OOBE

As with most of these writings, my take on this topic is nothing more than a shameless attempt on my part to take an idea first put forth by one of my contemporaries and put some context around it in hopes of broadening and deepening its application in a business setting. My hope is that the appropriate application and execution of these principles helps increase your competitive advantage, growth, and profitability.

I can still remember exactly where I was when someone first introduced me to the principle of The Crooked Wire. I was in New York City visiting a firm with whom we had formed a sales and distribution alliance to address a particular segment of the corporate apparel market. Their CEO described to us the strategy that their company had adopted to help foster a competitive advantage within the markets that they served. He called this strategy, or principle, “The Crooked Wire”. In a nutshell, the principle of the Crooked Wire involves a relentless focus upon the creation and delivery of innovative products and/or services that create unexpected and unmatched (by the competition) business value for the customer, and as a result, put crooks, or bends, in our value proposition that runs through the customer’s organization. These crooks, or bends, make it difficult for the customer to extract us, or pull us out, of their business, even when times are tough, and helps ensure long-term customer loyalty.

As weak as I am in the arena of creativity, my first thoughts were that I was enthralled with the idea, but I doubted our company’s ability to conceptualize, architect, create, deploy, and deliver new, fresh, and game-breaking deliverables that an industry as old as ours had not seen or experienced before. So I talked up this new philosophy for a few months and used it in some of our internal training sessions, but it remained as much of a concept as anything. In recent months, however, I became impressed with the need to reevaluate our toolset that we use to sustain and support our existing customer base due to the increasing challenge of adding new customers and growing the top line in this economy. I became convinced that the primary differentiator between companies that succeed and those that fail in this environment is service.

Our Customer Service department’s mantra is Concierge-Class Customer Care, or C4 for short. With minimal expectations of what might come of my request, I asked the leader of this area to come up with four or five new service offerings that would be a real surprise to our customer base, but that would be met with an attitude of, “We’ve never thought of that, but that is exactly what we need!”

It was not my idea that made this effort successful; it was the creativity of the business leader to which I assigned this task. She created a contest with a celebration for the entire Customer Service team if they could conceive and craft new customer service offerings that would be adopted by our largest and most significant customers. The ideas that were put forth were not only creative and very unique within our industry, they accomplished five strategic objectives:

1. Increased and improved communication with our customer
2. Decreased cost for both the customer and our company
3. Improved the timeliness of invoice delivery and payment while reducing cost at the same time
4. Decreased the negative real and emotional impact of back orders and out-of-stock situations by providing more options for the customer
5. Created a competitive advantage for both the customer and our company

I won’t give away the competitive advantages created by telling you the services that we proposed, but I am meeting today with our largest customer to finalize the deployment plans and schedules for these new deliverables. The customer is thrilled, our C4 employees have a renewed sense of pride in their value and contribution to our company, OOBE has increased our competitive advantage within our market space, and financial benefit will accrue to both the customers and our company. I can’t think of a better end result.

You don’t have to be overly creative or innovative to make the Crooked Wire work for your company. Just solicit input from those that know your business and your customers the best… your employees. You’ll be amazed at what you discover.