I read a fascinating article by Dan Solomon, a regular contributor to FastCoCreate.com. He comments on an interview with Sleepy Hollow creator and executive producer Roberto Orci and how Orci managed to turn it into one of this season’s best new shows.
This is an interesting topic that companies and customers have to deal with all the time. Your brand, its story and what you want to accomplish, and how to personalise this to suit your customer’s experience.
Figure Out What You Really Want To Accomplish In Your Customer Experience
What’s your company’s strategy for delivering great experiences to your customers?
If you really want to achieve a great Customer Experience, then you’re going to figure out a way to make the customer the most important element of your organization,
How important is it to make the Customer Experience part of the company’s culture?
It’s both very challenging and very important to have a powerful message to get across and a story to tell with your customers
Having a relationship between your customers at all steps along the way and keeping a record of the customer’s interactions and journey within your organization will allow you to treat your customer with ultimate personalization—which is really where you are going at all touch points of that journey.
Don’t Be Afraid To Think Big
Although it can be the small things that make a lasting impression in any walk of life, especially in the customer arena, we still need to think big and have audacious goals.
A question I frequently ask my clients is, “What would make this a WOW?” So, thinking big, “What big things could you do to WOW your customers?”
Just as the film Sleepy Hollow is decidedly epic in scope and bold in its storytelling, there are no half-measures on show in any part of the film experience and its production.
Just as in the customer journey the approach is a fundamentally important way to understand how an organisation needs to work. How departments need to work together, what content you need to develop, what technology you should invest in, what people you need, what metrics you need to track, and, ultimately, how much you want to expand and think big.
“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” ― Steve Jobs
Make Sure Your Big Idea Is Grounded In Something Real
How many times have you been in a meeting and someone has said to you; “That’s a great idea, you should take the initiative and make it a reality.” What typically happens?
Most of the time – nothing!
Most great ideas remain dormant because people don’t have the courage, resources, time and or money to take appropriate action. And for those who do take action, most are unprepared and thus find themselves spending valuable time and money on a dream that simply goes astray.
Converting any idea into reality is never an easy task, here are a few tips;
- Believe in yourself
- Embrace risk as your best friend
- Be patient and appreciate the journey can be hard and slow.
- Learn to sell your vision to others
- Be passionate with your ideas
- Make sure your ideas are purposeful and have meaning behind them
- Stay focused and stick to your plan
Extend Your Bold Vision By Embracing Diversity
The concept of diversity encompasses acceptance and respect. It means understanding that each individual is unique, and recognizing each other’s individual differences.
Organisational diversity occurs when there are a variety of people with different backgrounds, nationalities, and ages in the workplace.
Being able to embrace principles of diversity does require your whole team to put this strength into practice. That ultimately means reworking plans and ideas and encouraging any new activities,
We cannot ‘embrace’ diversity by remaining set in our ways, beliefs and thoughts. Often, this will mean removing old practices, altering traditions and modifying points of view. Creating a climate of diversity often can mean radically altering the way your organisation does things and how your Customer Experience will be perceived.
Learning to understand others and move beyond simple tolerance to embracing and celebrating the rich dimensions of diversity contained within both you and your team can lead to making it a success.
In the article Orci explains that committing to diversity opened up the whole storytelling potential for the show’s creators, as well as just providing a more realistic look at an America that’s full of more than just white people. For them, it wasn’t just about having diversity, it was about using it, and about making a point of the fact that, when you are someone of colour or a minority, it actually had effects, and there’s was commentary about it. If you put it into the DNA of the story, it can actually become fascinating, and a great, honest lead for storytelling.
Commit Fully To What You Are trying to Achieve
Every time we do something, whether it succeeds or fails, we try to learn what it was about it in each case,
Orci says. “If you are really interested in what you’re doing, and you really do love it, you will go the extra mile and it’ll just make it better”
There are several ways you can tell just how fully committed your team are to any project you are working on.
Firstly you need to ask yourself: are your people willing to go that extra mile if and when the situation demands it? At such times, when the pressure is on, will your Customer Experience Team be willing to pull out all the stops and get a result?
As a Leader, if you have both solid and motivated staff who are completely committed to the cause and fully understand the aims of the business, then the solution has already been solved.. I have always said that one of the most important jobs of a leader is to get everybody else to buy into your vision for the company by developing and sharing an inspirational vision that is stretching and adds value to an employee’s life.
Result
All leaders have to be capable of winning and maintaining team loyalty and must ensure everyone is working together for the greater good of the organisation.
As Dan Solomon says in terms of being idiosyncratic, “I think we’re just following where the characters take it. We start with this incredible premise–let’s not water it down.”
Do you make your Customer Experience Team feel fully involved or do you ‘water it down’?
Perhaps you should take the director’s cut and remember your purpose is to create a team that is pulling together in the same direction with the same passion and drive as improbable as in ‘Sleepy Hollow!’
