How to Become a Masterful Company

How to Become a Masterful Company
Tamara Gruzbarg of Gilt: Using Analytics to Give Customers What They Want
We’re Cutting Back To Ho-Ho
Domino’s Pizza Founder Sues Over Healthcare Mandate

Posted: 21 Dec 2012 11:00 AM PST

masterful compan In a perfect world, our customers would always be happy. They would always share their positive experiences with friends and family. They would only buy from us. But we know that that's not always a reality.

In his book, High Tech, High Touch Customer Service, Micah Solomon talks about using social media to provide stellar customer experience. He also outlines the profile of a "masterful company," those that go above and beyond in the area of customer service.

Using a few of his 12 characteristics of a masterful company, I want to show you how you can become one.

Make Customers Feel Welcome…Before They Arrive

It's one thing for your staff to greet customers when they walk in your door, but what are they doing to welcome them before that? Your website, social media channels, blogs, telephone and email all provide you with opportunity to connect with future customers and make them feel welcome before they ever step foot in your store.

Remove Barriers that Might Mar a Customer's Experience

If you have a physical store, this means making sure you're in an easily accessible location, that it's easy to find parking and that people don't have to hunt to find you. If you're based online, that means having a simple-to-navigate website and minimizing the steps to complete a sale.

Anything that might make a customer abandon his shopping cart (physical or virtual) should be removed.

Your Employees Should Show Genuine Interest in Customers

This can be a challenge when you're hiring disgruntled teens at minimum wage, but having a staff that honestly loves working at your company is key to drawing in customers. People can tell when employees don't like where they work, and it affects their experience.

Create Processes to Anticipate Your Customers' Needs and Desires

This requires thinking like a customer and determining what they really want and need. Then creating processes around those needs.You can do this by empowering all of your staff to observe customers and take the necessary steps to amending negative situations.

If those occur again, you have a process in place to make the customer happier faster.

Know that Each Customer has Unique Needs

While your customers may share certain characteristics (just take a look at your demographics), it's important to keep in mind that no two are alike. While you may be tired of giving the same speech about your current sale every time a customer walks in the door, realize that this is the first time this customer has heard it.

So say it with renewed vigor every time.

Make "Something Extra" Standard

I always say that setting expectations lower gives you the opportunity to surprise and delight a customer when you over deliver. Solomon says that giving a little something extra should be a part of your customer service culture.

That little additional boost may be all that separates you from your competition – and customers know that.

Never Stop Improving Customer Service

Even if you're known for having stellar customer service, you can never, ever rest on your laurels and decide there's no room for improvement. A masterful company continues to innovate how it addresses customer service solutions (i.e. adding Twitter support).

If you continue to strive to be better – you'll be a masterful company too!

Florist Greeting Photo via Shutterstock

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Tamara Gruzbarg of Gilt: Using Analytics to Give Customers What They Want

Posted: 21 Dec 2012 08:00 AM PST

They say that knowledge is power. Nothing could be truer when it comes to the world of business. Customer analytics insights can pack a powerful punch when it comes to your marketing efforts by creating a personal connection. If you know what your customers want, you can give it to them. If you give your customers what they want, they feel a personal connection with you. And that personal connection brings them back to you, time and again. Tune in as Tamara Gruzbarg, Senior Director of Analytics and Research at Gilt Groupe, joins Brent Leary for an in-depth discussion on this concept.

* * * * *

customer analytics Small Business Trends: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Tamara Gruzbarg: I have been working in the area of data analytics for over 15 years. I started my career in financial services, big banks, credit cards, and retail banking.

For those who don't know Gilt.com, we are just five years old. We are one of the pioneers in the Flash Sales Space online in the U.S. and we have new sales starting every day at noon. We have a limited inventory of sought after brands in women’s and men’s apparel, home goods, kid's stuff, gourmet foods, etc.

My role at Gilt is to lead the customer analytics and research team to figure out how can we get so personal with customers that they will say:

“I shop at Gilt because Gilt gets me!”

