Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Seth Godin has a good post today called “The discipline of one ring.” Here’s the crux:

. . . some companies have decided to answer the phone on one ring. . . .

When you need to answer the phone in one ring, you discover exactly what it means to provide a certain level of service. Either you’re succeeding or failing. So you hire more people and devote more resources, because there is no slippery slope. On or off.

I love this because it’s so pure. Are you in the service business? If you swear in front of everybody that you’re going to give white-glove service, then you’d better make sure you can pass the white-glove test — all the time.

This reminds me of what Mark Cuban did when he took over the Dallas Mavericks. He hired an old colleague of his, a top-flight sales manager, to run the Mavs ticket office. The guy’s mandate was simple: Sell out every ticket to every game. Cuban told the sales chief that if he needed to hire as many salespeople as the Mavs’ arena has seats, so that each salesperson would be responsible for selling out that one seat for 41 home dates per season, so be it.

Clarity is power.