the type of client experience that sets your business apart from the rest?
Technology has made delivering the right client experience easier than ever. I won’t get into all of the specifics of total experience design, you can read more about experience design here. What I will do is give you a few handy online tools for automating aspects of the client experience that your business is trying to deliver.
My list consists of the most common areas where I see business owners being inconsistent or working too hard with their experience delivery.
Doing What You Say You Are Going To Do- Clients won’t have a great experience with your company if you can’t deliver on the promises that your business offers. For small businesses, this starts with the business owner. A simple tool for helping business owners remember things is Evernote.
Keeping Your Clients In The Loop- There are a lot of tools to help with this but a simple and inexpensive tool is AWeber. Aweber is an e-mail service that helps you manage your e-mail database and allows you to send messages to these lists. When it comes to keeping your clients informed and educating them, this is as easy as it gets. I still see business owners keeping their lists on a spreadsheet and sending out e-mails manually.
Managing Projects- Getting your team on the same page and getting projects completed on time can be challenging. We created a project management system called Akomplish for this very reason. Now we can share projects with team members, sync activities with our calendars and have a daily snapshot of what needs to be done.
Those are three of the biggest areas that business owners seem to struggle with when it comes to delivering a client experience. The great news is that there are tools to help you automate what you are doing as you interact with clients and create the experience.
How have you overcome challenges with delivering your client experience?
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