Fellow entrepreneurs share their stories so that us so that we can build a better business.
Hi - mine name is Jim James and I'm your host. In 2019 I started this podcast to help entrepreneurs learn from one another. When I started the Entrepreneurs Organization chapter in Beijing, I realized that the best insights came from people who had already done the work.
If you're running a business; this show is my gift to you. It's hard enough as it is, and I hope that this podcast solves just one problem to help you on your way.
Reputations take years to build and can be destroyed in minutes. Paul Hourihane of RemarkAsiaPacific explains the 6 aspects of a reputation, and also how the CX Academy is training staff on how to deliver action which exceeds the adverts.
Jim James is the Founder and Managing Director of the EASTWEST Public Relations Group. He recently returned to the UK after 25 years in Asia where he was an entrepreneur. Whilst running EASTWEST PR, he was the Vice-Chairmanof the British Chamber of Commerce in China, he also he introduced Morgansports cars to China, WAKE Drinks, founded the British Business Awards, The British Motorsport Festival, EO Beijing, and was the interim CEO of Lotus cars
Hello, and welcome to this episode of speak PR. This is the podcast for business owners that want to unlock the value in their business with effective communications and today, I'm joined by Paul horahan, who is in Singapore, and who is the founder and MD of remote Asia Pacific. Hi, Paul. Jim, how are you? Pleasure to be here, good to see you. Support. Share with us, what you do is remarked Asia Pacific, we bring Best of the solutions that we can find and have trusted in from other parts of the world into Asia and point them at parts of the business that need them the most. And the first of the brands that we brought to market six or eight months ago was a business out of Ireland called the CX Academy, which is an enablement and training product to really help businesses up their act in terms of customer experience excellence and driving better outcomes for the interactions they have with their their customers on a day to day basis. That's what that is. How do you think customer experience Science impacts public relations. So I think if you if you if you step back a step and understand what what customer experience really is, and this is the opportunity, I think in terms of where businesses can improve and be more competitive, there's there's very often a confusion between customer service and customer experience. So Customer service is, what you do, how you do it, how quickly you do it have activities, and all that stuff is measured quantitatively. Customer Experience is all about the emotional outtake from all of that. So how do I feel after I've had a series or any interaction with your company? airlines are a great example. So people don't tend to talk about the check in was a disaster. And you know, the air hostess wasn't very nice, and I got delayed and all the stuff. They tend to talk about the entire experience, say, Oh, no, it was awful, or Yes, it was wonderful or it met my expectation. So it's all about people. Expecting stuff, and then meeting those expectations which results in an emotional outcome. And the most positive result of that to answer your question about the effectiveness of work, how it integrates with PR, is a very good one is what we might call a remarkable experience people will then talk about. And I think one of the key objectives of PR is to get people to talk about you. And if you generate good ones, they're talking about you. And that multiplies. And it's very positive effect on your brand and your business. So that's kind of the most obvious cross section between the two. And when you talk about the customer experience, how you helping companies to kind of evaluate where they're at now and to look to improve, because there's often a difference between what the advertiser said, the PR said, and then the actual experience through through the entire sales process. Yeah, it's kind of funny, you should hit on that so quickly. One of the things The thing is, it's about actions, not ads. And very often the over promising done by the marketing folks that you and I used to know so well, is a hard thing or hard act for the actual business to deliver and meet those expectations. So part of what we tried to do is to get them to align that. But also what we what we help them with is is determining what emotional outcomes that the business is trying to drive and having to deal with on a daily basis. So some of them are sort of more quantitative, some of them are qualitative. So there are only six outcomes that any business is going to drive to. So trust, of course, is the first the most important and is sort of what I say. It's the hardest arrives like a tortoise and leaves like a Ferrari. So it's a one that's hardest to learn and easiest to lose. A second, we call them drivers of of excellence. And the second one is that you know me, so the word that everybody wants to hear most often in the world. Is their own name. So you're getting my name right and knowing me, my my business situation or my purchase situation or on my emotional situation on my phone is important meaning knowing me making it easy is another meaning is it easy for me to transact or get what I want to or complete my my business with you and in the time that I want to empathy then of course is you know, understanding my situation and what it's like for me to be doing business with you if I'm stressed or in a hurry or disappointed or, for example, casinos are very interesting empathy play and gambling is a very stressful business people are happy, sad, excited, stressed. All of that is a very empathetic business. Then there's