Achieving Wow! in Your Business
One of the best examples of a stellar company culture I ever saw was a team that implemented Tom Peters’ “Wow!” workplace. Rather than prescribing detailed goals from a high level, the business leader set the expectation that our objective was to Wow! our customer, empowering the team to establish its own detailed goals to this end. We had monthly team meetings of not just business staff, but everyone associated with the product – engineering, quality, procurement, production operators, administrative assistants – everyone came to understand how their contribution was impacting the product, the business, and customer satisfaction.
One day our toughest customer was coming to visit. After some discussions in the conference room, they were to tour the production line. At most plants, such tours are carefully curated by engineering staff, answering questions and carefully steering the visitors away from the (…ahem…) less polished areas. When our meetings were concluded and the production line tour was to begin, we handed the customer team off to our lead production operator and told them we’d meet up for coffee when they were finished.
They were shocked; after all, this was unprecedented. Later, they told us it was the most impressive line tour they had ever been on. They were amazed that nothing was off-limits, and especially impressed that the production operators truly understood how their actions impacted on the quality of the product, and how that would affect the end consumer. The amount of customer trust and confidence built on that visit was immeasurable. “Wow!” indeed.
CÆDENCE has the know-how and drive to help you Wow! your customers. https://www.linkedin.com/company/caedenceconsulting/
If you’d prefer to figure it out from scratch on your own, we highly recommend the classic:
The Pursuit of Wow! Every Person's Guide to Topsy-Turvy Times by Tom Peters, 1994.
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Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
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