Global Public Articles

During an advertisement for an overnight shipping service, an announcer seriously intones ‘When it absolutely positively has to be there overnight.’ But for many, the question remains if the mail is truly delivered during the night time.

The answer is both yes and no.

Logistics of Overnight Delivery

Overnight delivery policies and rates may differ from carrier to carrier, but most share one thing in common — time frames in which overnight packages can be delivered fluctuate greatly. Factors, such as when the package was handed over to a shipping representative, can greatly affect whether important mail is sent out before the close of business.

For instance, if you were to take a package to the local shipping center of your choice before noon, your package will be in transit and may arrive at your destination the following day. If however, you get the package in near the time of closing, the package may be placed in transit but cannot be guaranteed to be delivered the next day.

Now, in regards to the terminology ‘overnight’ can be a bit misleading.

As in our earlier example, if a package arrives at a service center early enough and is designated as an overnight shipment, it will immediately be sorted in the overnight bin for delivery. This means that it will actually be en route to its destination that very day. If it comes later in the evening, most commonly after 3 PM, then the package will be placed on a mail freight air service and in some cases, this air cargo will ship out in the evening.

Again this can also depends on the policies of the company and the type of overnight delivery service you choose.

Types of Overnight Delivery

Just as there are several different mail carrier agencies, there are different types of overnight delivery packages. Depending on what you need to accomplish, the cost of the service may be expensive.

Critical Overnight

There are many packages that absolutely have to arrive on time, and in some instances, such as with medical supplies, it can literally be a matter of life or death. With critical overnight shipments, packages can be guaranteed to get there the very next day to all fifty states, and in some cases Puerto Rico or Canada. This is because the service offers special air carriage 365 days a year and seven days a week. Most other services only occur during the business week.

International options are also available although, depending on where the destination location is, it may not exactly get there on time. When purchasing Critical overnight service, keep in mind the fact that the guarantee is somewhat limited and look into other options before paying the extra expense of critical overnight shipping.

Next day Air

By utilizing commercial airlines, next day air packages can be delivered to any major US city in the US. Using modern day technology, like route optimization technology, shipments can be safely and effectively delivered on time when applicable. Next day air is a cost effective way of getting shipments to the proper locale but carries an even lesser degree of guarantee than critical overnight.

Again, if in doubt, discuss with the shipping representatives what the pros and cons of using Next Day Air.

Next day Air Saver Shipping

This type of next day service only delivers within the continental US and cannot guarantee early morning delivery. Anyone who chooses this less costly route needs to be aware of that all important fact, especially if the package has to be there before noon.

If the time of morning does not matter, but getting it there the following day does, this is a wonderful option and is less expensive than the aforementioned services.

So, does overnight shipping overnight–it depends on the time you drop off your package and what service you utilize-but the one thing you can be certain of is that overnight shipping will get your package where it needs to be in the fastest amount of time possible.

Canada’s largest courier delivery services company provides same day shipping, overnight shipping, international shipping and freight. Offers a range of choices to help meet all your shipping needs.

Part of the appeal of customer-centricity is that it takes very little business acumen to grasp its core concept. Focus intensely on customers, align your products or services with their interests, and voila: a customer - centric culture is born. Simple, right? Not quite.

Becoming a truly customer-centric organization is perhaps one of the most difficult transitions an organization can make, fraught with hidden obstacles and unanticipated challenges. Here are three potential roadblocks on the path to a customer-centric strategy, and how to get around them.

Failing to understand your most valuable customer
A customer - centric strategy is only as good as its customers. You cant let the average customer dictate what you do, says Robert Duboff, CEO of Hawk Partners LLC and coauthor of the book Market Research Matters. Generally speaking, Duboff says, 20 percent of a company’s customer base generates 80 percent of its profits. Given that split, its imperative to put your most valuable customers at the heart of your approach.

