Lesson Proper for Week 2 (Quality Service)

Customer Diversity: Providing Great Customer Experience Across Cultures

The world is getting smaller. Nations and communities are becoming more diverse. Due to advances in
communication, the spread of e-commerce and the ease of travel, many businesses today can expand to cross
cultural and geographic boundaries. With the rapid changes in technology, modern day customers have grown
comfortable with shopping online from whichever corner of the world they like, and e-commerce businesses may
easily receive orders from virtually anywhere.

Professionalism in customer service means different things to different people, but all of them are worthy of your
time, respect and attention. When customer service representatives acknowledge and respect diversity, they have
a greater opportunity to attract and retain diverse customers, build better rapport with them and increase
customer satisfaction.

Respecting customer diversity is more than simply good manners

We all know the old golden rule: treat others the way you want to be treated. But simply treating customers with
the same courtesy and dignity is no longer enough in this shrinking world. In order to truly succeed, you need to
grow beyond the “one size fits all” mentality and learn to understand and respond appropriately to the
preferences of customers from varying ethnic, social, and economic backgrounds. In this truly global economy,
skills like cultural awareness, flexibility, and effective communication are critical for customer service
representatives to properly deal with the expectations of people from different cultures. Kelly McDonald, the
author of “Crafting the Customer Experience For People Not Like You“, emphasizes that by creating a customer
experience that addresses a specific customer group’s needs and wants, you can differentiate yourself from your
competition and grow your business with new, incremental customers.

It doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Just learn how to create positive experiences for those groups of customers “who
are not like you” by letting a specific customer segment know that you understand and are responding to its needs.
And you’ll get a great opportunity to shine and develop a significant competitive edge.

Making cross-cultural customer interactions simple

Whether your customer interactions carried out by phone, via email, in Live Chat or in person, there are some
common sense principles that could significantly improve service.

1. Reinforce importance of recognizing customer diversity - Every business has a culture, and respecting diversity
should be one of the primary values guiding your team. Make sure all your employees show genuine sense of
fairness and goodwill, and take customer requests seriously, no matter what their race, religion, social status, or
other characteristics are. No condescending.

2. Know your customers and seek out culture-specific knowledge - The nature of your clientele is more likely
than ever to consist of people from all corners of the world. Whenever it’s possible, spend time to learn about
where your customers are from, and get a basic knowledge of relevant world views, values and beliefs.

3. Listen actively and recognize patterns for communicating - Customer service representatives with good
listening skills can quickly build rapport, effectively address the issue and suggest a timely solution. A good practice
here would be to pay attention to customer communication traits and mirror them to increase the effectiveness of
interaction, for example, slow down or speed up their speech rate, use the same terminology, and paraphrase
what is said by the customer to show that their needs are being heard.

4. Create a welcoming environment by having a diverse workforce - Hiring bilingual employees who not only
speak some other language but also have unique insights into different cultures would help create a fantastic
customer experience. Kelly McDonald in “Crafting the Customer Experience For People Not Like You” puts it clear:
When you hire people who are not like you, you’ll see your business grow with new customers very quickly.

5. Share your experiences with colleagues to work out consistent approaches - Cultural diversity is a real gift for
customer service reps. Dealing with customers from other cultures provides a great opportunity to learn from
others and grow in our humanity. You can learn from your customers, and you certainly can learn from your
colleagues.

Divergence and Convergence

Divergence and convergence are modes of thinking, mostly used by design thinkers as a creative process to define
and solve problems in a business/real-world context.

Let’s talk about what “divergence and convergence” actually means. Divergence is a mode of thinking where
you’re using your right brain to explore things without judging them. You’re deferring your judgement until later.
Divergence is about quantity; it’s about freedom to express your ideas without having to worry about what to do
with them or what others might think of them in the moment.

Convergence, on the other hand, is a mode of thinking where you’re using your left brain to analyze things and
think them through logically, so to speak. Convergence is about quality. This is the mode in which you’re evaluating
ideas for what they are.

Convergence is about analysis, critique, judgement, and feedback. Ideas that might seem ridiculous at the start (in
the divergent phase) become more realistic when you spend a few minutes in each phase, and this works for any
creative process.

Divergence is purely a right-brained activity. Convergence is left-brained. When you’re diverging, you’re giving
yourself the space to create with or without constraints. You’re making something and deferring judgement for
later. In that moment, you’re just focused on making that thing.

Divergence is about creating choices. Convergence is about making decisions.

