An old fashioned concept, perhaps, but it can set one ahead of the pack. Whether e-commerce or a traditional brick-and-mortar, there’s a balance to be struck between transactional efficiency and that invaluable sense of the human touch. Business may only take a moment. But the meaning it may have transcends time.

During the holiday season, with its faster pace and higher volume, the challenge is even greater. Yet what one customer senses as a great experience is entirely different from what another senses. So how do you tailor a service to a whole constellation of preferences, needs and wants? And how do you customize a relationship within a fabric of faceless transactions?

Put a face on it, and make people feel good. A great experience comes not only from better product features and functions, or better services, but because it makes someone feel good. They feel taken care of. They feel good about their choice. And their choice is your brand.

Majestery™ is in the unique position to focus on your customer’s expectations, lifestyle and personal preferences. So we can offer your client unparalleled, customized rewards for the choice they’ve made – your brand. Their loyalty to your brand is an investment we can help create unforgettable returns on. We are committed to your customers’ experience, just as much as you are.

Each time your customers and clients give us an opportunity to resolve a daily challenge and make their lives easier and more comfortable – be it with a high-end travel issue, a shopping choice, or a vacation package, for instance – we connect them back to your brand.

That’s why a personal lifestyle specialist makes so much sense: at Majestery™ we have the means and the resources to give your top tier customers a range of services and an impeccable customer experience. And that drives their loyalty – right back to you.

Here’s to a wonderful 2011.

André P.Politzer, CEO, Majestery™

Let’s be blunt. The traditional loyalty marketing with mileage or points is passe , obsolete and almost at the verge of complete stage of bankruptcy.  Addressing this customer segment calls for a totally different service paradigm.

Affluent customers want to be distinguished from the crowd: They only want to be seen at certain places, using only certain brands. Not just that, they want to be a step ahead of the crowd and look up to brands to identify the key trends for them and help them access/buy these products before anyone else. Fashion shows are an attempt by luxury & fashion brands to define what’s next and help the customers access it.

They seek exclusivity: Exclusivity is a big hit with these customers and therefore ‘limited editions’ or ‘only for select audience’ are tactics that certain luxury brands use for their brand extensions.

They want to feel unique and special: Personalization of products and services helps to provide these benefits.

They seek convenience: Affluent customers value their time as much as their money, making convenience fundamental to success in this market.

They are willing to pay a premium: They want the best quality, exclusivity, satisfaction and outstanding customer service. Brands that wish to target affluent customers will have to upgrade the quality/caliber of every person who represents them in the market or has any level of interaction with the customer.

Majestery™ caters too all of these needs of your most affluent clients, under your brand, in order to add value to your company.
Visit www.majestery.com and get familiar with our concept.

You all probably had this experience. My favorites are Mii Amo, the Sanctuary on Camel Back or even Six Senses in Thailand and probably so many more around the world where you won’t resist and will book your slot to get a massage or a treatment after trying the sauna, pool and all the warm water generously pouring on your hurting body, so damaged by the miles and the seating at your desk !

Well,  what do I really want to convey to you here? The experience? The desire? or simply the invitation to prioritize your well-being no matter what happens to your bottom line, your P&L or your board of directors pressuring you or threatening your job?

How can a coach ask his client to become wise? Let’s even ask. How about adopting the “so what”? “let go!” “take a deep breath”kind of approach and experience it once and for all? How about making your complicated life, intense and the busiest it can be, take a “sabbatical” of some sort, and take the pause, wherever you are?

How about embracing life, charging the batteries, and really live through a tangible “brick and mortar” focus on your soul and you body, and give them a chance to connect with you?

Simple words, simple advice. Coaching executives is about simplifying and prioritizing. Performance comes from a pure place. Everything else is a myth. High performers can look cool and relaxed. Detecting the fake in this is not difficult. The foundation for making it real is to really enroll and embark in the journey for connecting to yourself.

It’s a paradigm shift. It requires discipline and a solid mental condition. The coach pulls out all his energy and experience of the corporate challenges and real situations to guide you through this process and make it real. The point will be quickly proven. It will be so true that an ediction can develop and build up the right path for you.

