The article section, which can be downloaded by clicking here UniteUniversityfeaturingJez, discusses Jez’s contribution to the event, which saw him presenting a whole day, 5 hour workshop including breakout sessions and supporting materials.

Chris Auty, Managing Director of Unitron UK said: “Jez, your energy and passion is profound and respected between the Unitron team and its Unite members. Over the years I have had the pleasure of working alongside some brilliant minds in the field of sales and customer service, however, never with someone that takes such a refreshing out of the box approach as you do. We look forward to working with you in the future.”

“We hold ‘Open Days’ at our hearing aid centre and run local press adverts and promote through direct mail. What should our invitation letter to potential new clients feature to make it a ‘must attend’ event?”

The most powerful way to guarantee repeat custom, motivate customers to return to you and recommend you and attract new customers is through a reputation for excellent customer service.  As Mary Portas’ TV show Secret Shopper has helped clearly demonstrate and as I’ve been saying for years: you only have to be slightly better than awful in the UK and you stand out a mile.  Delivering good service is okay but delivering excellent service levels is such a welcome and pleasant surprise to customers that you really make a significant impact.

Many people believe they deliver great service but if you do – who knows about it?  Have you entered any customer service awards?  Have you shouted about customer’s experiences and testimonials?  Do the local papers and press and industry magazines know about your great service levels and have you make a pledge to deliver excellent service to your customers, informing them perhaps via an email newsletter?  Be proud of delivering great service (it really does mean a lot to customers and goes a long way to cementing future business).

I mention these because these awards, quotations (pick snippets – literally a line or few words – from glowing feedback and testimonials) and service charters/promises are things to include on your letterhead or open day invitations and help build your brand around the one thing that is going to make people comfortable and confident with parting their hard-earned cash with you: the fact that you make them feel valued, appreciated and Very Important.

So, what should you invitation letter include Simon?  Here are a few must-haves:

1: Use language that drives, not simply informs.  If you’re holding an open day which is on Saturday, that’s great – and very informative – but there’s no drive to get me there.  The open day should be unique (find something you’ve not done before that you can include – perhaps a theme with themed decor and food?); promote that the whole team of “friendly” specialists who work with you will be there, too, on hand to answer any questions; you’ll be open late ; there will be free nibbles and cake for everyone that pops in to see you; it’s an “exciting” opportunity and will be a “great day”.  Use words that inspire and ignite interest.

2: As I’ve alluded to above, give things away for free!  This uses what it technically known ad reciprocity: the notion that if you give something to someone for free, they are inclined to return the favour.  That free something could be time, advice, doughnuts, cake, batteries…. anything.  But make it worth their while.  You may well think a cup of coffee is a nice gesture but if I’ve got to leave my comfy house, get in my car and drive to your shop, park and then walk to you…. coffee isn’t going to get more than a “hmpf” from me.

3: Use your open day as a great opportunity to capture customer data and drive them at the same time by launching a competition.  The prize should be relevant to your customer base (a crate of wine or champagne won’t drive as well as an iPad will with a younger customer base).  Customers enter the prize draw by completing a slip on the letter and bringing it into the shop to pop into a comeptition box.  Look to your suppliers to supply the prizes and use their logo with a “prize supported/provided by” tagline on publicity.  Then send a press release to your local media: newspapers, TV, radio, free magazines etc to let them know about the great prize draw.

4: Keep the letter short, succinct and full of benefits.  Double check it, triple check it and then have someone else check it, too.  I’ve heard of so many invitations being released with the wrong time, date, day or address on! You want it to read like a “must attend” event that the customer won’t want to miss out on.

For further advice on how to achieve service excellence, my best-selling book Have a Crap Day, which takes a humorous look at exactly how to achieve service excellence, is available to buy here – enter the promotional code “iamasuperhero” for your discount.

These 5 key things will help maximise your ROI and ensure you get the best from your speaker:

1: As a recent client of mine from P&G quite rightly said to me: “time is of secondary importance”.  Cut the speaker’s allotted time at your peril. Professional speakers spend a lot of time and effort perfecting their presentation to create something powerful which hopefully inspires and motivates: you are investing in a specialist in their field to speak to you.  If you reduce the time the speaker has to effectively deliver their presentation, you not only reduce the impact but it almost always disappoints slightly.

2: Allow time for the speaker to sound check.  This is critical.  If you cannot hear the speaker properly, the entire presentation will be tainted – it is so important that everyone can hear the speaker clearly.  There’s nothing worse than trying to listen to someone when the microphone keeps cutting out or is distorted.  People simply lose interest and then you’ve wasted your investment.

3: Some speakers take bookings directly, however, others – like myself – can only be booked through a speaker bureau or speaker agency (there’s really not much difference in the two so don’t worry about the names).  The important thing to remember is that if booked through a reputable agency, you don’t pay any more.  Some speakers, myself included, are so busy that they prefer speaker agencies to handle all booking enquiries, negotiations, contracting, invoicing etc. The service you receive is much better than if you dealt directly with the speaker (we are after all often traveling and speaking so not contactable).  Select the agency carefully: on more than one occasion both the client and I have had less than ideal dealings with agencies that had impressive looking websites but were simply one man with a virtual office.  I now tend to work with a select few agencies and speaker bureaus who have proven to be very good, professional, reliable and offer the sort of service that you would expect me to endorse.  Look for testimonials referring to the agency itself or speak to other business colleagues and ask if they can recommend an agency, or see The Agents’ Association.

