Helen Mosher

Multimedia Storyteller and Digital Strategist

Writing

Information Overload

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An overflowing in-box is a sign that you’re not processing things into your organizational system efficiently.

(originally published at AdvisorToday.com, November 2006)

Whether you’re dealing with mail, email, voicemail, memos, forms, or any other physical or virtual “pile-able” materials, the best filing system in the world will not help you if you can’t get the information from that email, voicemail, etc., into those files.

So how do you get that information moving? Productivity consultant David Allen provides a comprehensive how-to in his best-selling book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. He opens the book with the startling assertion that “it’s possible for a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do and still function productively with a clear head and a positive sense of relaxed control.”

That may sound too good to be true, but the key is using your in-box wisely. “If you want to go for the gold, what you need to do is get your in-box zeroed out every 24 to 48 hours—paper as well as electronic,” says Allen.

What does it all mean?
Information that comes into your in-box is staged until you can assign it meaning, Allen explains. “You have to consider what I call the mighty meaning of ‘might-mean,’” he says. “Everything you receive might be something useful, might be something funny, might be something cool, might be something you don’t need at all—but you can’t tell right away.”

Here are some tips to help you discover that meaning and get your in-box moving:

1. Set aside a time to go through your in-box. Remember, it’s a processing station, not a storage depot, so you should be clearing it out regularly. But emptying your in-box doesn’t require that you complete everything in it. Rather, your goal is to figure out what everything is and how you’re going to deal with it.

2. Handle it top to bottom. If you handle the top thing first, and diligently process each item until you get to the bottom, then you’ll have an empty in-box. Jumping around tends to make you want to put things back in your in-box, and that’s a no-no.

3. Ask the right questions. As you process your in-box, evaluate it using the following series of questions:

  • a. Is this something you need to keep or something you should throw away? If you can throw it away, do so immediately.
  • b. For things you need to keep, is it something you need to act on or information you need to store? If you’re going to store it, put it in the appropriate place immediately.
  • c. For things you need to act on, is it something you can do in less than two minutes or something that will take more time? If you can do it in two minutes, go ahead and do it. If you can’t, add it to your “to-do” list, or whatever system you have for reminding you of actions.

4. Know when to pile. Sometimes you need piles, notes Allen, so that you can visually connect with the problem or project you’re working on. But don’t let unprocessed piles stack up. If you have several stacks of things to deal with, process all of them with the same diligence.

5. Create a “tickler” file. If you have to submit a form by a certain date next year, where do you put the form? The tickler file! Use 12 monthly folders and 31 daily folders to create a perpetual filing system. You can arrange your longer-term tasks by filing them into these folders. Each morning, retrieve your action reminders so that you can complete everything on schedule. Every time you empty a daily or monthly folder, move it to the back of the bunch so it becomes “next month” or “next year.”

Keep it flowing
It takes practice and determination to manage your in-box, but once you master it, you won’t drop details. “Your in-box is really just a holding station,” says Allen, who also has a free e-newsletter packed with productivity tips available at his website, www.davidco.com. “As long as you’re going to see the bottom of it in a reasonable amount of time, you can throw anything in there and let your brain relax until you can get to it.”

Save that Dance for Temple University Libraries Latest Archive

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PHILADELPHIA, MAY 23, 2002

GRANT HELPS LIBRARY RECORD DANCE HISTORY

If dance is poetry in motion, shouldn’t it be in a library?

It is now, thanks to the efforts of Mary Edsall, curator of the new Philadelphia Dance Collection at Temple (PDCAT), a collaborative effort of the University Libraries, the dance department at the Esther Boyer College of Music, and the local and regional dance community at large.

Established in 2001, PDCAT will document and preserve the history of Philadelphia dance and its contribution to the region’s culture.

“I spent two years working in the community, locating materials, talking with people and finding out if there was a need [for a dance collection], and there was,” said Edsall, a doctoral candidate in dance. “Our mission is preservation, documentation and artist education.”