Identifying those customers need not take exhaustive research and complicated measures. It can be a fairly straightforward process, as it is with the Net Promoter Score, or NPS, a metric developed by Bain & Co.s Fred Reichheld. As set forth in The Ultimate Questionwritten by Reichheld and published by Harvard Business Pressthe NPS approach consists of one simple question: On a scale of one to 10, would you recommend us to your friends?

Based on the answer to that question, customers are segmented into three categories: promoters, who actively champion a particular product to their friends and colleagues; passives, who are lukewarm about the product; and detractors, the opposite of promoters. A given company’s score is simply the difference between its number of promoters and its number of detractors.

NPS has proven to be a powerful tool for such companies as General Electric Capital Solutions, which has used it not only to identify customers that are already valuable promoters but to gain insights into how it can convert detractors. For a business like GE Capital Solutions, which serves more than 1 million very diverse customers in many different industries, NPS helps us better understand what our customers are feeling and how we can improve their experience with us, says Stephen White, a spokesperson for GE Capital.

Failing to support your external customer - centric strategy with an internal customer - centric strategy
Speaking of valuable customers, what about that most priceless customer of all your employee?

While most companies aren’t in the habit of regarding their employees as customers, those seeking to instill a customer-centric culture should rethink their stance, argues Elaine Berke, president of Westport, MA based EBI Consulting, which specializes in helping organizations develop customer-centric strategies. Customer - centricity needs to come from the inside out, says Berke. Leadership must avoid a double standard that makes it OK for managers to argue with or demean staff while still being courteous and considerate to external customers.

Consider the case of the world-renowned Johns Hopkins University Hospital. In developing a comprehensive Service Excellence initiative aimed at boosting its level of patient care, the hospital included employee satisfaction as a core component of the program. The hospital conducted an extensive survey to gauge employee concerns that turned up such simple, actionable insights as making it a point to compliment co-workers and instituting criticism - free no negativity days.

Customer-centric organizations value and respect internal customers as much as external customers, says Berke. Like the old saying goes, If you’re not serving a customer, you’re serving someone who is.

Failure to identify the moment of truth
Companies spend considerable time and resources developing metrics for processes, execution and other day-to-day functions but often overlook defining their moments of truth those points at which a customer interacts with a company’s product or service and forms an impression.

Companies are usually very good at creating metrics around [such procedures as] production deliverables but have a much harder time knowing how to create and measure standards relating to the quality of service being delivered, Keith Bailey of Sterling Consulting Group says.

In defining a company’s moments of truth, Bailey suggests looking at three different angles quality of product, quality of procedures and quality of relationships. Taking a hotel as an example, the quality of the product would be the cleanliness and comfort of the rooms. The quality of procedures would be such factors as how it long it takes to check in or how long customers wait for room service. The quality of relationship would be the friendliness and helpfulness of the staff.

Considering each angle separately allows a company to isolate the negative moments of truth within each and develop a game plan for turning them into positive experiences. Procter & Gamble, for example, identified its moment of truth as that instant when a shopper picks up one of its products and decides whether or not to purchase its decision the customer makes in an average of six seconds. The company has overhauled its marketing with that insight in mind, creating a global First Moment of Truth business team designed to win over the customer in that moment.

There are as many different customer-centric approaches as there are customers, and each has its own unique challenges, but the road to a truly customer-centric strategy always begins with the same steps.

Management Career Training Centre provides training and development, such as motivational seminar programs for HR professionals, supervisors and employers.

I’ve had a bunch of phone calls and conversations about a recent paper I wrote called “Do you know why your customers really buy,” which explores how using attitudinal data is critical to driving real business change. Based on that, I wanted to comment about two things on my mind:

There are a lot of professionals caught up in a quandary right now. They seem to be searching for a way to justify their loyalty and engagement efforts. They want to gain more ground competitively and showcase more quantifiable results to their company. They feel a bit exposed because much of what they do is “intuitive” and little is quantifiable. However, they are either not sure how to fix the issue or they are unable to get any real information to use/show.