4: Give the speaker, or agency, plenty of information ahead of time about your business: who your customers are, what your products or services are, what the dynamics of your staff team are, what morale is like, any subjects or issues that are best avoided and what you’d like to get out of having the speaker at your conference or event.  Many speakers like myself will research the client’s business in order to best position the presentation.  One thing to avoid at all costs is asking the speaker to amend or add to their presentation without giving much notice.  This is sometimes possible but requires time in order for the presentation to be re-worked and simply cannot be thrown in.  Bob Monkhouse once warned about asking professional speakers to “just say a few words”.  He was right.  Avoid this at all costs – the point of having a well-rehearsed presentation delivered by a professional is to help ensure a great result.  Unprepared variations of the content often don’t work as well as you may imagine.

5: Lastly, read the speaker’s requirements and try where possible to accommodate them all.  It might sound a bit flash and fancy but the requirements are the speaker’s individual needs, there for you to get the most from your investment in the speaker.  They may need a lectern, for example, which is important for their presentation and which they do not feel comfortable without – or maybe they simply need it to rest things on.

What sentence has the word ‘and’ 5 times in a row and makes perfect sense?  Have a think…

“The landlord of The Hairy Dog and Wet Duck pub ordered a new sign.  When it arrived, he felt some of the words were too close together so he rang the sign writer and told him he needed another new sign but this time with more space between the words Dog and And, and, And and Wet.”

Here’s an example of the word ‘that’ being used 5 times in a row, perfectly legitimately and in a way that makes sense: “I wanted to point out that that that that that man said should have been this”.

You may – understandably – be struggling to comprehend the sentences like that, so, if it makes it any clearer: the first ‘that’ is a conjunction, the second and fifth are demonstrative adjectives, the third is a noun and the fourth a relative pronoun….

Didn’t think it would.

In one respect most of us are like tsetse flies.  These bloodsucking African flies carry pathogenic trypanosomes, general known as “sleeping sickness”, to human beings and other animals.

What is peculiar about these insects is that they feed on cattle, giraffe, leopards and wildebeest but the eyes of a tsetse fly do not register the black and white stripe pattern of zebras.  Zebras, for the tsetse fly, do not exist.

Buddhists believe: “no man can see the back of his own head” but not only is the back of our head invisible, so is a significant part of the world around us.  What we do see though, can affect us and often in a significant way.

Many people had their homes largely destroyed by the earthquakes that hit California in January 1994.  Many described their homes as if someone had thrown hand grenades into each room.  The walls were cracked, the roofs were damaged and appliances and personal effects were mutilated and strewn about.  Rain poured into their homes.  Most spent several nights sleeping in their front gardens sharing barbeques with neighbours.  They were all in shock.

The horror of the event itself, followed by frustrations with insurance companies, utility services and finding contractors – this entire predicament is a zebra to most of us.  We have the facts but we miss the message.  We’ve seen the incident with tsetse fly eyes.

At a workshop in Scotland recently, a gentleman called Ed sat in the audience.  I discussed how a female psychiatrist I had recently met specialised in people traumatised by earthquakes.  She told me most of her clients were professional women whose home and personal possessions meant a great deal to them.

I related this in conversation with the audience and sensed that I hit a nerve with Ed: “It is not just women who feel that way, there are men who feel that way too”, he said softly.

The zebra became visible to me.  The next morning in the hotel, I caught up with Ed and he spent a great deal of time relaying to me how the earthquake back in 1994 had affected his life.  He now travels with an earthquake survival box (he had it in his hotel room); he senses little quakes, which I was oblivious to, with a sense of mild horror.  He has a deep sense of loss of his personal effects that cannot be replaced – his home for 20 years had many memories of his deceased wife, Mary.

The magnitude of his frustration of recovering was far deeper than I imagined.  Two years after the earthquake, his house was only 40 percent repaired.  Even with insurance, there were thousands of pounds of additional costs and hundreds of hours work.  Ed, who had grown up in an orphanage, served as a Marine and lost his young wife to cancer, looked me in the eye and said: “that earthquake has to rank in the top five traumas in my life”.  His professional life was in neutral.  So was his personal life.  On the outside, he seemed confident, charming and happy as ever.  But that earthquake fractured him on the inside – with signs of this some 19 years on.

Tsetse fly vision is widespread.  But many managers are never jolted into seeing the zebra in the way I was with Ed’s personal story.

Some retailers have more invisible zebras in their lives than they will ever know.  Customers leave and they never even notice it.  Some businesses I have worked with have customer defection rates of as much as 40 percent.  If sales seems constant, they never catch on.

Managers frequently see through tsetse eyes when they make decisions.  When sales decline and profits fall, they fire people, get new computer systems and put more controls in place.  They may try to reverse the situation by increasing advertising budgets or initiating a bonus system, or they may demand more effort from employees.  Rarely will this reverse the situation since they have missed seeing the real problem: their own ability to energise people to develop systems, which produce quality products and services to develop loyal and enthusiastic customers.

Many leaders I have experienced cannot lead.  They major in the minors and waste time working on low-leverage tasks.  Employees sense this and become demoralised so meet minimum standards in their jobs.

Zebras are marketplace opportunities that are never perceived; zebras are the capacities of our staff that we never sense; zebras are the profound feelings, both positive and negative, that our spouses, children or friends may have – that pass us by like a breeze.

We will never sense all the zebras in our lives, but you and I can become aware of more of them.  To begin with, we can stop talking and start listening because no matter what your business is, it’s about people.

Jez Rose is a specialist in communication and behaviour, working worldwide.  His book ‘Have a Crap Day’ on achieving customer service excellence, is available at www.DrJezRose.co.uk – enter the promotional code ‘iamasuperhero’ for your discount.