More than anything, divergence is about seeing the options or possibilities, while convergence is about evaluating
those possibilities with a given set of criteria (defined by you), deciding what the “right” choices are based on those
criteria, and executing those choices. Because you can’t do it all (nor do you want to), you must practice less, but
better.

The process skills of divergence and convergence also serve as the foundation of the Explore, Evaluate, Execute
approach towards solving problems creatively. Diverge = Explore, Converge = Evaluate

+ Execute.

Divergence can often feel exploratory, abstract, experimental, and optimistic. Some may even find practicing this
skill feels foggy since they may be more accustomed to operating on a plan.
You can also think of divergence and convergence as a more abstract way of looking at problems, while Explore,
Evaluate, Execute is a more tangible way of solving them. This is not to say that the former is any less worthwhile.
If anything, it’s more worthwhile since it forms the foundation on which Explore, Evaluate, Execute is based.

So why are the principles of divergence and convergence important?

Here’s the thing: unless you’re prepared to be wrong (divergence), you’ll never come up with anything original
(convergence). You can’t have a good idea unless you have a lot of bad ideas. By practicing divergent thinking, you
give yourself the permission to be wrong. You say to yourself that it’s okay to be wrong, and you’re required to be
wrong. How else will you come up with anything worthwhile? You won’t. When we practice these process skills of
divergent and convergent thinking, we let the process of doing the work determine the outcome of that work.
Unless we know what problem to solve, how can we solve it? We can’t.

Solving the right problem is more important than solving them the right way. This process helps us solve, and more
importantly, define problems in the first place. These “problems” can, of course, vary from personal to
organizational level.

The Canadian designer, Bruce Mau wrote: Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the
process, we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where
we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

How can we practice the process skills of divergence and convergence in our daily work life?

Let’s learn by way of example how we can practice these process skills: Let’s take the example of a writer. A writer
writes (without judgement) everything he knows about a topic. This would be an example of active divergence.
The focus is just on writing and nothing else. He is not passing judgement; he is simply writing from his ready
stream-of-consciousness until he’s exhausted his creative energies.

When he’s finished writing, he can then review what he has written. In other words, he can then edit his writing, or
he can do more research to fill in the gaps in his writing. The problem occurs when he tries to write (diverge) and
edit (converge) at the same time, which never works.

When you’re making something, make. When you’re critiquing it, critique. Just don’t do them both at the same
time. It’s counterproductive and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because it follows the principles of divergent and
convergent thinking, which in turn is aligned with the way our right and left brains naturally work, but you can’t do
something and be critical of it at the same time.

I also don’t mean to suggest that we diverge once, and then we converge, and that’s all there is to it. It’s a series of
interplay between the two. You’re intermittently shifting from one to the other. It is non- linear. The important
thing to remember is to keep them separate. When you’re diverging, you’re just doing that. When you’re
converging, that’s your only focus.

Show up every day. Give yourself the permission to be divergent and exploratory. Unless you do that, you can’t
make anything great. One way to do that is to write Morning Pages every day for 25 minutes. Then, figure out later
what you want to do with it. The point is our minds are for having ideas and not for keeping them. The problem
occurs when we try to think and do at the same time.

Gordon MacKenzie wrote in Orbiting the Giant Hairball:

Allow time — without immediate, concrete evidence of productivity — for the miracle of creativity to

occur.

You can also use these skills to do things that matter to you on a weekly basis. For instance, before the start of the
week, you can do a “brain dump” of sorts to make a list of everything that has your attention (diverge). Once
you’ve written such a list, then figure out what each thing means to you. Once you have a final list of things you
want to do for the week, then prioritize and do them during the week (converge). Having a Trusted System can
help you organize and act on this data.

I wrote about tools that facilitate divergent thinking in Tools for Knowledge Workers. These would be considered
as “emotional tools”.

Ideation tools (such as mind mapping, visual thinking): These are what I call “divergence” tools. They are also your
“thinking” tools. They’re great for project planning, idea generation and discovery, and getting clarity on ideas.
These tools also help you understand ideas/concepts, help you understand the relationships between those
ideas/concepts, and help you see those ideas as part of a larger system.

The tools you can use to facilitate convergent thinking (logical/analytical tools) may vary widely. The only criteria
for a convergent tool would be that it has to help you evaluate your choices objectively in some way. Here’re a
couple examples:

· Any tool that you can use to rank or to give a rating of some kind can be used to evaluate your choices.
Using selective criteria with grid is an example of such a tool.

· Your list manager is another example of a convergent tool. You’ve previously captured things that had your
attention (diverge) to figure out what they mean to you and what to do with them later (converge). In fact, you’re
practicing both of these process skills with your list manager.

