Failure's Upside: Innovation, creativity, and improved results

To be a professional disruptor, you must be willing to take risks. This means you must be willing to fail. Billionaire James Dyson once said, "I've always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they've had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative."

Here are more thoughts from well-known business leaders on the value of failure in their success, as well as two small examples of what we and some clients have tried in our own businesses.

Two small examples

Here are just two examples of how to do soft rollouts in small ways:

  1. No front desk. At John Robert's Spa we have always wanted to remove the traditional front desk and create more of an Apple Store-like environment. However, no one liked this idea at our existing salons so we waited until we opened a new location in 2013 to roll it out. There is no front desk, computer, printer, or receptionist sitting in a chair--not even a hostess stand. This concept was so successful from a customer service standpoint that the new salon immediately became the #1 selling location for product sales. In 2016 we opened another location, did the same thing, and had the same results. Now all our other locations want us to remove their front desks.
  2. Call center agent. We have clients who tested an idea by having only one call center agent greet callers by saying, "Thank you for calling ABC, this is Martha, who do I have the pleasure of speaking to?" They measured the results over 30 days and found that both her satisfaction scores and close rates were higher. The results gave them the ammunition to get buy-in from everyone else in the call center to say the same thing.

 John R. DiJulius III is the author of The Customer Service Revolution and president of The DiJulius Group, a customer service consulting firm whose clients include Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, The Ritz-Carlton, Nestle, PwC, Lexus, and many more. Email him at john@thedijuliusgroup.com.

Related Stories