The true challenge of the Coaching ROI (Return on Investment)For Coaches – For HR Managers – For Coaching Clients  

André Politzer     August 1st, 2007

 ROI is one of the most intriguing topics for an executive coach working with Corporate.This is a challenging value that is often categorized as “intangible”.With my long executive experience in Corporate Europe and Corporate America, I appreciate and understand that most decision makers would be suspecting that the coaching impact can’t be measured on solid grounds until proven otherwise.After all, whoever would make the decision to hire a coach, has accountability for the engaged expense. and this one needs to be obviously addressed. Let me line up a few relevant outcome items from my first experiences of facing those objections.  If organizations and practitioners work together to set standards and monitor activity, they will both benefit. From that standpoint, decision makers who are buying coaching have a responsibility to ensure coaching service providers that have the appropriate experience and qualifications. In the last four months, I have been focusing on how some organizations view measurement of their investment in their talent development budget. First the scope of application of coaching has been addressed. I can mention the following mostly common bottom line items those “prospective clients” mentioned during this exercise: -Improve individual/team performance-Improve productivity of the division (P&L) or global organization-Improve quality of interaction and communication between division leader and direct reports-Improve leadership/management effectiveness-Improve staff retention-Improve customer service and client retention-Establish a strategic planning dynamic-Improve emotional intelligence With HR managers I addressed their approach to coaching and found out that rather than being part of a development strategy, coaching help them truly maximize and harness their own departmental internal performance promoting efficient resources to their top executives and top performing teams, and furthermore provide additional savings in training and recruitment costs to the company.  On the latter, by hearing several times that this is really a sensitive area for them, I could suggest we talk about the ROI applied to Coaching. It positions Human Resources inside the company and identifies the total financial benefit the organization draws like a learning/training program cost. We can subtract from that value the total investment it would take to develop, produce, and deliver that program internally. We had some challenges figuring out an exact measure of the costs associated with a training program and isolate the financial benefits from it. The suggested comparison was very well accepted and it was reasonable in the eyes of my HR contacts to assess this as a financial value. I suggested the following  formula:             (total benefit – total costs) = ____           X 100 = ROI
                             total costs

 Total benefits would include the money saved by the organization, an allocation of a revenue increase for the division or the company, and anything that adds directly or indirectly to the bottom line.Total costs would include the development costs (using a comparable expense the HR or the division engaged in the past), the employee’s time away from doing something else, the overhead in education and materials, travel, cost of coordination, and any other cost incurred. The more I used that analogy to training cost and the more I could gain comparative benchmarks and a sincere recognition from the HR executive that we had room for creativity to find the tangible measure criterion applied to Coaching especially when it comes to the objectives listed above. Now, where do we go from here? As we relate to ROI and not to sales argumentation tips, I will add that it helps to show some evidence about value and not neglect to refer to standards such as the ICF (International Coach Federation) www.coachfederation.org  and the coaching competencies, some of the mechanisms such as 360-feedbacks, project outcomes, coachees reports to their supervisor, etc. That process will build up over time generating some clear benchmarks the company will use along the way, when hiring external coaches. Surprisingly or not, some of the contacts I had during this process also expressed lots of skepticism and objections talking openly about their own experience of dealing with too many of what they called the “cowboys” coaches who use too much of  “anecdotal evidence”. It made me feel each time I heard this kind of comment that it is crucial to agree on a definition for the ROI and offer one they can relate to a financial approach. For example: 

• Return on Investment (ROI) is a traditional financial measure based on historic data. Coaching is a new topic for research and resources exist to find data and evidence on performance (provide them with some resources)
• ROI is a backward-observation metric that yields no insights into how to improve business results in the future
• In training, like in educational organizations, ROI has been used primarily for self-justification rather than continuous improvement. In Coaching, it’s all about continual improvement at the individual and group level

I was inspired to search for good ROI resources especially in the professional training space. There are websites and discussions dedicated to the topic and countless articles and reports, books and tools to justify and even calculate a Coaching ROI. Here are some practical examples I used in the Cyberspace. ROInet is a Yahoo! Group forum evaluating and measuring experiences shared with over 2,500 members: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/roinet . It was created for HR professionals interested in measuring ROI in HR development projects. The ASTD  (American Society for Training & Development) is the world’s largest association dedicated to workplace learning and performance professionals  www.astd.org proposing a data-rich environment where you can find resources, discussion projects and issues related to measurement of ROI and it does not require any registration. I also found the American Evaluation Association www.eval.org an extremely relevant resource focusing a lot on HR performance evaluation tools. As a conclusion to this important topic, let me share a few tips I found useful when discussing ROI applied to Coaching: 

