Making Founders Replaceable with Ari Meisel

Standing On Service Podcast

In this episode of the podcast, Ari Meisel is on to talk about making work more efficient. He helps companies work faster, cheaper, and easier by optimizing, automating, and outsourcing. Ari talks about the benefits of automation and how it can help enhance the human connection, as well as the importance of managing expectations to ensure a quality customer experience.

Key Takeaways:

• In trying to identify his own overwhelm, Ari learned to help himself by focusing on making processes work better. In trying to fix his own problems, he found that the resources available to him weren’t enough.
• He had to learn how to fit a normal day’s work into only an hour, and this is where his strategy OAO was born: optimize, automate, outsource. This has been the genesis of his career: helping get businesses to a place where they can run and grow without too much intervention.
• There is often not enough attention given to the space between a customer wanting something, and that being fulfilled. Exceptional customer service is about the quality of that space; the customer journey can still be fulfilling even that space is large, and vice versa.
• Automation can and should be used to enhance the human connection. Automation can save you money, help you expand and scale, and help to reduce errors. This gives companies more time to focus on a direct connection with their customers.
• Automation needs to be the second step after optimization — looking at the how and why we do processes the way that we do will help identify inefficiencies that need to be improved before they are automated.
• One of the big keys to customer service is managing expectations proactively, if possible. Be realistic with your customers and your employees about timelines, product, etc.
• Getting consistency across multiple branches of a company can be challenging. Creating core values, especially those around the customer experience, is a great way to start this. A company’s mission needs to be realistic and something that makes sense to customers and employees. With a consistent mission, new employees can learn and be trained from day one on how to be an ambassador of that mission.
• Ari teaches four mindsets of employees: inventor, engineer, engine, and cog. An individual employee can be any one of those.
• When it comes down to it, customer service is about making your customers feel understood where they are, in whatever situation they are.

External Links:

Maintenance-one.com

Ari’s Website