Likeable Business by Dave Kerpen

Author:Dave Kerpen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill

FIGURE 6.2 The “wing walls” of Jetblue’s Long island city support center show a twitter search feed to ensure responsiveness.

Source: Morgan Johnston, JetBlue

BEING ACCESSIBLE

Kat Cole is the president of Cinnabon, Inc., an American baked-goods store known for its massive cinnamon rolls. Take a stroll around your local airport or shopping mall, and you’re fairly likely to find one—they’re everywhere. Kat Cole is too. She travels around the country attending conferences and meetings and visiting store locations to say hello to bakers and see how everything’s going. Cole is constantly busy, but she always finds time for the things that are important to her. One of the things that are most important to Cole is engaging with her customers. Send a tweet to @Cinnabon, and you’ll not only get a reply from Cinnabon but a tweet from Cole as well. She thanks her customers for kind words, urges them to petition for a Cinnabon location in their hometown, and engages them in witty banter. Cole could easily sit back and let the Cinnabon social media team do the work of engaging customers, but instead she gets involved. That extra engagement of the CEO and the accessibility to her humanize the Cinnabon brand by showing customers that everyone from the top down truly cares about their satisfaction.

Being accessible allows you to be responsive. Most companies are not so large that their leaders can’t devote time to hearing about what’s going on with the staff and learning what they can do better. A likeable leader is accessible to his or her team. Accessibility allows a company to be responsive to customers as well. Karmaloop founder and CEO Greg Selkoe even lists his e-mail address and cell phone directly on his company’s web-site. The practice started organically; when customers bought something from the site, he would call them and ask how they heard of Karmaloop, an online retailer specializing in men’s and women’s streetwear. Now, it’s a philosophy he advocates: “I think if you stand behind your product, you should be accessible.”8 At a likeable company, anyone can reach out to anyone else and expect a response.

RESPONSIVENESS ISN’T ALWAYS EASY—BUT IT IS WORTH IT

As an entrepreneur in social media, I’ve been a firm believer in the value of personal responsiveness for years. I make it a point to respond to each and every e-mail I get from our 100+ staff and interns, and I agree to spend 15 minutes with any employee or intern who wants time with me. Sure, this policy has gotten a lot harder to maintain as we’ve grown quickly in the past few years; and eventually the 15 minutes might have to become 5 minutes, and some e-mails may take longer to return. But I firmly plan on holding to this policy. I gain valuable insight each time I talk with someone from our team, whether it’s a top manager or an intern—insight into our business that has helped us launch new ideas, find and grow talent, and better understand our customers and opportunities.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.