This is humorous, but it's not a joke. A Sushi joint in Tokyo has turned to monkey servers to save costs and beat the recession. (YouTube video below)

I work with food and beverage chains from the U.S. to Europe to Australia, and they are all facing the challenges of the economic downturn. Unfortunately, most do not have the option of using monkeys as servers to reduce their payroll to peanuts, or soybeans in this case.

We use a slightly different strategy...um, an extremely different strategy, but unlike the monkeys, our methods can be used by nearly any chain. First, we help our clients retain their current customers. And second, we increase the wallet share, spend, and referrals of their customers.

To learn more about our methods to beat the recession, click here. To learn more about the monkey method in downtime, watch the YouTube video below.

My suggestion? Use monkeys to make money during this recession. If you can't use monkeys, call me.

Feel free to contact me with any questions regarding our methods. I know very little about monkeys.



If you need to make more cash from your food and beverage units during the recession, I'm your huckleberry.

a short, hot day or two ago (i live in Phoenix), i remembered a stat that i had heard on many occasions, but each time the numbers were conflicting, maintaining the consistency of snowflakes and fingerprints. confused, as i should be, i decided to google this stat to finally achieve the satisfaction of knowing the true answer. this mind-blistering stat states that “man’s knowledge doubles every X years.” turns out, google produced every number from 50 years to 2 years, so every conflicting number was somehow right. upon closer examination, i determined the numbers were correct, depending upon the date of the estimation. in other words, our knowledge is not only doubling every two years (current estimate), but it is growing exponentially on top of that. in five years, our knowledge will double quicker than now.

there seems to be one exception to the rule: businesses today refuse to double their knowledge on the customer experience, let alone increase it. this is fanatically frustrating to me, as i have devoted my career to improving my client’s customer experience.

how many studies must be done to know that people like things that make them feel happy?

here comes the rant: you can invoke two kinds of feelings when you interact with your customer. just for a second, consider there are no inbetweens, no neutral feelings, because it has been proven that neutral or satisfied customers are not loyal customers, and the goal is loyal customers....um....right?

so, one set of feelings can be likened to a 3 year old blowing their first wobble-bubble (a 6 year old who inspired this blog entry noticed i was watching him blowing bubbles, and he informed me matter-of-factly that the technical term for magic bubbles is now wobble-bubbles...makes sense, now that i think about it. i just wish someone would have told me sooner).

picture this: after a few failed attempts, a wobble-bubble forms after being the lucky recipient of the tot’s mouthwind. it takes flight, angering all the laws of gravity, and the height that that wobble-bubble achieves dictates how far apart the youngin’s dimples grow. happiness, eh? pure ecstasy.

without even moving on, it’s easy to conclude that we should strive to make our customers have these feelings. i probably should have bolded the previous sentence, but i didn’t, and i don’t feel like going back, so read it again.

now, if by some off chance you are still with my airport-induced rambles, take one more mental picture for me: what happens to the cheeky grin on the sub-adult’s face when that bubble pops? sheer devastation. oh, the clouds move in, and it’s as if someone took colors from a rainbow. the future holds nothing. nothing, excluding doom, of course.

why, from Alice’s green wonderland to our conference rooms, do we take our customers and pop their wobble-bubbles? they like wobble-bubbles, and as we discussed earlier every study done has proven that things that people like make them happy. and their expectation is that the wobble-bubbles will continue to rise. is it that hard to make sure that their expectations are met?

simple concept here: people like wobble-bubbles. they don’t like it when their wobble-bubbles pop. you have a choice to give them what they want, or be the biz-grinch and use your ooze-covered needle to *ka-pop* their wobble-bubble. that’s just mean.

ok. this is the second time i have stopped to make sure someone (anyone) was still following. i mean, if you left me, i understand...no blood, no foul. but i’m going to quit writing if you’re not there, ‘cause, what’s the point...

glad you’re still with me. here comes the meat ‘n’ taters.

business would be so much easier if you could hand a card out to every customer that comes through the door that spells out their expectations. “hi Customer, thanks for coming. here are your expectations, and i promise you we will fulfill them in every way.”

but you can’t. you need to find out what your client’s expect so you can put a stop to the wobble-bubble pop. the only way to do that is ask them. don’t just collect their feedback, act on it. at that point you will find out where you’re not meeting expectations. it just doesn’t matter one iota (really, what is an iota?) what you think they should get from you; it only matters what they think they should get from you.

the only way to fulfill expectations is to measure what those expectations are through enterprise feedback.

one last picture for you: rest those eyelids, and imagine your customers in a pretty field with flowers and sunshine. bubbles are flying everywhere. your customers are running around like they have never even seen a cubicle, enjoying their wobble-bubbles. they expect this utopia to end with eternity. and then the goo-covered biz-grinch *ka-pops* them all.

are you the one who creates the wobble-bubbles, or pops them?

if you need to find out what your customers expect, or whether you create wobble-bubbles or pop them, i’m your huckleberry.

jeff

odd question i know, but if you'll hang in a few seconds i will gladly explain the admittedly distant relationship between the two.

many times as i grow older and the noise of life seems to overtake my memories of the good ole days, i find myself doing things that i used to do as a kid, and these simple acts bring back long-forgotten, yet fond memories. today, as i was perusing the fridge to see what was the easiest thing a hungry, lazy man could put together to tie over my ever-present appetite until dinner, i noticed three simple elements that encouraged a smile to slowly widen across my face: bread, mayonnaise, and kraft singles.