The collection includes posters, playbills, programs, business records, sound recordings, press files, videotape and photographs. Dance itself is ephemeral, Edsall said, but through recordings and documentation, the collection allows people to study the history of dance through more than just the performance.

“It really runs the gamut. We might even want to get architectural and set designs; it’s interesting from a research point of view to see how people redesign spaces,” Edsall said. “Costume designs are works of art in themselves.

Edsall emphasized that PDCAT was going to be a very active archive. It is housed currently at Paley Library, as part of the University Libraries’ special collections department. Among the collections that have already been acquired are archives of Philadelphia Ballet, Philadanco, the Philadelphia Dance Alliance, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and Group Motion Dance Company.

“This is not a cellar-based collection that we found in someone’s basement and we’re just going to let gather dust,” said Edsall, formerly a curator of Harvard’s theater collection and a dance archivist at the Library of Congress. “With my experience, I have seen a lot of what works and doesn’t work. That’s invaluable to me as we’ve tried to build a collection here, so that we can create something that is unique for Philadelphia.”

Edsall’s devotion to Philadelphia dance comes from her background as an undergraduate at Stockton College in southern New Jersey. Despite being surrounded by teachers from New York (where she went to get her master’s degree, at Columbia). some of her fondest dance memories come from Philly. “I saw dance in Philadelphia all through the 1980s,” Edsall said. “I had an emotional connection with the city. Some of the first avant-garde I saw was here at the Painted Bride.”

One of Edsall’s first dance teachers at Stockton impressed upon her that there was a need to start collecting stories and records to document not only dance but also the lives of the dancers. That teacher later died of AIDS, she said. “We were losing the first generation of American modern dancers through natural causes, and then we were losing a whole separate tree ring to AIDS. That’s when I decided this is what I was going to do.”

Edsall holds a second master’s degree in library science from the University of Maryland, as well, which makes her the perfect curator of the library collection, according to University Librarian Maureen Pastine. “She has built quite a reputation in the field,” Pastine said. “Because of Mary’s expertise, she will be able to equip our staff to do the cataloging and eventual digitizing of visual archives, something very important in the world of dance.”

Edsall was likewise thrilled when Temple Libraries agreed to host PDCAT. “They didn’t only agree to host it, they were excited about it,” she said, “It belongs here.”

Temple is the natural home for the collection. The Esther Boyer College has one of only four doctoral dance programs in the country, and the University Libraries have experience dealing with Philadelphia-specific collections with its urban archives department. “This partnership is an exemplary model in which artists’ work becomes the basis for artistic production, research and community Pride,” said Luke Kahlich, dance department chair.

PDCAT was recently awarded a $30,000 grant from the Delmas Foundation and a $77,000 grant from Dance Advance, a program funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. These grants will help fund the curator position and facilitate the video documentation of several important local dancers. Other fundraising efforts are ongoing.

Edsall noted that the PDCAT would prove useful to dance students who wish to recreate or trace the history of particular ballets, for instance. Changes in choreography and style analysis are as much a part of dance research as is chronicling dance history.

“This collection belongs to everybody,” Edsall said. “This is a lifelong effort–as long as people dance, there will be the dance archive.”

Originally published May 23, 2002 in Temple Times. It was a commencement feature, running a bit longer than a normal Temple Times feature. Reprinted with permission.

 

A rewrite: What about Generation X?

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I originally had this published at The Episcopal Cafe last fall, but I have a lot of new readers coming in from the blogosphere who aren’t of my faith persuasion, and, sensitive to their range of spiritual beliefs, I’ve recast it for the secular audience.

I was talking to a friend about the challenges we face by virtue of being born after 1970–well, of being gen-xers in general, and being caught between the “Boomers” and the “Millennials,” and how this affects us in our professional and vocational lives. It came up last week on an email group, and I passed it along to several of my friends who are doing their part, in my humble opinion, to attract people like me to organizations that share a concern that their membership may be overly grey-haired.

Not to put too fine a point on my own grey hair, mind.