Here’s how you can use these process skills in your knowledge work:

· You can’t “prioritize” (converge) until you know everything you have on your plate (diverge); the reverse
doesn’t work.

· Capture things on the go in your list manager first (diverge), and decide later what to do with it (converge).

· For weekly planning: at the end of the week, diverge on a list of things you want to work on by the end of
next week, then converge by deciding which ones to work on and schedule them in your calendar.

· How do you decide what you’re doing today (if you don’t already have a running list of things you need to do
at some point)? You make a list of everything you have on your mind that you think needs to be done today, then
you figure out what you actually want to do from this list, and skip the rest. Unless you actually
know everything you have on your plate, how can you do anything at all?

· Run effective meetings: start out by creating an agenda by involving members to participate to figure out
what you want to discuss, then prioritize the list and figure out how you want to set it up (with constraints).

· Process email quickly from the inbox (diverge), then batch-process all emails in relevant folders, such as
Action, Hold, etc. (converge).
· Use a mind map to explore anything by way of ideation (diverge). This is also a great way to plan your
projects.

Here are some examples from our daily lives:

· Writing Morning Pages is a great example of practicing these process skills. When you write Morning Pages
(diverge) to find out what has your attention, you can later decide what to do with it (converge).

· Listen to others (diverge) before giving them solicited feedback (converge).

· Flip through TV channels to figure out what you want to watch (diverge) before settling on a channel
(converge).

· Develop your own taste in art, whether it be films, music, books, or what have you. You need to explore a
variety of media in order to figure out your own tastes. For instance, you have to listen to a lot of different music
(diverge) to find the ones you like (converge); ditto with books, films…anything of interest, really.

· See all the food choices at a dinner party before picking and choosing what you want to eat. You can’t eat it
all, so pick and choose by exploring your options first, and then decide on what to eat.

· When you reflect in the evening, ask yourself: what did I do today? What’s the best thing that happened
today? You’ll see that unless you ask the first question (diverge), you’ll have trouble coming up with an answer to
the second question (converge).

GLOBAL MARKETING STRATEGY - STANDARDIZATION VS. ADAPTATION

Taking your business global and successfully selling your products and services in international markets can pose
many challengers. Through the years we have witnessed many multinational companies make costly errors when
attempting to sell to a global audience. These errors are primarily explained by a lack of understanding of how
Standardization and Adaptation play in international markets. This lesson examines the issues of standardization
(global strategy) and adaptation (customization) in global marketing strategy and suggests methods that can guide
multinational companies compete effectively and efficiently within the international markets.

Standardization vs. Adaptation

The first view is the standardization standpoint (as proposed by Jain, 1989; Levitt, 1983). According to these
authors, supporters of standardization believe that there is a union of cultures with similar environmental and
customer demand around the globe. They argue that trade barriers are getting lower and that technological
advances and firms are displaying a global orientation in their strategy. As they believe, creating one strategy for
the global market and standardizing the marketing mix elements can achieve consistency with customers as well as
lower costs. Levitt (1983) argues that companies that are managed well have moved away from customizing items
to offering globally standardized products that are advanced, functional, reliable and low priced. According to him,
companies can achieve long-term success by concentrating on what everyone wants rather than worrying about
the particulars of what everyone thinks they might like.

On the contrary, supporters of the international adaptation approach, emphasize the importance of customization.
The fundamental basis of the adaptation school of thought, is that when entering a foreign market one must
consider all environmental factors and constraints such as language, climate, race, occupations, education, taste,
different laws, cultures, and societies (Czinkota and Ronkainen, 1998). However, researchers have identified
important source of constraints that are difficult to measure such as cultural differences rooted in history,
education, religion, values and attitudes, manners and customs, aesthetics as well as differences in taste, needs
and wants, economics and legal systems. According to Vrontis and Thrassou supporters of this approach believe
that “multinational companies should have to find out how they must adjust an entire marketing strategy and,
including how they sell, distribute it, in order to fit new market demands” (2007). It is important to alter the
marketing mixed and marketing strategy to suit local tastes, meet special market needs and consumers non-
identical requirements (Vrontis and Thrassou,2007).

