Cami noticed a change at a local makeup store, Sephora, recently:
There is a fellow introvert on the Sephora customer experience team who deserves A RAISE RIGHT NOW pic.twitter.com/4Aan7lUyVD
— Cami Williams (@cwillycs) November 4, 2019
Sephora has identified that not every customer desires the same journey, so they created a fork in the road to cater for two different personality types, so that more people could pay them money. They included more people in their customer journey. They included more people in their sales targets. They included more people in their revenue. This is what an inclusive business looks like.
What changes or choices could you be making to your customer journey to be more inclusive of people who think differently to you?
For me, I think I have leant too far away from telephone calls and conversations. I think I need to open myself up more to being more available on the phone.
How do you think you could change? How do you think you could be more inclusive?
This is pretty brilliant idea by Sephora and retail in general!
As it translates to officiating and celebranting (is that a word?), I’m not sure…
This might sound strange, but I think I actually exclude people in the process, only because I feel like I have a clear picture in my head of what my ideal couple “looks” like (not physically, but I think you know what I mean – what they like, think is funny, enjoy doing etc.), and not only a match for me, but just as importantly, that I’m a match for them.
Derek Sivers had this brilliant chapter in his book Anything You Want. He said:
“You know you can’t please everyone, right?
But notice that most businesses are trying to be everything to everybody. And they wonder why they can’t get people’s attention…
It’s a big world. You can loudly leave out 99 percent of it.
Have the confidence to know that when your target 1 percent hears you excluding the other 99 percent, the people in that 1 percent will come to you because you’ve shown how much you value them.”
I’m trying to do the work of really finding those people I’ll connect best with because they’ll give me the freedom to deliver my best to them, and in turn, I know they’ll be happy with the final product (ceremony). The couple who says they only want to communicate on the phone and don’t have much input in the ceremony content probably won’t be the couple that will love my style the day of…
Just my thoughts on it!
I think being “exclusionary” in this way is absolutely spot on – Josh has written before about how “Almost Nobody” wants you to be their celebrant, and that’s a good thing, but I think we also need to consider ways of being more inclusive if our goal is to do celebrancy as a full-time gig. For me, introducing my Legals Only Ceremony has been gold for my full-time goal: I now include customers who don’t want a fully personalised, bells and whistles wedding, who just want to get legally married, and they now make up over 50% of my wedding business every year. If I didn’t include these customers (who definitely don’t bring me the same level of joy as a premium couple who want to be totally engaged in developing an awesome personalised ceremony), I wouldn’t be able to do this work full-time.