On Sept. 20, that group, which I can loosely describe as a group of 20/30-something peers approaching spirituality with a bit of a noncomformist edge,  met over margaritas to discuss, as one friend put it, “the theological / ecclesiological / missiological / tequiliological implications” of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; indeed, the Harry Potter series as a whole. Decidedly not what my parents would call a church, by any stretch of the imagination, but it suits me better to “practice” than to “worship.” And I got to thinking about it: why was this something I could be so down with, especially knowing that somewhere out there, another focus group was emerging to study my generation. Yawn.

The more I see things with top-down architectures being applied to us youngish people, the more I realize it doesn’t work. I’ve seen great ideas committee-ed to death all because people older and wiser than me must control every outcome of every plan of every initiative. And the more input I got from friends of mine, the more I realized:

Your invitation to me to participate doesn’t mean much if you don’t let my input—and leadership—count. And that’s what I’m hearing from frustrated 30-somethings who want to take on leadership positions but still get flak for being slackers, which we really are not anymore and we’d like some credit. I originally wrote this about being a member of the Episcopal Church, but it’s true of many other organizations. I worked at a financial services magazine that refused every pitch I made about Gen-X prospects because we’re not buyers. I work for an association that’s trying to figure out how to attract people under 40 because we’re not joiners. One friend of mine added to the conversation that she’d like to see “‘young adult’ stricken from the cultural lexicon–for reasons that resonate with me: mortgage, career, family. Heck, my son is almost 15, and pretty soon I’ll be the young adult parent of a young adult.

So, if we’re not young adults anymore, and nowhere near middle aged (if 50 is new the 30, we’re actually teenagers), what are we? How do you address the wide demographic of a narrow slice of the population that’s holding an awful lot of cards and generating absolutely no buzz? Sure, skip us. Move on to the millennials.

Here’s my take on things, though. Generation X is the bridge between the Boomers and the Millenials. We were raised with enough technology that we’re conversant in the ways that today’s teenagers interact on social networks. But we also know how to dial a phone. We’re all wired in varying ways, but each succeeding generation is increasingly plugged in. Let me put it another way. Historically, many immigrants have come to America speaking only their native language. Their children, however, speak both languages fluently. But I know many cases where the grandchildren don’t speak anything but English, and the middle generation must help the bookending generations understand one another–literally. So what happens if you skip the middle generation?

Here’s an example I ran across recently. Blogs are a publishing platform that were adopted quickly by compulsive writers with varying degrees of web-savvy. I’ve had so many that it’s a wonder I can populate them all with random Helen/Gallycat brain noise on a regular basis, so I wax and wane with all of them. They’re a great way to distribute content, to self-publish (no, really, I’m more prolific than Stephen King!), to bypass censorious editors, to think aloud, to take the podium, to brainstorm in community. So of course, many organizations, seeing the value of being able to share content with one another, decided to barrel full speed ahead with a blog. Occasionally, some would enlist me to help get the blog off the ground, since I know the technology. One, in particular, was group that was looking forward to getting some ideas out there.

But they didn’t listen to my input on certain key issues that ultimately doomed the blog. The problem was that every post had to be approved by a committee. I felt like Cassandra, trying to explain to them why it would inhibit participation on the blog. It died a few months later, neglected and forgotten.

So how is this an example of why we, Gen X, are the translators? We are well equipped to understand social media, which is going to be the communications medium of choice for today’s young people. How is this changing the face of communications? My connections in the news media say it’s as revolutionary as Gutenberg and the moveable type printing press. Ignore this opinion at your peril. Blogs are just a part of what that next generation is coming online with. We can speak their language. We can speak the Boomers’, too, though. Did I mention my teenage son? Yes? What about my aging parents? How’s your retirement portfolio?

