The Happiest Place on Earth

Three Keys to Success
By Jeffrey Hansler, CSP

Is the company you own or work for as productive as it can be?  Here are the three simple keys to the success of an organization.

Productivity at its best is customer awareness, a quality product, and a healthy company environment.  These attributes are all integrated and contribute to each other.  All successful companies strive for these and work to maintain them.  Leave these unattended and the company will cease to grow.  Leave these unattended for too long and the company will fade away.

What is customer awareness?

Customer awareness is listening and understanding your customer's desires.  Too often businesses rely on meeting a customer's "needs".  Needs change with the wind.  When the economy is tough, people actually "need" very little.  They no longer "need" that new car, new TV, new home or the carpet to go in it.  People, however, will always have underlying desires such as security, happiness, and health.

Listen to your customers, ask questions, and they will tell you their desires.  If the customer associates your products with satisfaction of their desires, they will buy your products no matter what the state of the economy.  As an example, no one needed an amusement park that had rides, funny characters and a nice atmosphere, but Walt Disney listened to people and he knew they wanted a place that a family could have fun together.

What is a quality product?

To address quality, let's talk about need versus desire again.   The need for transportation is real and with time schedules in Orange County, a car is pretty standard equipment, but few of us drive around in boxes stuck on four wheels.  This provides a mental picture of where the need ends and the desire takes over.

These desires determine what we expect for quality.  A quality car might have to meet our expectations on looks, reliability, and maintenance.  If it meets or exceeds our individual expectations, then it will be deemed a quality product.

Disney defined quality for an amusement park by delivering a safe environment with fun rides in a clean park serviced by courteous people.  When other parks meet our expectations, as defined by our experiences with Disney, we feel we have been delivered a quality product.  When they do not meet our expectations, we wish we had gone to Disney.

What is a healthy company environment?

A healthy environment allows people to feel a part of the company.  When people are allowed to contribute to the company with their ideas and decisions, they feel a part of it.  People want to supply a product they can be proud of and be recognized and rewarded for in their efforts.  In a healthy company environment, people are recognized for contributing to a quality product.  More and more often, rewards are taking the form of profit sharing and bonuses tied to company performance, but by far the greatest reward is treating people fairly and in line with their expectations.

How does all this occur?  By listening.  Listen to your customer.  Let as many company personnel as possible meet with your customers and listen to them.  Then provide a company environment where they can talk about what they have heard.

Listen internally.  The company must have open communication.  Receiving opinions and feedback from the customers is critical.  Although, the sales and service staff are key information sources for gathering customer feedback, all company personnel areas should feel responsible for finding out what the customer thinks.  Communication from the customer must reach every management level in the company, because customer satisfaction with the product is the clearest indication that the company is healthy.

Then deliver the quality product your customer has told you about.  Deliver the quality product your company personnel would be proud of.  Let your employees deliver a product that they would be proud to hand deliver to the customer.  Give your employees the freedom to insure that the product will come out right.

Why?  Employees that are allowed to make a difference do make a difference.  Employees that make a difference become respected employees.  Employees that are respected and like the jobs they are doing have a strong tendency to do quality work.  Quality work yields quality products.  Quality products bring back and keep customers.  The business grows.  Just ask Mickey Mouse.

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Jeffrey Hansler is a professional speaker, author, and consultant. He is a frequent speaker at association events and is the author of Sell Little Red Hen! Sell! He can be reached at jhansler@oxfordco.com.

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© 2004 Jeffrey Hansler  All rights reserved