a really important thing which are important driver, which is called you fix things. And that's the sort of, if someone bothers to complain and say, I've got a problem It means they care about you eight or nine times more than someone that doesn't. And if you fix it, and if you fix it heroically, you'll get rewarded with an enormous amount of positive energy and emotional outcome and remarkable remarks to other people and, and those kinds of things. So they're the drivers. And yeah, that was another one but it's small, the other key ones that really matter. So with the CX Academy, then for taking these six can just walk us through what would a company do if it was to come to the academy? How would you help them so it's called the academy for a reason. So what we do is we educate them and their staff at scale. And the big thing about this is scale. So we've got courses that they buy, which are certificate and diploma courses which are endorsed by two trade associations are a university. And the whole point here is to give them a management measurement framework of the outcomes that they're driving to as a business, and then give them an ability to enable their people, senior, middle and front end to really execute and drive those kinds of outcomes. The COVID things been interesting actually. It's changed this business and the focus quite a bit. It's some frontline staff have kind of become from lambs to lions. So talking to brands about investing in their front frontline staff and become a very different conversation than it might have been a year and a half or two years ago. They now are appreciative and people are telling them how wonderful that people are, when they're in a difficult situation so good they are in looking after them. investment in that sort of level of staff has become quite a priority for good, well run businesses. So that's what they get from us and who it's for. They are Sort of six week long and 14 week long courses to the same structure to the same measurement delivered by experts in the fields and professional educators, all done online. So it's quite COVID friendly and how it's executed. And it's been done in a very kind of visually rewarding way. It's a very beautiful experience. So that's what we that's what we kind of try to give to them and add value to. And there's a lot of businesses taking it up. And the timing for this, given our atmosphere is interesting to say the least. Yeah, that sounds fantastic in terms of the sort of investment that companies that needing to make, it sounds like quite a holistic approach, and requires almost the entire organization to go through it as opposed to be sort of a tactical one or two people within the organization. Is this something that's accessible to, you know, SMEs, or really only MNC is able to afford this? What sort of sizes we're looking at? Yeah, great question. I think that The the operative word we have here is scale. So there are not many things that many products like this in the market. So a certificate from us is 500 euros it's about 17 hours of learning six weeks, six weeks time duration, and the diploma was about 2800 euro. So these are not normal sums of money. And it's a very kind of sensitive and hot and competitive topic that it's around. So absolutely, it's available to small medium businesses at that kind of scales. It's not outrageously expensive. It's you know, in hundreds and small thousands of euros per person trained and executed, would have presumably, there are government incentives around paying for services like yours in terms of it being a skills upgrade. Yes, there are tax deductible or even a in Singapore there are all manner of grants for skills upgrading. Yes, we've got Fight for that in Ireland and Singapore and Malaysia and Hong Kong. So yes, there are. But what I, what I say to people is if you don't think it's worth the money, don't go look for the government subsidy. This is the value it is. And that's how you should really look at it. If you get a government subsidy, that's great. And that's your relationship with them, but we deliver this kind of value for you. That's really how it should be a currency. It should be that it and what about adoption, Paul? Because, you know, as we all know, a lot of programs whether it's, you know, CRM programs or no productivity initiatives within companies get trained but failed to get implemented. What about the success rate once people have done the course how do you ensure that this follow through? Well, we do. There are three kinds of levels of of that there's Some continuous training programs that go after, after the formal training is finished, which keeps the skill levels up. Secondly, we usually managed to stitch this into an HR approach to make sure that the skill levels are kept up, meaning that people are trained and other people join that they go through the same level of enablement to a cx objective. Thirdly, you can't really do this, there's no point in doing this, if it's not taken seriously. It has to be baked into a fundamental strategy for the business. Otherwise, you just simply won't work. So with sometimes we say to larger businesses, you know, there's no point in taking two or three people to do this and expect a material difference you've to take a whole department of or, you know, regional, whatever it is, to show it to demonstrate that it works. So once it's piloted with a degree of success, the retention rates go up very dramatically in terms of it as a strategy. People sort of mess with it and just kick the tires. It tends Just go away. So I think the answer is it depends on how serious the business is strategically about customers, and what sort of competitive edge they want to build. As a young business, we've been doing this for about