So anyway, back to the matter at hand. Don’t skip Generation X. We’ve seen it more than once. We’ve heard you ask how to reach us, and seen you form committees hoping to find the magic pill that will get us back in to your idea of an organization. To be honest, you might not. At least, not through the means you’ve traditionally reached out to people. In the new world, you don’t just program and broadcast; you invite, share and participate. I understand that it’s difficult to turn a ship around, and for an organization of any size to embrace change quickly is a frightening prospect. But by the time you bust out your magnifying glass and whittle down to the details of the new media environment and position yourselves in the emerging economy and get all that together in a strategic plan for the new millennium that started when folks my age actually WERE still under 30…

It’s not enough to study us. Listen to us, yes, hire us, absolutely. But most importantly—

Join us.

The original, published Oct. 9, 2007, is here.

Writing for social media

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Because I come from a journalism background, I approach content management as a journalist. Not like a journalist, mind, but as one. And that’s a good thing, because part of my job is helping old-school journalists learn social media frames. But they have habits deeply ingrained, and trying to coach them into new media techniques is like herding cats. Now, I’m sure I’m not the first person to talk about these items, but it’s hard to find stuff on generating content in the socialmediasphere, and what sets it apart from traditional news writing–both online and print–for the organization that’s got both feet stuck firmly in Pulitzer world when all they want nowadays is a Webby.

So, without further ado, here are Helen’s handy tips for generating social media content.

  1. Share, share, share. I’ve found that there are two categories of share:
    • The “Hey, I found this, and it’s really cool” share (:found). This is when you’ve found a link that is absolutely so cool/useful/interesting/funny that you have to give it to all your friends. Viral marketing totally depends on the “I found this, and it’s really cool” share. Social bookmarking and tagging are aggregators of this kind of content.
    • The “Hey, I wrote this, and it’s interesting enough to me that I want to share it with you” share (:writ). Being a compulsive writer, I do a fair amount of this. Most corporate blogging (of the nonPR-fed variety) is made of this type of content, and quite a bit of “citizen journalism” gets created this way. Transmission of this type of content is facilitated by :found.

    Most social media outlets aren’t all one or the other but on a spectrum, depending on how the user engages the platform. For instance, del.icio.us allows you to add comments to a link to give the link context. Blogs provide both ends of the spectrum, allowing armchair pundits to write essays about each other’s essays and content editors to pick and choose :found stuff for quick links. Twitter wants your content but limits you to short bursts of text, as does Facebook’s “status” update.

  2. Comment boxes do not a blog make. The read/write functionality is there, but if you post a 700 word article from your publication and bury a comment box at the bottom of it, you’re less likely to get comments. Rather, keep that content elsewhere on your site–a webzine, perhaps? Use the blog to tease readers over to that content in one of these or similar ways:
    • An interactive table of contents, with links to the stories and 30-word teaser decks to help readers choose what to click to. This can be a mirror of your email newsletter, but worked this way it becomes a “pull” rather than a “push.”
    • An introductory paragraph from the author of the article, providing context for the story before linking to it. After all, authors always have a story about the story. “This article was hard to write because the subject had gone deep underground. But we finally were able to reach Puxatawney Phil, and you can see the results here.”
    • The three most important paragraphs from the top of the article, usually the first three paragraphs, with a “click for more” link underneath it. Great way to digest news articles.
    • Your own introduction, explaining why you like the article. Compare this to the editor-in-chief’s page in a regular magazine, where they give shout-outs to articles in the month. “Don’t miss Pepe Le Pew’s heartbreaking tale of love and loss on Page 94!”
  3. Use first and second person. You want to engage the reader, so go ahead and speak to him or her directly and encourage the reader to answer. For instance, this is a new blog of mine with an initial readership of zero. How am I attracting readers? By going out and introducing myself. That’s first person. How am I engaging readers? By talking to you. Hi, there, you. That’s second person. Hey, you in the third row, I’m talking to you! Are you listening to me? I suppose that’s encouraging you to answer, but… no.
    More encouraging would be for me to ask you a question that leads to you writing your own top 5 points for creating social media content. It’s not just blog posts, either. Today I was tasked with rewriting our mission statement to fit in that little block of text on Second Life for “Group Charter.” I did this by recasting it into second person.
  4. Determine what content you’re already generating that can be leveraged in social media. As an organization, you probably have plenty of content channels that you didn’t even know you could leverage. (Leverage is an obnoxious word, but using it causes CEO faces to light up.) Are you doing training functions that could be podcasted or webinar-ated? Are you passing around links to colleagues that you could blog to your members? Is there syndicated material on, say, a sister organization’s website that you can capture through a webfeed?
  5. Learn to let go. Part of generating content is getting more content from your users. And that means you’ll probably get some oddball typoese on your site. That might mean that u needs 2 bkum flooent n lolcat & sms just to make sure nothing inappropriate crosses your site (er, need to become fluent in “LOLcat” and text message shorthand). Today, I sat through an amazing webinar about all the potential in social media for publications. The pressing concern? “What will we do when the comments don’t meet our style specifications?” Oh, the horror!
    Well, here’s one thing I do know. Two, actually. 1. As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. This is known as Godwin’s Law. There’s a corollary that I’m not sure has been made quite as explicit, but another truth is that 2. As an online discussion grows longer, the probability that someone will invoke one’s lack of spelling or grammatical talent approaches one. (It usually results in Godwin’s Law being invoked, anyway, because the person so invoked will usually respond with “Grammer Nazi.” Sic.) It’s rather like the debate over serial commas. Don’t sweat it. Create clear terms of service and reserve the right to edit that really egregious misspelling of “public,” but your readers are smart enough to know that user content is… just that. User content. And they really didn’t come to get graded on their participation.