ah, those were the days. a rough summer day of swimming, baseball, and bike riding, and then on home to enjoy the fixin's of an artfully made mayonnaise and cheese sandwich. so, today as the nostalgia swept over me and i fearlessly dived into my first bite, i realized something was amiss.

after some serious analytics, i discovered that the addition of a beautiful wife to my life had made some changes to my cheese and mayonnaise sandwich. you see, she likes healthy food. the once loved soft, white Ironkids bread had been replaced by wheat bread with 134 added grains, which resulted in some crunchiness with every bite.

this was not a cheese and mayonnaise sandwich. it almost was, but the wheaty impostor just didn't cut it, even though we call it bread as well.

customer feedback is three major elements: surveys, analytics and actions, and closing the loop. according to Gartner, 95% of companies collect feedback, 35% analyze and use the feedback, and only 5% tell their customers what changes they made.

where does your company fit in? even if you say you use customer feedback, are you generalizing the term? just the same as wheat bread is no substitute for white bread, collecting feedback and doing nothing with it is not using customer feedback.

the most common reason only 5% of companies actually relay to their customers how they are using their feedback is that it is a process that can be difficult to put into play. however, technology has come to save the day once again, turning this tough process into a simple application.

do you close the loop with your customer? or do you substitute wheat bread for white bread and call it a cheese and mayonnaise sandwich?

if you are looking for someone to help you close the loop with your customers, i'm your huckleberry.

the new buzz words are clear: customer experience, customer loyalty, customer advocacy, etc. we all now know what we should be doing in theory to retain customers and build our revenues. we focus on the fact that it costs 7 to 10 times more to gain a new customer than keeping the oldies.

but, just for a few minutes let’s examine the true cost of losing a customer. it only starts with the fact that we no longer see their money.

i’m going to write about an ongoing problem i have with one of my vendors. now, normally i never talk trash (because usually i use the opportunity to gain the problem vendor as a customer), but i have given every chance for this company to fix a simple problem. i can’t even get a response. so, without naming names (T-MOBILE), i will spell out the true cost of losing me as a customer, or even worse, holding me hostage as a customer.

my account with T-Mobile has been active for over 10 years (that is 3 times longer than i have known my wife!). i’m a perfect customer. never leave. pay my bills on time, etc. however, about a year ago i used my upgrade “discount” to buy my wife and i brand spanking new, state-of-the-art, T-Mobile Wings. these wings are absolute garbage. i have been through over 7 phones that have failed due to bad touch screens, no signal, and other unexplainable defects. this phone has done everything possible to make me angry short of calling my mom and letting her know the things that i do that i shouldn’t.

now, maybe i just have the worst luck in the world with phones, or maybe the phone heard a few things that i said about it when it was pretending to be broke down, and now it has it out for me, and tells his new replacement friends that are en route via a $20 FedEx package what a jerk i am. as far as the customer is concerned, this doesn’t matter.

T-Mobile refuses to replace the phone with anything better than something your 10 year old would be embarrassed to carry (imagine Zach Morris and his first mobile phone). whether i am right or wrong matters little. it’s my expectations versus reality.

now, let’s examine the true cost of losing me. i am calling them next week to pay my cancellation fees. they had me on contract for another 12 months at $200 per month. so, $2400 – cancellation fee = $1900 lost. that’s the easy equation.

before we can determine the other costs involved, let’s go through a day in the life of Angry Joe Customer (me). today, i spent over 90 minutes on the phone with T-Mobile. my favorite part of the day is my early morning coffee and planning step by step my calls, appointments, etc. for the day. as nice as the girl was at T-Mobile, i didn’t want to talk to her, but i had no choice as my phone didn’t work.

after having all of my calls forwarded to my house phone as to not miss any, i realized that my trip to the gym would have to be without my phone, as well as the grocery store, and everywhere else i planned to go that day. i’m ashamed to say it, but this is quite limiting for me.

after my trip to the gym, i came home and returned all of my missed phone calls. four, to be exact. do you think i told them exactly why i wasn’t at my phone? of course i did. and i told them the problems i have had for a year now. there is 4 people right there that i guarantee will think twice about using T-Mobile. hmmm…..opportunity cost….4 people times $1200 per year would equal $4800, right?

now, multiply the $4800 times the number of times my phone has gone down and i’ve had to explain why i’m unable to be reached….that would be 7 x $4800, or $33,600.

ok. starting to look a little more expensive than the original $1900 they would be losing with me? if we then take into account that i tell people how i feel about T-Mobile every chance that i get, this is an astronomical loss.

not to mention that now i am sitting here writing a blog about it. i have 4,366 people in my Linkedin network alone, and each connection will get an e-mail about my new blog post. the internet has changed things. a company cannot afford this.

my point was not to bash T-Mobile, which admittedly was a bonus that i accomplished in this blog (i feel better, how about you?). my point is that companies need to see the true cost of losing a customer.

granted, not all of them will be angry when they leave a company, but they did have a reason for leaving, which means at best they will say, “yes, they did a good job, but i found this over here which was even better.”

the truth is you can’t keep everyone. but, it’s always worth a try. keep your customers.

if you need someone to tell you exactly which customers you are at risk of losing, i’m your huckleberry.