1. Make sure you discuss and agree the outcomes your prospect wants to achieve from coaching at the outset
2. Make sure those are realistic, clear, and genuinely relevant to individuals and teams inside that organization (if you have the opportunity to evaluate that aspect directly with the stake-holder who will be involved with the coaching program, that will ascertain this crucial level of clarity)
3. Record these outcomes as part of a potential “coaching contract” and it will be used as a basis for determining what has been achieved
4. Try to develop some tangible measures like the examples I listed above
5. Establish right from the inception of this relationship a process to review performance with the coach and the coachee at given times to make an ROI estimate
6. HR and P&L Divisions are presenting budgets and forecasting to their supervisors. They are accountable for their expenses. Just keep it in mind and offer your support to provide all the tools and the resources needed to make a balanced mix of tangible and intangible criteria allowing to present a reliable ROI formula

 The challenge for each of us is to avoid the assumption that our clients support our way of thinking. I suggest we try to appreciate all facets of our clients, especially when they are only prospects. Looking at the Return of their Investment on our services already makes them trusting we do care about their accountability.

http://www.yourfocuspoint.com/It doesn’t take very long to figure out whether or not the person you’re talking to understands the value of coaching. Just ask “hey, have you ever thought about using a coach?” “A what?” “C.O.A.C.H! Someone who cares, has skills, is seriously involved, understands business (let’s say has experience), can identify with your challenges, is your closest business partner, works with ethics and applies the International Coach Federation core competencies and ethical guidelines.”Look, that’s the whole point of starting this blog today. We, as coaches, are coming across fascinating and unique situations every hour of the day. Through the eyes of our clients, we can see the entire world, feel the challenges, and tremble when it comes to sensitive situations or genuine breakthroughs.Let’s start today with an incredible story. (We are using aliases and are slightly changing the context of each situation to keep the client’s confidentiality).My client “Rob” is the founder and chairman of a 500 employees high-tech multinational public company. At 9:00 am, Rob announced to the media that last night he was about to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge but at the last minute thought about his ten kids and dear wife, whom he cherishes, and had to step back, not even sweating or shaking. The radio interview took place first thing in the morning and without hesitation, he revealed this information live on the air.
Now he is talking to me and sets the agenda for his session; how can he continue to be himself when interviewed and not create a new character or fake anything! After reiterating the boundaries between Coaching and Therapy, I reframed this objective by suggesting that he look for the best disposition he can find for himself when he is exposed, and represents others than himself when he speaks as a chairman of a public company versus talking to anyone privately.
Basic concept? Naivety? Total lack of sensibility about remaining discreet as a public figure? Before we could focus on Rob the Chairman, we had to address the tremendous amount of adrenaline invested the day before. I listened attentively but did not respond as Rob questioned the meaning of his life, his contribution to his kid’s education, as well as other intimate aspects of his life. We were then able to explore the impact his declaration would have on his business life and speculate on the number of articles we’d be reading in the press and the value of stock for the next few days…What is the problem here? Should we look into his direct reports? Who is affected most by Rob’s depressive inclination? What is lifting his morale? What triggers to his falling pattern? Did it already happen but luckily not in sequence with a public appearance so that this can go away from his mind and remove him from the vulnerability of reacting or be impulsive?Far from setting any standard remedy to this situation, I feel the incident is somewhat revealing. I cannot pride myself that this is happening everyday and that I injected the most powerful vaccine to protect my client from this incident to happen again. Little by little, Rob gained some awareness about his surroundings, his responsibility, and the minimum tolerance benchmarks.We, in fact concluded on a set of three benchmarks for him to keep in mind at any price, so that his exhibitionist tendency do not revisit at critical times. Family remained at the top. He is spiritually and materially responsible for nourishing his loved ones. The purpose of him working after he made his money in 1993, when the company went public, is definitely to create jobs and be a productive philanthropist. Finally yet importantly, the appreciation of life through his religious values as the unavoidable outcome of completing the suicide that night would have caused him to become a murderer… This extreme provocative image connected him to true deep values and made him feel very satisfied and complete. He had the tools and could use them at anytime. Rob asked that we develop a communication strategy and an action plan to deal with the inevitable interviews he would encounter. He wanted to be prepared and to keep a strong profile.By the way, my dear first readers do not think for an instant that the above story is reflecting any kind of expertise on my part. Each situation has its magnitude and intensity. With the discipline of using competencies and reflection with research, when it’s needed, I simply try to remain professional in any given situation.Coaching is a process. There are many approaches to it. What makes a coach a good coach is probably his/her ability to cope with a specific situation and apply the appropriate strategy.