Well, anyways, off I go contributing content. I have no idea whether it’s useful or not, but I suppose at some point someone will find it and tell me that I’m completely borked for writing this when it’s been done ten times over better elsewhere and link link link for examples. I left things out, too, like write short bits and if it gets longer than 600 words or so, you better have bullets and subheads breaking up the text. But honestly, I’m keeping these notes down for the benefit of the presentations I know I’m going to have to give. And in the spirit of social media, I’m all about the share, share share.

Serving Up Success

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Every recipe for a thriving practice has one key ingredient: excellent customer service. Keep this ingredient top of mind, and you will make every transaction the catch of the day.

By Helen Thompson

(originally published in 2006 at advisortoday.com)

I don’t know much about fish. I never liked it as a kid, never acquired a taste for it as an adult, and never once clipped a recipe for fish or seafood out of a magazine. So when I found myself hovering in front of the seafood counter at a local supermarket recently, I was amused when the guy behind the counter—Mike, he said—smiled and asked what I was looking for. Normally, I answer the “Can I help you” line with “Just looking,” but that answer didn’t fit this question. So, I explained that I was thinking about trying my hand at cooking some fish for my seafood-loving fiancé, but had no idea what to get.

Excellent customer service is the underpinning of any successful enterprise.

About 15 minutes later, I walked out of the store with a neatly wrapped bundle of orange roughy. It wasn’t what I thought I had been looking for, and I spent more money than I had planned, but it ended up being the perfect dinner, and I was back the following week for my next round of cooking lessons. Mike the seafood guy had made a particular impression on me by using specific techniques to make the sale—and won my loyalty, to boot.

The same steps that Mike followed form the core of what I heard from financial advisors and customer-service consultants as I prepared to write this article: Excellent customer-service is the underpinning of any successful enterprise.

Learn from experience
Begin to create your customer-service plan by thinking about where you’ve had really good customer service. What made an impression? What brought you back? What made you feel valued? Write these things down, because you’ll use them to formulate your customer-service plan.

The need for documentation
Writing down the plan serves two key purposes. One, it allows you to communicate your expectations to your entire team. No matter how large or small your practice is, your leadership will help everyone become more conscientious of where they have received good service and how they can put those ideas to work for you, according to Craig Cochran, author of Becoming a Customer-Focused Organization. Secondly, once you have your “dream service” documented, it becomes easier to check yourself, implement best practices and make sure you’re catching customers.

