Will Bachman 00:01
Welcome to Unleashed I’m your host Will Bachman. If you were making a living driving a taxi or an Uber, what might you do to optimize your tips beyond being polite and helping to load baggage and getting to a destination through most efficient route, Here are six additional ideas, and I’m sure you could come up with some better ones. Number one, give out free water bottles. I’ve seen perhaps 10% of Uber drivers do this. Number two, ask the customer what kind of music if any they would like to listen to during the ride. I have been asked this by exactly one driver over the past two decades. Number three, have umbrellas available for purchase. Number four, learn a bit of history of the city and offer to provide some commentary on historical sites during the drive. This could be particularly effective with out of town passengers picked up at the airport. After all tourists pay to ride around one of those double decker buses with a canned monologue. Number five, provide a rundown of all the plays currently running. Number six, have a couple 10 foot phone charging cables plugged in and available to passengers in the backseat. I’m not sure why more taxi drivers don’t try strategies such as these, but I have two theories. Number one, drivers have tried them. But the additional tips they generate aren’t worth the additional effort. And number two, some drivers do use such strategies. But those individuals quickly earn enough to move on to a different line of work. So we have a survivorship bias towards drivers who don’t think to do these things. The common theme of these six ideas above is that while they have, well, they don’t have anything to do with the core function of the driver, which is getting us safely from A to B, they nevertheless would impact our experience of the service. And that’s the introduction to this podcast mini series. Over the next five episodes, I’m going to discuss some ideas of what we as consultants can do to improve the client experience in working with us. The actual answers we come up with the deliverable, the insights, the recommendation, that’s the equivalent of the pure transportation of getting from point A to point B. But there’s a lot we can do to impact the client experience and turn a humdrum project into something memorable and worth talking about. I’m going to use a five part framework that I learned from David A. Fields. And if you haven’t already, I strongly encourage you to read his book The irresistible consultants guide to winning clients and sign up for David’s weekly blog posts at David A. Fields calm and he was the guest on episode number one of this show, so check that out as well. In 2018, David and I ran several workshops on client experience in which several dozen independent management consultants participated. And in the next five episodes, I’ll provide some takeaways we came up with some suggested steps we can take in each of the following five phases of a project which are number one, the pursuit or proposal phase number two, the onboarding slash kickoff phase. Number three, the actual project execution itself. Number four, the project wrap up and number five post project. If you sign up for the weekly Unleashed email, you’ll get a checklist that includes all the suggestions from all five of these upcoming episodes. And to sign up, visit umbrex.com slash Unleashed. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this mini series. You can email me at unleashed@umbrex.com. And if you find this miniseries helpful, please share it with a friend or share a link on social media or review the show on iTunes that helps other people find the show. Thanks for listening