Brainstorming Meeting via email

Back in September I remember the media release coming across my desk about St.Marys CBM and a pink cement truck. At first glance I thought what an innovative concept for a few reasons;

1) A great marketing tool to place St.Marys CBM as a leader in the construction industry for the inititative.

2) Excellent opportunity for the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation to reach a new audience of potential contributors

3) This is the first iniative of a construction related company taking on a promotion like this.

My wheels immediately began spinning on how can we do something as great for Breast Cancer Awareness and the concept initially escaped me until about a week ago our newest rep Cindy from Ottawa had mentioned an idea of doing a special theme profile on women in construction. I also was reminded of our rep in Sault Ste Marie, Leslie, she had become a member of the Canadian Association of Women in Construction (CAWIC)recently and wanted to do some coverage for them but had not gotten any strong support.

So the brainstorming began between Cindy, Leslie and I and a few emails later the concept of "Women in Construction" came up for a special profile in our February 2009 issue of the Ontario Construction Report. The concept was to cover all companies, trades and suppliers related to the construction industry and ask them to share their stories of the strong women leaders and employees in the companies.

We divided up some tasks such as contacting the major women construction associations to offer to do some coverage for the special issue, looking at potential advertisers and then my responsibility was to contact the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation with an excellent idea to test polite a fundraising program. I am hoping to hear back early next week if my idea will work and a new relationship will be started. I will then share the concept if they sign off.

What does this all mean? Well it goes to show the power of a team sharing ideas and working together and contributing. Three separate ideas suddenly collided and meshed into something bigger and better which is more likely to succeed. The best thing about this is that the entire conversation happened between a few phone calls and emails by three people, one in Niagara, one in Ottawa and the other in the Sault. So much for meeting at the water cooler at the corporate office.

Wood WORKS! Announce Finalists for Ontario

As a proud sponsor of the 2008 Wood WORKS! Awards Gala it is my pleasure to provide you the list of finalists for this years awards. Below are the links to the list of Finalists from Ontario.

The Wood WORKS! Awards recognizes people and organizations dedicated to pioneering and preserving the use of wood in Ontario. The 8th Annual Wood WORKS! Awards Gala will take place on Wednesday, November 12, in the Cohen Ballroom at the Toronto Congress Centre.

Toronto Area Finalists

Northern Ontario Finalists

Greater Toronto Area Finalists

Eastern Ontario Finalists

Huronia Finalists

On November 13th I will be at the Wood Solutions Fair at the Toronto Congress Centre and I look forward to seeing you there.

Working with the design community, Wood WORKS! connects practitioners with resources related to the use of wood in commercial construction, assists in product sourcing, and facilitates the delivery of education and training. The project's mandate is to work toward changing attitudes and perceptions about wood use by communicating its attributes as a sustainable, cost-effective and innovative material (See www.wood-works.org for more information).

Wood WORKS! is an industry led initiative of the Canadian Wood Council.

The Killers Human

Customer Dis-service

From all my years in the world of business the first and most important thing I learned when dealing with any type of customer service question, concern or problem was also to diffuse the situation first by saying to the customer the following words,

"What I can do for you is..."

No matter what follows these words I have already told the customer that I am going to work to solve their problem, I can do it for them and I am listening.

The worst words you can use are,

"What you need to do is..."

No matter how polite you say this, how cute you look the first reaction you will always get is no one tells me what to do when it is your problem to fix.

In the fourth day of my issue with getting blasted with what was originally 47,000 spam emails that capped out at 165,000 I finally found out that no one at http://www.bell.ca/ overseas tech support was actually working to help address my two issues which were clearly stated and read back to me by at least two reps when I followed up after the time frame they had provided.

Issue one was stop the spam.

Issue two was to delete the 165,000 emails.

Turns out from day one there was a note added to the folder saying they could not delete the emails. No one bothered to tell me, they only said "It has been escalated!" The original timeline of 30 minutes became 72 hours. 72 hours was today and I was not letting them off the hook until I got an answer. The first rep I spoke with today said, "I can take care of it". Well the good news is he did delete 25,000 emails for me,I found out later he was deleting them 100 at a time like I am required. I called back tech support 3 hours later and asked why it was taking them so long to delete the emails, I did not know they had to be manually done. The (worst customer service skill deprived) rep simply said after a dramatic pause "You need to do it. I can't" I asked him what are you talking about, the last rep said he could do it easily. He said, "Well he was manually deleting them and I can't do that you need to."

At the point I hung up. If the tech reps from the beginning said we can stop the spam but can not delete the emails, my expectations for the next three days would have been set properly. The problem is the reps I followed up with daily never told me this, they took the simple it is not problem to deal with and said I will put in a special note and escalate it. If they had been honest I would not be so frustrated now that if it was not for the lovely 8 months left on my contract I would be switching Internet service providers.