Educate your team
Leadership is tremendously important for good customer service. Cochran’s list of customer-service skills that are leadership driven includes employee attitudes, training and discipline, as well as organizational communications. “It’s easy to lose customer focus,” says Cochran, a customer-service coach who serves as North Metro regional manager with Georgia Tech’s Economic Development Institute. “Communication about the customers—what works and what doesn’t—needs to come from top management on a regular basis.”

The customer-service plan you create from your own customer-service experiences will allow you to communicate your expectations to your team. Provide educational opportunities such as training seminars or mentorship programs to help your team improve, share what you know works and encourage your team to do the same.

Another important leadership element of customer service is the need to recognize where your team’s strengths and weaknesses are. After all, you don’t want the person from the floral shop or the grocery stock clerk telling you the difference between tilapia and mahi-mahi. “When you really do a good job at customer service, you end up getting too much work,” says Marc Bregman of Bregman Financial Services in Lodi, Calif. “Then you have to hire more staff to keep everything under control. But more help won’t make you more money: You have to hire the right help.”

Cochran notes that this is an often-overlooked aspect of customer service, but getting it right allows the team to focus on clients rather than on internal procedures and other things that aren’t important. “It seems counterintuitive, but proves itself again and again,” he says. “When leadership focuses on people—what they need, what information is critical, what tools are necessary and what type of development they require—it really facilitates their ability to focus on the customer.”

Your clients can get financial information from many places: the media, the internet, family members and other advisors. What sets you apart?

Be the best at what you excel in
One of the things that really impressed me about Mike the seafood guy is that he really knew his stuff and used his expertise to help me. Your clients expect the same from you. They can get financial information from lots of different places: the media, the internet, family members or other advisors. What sets you apart? You can start with branding—strong corporate logos and marketing packages that help your name stand out will help clients remember your name first. But shouldn’t the converse be true? Remember their names, too!

Carl Fellhauer, LUTCF, of Trusted Financial Advisors in Colorado Springs, Colo., addresses this by packaging his know-how in a personalized, printed and bound presentation. “Even if it’s just an answer to a simple question, they’ll get the answer in a folder with their name and today’s date printed on it,” he says. “We want them to know that each meeting is that important to us.”

What will really set you apart is your ability to “come around the counter.” Demonstrating your knowledge while fulfilling your clients’ needs (and making the process look effortless) is a key to earning their loyalty.

Systematize your customer-service practices
Everyone wants to feel special, but this presents a different challenge: How can you treat all of your customers right and do so consistently? Time management is a tremendous part of customer service, and solving that challenge is easy: Systematize it. “When there’s no process or system in place and you’re working without a set of guidelines, providing good service becomes really difficult,” says Tonya Mathison, a MassMutual agent in Walnut Creek, Calif. “Taking the time to set up your process is just as important as implementing the process.”

Start with your customer-service plan and figure out how you want to go about implementing it. You can determine what you want to do and set up a process to formalize it, or you can identify what you’re already doing and document that process so that you can delegate more effectively. Once you have that list, it’s not only a tool to help your team provide great service, it’s also a great way to let your clients know what to expect, according to Fellhauer, a member of NAIFA-Colorado Springs. “What the client expects is based on a conversation we have early on in the interview process,” he says. “They won’t get disappointed because we review those expectations every year.”

Mathison, who also lays everything out for her clients—from the very first interview—notes that customer service is a difficult thing to systematize. One of the ways she handles this is by following up every meeting with a thank-you note. “After all, they’ve taken the time out of their busy schedule to come meet with me,” says Mathison, a member of NAIFA-Mt. Diablo (Calif.) and of Women in Financial Services. “So after every meeting, I send them a handwritten note, and I always reference something that we talked about. That shows that we’re listening.”

In addition, she keeps a box of greeting cards ready for whatever client event comes up. “It has every kind of card you can think of: wedding cards, baby cards, thank-you notes, blank notes, something I find that I think is pretty,” she says. “If any occasion comes up, I have a card for it. And it works!”

