creative briefing

If you ask a marketer to figure out the best ways for a business to serve its customers, their first intuition would likely lead them to turn to surveys and other forms of market research. While this is an efficient method with a proven record of success, I’d like to point out an even easier and more cost-effective method for those of you (like me) who don’t have the convenience of a market research department to depend on.

Live life. And pay attention.

Yes, it’s that simple (sometimes). Remember that long before we become marketers or business people, we are customers. As customers we engage and interpret a number of different experiences every time we interact with the outside world. With each interaction we pick out the good and the bad - maybe not consciously, but we definitely form preferences over time. These day-to-day preferences form a goldmine of customer insights for you to leverage. All you have to do is pay more attention to what you like and don’t like and right away you’ll start to figure out things that you and your business can do to help serve others better.

Not convinced? Let me give you a few examples.

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In my spare time lately I’ve been catching up on a good dose of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares with Gordon Ramsay. If you aren’t familiar with this show or who Gordon Ramsay is, here’s the premise in one sentence: Scottish award-winning celebrity chef rescues failing restaurateurs from bankruptcy with brutal honesty and humorous obscenities.

Aside from his entertaining overuse of the F-bomb, what I’ve found is that Ramsay brings a wealth of experience, knowledge, and insight to the table on how to run a business. He himself has been at the head of many self-started restaurant ventures - some successful, some not so successful - and his passion, talent, and wisdom are clearly elements that have led him to become one of the most well-known businessmen in and out of the kitchen.

In Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay applies a number of basic principles to help failing restaurant owners turn their fate around. While the series revolves around the food industry, much of Ramsay’s lessons are applicable to businesses of any nature. Here’s a list of 10 of those lessons that will help you run a more successful business.

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I just picked up my new used BlackBerry 8320 Curve yesterday - my first handheld complete with WiFi functionality. Naturally I spent most of the afternoon and evening toying around with it, and in the few hours that I was able to experience the supposed greatness of the mobile browser it occured to me how far behind the mobile surfing experience is from the one we’re used to on a computer.

Granted, the 8320 is not the iPhone (I’m sure there are many of you who will be ready to pounce on that tidbit). But recognize also that the majority of the mobile users are not iPhone users either (not sure how this demographic will change in the next few years though). Plus, while the iPhone’s Safari browser is a few leaps ahead of the rest of the market, it’s still far from delivering a flawless surfing experience.

It’s certainly a give and take situation - web designers need to make their sites more mobile-ready while mobile software developers need to up the firing power behind the mobile browsers. But somebody should be the bigger man, and in my eyes, I think it’s the web designers’ move next.

What happened to the .mobi movement? If web designers start building sites that are more compatible for mobile browsing, the customers and end-users will have more incentive to demand better technology on their handsets. Users don’t buy fancy handsets to see crappy websites.

On a lighter note, my 8320 is probably the one single environment where Windows Live trumps Google. That made me smile… and then cry.

In light of this year’s wireless number portability hoopla, I found Fido’s latest approach sort of interesting.

 
Thank god! I was growing tired of my 7-hour conversations having to be cut off because my phone battery wouldn’t keep up.

Wait, do the phones come with 7 hours of free minutes too?

Isn’t it a bit weird that such a competitive service industry has one major player showcasing their products on the frontline (especially since 7-hour mobile batteries aren’t exactly unique to Fido)? Unless Fido expects wireless consumers to naively rack up their phone bills by making use of their “new-found” 7-hour batter life…

Oversight or strategy? What do you think?

You might have noticed that the site was down for a good part of the day. It caught me by surprise this morning as well, and only after submitting a ticket in the afternoon to my host midPhase was I alerted that:

At 9:45AM CST we experienced complete connectivity loss with our upstream providers. While most of that connectivity has been restored at this point, we are still working to restore connectivity to a few cabs.

You’d think that as a customer, you would get a notice of something like this without having to submit a ticket. midPhase would probably also save themselves a lot of trouble from answering all the tickets by just sending out a mass email to its affected customers.

It’s funny (or sad) how so many companies, who would otherwise be considered exceptional, often forget the importance of customer service. You can offer a guaranteed 99.9% uptime, but it’s during that 0.1% that your customer service really matters.

In any case, your regularly scheduled blogging will now resume. :)