I recently attended an industry tradeshow. I had many conversations about how to select metrics, and how to present results to other company peers and executives. This show confirmed what I have been witnessing for some time - a lack of understanding about how to quantify loyalty results.

I believe it is important to use metrics with any marketing or loyalty initiative. Many business managers use only a yearly customer satisfaction survey, exit surveys or a promoter score. Although these are good, I suggest using more. Utilize a broader spectrum of measures to get a clearer picture. At Allegiance, we deliver a handful of metrics: loyalty, satisfaction, promoter and engagement scores. These improve your read on the situation. Don’t use too many though or you’ll soon go crazy chasing data. You should feel comfortable about how to justify your job, get a raise and show positive economic-related results from your efforts.

You can measure churn, share of wallet, word of mouth, lifetime value, etc. The simplicity of net promoter is good because it brings the conversation into the boardroom in a way that people can understand. However, the backlash on net promoter is also deserved. It is just too simple to be the only metric to use for business decision making.

The other important item to consider when trying to justify success is looking beyond statistics and dashboards. What does the data really tell you? What decisions have you made that drive business forward as a result of having that data? Too many people say: “our net promoter score is such and such” or “our allegiance engagement index is this” and they leave it at that. A static measure only tells you half of the story.
It’s good to have a point-in-time measurement, but it’s even better to know what drives those scores, and build a best practice that allows you to understand what you can do to impact those scores.

For example, understanding why a customer buys the attitudinal part of the relationship you have with them will help you to really serve them better. Here’s an example from my paper “Do you know why your customers really buy?”:

An organization always assumed their most engaged customers were of a middle aged demographic. Through segmentation analysis, they discovered that one of their most engaged groups was their early adult group. Knowing this information, and understanding what drivers lead this group to be engaged, the company launched new marketing and product initiatives to better serve the early adult group and ensure their engagement remained high. They were also able to identify that both the early adult and middle aged groups became disengaged with the company after 2 years as a customer. They held focus groups and launched surveys to study why this happens. Knowing this information allowed them to change this pattern to impact long-term engagement and profits.

I like to talk to marketing, sales and loyalty pros about understanding the attitudinal side of relationships better. They tend to focus more on the transactional side too much. The “who, what, where, when, and how” of a relationship is important, but so is the “why.” I encourage anyone involved in enterprise feedback management to seek out attitudinal information. To learn more about how to do this, get a free copy of my paper.

Terence Fugazzi is the VP of Demand Marketing at Allegiance (http://www.allegiance.com). His company provides Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) solutions that help organizations grow and increase profitability through improved customer and employee loyalty and engagement.

Without getting into deep research, it seems to me that the average marketing manager should be able to put together a sensible survey simply by using some common sense. Somehow, this is not happening as often as I would expect. My speculation is that people are so hungry for feedback on so many items that they can’t resist asking their customers for feedback on all of them. The result of this is that survey abandonment goes up proportionate to the length of the survey and the demographic of the recipient. And, you wind up with skewed results, since certain classes of respondents, as a group, are more inclined to abandon than others. Here’s a recent experience of mine to make my point.

I recently stayed at a hotel in southern Utah. Two days after my stay, I received a survey request from them. I like this particular hotel chain, so I had no problem opening the survey and giving them my feedback. They had a nice little progress bar on the screen so I knew exactly how far into the survey I had gone. After three or four pages of multiple ranking pages, however, I was still only 40% complete. The next page had 15 ranking questions on everything from their toiletries, to the beds, to the TVs, etc. I bailed out of the survey.

There are two issues in how the hotel should have designed their survey:

1. The hotel knew who I was and from my profile, should already have known whether or not I was a frequent business traveler or a pleasure/family traveler. Knowing that, they should realize that getting frequent survey responses from me would be very valuable to their business, but also knowing that I am a business person with very little time, they should ask, at most, no more than 5 questions. They could have easily asked me 5 questions out of a set of 20 and by doing this randomly across all their business travelers, still have received the feedback they desired. This would especially be true since their abandonment rate would probably drop by a factor of two or three.