Advantages and Disadvantages of Standardization

Standardization and international uniformity has many advantages. For one, people can expect the same level of
quality of any specific brand anywhere around the world. Standardization also supports positive consumer
perceptions of a product (Products and International Marketing, n.a). If a company enjoys strong brand identity
and a strong reputation, choosing a standardized approach might work to its benefit. Positive word-of-mouth can
mean an increase in sales around the globe. Another advantage includes cost reduction that gives economies of
scale. Selling large quantities of the same, non-adapted product and buying components in bulk can reduce the
cost-per-unit. Other advantages related to economies of scale include improved research and development,
marketing operational costs, and lower costs of investment. In addition, standardization is a reasonable strategy at
a time where trade barriers are coming down. Finally, following a standardized approach helps companies aim
focus on a uniformed marketing mix specifically focusing on one single product, leaving enough room for quality
improvement. By emphasizing on one uniformed product, staff can be trained to enhance the quality of the
product attracting manufacturers to invest in technology and equipment that can “safeguard the quality of the
standardized product offering” (Products and International Marketing, n.a).

Standardization, however, poses a number of disadvantages. As mentioned previously, different markets mean
different preferences. Selling one unified product lacks uniqueness. This allows competition to gain market share
through tailoring their products to meet the need of a specific market/segment. Since different markets have
different needs and tastes, by using the standardized approach, companies can become vulnerable. One example is
Walmart’s failure in entering global markets. The retail giant faced many challenges when entering foreign markets
such as Germany, Brazil, South Korea and Japan as it discovered that its formula for success in the USA (low prices,
inventory control and a large collection of merchandise) did not translate to markets with their own discount
chains and shoppers with different habits. The biggest problem was that Walmart, a uniquely powerful American
enterprise, tried to impose its values around the world. In particular, Walmart’s experience in Germany, where it
lost hundreds of millions of dollars since 1998, “has become a sort of template for how not to expand into a
country” (Landler and Barbaro, 2006).

Another disadvantage is that it depends largely upon economies of scale (Products and International Marketing,
n.a). Naturally, businesses that are global manufacture in many counties. This can pose a problem since a number
of countries implement trade barriers such as the USA and the European Union (Products and International
Marketing, n.a). In this case, adaptation is predestined.
Nevertheless, although the standardization approach is more common, its adoption is not unconditional, as
proposed by Douglas and Wind (1987). The authors explain that standardization strategy increases a company’s
performance. However, this is only true for companies in which competition takes place in a global range, such as
consumer durables, electronics, fashion, luxury goods, perfumes, etc. In these cases, the same product can be sold
throughout all markets. On the contrary, there are other industries in which the same does not apply and this must
be considered.

Consumer nondurables, including food products, are the most sensitive to differences in national tastes and habits,
making them more likely to need changes for various markets. For example, Unilever saw an opportunity among
low-income consumers in India who wanted to buy the company’s high-end detergents and personal care
products, but couldn’t afford them. In response, the company developed a low-cost packaging product and other
options that allowed it to offer dramatically less expensive options. This flexibility not only opened a new market
for the company, but also allowed it to develop brand loyalty that consumers could take with them when their
income increased and they could afford higher-end products from the same manufacturer.

Businesses should answer questions related to the marketing mix such as “what do we intend to standardize?” and
“Do we standardize customer service and product support, marketing communications, pricing, and channels of
distribution?” The answers to these questions should neither be all standardized nor all adapted. It should be a
balance of both.

Striking The Right Balance

Both approaches appear to be rational, logical and coherent, highlighting the advantages and benefits that a
multinational company could gain by using either approach. Yet, when multinational companies exert all

their efforts on the extreme position of either approach, they often become unfeasible and incoherent. The truth
is, marketing for multinationals does not lie in either of these two opposite approaches, as both approaches are
likely to coexist, even within the same company, product line, or brand (Kitchen, 2003; Vrontis, 2003; Soufani et
al., 2006).
Many researchers agree that standardizing certain elements of the marketing mix and adapting others to different
market conditions is necessary (Vrontis and Thrassou, 2007). These authors believe that standardization and
adaptation is not an all-or nothing proposition, instead it is a matter of degree. For example, diversity among
different countries does not allow full standardization. However, the high cost related to adaptation may limit the
use of the adaptation approach (Vrontis, 2005). Nanda and Dickson (2007) concentrate on three factors to
examine standardization/adaptation behavior: homogeneity of customer response to the marketing mix,
transferability of competitive advantage and similarities in the degree of economic freedom. They note that even
in countries with similar cultures (e.g. across the European Union) there are differences in customer needs and
wants. Furthermore they argue that standardization will be successful when the homogeneity of customer
response and the degree of similarity in economic freedom is high and competitive advantages are easily
transferable.

Elements of both approaches should be incorporated in order for multinational companies to succeed. Gaining the
benefits of both approaches requires companies to not only standardize various marketing mix elements and
marketing strategies, but also to follow adaptation where essential in order to satisfy apparent market needs.