It’s No Time to Trip

It happened on Thursday after lunch as I ran up five steps to the office holding a cup of coffee. On the second step, I tripped. Instantly I knew what happened. “Call an ambulance,” I shouted.  It was a complete quadriceps tendon tear. This time on the right thigh. Four months later, the surgeon’s final check up with words of caution, “Don’t trip.” Those words are also good business advice. While “Don’t trip!” is a powerful message, it can be ignored, even at a time when it’s easier than ever to take a dive on the second step. When they “trip,” many businesses either don’t recover or remain badly injured. Yet, their missteps can make us more aware of the dangers and how to avoid them. Here are examples of what to watch out for:

• Never compromise credibility. Yet, companies can’t resist “putting a spin” on their actions, which only makes them look stupid or worse. Take what Bank of America’s global strategy and marketing officer Anne Finucane said after her company pulled the plug on its $5 a month debit card charge in the face of a nationwide revolt led by a 21-year old part-time nanny. “We were too aggressive. We were convinced given the environment, given the reaction, given the mood of the country that it just wasn’t the thing to do,” she told the Boston Globe.

This is pure corporate spin, jibberish and should be avoided at all cost. Always protect the company’s credibility, which she could have done by saying, “We made a huge mistake and we’re correcting it. We should have been better listeners. It was a good lesson for BofA.”

• Watch out for the details. Paychex, a national company recently sent its 401(k) plan customers an urgent notice detailing an action they needed to take by a specified date. There was one problem: they neglected to include the contact information. What does that say about the company? A well-meaning company has a website promoting its annual clothing drive. Unfortunately, the dates of the drive were missing. A highly regarded insurance company sends out email messages with grammar and spelling mistakes. Minor matters? Perhaps. But it also fuels the way we perceive companies.

• Saying it doesn’t make it so. Just as more customers are embracing self-check out at supermarkets, other operators are rejecting it. They maintain they want to interact with their customers, particularly in the check out line. Really? Haven’t they noticed that many cashiers are texting, talking to other employees and yawning? Haven’t they noticed the way they handle the food? Bread and tomatoes stuffed in the bottom of a bag? Why not give customers a choice? All too often, righteous responses by companies are purely self-serving. In this case, it may be the technology cost that’s the issue, not “personal service.”

• Getting customer-friendly communication right. Who doesn’t dial an 800 customer service number without trepidation, doubt and angst?  Between pushing buttons, waiting for the call to be answered, then being transferred when someone comes on the line, repeating the problem and being told to call another number, what’s there to love? For many consumers, it’s more like “anti-service.” Such experiences establish terrible expectations and cause misery for those taking the calls. It’s bad business, no matter how you cut it.

Not surprising, Apple does it differently. Not only do customers have a choice of how they want to communicate with the company, but they can also set the date and time they want to be called, for example. And it works because the calls start off with customers having a positive attitude, rather than with anger.

• Getting ahead of yourself can put you behind. Whether it’s announcing a new product, a major event or a new service, it’s dangerous to put cake on display before it’s baked. More often than not, it becomes a problem. The Chevrolet Volt is a good example. Several years of hype for a technological marvel led to extraordinarily high expectations from a company that, at the time, was on the ropes. Then came production delays, dismal sales figures, endless “battery fire” stories, the announcement that GM would buy back Volts, and, finally, GM’s president saying the engineers should lop off $10,000 in costs.

What a negative PR scenario. This isn’t a story about technological failure. GM created the perception that the “old GM” was back doing things the wrong way. It’s another horrible example of getting up-to-speed before starting the car, a perfect prescription for fostering further doubt about the company.

• Thinking outside the walls. Thinking “outside the box” is an overrated and useless exercise since it rarely occurs except, perhaps, in someone’s fantasy. The real rub is failing to think outside the walls –– the company’s walls. Even though Polaroid brought the first digital camera to market, it couldn’t shake off seeing itself as an “instant film” company. That sealed its fate.

Now, Research in Motion flirts with a similar destiny as it’s market share dropped from about 50% at the end to 2009 to nine percent in the third quarter of 2011, according to Canalys, the London-based market research firm, as its attempts to overcome a “push” email preoccupation failed. Getting it straight starts with getting yourself out from behind the company walls.

• Blindsided by belief. It’s amazing how great companies make such foolish mistakes. In its CEO’s unrelenting drive for Bank of America be the biggest, it swallowed Countrywide Financial at the moment when it was overflowing with toxic home mortgages and continues to suffer the consequences. Then, there’s Netflix that based its success on the making its customers happy. That went well until it came up with a 60% price hike and separated its DVD and video-streaming businesses, only to see 800,000 disappear.

Most dramatically, the famed Xerox research lab developed a blazing array of computer technologies in the 1970s –– the Alto personal computer, the Ethernet, laser printing and the graphical user interface –– but the company, blinded by its imaging process, dismisses them as too risky. It seems that Research in Motion heads down the same path. So absorbed with its push email mindset, it missed the smartphone phenomenon and may never recover.

How easy it is to trip when we’re blinded by our beliefs. Unless we pay attention to the dangers inherent in our fast-paced business environment that are waiting to bring us down, it’s easy to trip at the most unexpected moments.