Never Misunderstand Kindness For Weakness

Words from a humble Master of the Obvious:

“superior customer care coupled with heartfelt kindness always muscle up to fuel a brands offense, defense and value. In essence successful brands have boundless sensitivity, rugged constitutions.”

Leadership is smartest, most effective and competitive when it walks, talks and builds an unyielding demand for customer kindness, customer value. I truly believe and have applied for decades this trenchant rule for customer engagements: kindness and respect are your most valuable assets, your greatest competitive advantage, your most profitable business weapons of choice.

Customer kindness builds leadership brands. Forlorn customer care, arrogance, neglect and or sluggish response portends failure in company vision, in financial results. Trust me, without naming certain companies we all have competed with, their lost sales and market share footing was as much about a blatant lack of customer kindness and valued experience as it was about the value of their brand, products and operational deliverables.

Our new social and e-commerce digital tools, instruments and levers are creating challenges and opportunities that are consumer invigorating. While the ancient valued power of customer kindness, respect and reflective actions may be considered e-old, they are still highly valuable as e-new and much easier to deploy. Customer kindness is still lacking and anemic in so many who compete with us, yet strong, flinty and fierce in so many who wish to defeat us. As we know in highly successful companies, customer kindness and customer service is not a department, it’s simply and smartly everyone’s job.

Kindness in business is courage in business expressed in varying yet highly relevant ways... Courage Expressed In Music

Some great leaders I personally study, highly respect and learn from I believe say it best:

Sam Walton, Founder of Walmart: “The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.”

Ross Perot: “Spend a lot of time talking to customers face to face. You’d be amazed how many companies don’t listen to their customers.”

Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com: “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”

Peter Drucker: “Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.”

Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com: “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”

JC Penney, founder of JC Penney’s: “Every great business is built on kindness, on friendship.”

If you care through formidable, kind and valued actions, through every capital aspect translated through your products, through your brand value, then over time you will be able to ask for a few more pennies for your products and your brand than your competitors. If you truly care about customers through your kind actions, trust me, they will in turn, care about you, your brand your future. Regardless of your social engineering prowess or your expensive advertising and marketing muscle in this new, highly exposed socially charged customer world of instant information your brand glorification or gratification isn’t what matters most. What matters most and competes best is customer care in the language of customer kindness.

As leaders, we must never mistake or accept weakness for kindness within our organizations or within our perceived brand value: our financial brand equity. Weakness is always an opportunity to improve. However, weakness can also be an advantage that you sadly hand to your competitors as they command smarter brand recognition and customer kindness through each and every touch point of their organization. Kindness in its most relevant leadership sense is acting upon the courage of your brand conviction.

To best recognize, respond to and crush sales, brand and organizational weakness, I offer five customer centric relationship mistakes to avoid:

1. A silent refusal to be flexible with your business relationships to match each of your customer’s expectations and styles of engagement.
2. Misplaced weakness and lack of understanding in how to gain new business, not realizing or acknowledging your sales and marketing teams simply did not “earn the right” to ask for the business while your competition did.
3. A series of brand and product “fat claims” through your advertising, sales presentations, and marketing programs that your company or your brand does not pay off.
4. The inability to impress customers through leadership kindness defined as genuine and relevant organizational customer experiences of competitive excellence.
5. The kinetic failure to listen and respond to customer requests, problems, and opportunities with caring kindness, relevancy, and hyper-speed.

Green Reign Leadership principles offered to Forester Research leaders.

Many years ago when I competed on the streets of New York City, I realized through customer engagements that it was never good enough to simply offer better featured products with more aggressive pricing. It was never good enough to just deliver the products on time or proclaim our great advertising and marketing programs. The winning customer centric formula that worked again and again beyond better products and services was to be kind and caring to each and every customer, never weak, never late, always first rate creating mutually positive fate.

Believe it or not, I stay in touch with a multitude of customers as well as former company team members because they are kind to me and stay in touch with me even if we no longer do business together. This is mutual personal brand building, the power of kindness in customer and colleague engagements. My former customers mirroring kind leadership, reflecting warmly right back at me. The best part, is I know their kindness for me based upon our wonderful long term and  hard earned relationship, makes them also feel good, and also extends their brand kindness inside and outside their building for their own customers.

Smart, urbane business leaders kinetically say ”never misunderstand kindness for weakness.” Without customer kindness, your personal brand, your team members’ results, and your company’s future potential will be weakened by those competitors who lead with better products, more caring services, and genuine, highly competitive customer kindness.

Leadership reflects and defines a company’s DNA for customer relationships. Let us congress and proclaim loudly the need for formidable customer care and kindness to ensure our greatest competitive advantage,  greatest brand value. Those whom already play smart this way will surely call me the “Master of the Obvious.” Those who trust and lean into the birr of these words already lead and care in kind action for customers. Sadly, those who do not find accord in these words  will continue their competitive journey without this market proven brand leadership advantage.

Green Reign Leadership is available at amazon and Barnes and Noble