151: Grab Your Customers’ Attention – Featured Interview with guest expert Adrian Ott

CEO and Founder, Exponential Edge Consulting

Adrian Ott talks to Bill Ringle about how to make customers happy, compete, and her book The 24-Hour Customer. 

>>> Visit MyQuestforTheBest.com for complete show notes and more expert advice and inspiring stories to propel your small business growth. My Quest for the Best is a top-rated small business podcast with over 300 episodes of thought-provoking and insightful interviews with today’s top thought leaders and business experts. Host Bill Ringle’s mission with this show is to provide the strategies, insights, and resources that will unlock the growth potential of your business through these powerful conversations.

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Listen to this interview to learn:

• The five triggers that influence to what a customer will give his or her time and attention.
• What led her to write The 24-Hour Customer.
• How companies of all sizes can capitalize on mistakes or disruptions of service made by competition.

Read the Show Notes from this Episode

• 1:11- “After [running the HP Garage Innovation Program] for a while, I realized I wanted to learn new things, learn about new companies, and so decided about 10 years ago that I wanted to quit HP and start my own company.”
• 2:22 [On what Ott’s business does] – “Trying to improve the customer experience and making things more sticky with customers.”
• 2:52 Ott discusses the 5 Triggers, as she talked about in her book The 24 Hour Customer
• 3:33 How status determines what people will pay time and attention to.
• 4:00 [The Software Renewal Case Study] – “We worked with one client who was really having trouble with getting customers to pay attention to them, and this had to do with the renewal of software. What we ended up doing is mapping end to end their customer experience.”
• 4:41 [The questions her company asks when working with companies] – “Can we somehow make this more engaging from a 5P perspective?” and “Can we design a process to make this more engaging?”
• 6:05 [How optimization of peer engagement impacts customer engagement.] – “You’re not going to turn down your friends.”
• 7:37 Ott describes an example of how implementing gamification into the workplace can create better behaviors internally.
• 8:14 “Personal Pursuits is the next P, and that is intrinsic motivation. We may spend time on a mystery because we want to know, we’re curious.”
• 9:16 “If you can start to think in terms of these triggers, and your interactions and communications with them, [your customers and employees] are going to be more engaged.”
• 9:39 [Inspiration for writing the 24 Hour Customer] – “One of the things that struck me was that there was a lot of information out there about personal time management, but I wanted to help my clients understand what was happening with their customers and their employees. I looked around and couldn’t find anything, couldn’t find any frameworks.”
• 11:10 “I spent about 3.5 years in the preparation of this book.”
• 11:47 “It took me a long time to get to these very simple notions of these very complex ideas.”
• 12:00 [On the types of clients Ott has been working with recently.] – “It’s been very interesting to learn about new businesses.”
• 12:45 “When I wrote the book I never dreamed it would apply to financial services as well as it did.”
• 13:09 “I’ve been surprised by how timeless and cross-industry available the concepts are. I had primarily designed it with the idea of large companies in the tech industry.”
• 14:25 “Time and attention are universal. These are universal problems that everyone is struggling with today.”
• 15:45 [The 5P Triggers] – “We have Peers and Power, which is a socially-oriented trigger; Personal Pursuits, which is an intrinsic or personal kind of trigger. We have Price, we have Productivity – so things that help us save time will grab our attention, so that has a lot to do with convenience. The last is something I call Prairie Dog Events, and this is a term that I use to describe what happens to customers and employees when they’re suddenly woken up.”
• 16:39 [On Prairie Dog Events] – “It’s during those times that we’re going to be most receptive to change and so that’s when we start saying so that’s when we need a new piece of software, etc.”
• 18:03 “Prairie Dog Events are opportunities if you’re in the kind of service that has these kinds of attributes. “
• 19:34 “Almost half of our day is routine and habitual, so there’s a tendency for us to want to make things automatic.”
• 21:01 [On what allowed her company to evolve to include new industries, and write her book] – “Partially out of my own wanting to do new things, but also that I was recognizing that technology was becoming much broader than the tech industry itself…other industries are pulling us in to see how business consumers are using tech products.”

Expert Bio

Adrian C. Ott is the CEO and founder of Exponential Edge® Consulting. She was named Silicon Valley Enterprising Woman of the Year 2011 by the National Association of Women Business Owners – Silicon Valley and called “one of Silicon Valley’s most respected (if not the most respected) strategists” by Consulting Magazine.

Adrian works with some of the most innovative Fortune 500 and start-up companies in the world to gain a market edge in today’s exponential economy. In addition to assisting clients, she writes a popular column at FastCompany.com, and Chairs the Strategy & Growth Roundtable for the Harvard Business School Association of Northern California, the largest HBS alumni club in the world.

She is also the author of The 24-Hour Customer, a Library Journal “Best Business Book 2010”.

Contact Info and Social Media for Adrian Ott:

• Primary Website
• Travels From: San Francisco, CA
• Business Phone: 650-331-7378
• Connect on LinkedIn | Twitter

Books by Authored Adrian Ott”