a year and a half. So there is some statistics on that. There's a lot of research on cx. In terms of cx project failures and stuff. There is some there are numbers. But we've seen more than complete them fail, that's for sure. But it seems such a logical, logical thing to do when it's, I think, seven times more expensive to acquire a customer than to retain one. Isn't it? Something like that? Yeah. And so a question we get asked a lot is how do I measure the ROI or return on investment from this kind of program or expenditure And to your point, it retains customers, it makes customers cheaper to acquire because people talk about you and people come to you at a lower cost. It retains it Reduces staff turnover or attrition, in other words, increases staff retention. It decreases the cost to serve. As people become more self enabled and happier to deal with you. It can increase margin with people paying a little bit more money for easier access, things like that things they want. These sort of five or six or seven key measures are all kind of boardroom level measures of what's important to small, medium, large businesses. And is this working for just fmcg for a consumer, or is it also working for business to business organizations are governed as well, for example, yeah, yeah. It really works for businesses that have a number of people serving. So a few people serving many people, or a lot of people serving very many people. That's when it kind of really comes into its own and you can do these things at a scale that's appropriate to the business. So some examples, you know, you mentioned you mentioned airlines, but would it be restaurants or hotels and it's any business really that has to serve a number of clients or customers in a fair in a fair count, who are sort of in commoditized areas so all airlines got a Boeing all airlines got, you know, nice looking staff, or all Airlines Flight flight to the same airports around the same times when you'll pay very different flight fares based on what you expect to receive from them. financial services companies telcos utilities, transport, government, where service and and the outcomes of making people's happy and satisfying their needs are important. That's really the sweet spot for this. And it comes down to smaller chains and restaurants. Absolutely. We've got many customers who run three or four hotels, those kinds of things employ 100 people. 200 people where they can really use this to make the personalization their business world class. So yeah, it goes down that kind of, to that sort of size of business typically. So from really big ones to kind of your people dealing with a lot of people actively.
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And is there is there sort of one
Jim James:
like tool or tip that you've learned? From the Sir, I'm going to just do that one again, because I thought I'd turn this thing off. Is there one sort of tool or thought within the CX program that you've noticed to be particularly effective one to two favorite tip that you found? The answer to that is kind of Yes, the whole thing. So you can't take the six drivers and say, You know what, I'm going to learn everybody's name and I'm done. Or you know what, I'm going to empathize like crazy with people. It's all done because people take the whole experience and Georgia compare you with themselves and others on that basis, so it's not achievable thing. And you've got to do it all. Okay, I want you to find this working for you and for your businesses, your own business. Paul, you've been an entrepreneur for 25 years, as long as I've known you. So what would you say is the best sort of PR tool or activity that you've been using to build the brand of the academy? I would say it's kind of one very obvious and to the expected answer to that, and then one, that's not so your reputations very important. This is the strongest marketing tool of them all in almost any business. But what I have to say is in particularly this business, which is my case, less than a year old, we've been using social media and LinkedIn heavily. And we found that has helped. So let's get our profile up and get us into commerce. We may not have been in quite a lot faster than perhaps some of the more traditional methods of marketing. So word of mouth and well run business business social. has worked really quite well so far for us those two things. Okay. Great. Thank you. So you're very active on webinars? I see. Yes. And we've done a lot of other webinars. Sorry, you're right. Where we get together with partners where we get into each other's audiences. I think I've done nine of them in eight weeks. Managing Director of remark Asia Pacific, where would people find out about you just go to remark APAC calm and it's all there. Great. And also put it in the show notes. So Paul, thank you so much for sharing and being on if what I guess will be your 10th digital recording and the last two months and sharing some thoughts with the speak PR community about how to get noticed using effective communications and customer service better Jim, good to see you. Thank you. So that was pulled her hand over Mr. Asia Pacific. And key there for me is the importance really of having great customer experiences. Because as we know, through amplification, which is the A in our speak PR program, the happy customer will share and amplify the appreciation of your brand. And this is the best form of PR that's available to us all. So thank you for listening to this episode of speak piano. This is the podcast for business owners to unlock the value in their business with me, Jim James. And so until we're together again, I wish you the best of health of profitable business and that you keep on taking great care of your customers.