It’s not about what you want
No matter how much I am starting to appreciate fish, I have yet to want anything to do with salmon. But there’s always someone who insists I don’t know what I’m missing. Make sure you are not one of those people. You can set up your service standards according to your favorite customer-service experiences, but always treat your customers the way they want to be treated.

That means getting to know them. One of the hardest exercises I ever did as a retail bookstore manager was teach my staff how to ask the right questions. Switching from “Can I help you?” to “Can I help you find something today?” still leads inexorably to “Nope, I’m just looking.” Train yourself and your staff to ask open-ended questions, which lead to genuine conversations with your customers. Since you’re in the business of cultivating relationships instead of book-selling, it’s a good idea to take notes on what you learn so that each time you touch base with your customers, you can speak to their lives directly.

For a great how-to on asking your clients open-ended questions, check out A Little More Conversation by Paul Calendrillo.

Cultivate thoughtfulness
For Mathison, getting to know her clients reminds her of dating. As she moves through her initial meetings with prospects, she has a structure in place: introduction, discovery and fact gathering. Each meeting presents an opportunity for a new phase of learning about the client, and she makes an extra effort to get details that she can act on during future meetings. “If they put cream in their coffee, I know that,” she says.

Train yourself and your staff to ask open-ended questions, which lead to genuine conversations with your customers.

Think of this as an ongoing process that can serve two purposes. One, getting to know your clients allows you to provide them with customized service, always a bonus. But there’s also that tricky matter of getting feedback from your clients. Forget the surveys and the focus groups, says Cochran. “Brainstorm where you’re already talking to customers, and leverage those interactions for getting feedback,” he says. “Scaled surveys in which they rank you from 1 to 5 on professionalism and friendliness have a lot of failure modes and are hard to respond to. For instance, when you get a 3.75 on friendliness, how do you take action on that?”

Rather than go through the process of creating and sending a survey, Cochran says to build a few minutes into the end of your appointment and ask one or more of these questions, the answers to which you can then use to formulate a course of action:

  • What have we done well lately?
  • What have we done not-so-well lately?
  • What would you like to see us do differently?

Give a little something extra
Did I mention that Mike the seafood guy gave me a $2 per pound discount on the orange roughy I bought and threw in an extra fillet? I would have bought it anyway, but he wished me a long and happy marriage and joked that it was my wedding gift from him. He’d picked up on the word fiancé and made sure that I knew he was paying attention. He’s earned my business, in spite of the really fancy gourmet market that opened around the corner not too long ago. You can do the same for your clients.

Mathison has had clients’ cars washed during their meetings and has sent breakfast baskets to clients in major life transitions. “I just try to listen for extra special things I can do for people,” she says. “But that’s part of their becoming friends as well as clients, and getting to know them on a personal level.”

Cochran is quick to note that you don’t need to contrive a friendship, but giving that little extra or providing additional service is one of the best ways to start getting referrals. “People want to do business with their friends,” he says. “It’s impossible to be friends with everybody, but if you’re the friendly face offering extra value or added services, they will automatically think of you when the need comes up.”

The funny thing about providing extra value is that it’s often something you don’t realize is valuable. “As demographics shift in the financial-services industry, that means there’s a whole bunch of people who may not be as educated on the basic information as you would expect them to be,” says Cochran. “Educating them is nothing but opportunity.”

Remember to set your own limits, though. “When it comes to customer service, we provide world-class service to people,” says Fellhauer. “But I don’t take phone calls at home or while on vacation. I do let them know they can send me an email and we’ll take care of it. That’s one of the reasons we let people know, up front, what they can expect from us.”

