Putting Your Customers' Needs First

1936, has sold over 30 million copies. Warren Buffett took the Dale Carnegie course "How to Win Friends and Influence People" when he was 20 years old, and to this day has the diploma in his office. Good advice never goes “out of style”. Serving our customers’ needs requires that we can influence others to join in our campaign to always put the customers’ needs first. Some of my associates might question whether I ever mastered the course as it relates to “How to Win Friends” but few will argue with the fact that I learned “How to Influence People”!

My First Company…

If you happened to miss reading the one-page Preface to this book, I suggest you stop and read it now. It will provide a brief introduction to my first real job at Westinghouse Electric Corporation and why I ultimately would become a Customer Advocate for the rest of my life! Little did I realize at the time, but my thirteen years at Westinghouse Semiconductor Division would serve me well as the foundation of serving the customers needs for the remainder of my workplace career. departments…Engineering, Purchasing, Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Finance, etc., but Westinghouse Semiconductor Division was open to experimentation. At the time, I was in Product Marketing responsible for low and medium power thyristor sales. What the company elected to do was to create teams consisting of a product marketing person, a customer service representative and an application engineer. Each team of three covered a specific product area and sat together as a team. On my team, the Customer Service Rep sat on my left and the Application Engineer sat on my right. While we each still reported to our respective functional department managers, daily we worked and interacted with customers as a team. It did not matter which one of us the customer contacted because we could handle virtually any situation or question the customer had because we could more easily back each other up as we were physically sitting together as a team. We would frequently jump in on conference calls to address any issue that might require multiple functions to assist the customer or to resolve a problem. • Employee Involvement – At the time, I was responsible for Assembly Sales Product Marketing (rectifiers and/or thyristors mounted on heatsinks in various electrical configurations); we had an elderly lady, Emily, on our assembly production line; she could build anything from a simple schematic drawing; she would also be assigned to build the most complex jobs for our customers. I asked the Manufacturing floor supervisor one day if I might be allowed to give the production workers an overview of our assembly sales and the customers and applications we served. I showed them slides of many of our customer sites and discussed the various applications that our products (that they built) were used in. At the end of my presentation, Emily and the other production workers thanked me profusely for • Teamwork in the Workplace – Most companies are organized around functional