Podcast Episode #18: Solving Customer Problems in a Crisis

Hi and welcome to the Key Customer Growth Podcast. My name is Jermaine Edwards and I have become obsessed with customer behavior and how people and organizations win with their best customers long term. After starting, failing, and growing my own companies, 30 customer growth projects, hundreds of strategies, and the study of 50 years of customer service research, I've seen firsthand how and why organizations win, lose, and win again with their most important customers. This podcast is my way of sharing those insights, failures, principles, and strategies so you can become what I call an irreplaceable advisor, someone so valuable your customers never want to leave. In an increasingly competitive world, how do you continue to deliver unrivaled value and deepen those most important customer relationships? Join me as your customer growth guide. Your journey starts here.

Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide, and we're on episode number 18, and we're thinking today about our own thinking, how we solve problems, how we look for root cause and identify the exact thing we need to begin to solve for to bring new advantages, new results, and eliminate challenges in our business. So I don't know about you, but I think most people in the world who's lived, you know, any length of time will say they sometimes felt vulnerable. In fact, I wonder if you've ever felt vulnerable in a place that you've never been before. Answers seem distant, hard to reach. Those around you seem silent, or at best, people have ideas, but nothing is really sticking. Nothing seems like the right kind of answer. That was what I experienced at the beginning of March 2020. The phone began to ring, and from my customers around the world, peers, colleagues, partners, team members, their concerns around the coronavirus. It had spanned entire markets right around the world, and everyone was looking for answers on how to solve their problems, but also how best to help their customers. So I took a deep breath, and I was reminded of something that I was taught by a former mentor. That we live in a VUCA world. VUCA meaning volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. And all of these attributes can be applied at almost any time in history. You can go to any year in history, any year in your own life, and you could probably apply one of those words to particular situations or challenges you may have had to face and have overcome. Something that may have been volatile, something that may have been uncertain, complex, or ambiguous. Something that has added or contributed to a disruptive part of your business. Great companies, they lose every day. Somebody is losing, but what keeps them alive are some of the practices I'm about to share with you. Ideas that you'll be able to explore and implement, particularly going through tough times. And tough times are not new to humanity, but when we think about how we process and how we respond to the situations around us, we often don't create enough space to think, you know, truly take a step back and consider what it is that we— that is really important for us to hold in mind to solve the problems in front of us. Solving big complex problems requires a shift in belief and perspective before almost anything else. A belief that what you see is not what will be forever. And a perspective to see what is hidden or undiscovered. And it's exactly what we need to move forward. A belief that it's never forever, no particular problem lasts forever, and a perspective that there is something hidden and undiscovered that we can explore that will move us to a place of greater clarity, confidence, and certainty in how we can respond and move forward in our businesses. So I'm going to start by talking about something we call control and influence. Not when I say we, as when you look at the studies, uh, in psychology, studies and just behavioral response in high performance, this whole idea of control and influence is about belief. We can often look at our circumstances and immediately see the things we can't do, those things that are restricting, because our brain is wired to look for those things that are dangerous to us. But it's okay to feel vulnerable. This is it. In fact, I believe vulnerability equals power. Why? Because it's the place where you are most aware. You're aware of your restrictions, you're aware of the challenges, you're more aware of all those things that may be in your way, and that's a good thing. You can take that awareness and simply then begin to ask some different questions. What can I control? What can I influence? And what is out of my concern? Something I cannot do anything about. And in my circumstance, that was, well, what can I control? I can control the way that I respond. I can control the way that I go and communicate with others. I can control the way that I lead and support and serve other people. What can I influence? I actually can come alongside customers. I can come alongside partners. I can come alongside my peers, my family, and support them in a way that helps to influence the way in which we do work and collaborate together. What can't I control? The coronavirus, natural disasters, earthquakes, things that we, we know are prevalent and happen throughout our world. So if you're listening to my voice right now, it might be a good idea that if at any point in time right now you are facing a particular challenge, just ask yourself the question, hey, Maybe take a piece of paper and write down, hey, what is it that I can control right now? What can I influence? And what is out of my concern? Just put those into 3 different buckets and breathe, because now you're in a much more powerful place to respond. But outside of that, it's really important that we understand the problem we're actually solving for. So, once you've identified, "Look, here's the problem," we need to describe it well, but we need to also solve for the real problem. So, when you're resolving a problem, it's important to understand the difference between a cause and a symptom. A symptom is an indicator. It's a sign that a problem exists. In other words, when you resolve an issue, you must address the cause of the problem and not the symptom. So an example of this might be the current problem you're experiencing is a lack of sales or customers becoming more risk-averse. Are these the problem or symptom of something else? I propose that when you see things like this, they are symptoms. Lack of sales with your customers could be a result of an ineffective system. That you have that is not adding