Stuff happens
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but eventually something will go awry. At the least, your staff is inconvenienced, but if there’s a serious problem, ducking it will undermine your client relationship. “I could just take the stand that we did what we were supposed to, and if it doesn’t go through, then it’s not my problem,” says Bregman, a member of NAIFA-Stockton and chair of the association’s Young Advisors Team. “But it is my problem. ”

Take it as an opportunity to shine. “Smart organizations learn from their mistakes,” says Cochran. “If someone is motivated enough to contact you and tell you something went wrong, that is the biggest opportunity any organization has for establishing loyalty.” Jump on what they say, and once you’ve established that it’s a legitimate complaint, take action to make it right, he says.

And make sure you always follow up. “Once you’ve taken action, be sure to let the complainant know what you did,” he says. “If he doesn’t realize that something’s been fixed, there might as well have been no fix. It’s all about perception.”

For more of Cochran’s tips on how to develop your leadership-driven customer- service skills, including downloadable checklists and surveys, check out his article Keeping Your Clients Front and Center.

It’s common sense
You knew a lot of this stuff already. Let’s face it: Customer service isn’t something that generates earth-shattering developments. You can imagine the headlines now: “Research proves, once and for all, that customers want to be treated well!” That’s what we all want. But even the most seasoned customer-service professional sometimes needs a refresher course from time to time. You have the opportunity to be a leader in this arena by helping your staff become your front line of customer-service experts. After all, you never know when someone who looks suspiciously like me will walk in looking lost, just waiting for the question that will elicit, “Well, my seafood-loving fiancé and I are getting married soon and buying a house, and I’d like to try my hand at getting our financial shop in order, but I have no idea where to start.”

Because right now, I’m just looking.

The metaphors in faith

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It’s fascinating to me that one of the best explanations I’ve seen of scripture as metaphor comes from a book with a metaphor in its title. And it also occurs to me that perhaps the reason extreme conservatives see scripture completely differently than I do is that they cannot understand metaphor. In the secular world, these are the people who do not grok fantasy and often eschew fiction, considering them at best unbelievable, and at worst lies.

But the title of the book, “The Heart of Christianity,” gives me something to point to when someone doesn’t understand metaphor. Does Christianity have a heart, with atria and ventricles, cardiac tissue and valves (never mind that there are mitral valves in your heart)? Of course not.

It seems to me oddly fitting that a literal heart should wither and die. But a metaphorical heart, whether Poe’s telltale one or the ones we put as central to our dearest notions, beats strong and true throughout time.

I’d like to quote a few things from this book. Its author, Marcus J. Borg, is the Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University.

When people ask, “Is that story true?” they often mean, “Did it happen?” (50)

I was recently asked this by a third grader in bible school class. “Is that story true?” And I, having been back to church after a yearlong hiatus only one week, stuttered, “It’s true in the Bible.” An inadequate answer, really, for what I wanted to convey. At the time, I parsed it as “It’s true if you believe it to be true,” that faith is what sustains us to believe the unbelievable. And then I read this passage, and came to understand that what I was struggling to convey is:

It is truth.

Not the truth, not true, but truth. But I also understood something else as a result of another thing Borg has to say: True does not always mean factual. That’s a stretch for me even in my literal mode and antagonizes everything I “know” as a journalist. But Scripture seen metaphorically becomes true (emphasis mine):

The Genesis stories of creation are seen as Israel’s stories of creation, not as God’s stories of creation. they therefore have no more of a divine guarantee to be true in a literal-factual sense than do the creation stories of other cultures. When they are seen as metaphorical narratives, not factual accounts, they are ‘myths’ in Thomas Mann’s sense of the word; Stories about the way things never were, but always are. They are thus really true, even though not literally true. (52)

Think of the difference between literature and fiction, or instance. What makes a piece of fiction become literature? Its truth.

One of the first things that my friends point to as evidence that religion is a bunch of crock is the utter unbelievability of the creation, fall from Eden, the Flood and so on in the old testament, and the christmas and easter stories in the new testament. On the other end of the spectrum are those whose fanaticism rivals the secular skepticism: people who take the bible so literally that their world really is only 6-10,000 years old and God must have a right hand because Jesus is really sitting at it.

Somewhere between those two extremes is something that I will call truth. Not The Truth. Not True. But Truth.