customer experience Archives - Greatness Magnified

In my line of work, I find many people ask about prioritization and time management. It’s something that all busy professionals and business owners struggle with.

Adrian’s no different. Consider his question which I am sure will resonate with you.

“I want to be blatantly honest with you Sarah, I struggle with priority setting and time management, but priority setting in particular. It’s true, I do say yes to a lot of things because you know how I give you all trouble about saying yes to too many things. But especially work that I love. I love to say yes to freelance photography. And it’s not that I have no time. I have perhaps too much time. I have a great team that also works with me at the gallery, and I will pass things over from them from time to time. I’m doing more outreach these days, and I just don’t know if what I’m doing is effective and paying off. I use about 15 different forms of social media, and I do occasionally get people in the gallery saying they found me there. But again, not that many people, and I’m not sure if all my efforts are effective. Any ideas?”

Do you have the same question? Can you relate?

There is so much pressure – on individuals, organizations, and entrepreneurs – to create content and to be out there on many social media platforms. But many feel they don’t have the time or can quantify their efforts to create ROE (return on effort). Not to mention the worries about your privacy, impact on your lifestyle (e.g., cutting into fitness time), and attention taken away from family and friends. These can leave you feeling depleted, frustrated and ineffective but it doesn’t need to be.

Social media has many benefits. It builds and reinforces your brand so you’re ready for the next opportunity (e.g, prospective employers, clients, and relationships). It is free and easy to use with almost no learning curve to get started. It’s also millions to billions strong (depending on the platform) so guaranteed, it can help to build your credibility if you’re putting valuable content out there.

Here are three tips to be sure, like Adrian, your efforts get you results:

1. Choose the social media platforms

Rather than try to be on every social media platform, decide which ones you feel most comfortable with and adds value. For example, I don’t serve youth, so you won’t find me on Snapchat (much to my teens’ glee!)

Ensure the ones that you choose are matched up to where your prospective employers and customers are. Get really good using the ones you choose and you’ll find not only do you enjoy it more, but you’ll also be able to find ways where you can maximize it, such as sharing from one site to the other, rather than creating organic content for all of them.

2. Monitor your analytics

Have you looked at your analytics lately? What posts get the most interaction? How many people follow you? What followers’ level of engagement is with you over time? If you find certain social media platforms have low engagement, maybe you can take a “holiday” from them. Or, try to boost those analytics such as having a call to action on your posts (e.g., share the post, tag someone). You can even try giving away free, valuable content or encourage in-person visits (such as in Adrian’s business he wants more foot traffic).

Take note of what posts tend to get the most interaction and by knowing this will help you make some really conscious choices about how you spend your time on social media.

3. Delegate to your team

Social media posting is time-consuming and requires diligence, persistence, and consistency so your audience comes to know and expect your content and your brand. But the good news is, you don’t have to do it all yourself.

My virtual assistant, Caroline, handles all of my sharing and posting of these weekly posts (in fact it’s part of a broader system of connecting with you weekly that I spoke about in last week’s post). Because of her system, she is super efficient and more effective at it than I am, therefore I can work on other aspects of my business given she has that covered.

I hope you found these three productivity and time-saving hacks really helpful. If you have other questions or comments about how you can maximize this, jump over to my Facebook group, Greatness Biz. It is especially helpful if you are considering starting or expanding a business. In this community, we discuss many aspects of business because productivity and time management is essential to your success.

In a recent post, I talked about how you can maintain your professionalism and stand in a place of your greatness even when things go very wrong and you’re incredibly stressed. In that post was some key lessons and suggestions about how you can reduce your stress level and demonstrate our greatness even when the situation is crumbling around you.

One thing I have learned is that if you stand in your greatness, other folks are able to grow and learn from it. You can show there’s another way of behaving even when things aren’t ideal. It’s not easy, but it’s important.

The alternative that I see if people getting into complaint mode. Folks lose hope and fixate on the negativity. Worse yet is the toxicity seeps into the environment, like a negativity smog descending.

The example I shared in the last post were service professionals who sadly, are often treated as invisible objects. They can be made to feel dispensable. They often are undervalued, not appreciated and feel overworked. I wasn’t about to do that to reinforce this, even in the midst of a stressful circumstance.

One of the biggest reasons they feel invisible, dispensable and undervalued? They’re not given feedback – positive or constructive. They usually only hear – often in harsh tones – when they’ve “messed up”. And usually, it’s in generalities about situations they’re not even responsible for.

The benefits of giving feedback in a respectful way to serve folks – in addition to showing you appreciate them – is they’ll work harder on service recovery with customers. When treated professionally, they are more likely to act like professionals. It makes so much sense it seems redundant, but have you seen someone in frontline service dressed down, devalued and disrespected? Happens all the time. Instead, here are three tips on how to handle a bad situation with professionalism, allowing others to save face and leaves everyone better off!

1.Speak directly with staff

This is twofold: from the customer and from the manager. We talk a lot about giving feedback as leaders, but let’s focus in on giving feedback as customers. How many of us give it directly? Or instead, do we wait to write on the comment card, give an unfavourable Yelp rating or tell the manager? Or worse, not give feedback at all and instead, “Well, we’re never going to go there again.” After all, “It’s not my problem” right? The flawed logic is that there isn’t an opportunity to learn, to improve right away and to do service recovery so you can walk away at least a little more satisfied.

No one wants to do a bad job. Give them an opportunity to delight you in the moment and course correct.

2. If speaking directly doesn’t work, talk to a supervisor

For this organization I told you about in my last post, the root issue was many brand new staff without the proper training. I learned this from speaking with them and them saying, “I don’t know what to do in these situations.” In other words, I had some feedback for leadership about an apparent onboarding gap. It looked like it was an issue with the service, but the root issue was the lack of training.

Knowing this, however, didn’t solve my issue. I needed the supervisor’s help because the staff was making excuses. She went and spoke with them right away, and recovered the materials that were apparently impossible to find. By the manager having to roll up her sleeves (literally…to root through the garbage for my lost materials with staff) she understood the importance of addressing the gap!

3. Show appreciation

Despite being frustrated, I used a technique we learn in therapy school called, “repair attempts.” It’s when you’re having a fight or when tensions are rising, you say something to soften the tension. “I see you’re all incredibly efficient and hard working.” It was true. It was just a strength overused in this case that in haste, the information I needed got discarded. But it didn’t minimize the fact this team has greatness, and each individual needed to feel valued as well as take responsibility for addressing the current issue.

The supervisor really stepped up, so of course, I shared my appreciation to her, and in return, she gave me her card and said, “If there’s anything else you need please contact me directly.” I suspect if I were yelling and unprofessional she’d be hesitant to do that!

Do you have any other advice about how to handle a difficult work situation professionally and respectfully? Comment below!

And why don’t you join me next week for another post on Your Greatness Magnified…Work, Family, Life and check out my YouTube Channel or website for lots of resources!

How to Handle a Bad Situation: Three Tips that Leverage Your Greatness & Allow Others to Save Face

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