Small Business Trends: Can you fill us in on how many people actually visit the site?

Tamara Gruzbarg: We have over 5 million active members. These are people that come to the site on a regular basis. We have a pretty large group of people that we are in constant contact with. We send them emails around new sales that we are starting, and we figure out what makes it for them.

Small Business Trends: I would assume that having 5 million active folks must provide a lot of information you can capture about them?

Tamara Gruzbarg: We know a lot about people that come to the site because it is a membership site.

On top of all the transactional information, we know what you purchase, when, and what type of brands you like. How frequently you visit and when you visit. And what areas of the site are most interesting to you.

Small Business Trends: How has this wealth of information changed the way you go about doing what you do?

Tamara Gruzbarg: Big data is a new term and a not so new term. At the end of the day, you'll try to get your hands on as many data elements as possible to figure out what the right thing is to do for the customer at every given point in time.

In order to be able to utilize it, you have to have pretty solid infrastructure. We have a great, scalable data warehouse here at Gilt. Built and maintained internally so our data engineering team can collect all of this disparate information from different sources – visitation, browsing, and emailing information.

We send so many emails. We are interested in the fact that people are opening, clicking our emails. When they are interacting with our emails, all of this information is available in our data warehouse.

Last obviously, transactional information, preferences, wait-listing and demographic information. All of this is in our centralized data warehouse location. We have various tools that allow us to access the data warehouse and perform different kinds of analysis.

Small Business Trends: Recently, Accenture came out with their customer survey study finding 48% of respondents think a tailored experience is critical to a strong customer relationship.

Tamara Gruzbarg: For us, it's absolutely mandatory. We don't have any excuse not to be personal.

For example, we send out our daily sales reminder email. We have to provide you with enough information that will entice you to come to this site. When you have around 40 new sales starting every day there is no way we're going to send information about all 40 sales into one email template.

We have this personalization algorithm we're constantly developing and improving to help us figure out what the right sales to put in front of you every day in your email are, and also on the site.

Small Business Trends: What are some big challenges in creating those personalized experiences?

Tamara Gruzbarg: I think one of the most interesting questions is:

“How do you find the balance between 100% personalized vs. having this opportunity to introduce your customers to something new?”

Gilt is a curated site, and we pride ourselves on our ability to find new and exciting designers people might not necessarily know. When you are 100% personalized, then you are only basing your recommendations based on historical behavior information. You basically don't have this opportunity to offer something new.

Small Business Trends: What are you measuring to see how successful these campaigns are?

Tamara Gruzbarg: Conversion is one of our biggest and most important KPIs, because we are in the business of selling merchandise and making money. In addition to that, we pay attention to what we call engagement metrics:

• Are people engaged with our emails, through open rates and click rates?
• How frequently they are visiting the site?

Then, we are actually following customer behavior throughout the channel to see where the potential drops-offs are happening. This information gives us an idea for site experience improvement.

We also have a referral program and we are very much interested in our existing members inviting their friends to join the site. Because through a lot of analysis, we figured out that our referral channel is one of the most profitable acquisition channels for us.

Small Business Trends: Ca we talk results?

Tamara Gruzbarg: We are consistently seeing double digit incremental return on investments (ROI) with the types of tools we are developing using big data analytics.

Small Business Trends: Has social media changed things?

Tamara Gruzbarg: Social media is definitely a very interesting area and something we pay a lot of attention to. We are not currently integrating social media data at the user level, if you will. So we cannot really go into the data warehouse and say that this person has so many friends on Facebook and this is this person's interest on Facebook.

We are using data analytics in conjunction with social media when we monitor the sentiment about Gilt on the Web.

Small Business Trends: How about mobile?

Tamara Gruzbarg: Mobile actually influences a lot of how we are looking at our standard KPIs. More people are interacting with us on mobile. So they might see an email in their email box, and then go to launch their Gilt app right away, which would not translate necessarily to open rate or click rate. But definitely would translate into conversation and revenue.

Small Business Trends: Where can people go to buy something from Gilt?