value that your customers would recognize and appreciate. Or customers becoming more risk-averse could be the result of a market anomaly that is out of your control. Either way, the moment you identify what you're really trying to solve for, the better able you are to apply your resources more effectively and not wastefully in the wrong areas. So how do we do that? Well, we have to think about this in terms of a system. We don't want to just respond without a clear way in which we can disseminate and extrapolate the information that's needed for us to make really good decisions. So I came across a particular book that really changed a lot about how I approach my own businesses, supporting customers. And it's the process called thinking time. And it was taken from a book called The Road Less Stupid, written by a guy named Keith Cunningham, a mentor to Tony Robbins and the man who inspired the actual Rich Dad Poor Dad book by Robert Kiyosaki. And so now more than ever, our ability to synthesize mounds of dense and complex information, find patterns or offer insights personalized for, for ourselves or for our customers requires a different kind of thinking. Thinking that allows you to consider choice as a system that leads to results and not just activities. And this is an important phrase. Good thinking time is when somebody considers the choices they make as a system that leads to a result and not just activities. Because we know there is cause and effect. So as we think through something, we also want to think through the positive implications, but also the negative implications. So thinking time is about perspective. Controlled influence is about belief. Thinking time is about perspective. And when you can think better, that can be a superpower. Your ability to cultivate a practice of reflection and evaluation and challenge of your day-to-day activity will transform your results 100%. And the impact of this, or the impact of this practice, can be explosive as you begin to recognize real risks and new opportunities you hadn't discovered. So how do we think about this? Well, good thinking time, or the process, a system of good thinking, will almost always answer two questions. Number 1, what problems should we solve for? And what don't we see? What problems should we solve for? And what problem— and what don't we see? And both are very important questions. And so when we're starting this process, there are some characteristics of a really— of a question that is really helpful for us. So a great question has 3 common characteristics. This is shared by this guy named Keith Cunningham, and I agree in principle, and I practiced this for a number of months and had some transformative effects in my own business. So these 3 characteristics, all being it doesn't need to have all 3, but if it does, it's going to be even more effective. So, a great question will have— will help you to provide insight on what the actual problem is that needs to be addressed. It will simplify the how to approach the problem and make it solvable. And it also should expand the number of possibilities to solve the problem, or at minimum, improve the situation. So, let's give an example. So let's just imagine for a moment that the problem that we see— our customers are doing less business with us, so they're purchasing less from us, and that's clearly a problem. So a typical question we might ask ourselves are, why are customers doing less business with us? That's a, that's a reasonable, that's a fair question to ask. However, That just solves the symptom that we're seeing. That just looks at the symptom. Even with the question why, it still looks at the symptom. Why they're doing less business? We're now focused on the less business. However, a thinking time question, or question that's aligned to give us insight, help us to simplify the problem and expand the possibilities, would need to be much more expansive. So, an example might be, "How might we explore the real challenge of why customers are doing less business with us?" "How might we explore the real challenge of why customers are doing less business with us?" Automatically, you see, both questions offer similar responses, but the second question meets the great question criteria. It expands the possibilities and simplifies how to approach the problem. The question is, how might we explore the real challenge of why customers are doing less business with us? Just that simple statement at the beginning, that simple phrase at the beginning, how might we explore it, opens up the possibility of getting to the accurate facts of what it is that we're experiencing. So, the Good Thinking Time is about a process, a system that leads to a series of results and not just activities. So, we need to find the unasked question. What is the question that we need to ask ourselves? We need to separate the problem from the symptom. We need to check our assumptions, consider the consequences, and then we need to then create, then we have the power to create the machine, to create the actual vehicle for giving us the result that we want. So, if you can think about these, these, these aspects there on thinking time, taking space to solve for the real problem, maximize your time by thinking about better quality questions that have these characteristics, and know that we have to look for the unasked question. We need to separate the problem from the symptom. Check our assumptions, consider the consequences, and create then the vehicle to drive those results. So with that, there's a really helpful place that we can begin, and that's first of all understand we just live in a VUCA world— volatile, uncertain, It's complex and ambiguous, but we have control and influence, and we can shape and shift our beliefs, both for ourselves and our teams and our organization. But we have to solve for the real problem and give ourselves space to apply thinking time. I hope it's been helpful for you, and I do have an extra resource for you in the link within the podcast to help you apply this system into your own organization, and I'll see you in the next episode.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Key Customer Growth Podcast. Hope you enjoyed the episode and got some great value. If that has been your story today, please share, comment, and subscribe so we can reach more people with the message and impact them also. Most importantly, I want to hear your feedback on what you liked or what you would like to hear and see in the future. Look forward to hearing from you, and you can find all the show notes below. Wishing you success in becoming an irreplaceable advisor.