2. Even if the hotel did not know I was a business traveler, they still should have done the same process outlined above because hotel stays are generally a repeated service. This means unlike, for instance, a car purchase, you are likely to repeat business with them more often than once every few years. Common sense says that recipients of surveys who have made higher dollar, more infrequent purchases will be more likely to tolerate a longer survey. If you are a provider of a more frequent service, you want to design a survey that is quick and easy for the recipient to take so that you will get feedback EVERY time you deliver that service.

So, use common sense when surveying. Understand your recipient. Spread the feedback items across the audience, especially when the sample size and frequencies are high. Know your key goals and cut questions that are not absolutely necessary to meet them.

Terence Fugazzi is the VP of Demand Marketing at Allegiance (http://www.allegiance.com). His company provides Customer Engagement Software that helps organizations grow and increase profitability through improved customer loyalty and engagement.

When speaking to audiences or coaching clients, I am always asked what may have gone wrong upon submitting their proposal to a prospect who was previously interested but now no longer communicates.

1. Speak to the budget of your prospect
2. Itemize your packages offered for easy comparison
3. Full disclosure

Prior to writing your proposal, you of course need to find out why your prospect invited you in for an appointment or agreed to take time on the phone to speak with you.

The initial conversation puts you, the vendor, in the position of a consultant. You need to dig deep through questioning to discover all of the problems your prospect is experiencing.

In turn, you question further to find how each problem is affecting other areas of their business. Only after you ask all of the relevant questions for the situation, will you be able to determine if your services are a correct fit and that you can indeed help.

It has become apparent that some industries do not know to ask for the budget of their prospect. Instead, these suppliers simply assume they know what is needed and that the money is available to accept the proposal.

The belief of these vendors is their prospect would not have inquired about their services in the first place. Nothing is further from the truth.

When it is your turn to speak after uncovering the needs of your prospect, ask upfront,What is your budget? If you do not ask this frank question, you may well be wasting your own valuable time putting a proposal together and presenting it.

Your prospect may have designer taste or a budget so low they cannot possibly afford the services offered. You will frustrate the prospect to the point where they walk away.

The second element of a proposal is line items. Your proposal should clearly indicate everything that is included. If you provide individual pricing for each service then that should itemized. If you instead provide a package, be certain every element is carefully listed in the package.

Provide as much detail as possible so that your prospect knows exactly what is to be expected. Your prospect needs to know exactly what they will be receiving in exchange for their money spent.

To improve your success rate for sales, relationship building throughout the sales cycle is also a critical element.

The biggest error on a proposal is omission. Omission of expected items in the package will cause your prospect to not walk away but run.

Some vendors purposely omit or are vague about what needs to be included. They hope to begin the project and mid-way through announce an extra element is needed which allows them to add money to their bottom line.

This practice only serves to spread bad word of mouth and hurt business on a bigger scale than just losing one prospect. Honesty is still the best policy.

Upon working with a kitchen designer, an associate was given a proposal to update his old tired-looking house. Jim initially told the designer he was on limited income and the improvement needed to be modest. He was never asked precisely what he had in mind. Instead, the designer said she understood.

The proposal came back being thousands of dollars over the expected amount. Jim told her the numbers needed to be redone.

Jim and the kitchen designer finally came to agreement however Jim said he needed to check one more source before signing. The second vendor asked the question, In addition to the cabinets, how much are the counter tops?

Jim called the first company to ask if the counter tops were included in their proposal. He thought, how would a kitchen design be complete without the counters? To his dismay, Jim found out the counter tops were a never-before disclosed extra charge and not included in the bid.

Jim walked away thanking his lucky stars he never signed the paperwork.

Elinor Stutz, CEO of Smooth Sale! and author of Nice Girls DO Get the Sale selling worldwide, speaks, trains and coaches.

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