Tamara Gruzbarg: You can go to Gilt.com. Register, and quickly receive an invitation and start purchasing right away.

This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.

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We’re Cutting Back To Ho-Ho

Posted: 21 Dec 2012 05:00 AM PST

cut backs business cartoon

I have three employees – me, myself, and I. Well, actually, I just had to let me go for sleeping on the job.

I’m all about efficiency.

I’ve got blogs and tweets scheduled weeks in advance, photoshop actions to take care of even the smallest repetitive tasks, and keyboard shortcuts to insert all manner of boilerplate response in my email.

But as much as I love efficiency, I just can’t agree with this cartoon.

Happy holidays!

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Domino’s Pizza Founder Sues Over Healthcare Mandate

Posted: 21 Dec 2012 02:30 AM PST

Business owners face many obstacles in a changing world. Looming healthcare regulations in the U.S. have upset business owners and entrepreneurs on grounds of everything from cost to religious convictions. These challenges are par for the course and something all entrepreneurs must face. How you overcome obstacles will determine your success growing your business in the long run. Here are some of the many difficulties business owners must face and some advice on overcoming them.

Challenges & Change

Tilting at windmills. Domino’s founder Tom Monaghan, though no longer involved in the pizza chain he helped create, is suing the federal government because new healthcare regulations will force him to provide contraception coverage for employees of a Michigan office complex he owns, despite the fact that he says doing so is against his Catholic faith. Meanwhile, David Overton, CEO of the Cheesecake Factory and other entrepreneurs wonder about impact new healthcare legislation will have on their businesses. Huffington Post

Happy New Year. Healthcare law or not, every year brings new challenges to small business owners and entrepreneurs. The best way to handle them is to spend some time at the end of each year contemplating the changes that might be coming, says Glenn Muske, Rural and Agribusiness Enterprise Development Specialist at the North Dakota State University Extension Service. Make a habit of examining coming challenges and changes likely to impact your business at least once a year. Small Biz Survival

Rising Above It

Critical mass. No matter what line of business and regardless of changes in regulations or markets, all entrepreneurs face one common obstacle at one time or another. That obstacle is naysayers and critics more eager to tear down your brand than to give any relevant feedback. In fact, strategic marketing consultant Steve Miller is of the opinion that genuine feedback is in such short supply, he’s not certain he even believes in the phrase “constructive criticism” anymore. Ignore the critics and do what’s best for your business and your customers. Two Hat Marketing

Mutiny on the bounty. There are times it doesn’t pay to ignore what others think. This may be the case if bad morale is rampant among your employees. In fact, if your employees aren’t happy or doing their best, it may be your fault, says marketing specialist and copywriter Shannon Willoby. Fortunately, there are some simple steps you can take to turn your business culture around. The way your employees feel about you and your company makes a big difference in their productivity and ultimately in your success. It’s time to address it. Scott’s Local Business Corner

Time to go. Of course, the worst case scenario in the situation mentioned above occurs when employees become so fed up that they walk out the door. Bernd Geropp acknowledges there are times when your employees leave you for career improvement and better opportunities. At times like these, you should be happy for them and wish them well. Unfortunately, all too often, there are other motivations involved. High turnover at your business can cause considerable challenges. If there is a way to retain your people longer, you owe it to your company to examine it. More Leadership, Less Management

Lofty Goals

I can see for miles. Perhaps the best way to create a company culture designed to overcome obstacles is to adopt a company vision. A vision can bind your team together giving them a common goal and a clear path forward, says business adviser Brad Farris. Here are some broader benefits you and your business can derive from developing a clear and compelling vision. EnMast

Don’t be a copy cat. The digital revolution has brought about some unpredicted results. Digital technology has made it easier to duplicate and disseminate information than ever before in human history. Arguably, the best result of this revolutionary change has been the lowering of barriers for those seeking to publish content on many subjects at little or no cost, and the rise of the information entrepreneur. The worst result may be the cheapening of that content because of how easily it can be copied by others. This has given rise to another challenge, how to create unique value in a cookie cutter market. ClickNewz

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