BIZBUZZ: R. Whiteley, The Customer Driven Company

This is episode 7 of BIZBUZZ.

I stimulate conversations that challenge business owners to consider new possibilities and to Act Boldly.  The following video highlights some of the content from Richard Whiteley’s book The Customer Driven Company that made sense to me.

Hi, I’m Gary Brown a FocalPoint business coach.

Welcome to BIZ BUZZ.

I’ve chosen to comment on The Customer Driven Company, by Richard Whiteley.  Not surprisingly, this book deals with the relationship that we have with our customers.

I’d like to highlight four observations from the book that interest me.

The first deals with vision.  I know that this is a repeat from my most recent BIZBUZZ episode, but I believe it bears repeating.  Whiteley defines vision as a source of inspiration and a guide to decision making.  How often do we use our vision statement as a litmus test for decision making?

My next observation expands on vision statements.  Whiteley encourages the reader to communicate the vision constantly.  He stresses the need to establish challenging goals that are driven by the vision and to embody it in our everyday behaviour.  How many of us act on this advice?

Comment number three is specific to our customers.  The suggestion is that we should make it easy for our customers to complain to us about our products and services.  That might sound trite but do we even have a method for customer complaints?

Finally, I’d just like to mention that Whiteley identifies what he calls the seven essentials that are the game plan of winners.  Here they are:

1. Create a customer keeping vision

2. Saturate your company with the voice of the customer

3. Go to school on the winners

4. Liberate your customer champions

5. Smash the barriers to customer-winning performance

6. Measure, measure, measure

7. Walk the talk

That’s it for The Customer Driven Company.

Your comments are always welcome.

Stay tuned for more BIZ BUZZ.

Story Telling

Summer seems to have arrived, so I went to camp last week.  Well, not actually.  But, I did attend a story telling workshop.   It seems to me that the role of story telling in our lives is getting an increasing amount of media attention.  I’m interested in learning how we can employ story telling to improve our emotional connection with our internal and external customers.

So, for some fun, I  thought that I’d pose the following challenge.  Write a story that has happened to you since June 21/13.  As with most things in life, there are some requirements.  Here they are:

1. keep it short
2. write it in the first person
3. what learning occurred for you that can be applied to your business life?

Here is my story.

“I had decided to attend a story telling workshop in Stratford, as part of the Stratford Festival Theatre season.  I had been confronted by the story telling theme four or five times over the past six months and I was excited about getting some first hand exposure from the experts at Stratford.

Late the night before the event I was going over my checklist for the following day.  I was to attend a 7:15 am networking meeting.  This would end at 8:30 and I had previously arranged to meet a client who was accompanying me at 9:00 am.  We had to be in Stratford for a 10:00 am start to the workshop.  Sitting in front of my computer is when I discovered that my email confirmation for the workshop did not contain the tickets.  It was too late to contact anyone at the theatre.  Right I thought, I’ll call just before I meet my client.

The next morning I drove out of my driveway and this is when I noticed that the fuel gauge was hovering on ‘barely fumes’.  Rats!

I dashed out of the networking meeting and got to my car shortly after 8:30.  Hey, I might just pull this off without my client being any wiser.  That was before I encountered road works; a diversion that took me out of my way; and a senior apparently practising driving stealth.  And this was just trying to get out of the city on my part.  I finally managed to reach the highway and head towards the assigned meeting place.  This is when I thought that hands free phoning would be a useful tool.

As it turned out, I was extremely punctual and was promptly rewarded by my client suggesting that he would drive to Stratford.

My learning: Don’t leave all of the details until the last minute.  When planning, you can anticipate that something will go wrong and an allowance for this is more than a good idea!”