Customer Service – Page 11 – The Consulting Artist

Is Your Message Clear or Are You Contributing to the Noise?

This post is part of the Guest Blog Grand Tour over at Life Without Pants – an epic journey of over 75 guest posts. Want to learn more about Matt Cheuvront & see how far the rabbit hole goes? Subscribe to the Life Without Pants RSS feed & follow him on Twitter to keep in touch!

If you’re an avid reader of my blog…wait, you’re not reading it yet? What are you waiting for?

Ehem, anyway, if you’re an avid reader of my blog you know that I am not a man of few words – in fact – if there’s one thing I continue to work on as a writer, it’s condensing my long winded thoughts into concise, easy to digest ideas. Because when it comes to writing, sometimes less is truly more.

Seth Godin, Carlos Miceli, & Tim Jahn are three guys I admire for their ability to say a lot without saying a lot. They represent a ‘big picture’ concept that a lot of bloggers and businesses neglect. They’re able to get their message across without clutter – they cut through the noise and get to the point. When you get wordy, when you throw a lot of messages and signals at someone, you run the risk of losing them in translation.

I’m a freelance web designer myself – and there are three things I always tell the clients I work with who are building their website or blog.

Your calls to action must be obvious

If I want to subscribe to your blog, send you an email, or buy your product. I don’t want to figure out how to do it; I just want to do it. Make sure it’s easy for your visitors to do what you want them to.

Provide easy navigation

Again, this goes along the same lines as creating clear calls to action – your page navigation needs to be clear and consistent. Leave a trail of breadcrumbs that is easy for your visitors to follow and navigate through.

Define your takeaways

On each page of your site, there needs to be a clear takeaway – whether it’s simply to read and comment on a blog post, subscribe to a newsletter, or sign up for a service – you need to define a purpose for every single page of your website – and make that purpose easy to define for your visitors.

You don’t hold your breath all the time. Sometimes a grandiose 1000 word blog post is in the cards – but never underestimate the power a few impactful words can have. Sometimes, in fact, often-times, less truly can be more. There is beauty in simplicity.

A Year of Change

Every year I’m fortunate to experience lots of change. I enjoy it. The mix of excitement, uncertainty, and the helpfulness of so many people I’m fortunate to know make for a thrilling journey.

2009 has been exceptional. My forays into the world of social media exploded as the Stop Doing Dumb Things to Customers blogging experiment went from strength to strength. Thousands of people tuned in and many have contributed and co-created too. This inspired me to try and improve the mix of employee, customer and social engagement offered through the blog, and through LinkedIn and through facebook, and beyond. I found real enjoyment in writing and it helped make some fantastic new connections, of which more in a minute.

In the summer of this year, I resigned from a successful and enjoyable 12.5 year career working for BT which encompassed sales, sustainability, change management and employee engagement. I’ve started a new business (well someone had to). It’s called What Goes Around Limited. I hope it will bring the very best of what I’ve learned and am learning about engagement, sustainability, leadership, trust and autonomy in pursuit of great service to an even wider audience. In the few short months that What Goes Around has been in existence, we’ve enjoyed some success, uncovered lots of opportunities and made plenty of mistakes. Sorry, I mean learned lots of valuable lessons.

Something I learned a few years ago (I think it happened when I became a father) which I want to amplify today is the power of sharing. My experience of large organisations has taught me that sharing is often spoken about, and rarely practiced. The old maxim knowledge is power only feels right to me when the knowledge is shared to create power with others. Yet too often knowledge is selfishly held close in the belief that it can create power over others, where its value is truly limited, and sometimes even dangerous. In the belief that we can co-create more real power and movement in 2010, I want to share just a few of the many people and things which have inspired me in this exceptional year of change.

Have a great Christmas, and an exciting New Year.

Doug Shaw
07736 518066
What Goes Around Limited
Registered in England. Company number 06997727

Inspiring people, places and things

Jonathan Wilson. Jonathan is one of the most fascinating people I know. Though I’ve known him for some years, I include him on this list because the new ideas and opportunities he introduces me to make it feel like I’m often meeting him for the first time. This year he showed me a great way to measure communication and performance within a team, and improve it.

Is Bad Behaviour Killing Big Business. My friend Katherine Wiid encouraged me to start what is now a growing network on LinkedIn full of interesting people sharing, learning and having some fun discussing stuff about behaviour. Click here and if you like what you see, please feel free to join in.

David Zinger. Katherine then introduced me to David Zinger’s employee engagement network. A growing, thriving network of people with a sincere interest in this exciting subject. David also runs davidzinger.com an interesting and useful site full of insight, cartoons, poetry, plans and the Zinger employee engagement model.

Life Without Pants. Through David Zinger’s network I met Shereen Qutob-Cabral. Shereen is an enthusiast and a motivator. She showed me the way to Life Without Pants and its owner Matt Cheuvront. Matt writes and collaborates wonderfully. Amongst the wonderful things you can find at Life Without Pants is a great read called the Inconvenience of Change. 38 bloggers coming together each with their own story and perspective on how to inspire change.

What Matters Now. After enjoying the great work on Life Without Pants, I went seeking more. I found What Matters Now, which is the work of more than 60 people with big ideas and something to say. It will inspire you to make some changes in 2010, and to keep doing work that matters. Please download it and share it with your colleagues.

Other folk who’ve given me a hand in 2009 include Chris Plush, Tony Mason, Walter Hicks, Gary Smailes, Pete Massey, Dan Pink, Kate Davies, Ross Clephane, Lyndon Wright, David MacLeod, David Shanks (who gave me the name What Goes Around Limited), Dave and Maggie Wheeler, Huw Williams, Joseph Bridgstock, Tamar Collis, Charlie Duff, my dad Paul and my darling wife Carole and lovely daughter Keira Joe. For every experience I recall there are more I can’t right now so my apologies if I’ve forgotten to acknowledge your help and co-creation this time, I hope to do better in the future.

Common Causes of Project Failure

Spotted an interesting report primarily aimed at managing and delivering projects across Government. But hey, why should they have all the learning eh? Strikes me that this is a lot about trying to do too much. Headlines discussed include:

1. Lack of clear links between the project and the organisation’s key strategic priorities, including agreed measures of success.
2. Lack of clear senior management and Ministerial ownership and leadership.
3. Lack of effective engagement with stakeholders.
4. Lack of skills and proven approach to project management and risk management.
5. Too little attention to breaking development and implementation into manageable steps.
6. Evaluation of proposals driven by initial price rather than long-term value for money (especially securing delivery of
business benefits).
7. Lack of understanding of, and contact with the supply industry at senior levels in the organisation.
8. Lack of effective project team integration between clients, the supplier team and the supply chain.

You can download the full report from here.