What can you learn from this?

1) Always tell the customer what you can do for them.

2) Set realistic expectations.

3) Tell the truth no matter how much it hurts.

So any Internet Service providers looking for a new customer in 8 months? Heck offer me a deal so good I can't refuse and I will switch tomorrow. Bell wonders why I switched my phone service, I wondered why for two seconds and realized it was how they treated me.

47,000 reasons I do not like email today...

The image above brings to mind peoples frustration when dealing with tech support for computer and email issues with an outsourced agent. In today's age a new interactive chat function on web sites, these is some releif in regards to the misconception of dealing with people with accents or who do not sound like us, "EH!". Customer service from companies like Bell are often outsourced to country's such as India but you would be amazed at the true skill and education levels of the people you are dealing with. From my previous profession in direct marketing with contact centres I found that reps from India had in most cases at least 3 years universitry education.

So far tonight the interactive and immediate chat solution for customer service has been a pleasant one. Obviously this may not be a tool we or most construction related companies could use in a traditional setting and I find it har dto believe a contractor would outsource tech support for sub trades to contact if a question arose regarding plans.

Back to the reason of this post...

I am in a bit of a breakdown state of mind, just got back from my son's hockey practise and noticed I had 47,000 emails downloading when I logged in to check email.

It appears someone has used my email address as a return address for a UK Lotto scheme. Just got off of from speaking with tech support and hopefully it will be resolved in the next hour.

In the meantime I may have to reply on old fashioned technology for people to reach me tomorrow, I will check my mail box out front of my house.

Wish me luck!

RONA SHOWS SUPPORT FOR THE CHILDREN’S AID FOUNDATION, ONE J.J. BEAR AT A TIME

RONA the largest Canadian retailer and distributor of hardware, renovation and gardening products, has partnered with the Children’s Aid Foundation to sell the renowned J.J. Bear – a cute and cuddly teddy bear – across its Ontario stores in support of abused and neglected children.

100% of proceeds from sales will be applied directly towards supporting the Children’s Aid Foundation programs for children in Ontario, matching the funds to communities where they were donated. J.J. Bear is available for sale until December 30th in participating RONA stores across Ontario, including RONA Home and Garden, RONA Cashway, RONA Lansing and Noble Trade, for the price of $10. It can also be purchased online at www.cafdn.org as of November 1st.

You can see this ad in the November and December issue of the Ontario Construction Report and also get more information as we will be showcasing the bears at some of the trade shows we will be attending in November and December.

Also for the holiday season we are running a special Turkey Drive for your local foodback. For every holiday greeting ad placed in our papers we have discounted the full colour process cost by almost $200 and will donate a turkey on your behalf to a local food bank. You can get more information here for our Toronto paper the GTA Construction Report.

What are you doing this upcoming holiday season to give back to your community? Share your stories and events with me by email chasemarketing@sympatico.ca

You know your reaching towards success when people start calling you...

Over the past few months my efforts in locating potential feature articles and advertisers for our papers has gotten a little easier. Maybe that is the wrong wording to use, but people seem to be calling me before I call them, which is a good sign.

When I first started working with the Construction News and Report Group back in March of 2007, i had to hit the pavement and make calls daily to generate modest results. Along the way though I realized that better results could be found by simply building relationships and getting out and meeting with the people I was and could do business with. I made some mistakes along the way of course but I learned fom these and adapted.

Thinsg I know that 90% of the time resulted in failure that I tried:

1) Not getting to know the customer before I asked for their business.

2) Making the conversation more about what I could do instead of what the customer needed.

3) Try to make a sale to everyone (Pounding a square block into a round hole).

So how did I come to that moment of realization? I ran into somebody I knew who was in the construction industry one day and had a normal get caught up type of conversation. At the end of it we naturally came to the conclusion that a business relationship made sense. My success in past roles in other companies was always dealing with existing clients and doing business development with people that knocked on my door, so inititially I took this job which involved new business development like the one of the guys from "Glengarry Glen Ross". I tried to sale people instead of building relationships, building the relationship now became the sale.

So what did I change, I went to associations meetings. I found out what was going on vs. waiting for them to send an update. I realized that I could not close every sale in a few meetings. I realized that some people needed more time, so I adjusted my schedule to fit them. Instead of lining up feature articles last minute Istarted lining them up months ahead of time.

Now do I get some sales in a first meeting with a client, yes because the customer has an immediate need. The rest of the time I am learning about what my customers may need, but always first getting to know them.

How are you going to get to know your customer today?