Book Review -- Sharpening Customer Service Skills

The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence by Robert Spector and Patrick McCarthy is a helpful book on customer service skills.  Nordstrom’s primary goal each year is to improve its customer service.  The book elaborates on ways the company maintains its high caliber of customer service.  Knowing your product, learning about operations within the company, and seeking out mentors are three concepts relevant to the work of a prospect researcher.

Chapter 3 “Nurture the Nordie” provides insight that is applicable to development and fundraising.  “You can’t develop a relationship with a customer if you don’t know your product.”  This idea translates into the realm of prospect research when working with a development officer and understanding qualities about the donor or prospect.  The ability to learn and know how best to supply information to your assigned development officer strengthens the value of research you provide.

Another helpful point from the book is to learn about operations outside of your group.  “Top Nordstrom salespeople do not confine their product knowledge to their own department.  By learning about the products in other departments, they take advantage of a Nordstrom policy that empowers salespeople to sell anything in any department throughout the store.”  Knowing more about the operations of other areas of your institutions can improve your understanding your department’s role and purpose.  Consider how other groups within your department contribute to the overall goal of fundraising.  Are there processes that are similar to responsibilities of your group?  If so, are there ways you can learn from each other to make your contributions more efficient?

A final point to highlight is the importance of mentoring.  Mentors can be within your department or even outside of your company.  Early in the book, a salesman at Nordstrom sought out a mentor when he first started working at the department store.  He found a mentor in a co-worker that had worked at the company for many years.  He learned the importance of seeking out customers as opposed to waiting for customers to walk into the store.  His mentor would call customers to keep them informed of recent sales and events at Nordstrom.  A similar mindset applies to the realm of prospect research.  More and more development offices try and focus on being proactive rather than being reactive.  In our every day of research, it’s easy to get into patterns of always waiting for research requests.  Coordinating research with the needs of leadership and development officers ahead of time can make a difference.

The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence focuses on the corporate culture of the department store and offers ways to implement customer service skills at your own organization.

Melissa Sridaromont, Secretary, APRA MidSouth

secretary@apramidsouth.org

Puzzle Masters

Forgive me if all this is a bit too basic for the uber-researchers among us—but remember that all information is being heard by someone for the first time (after that, it’s all reruns, déjà vu).

Admittedly, it’s rare that I get this question in response to a profile:  “How do you do what you do?”  Usually, gift officers don’t want to know how the sausage was made; they just want to savor the deliciousness of the information fitting into their preconceived notion biscuit sandwich.  So it took me a moment to come up with a response:

“This profile?  Think of it as a jigsaw puzzle, all put together.  Then break all the pieces apart, shake them around, and fling ‘em up into the air.  The results?  A piece here, one under the chair, another in the vent, one in your pocket.  I pinpoint all those pieces, wipe them off if needed, put them together—eureka!  Piece of cake.  Any trained monkey . . . .”

Then they nod, back out of the room and slip away down the hall.  So that’s “what I do”—but how about the “how I do it”?

Begin with the basics of the search engine. I’m sure there are many satisfied Google users out there, but I always gravitated toward the metasearch engines—why just search one engine when you can get results from multiple ones all at once, and often with categorized results?  Prevents you from having to slog through the hits about, say, French hotels when you’re trying to find out about Paris Hilton.  I used Carnegie Mellon’s Vivisimo for years until it was commercialized to an unrecognizable state, then I switched over to DuckDuckGo and continue to be happy with it.  Remember to place phrases and compound names in quotation marks for best results.

What does the person do, and how long have they been doing it?  Career and education information is sometimes best found on LinkedIn, but recognize that results may not have been updated.  Peruse any news results from your search engine to see if the person has taken a new job, retired, gotten married.  There are good proprietary sources for such info, sure—but often you can get superb access to news articles through services paid for by your college or public library (Newsbank, for instance).

For information on stock holdings, secinfo.com and EDGAR are reliable resources.  Real estate?  Sure, there’s Zillow and Trulia, but I’ve either gone through vendors (e.g., Lexis Nexis—and Dataquick has impressed me) or directly to the assessors for timely ownership details and market values (either via the fine compilation at UVa’s Portico site [http://indorgs.virginia.edu/portico/] or at the links on pulawski.net).

Find out if the prospect owns or flies a plane in the databases at landings.com.  Political donor?  Plenty of sites, including http://www.politicalmoneyline.com/ (a plus—often the entries include the donor’s occupation and title).  Information on foundations?  Guidestar or the Foundation Center (free access on both).

To uncover current or past college connections, I frequently consult the compilation of U.S. university and community college web pages at http://www.utexas.edu/world/univ/.  And there’s always the situation that calls for extraordinary means, such as going to the Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/web.php) to resurrect web pages that have passed into cyber history, or to Google Translate for comprehending pages or phrases from another language.  And never overlook what rich data you have in your own files and database.

That’s basically it—the puzzle is as complete as it ever can be.  Pat yourself on the back (somebody has to), decompress, rinse, repeat ad infinitum.

Tim Dempsey, Director-at-Large, APRA MidSouth

at.large@apramidsouth.org