doug smith training

Have you ever noticed that a business you are dealing with suddenly offers a better deal to NEW customers than what you already have? How does that make you feel? Big data has produced so much specific stratification in our customer worlds that it is now possible to only give our best to those customers who are most profitable. It is possible to overlook those customers who have been loyal (and have gotten us to where we are) in favor of recruiting new customers. It is possible to treat different classes of customers differently. Does that feel intuitively right to you? What if you're a member of a class that's treated with lower quality than another? Chances are, that IS happening to you in one transaction or another. Do we really want to keep building a society where those who pay more are treated better? What about offering everyone our constant best? That doesn't mean that we stop using data to identify our best opportunities or serve our best customers exquis

As a leader, how much attention do you give to improving processes? Are they optimized fully, or just barely inching along? Too often I've seen leaders spend their efforts trying to fix people, when the center of their problems is usually broken processes and procedures. Any process can be improved until it's no longer necessary. And then you can shut it down. Work at it until it is optimized -- doing everything that you expect the process to do without creating problems and without slowing people down. Keep improving those processes. If you're still doing it, you can still improve it. -- Doug Smith