It's Not About Me

o Create a preference for your company’s products & services by being the easiest company to d o business with o Design business systems and platforms that deliver a superior customer/user experience o Become industry leading Business System Architects/Facilitators

• Me…Myself…and I? Too often, every time we get ready to do something important, we automatically tend to think about how it is going to affect ME or MY DEPARTMENT or MY COMPANY instead of how the planned activity might impact the customer! Also, stop trying to maximize your company’s return on investment for a few minutes and instead begin thinking of how you can help make YOUR direct customers as well as THEIR end customers (if applicable) jobs easier! You may soon realize that when you make your customers’ experiences easier in dealing with your company or organization that “surprisingly” yo ur business or organization will begin to prosper in more ways than you had ever imagined!

• Original Ideas There are not that many original ideas in the world. The task at hand is to find those ideas worthy of development for your company or business and to customize them to fit your situation. Enhance the ideas, put them into practice, replicate them where possible, continue to refine them when necessary, so that your customers will benefit from the unique experience that you have created for them.

• Justification for New Projects Never use “Headcount Reduction” as a justification for a new customer service enhancement. Nobody wants to support an endeavor where the justification ends up being a reduction in personnel of the very people who are serving the customers’ needs in the first place! Over ten years or so of system enhancements, Thomas & Betts probably had a customer service department of 25 or 30 personnel doing what once would have taken over a hundred people to do, but we never once had to reduce the department’s headcount. Fortunately, we were able to grow and expand our business at a rate that kept our employment levels at a stable level or slightly growing. As a last resort, look to retraining existing personnel for new assignments in other areas of the company to avoid layoffs or employment reductions. The end goal should always be to get total “buy in” from all your employees when making system changes and enhancements to improve service to your customers.

• Setting System Enhancement Priorities Companies soon realize that they can never do everything they want done in the timeframe that everyone desires. Thus, we have invented priority lists. In many companies, the Information

63