Customers Rule
Posted by Dave Capuano on Fri, Jul 30, 2010
When I joined Vovici, our CEO, Greg Stock, introduced me to Vovici’s Core Values. One of the primary core values the company has established is “Customers Rule”, where we set out with a goal to make our customers successful in order to drive our success. Over the past couple of months I’ve spent time engaging our customers in various activities that span the marketing spectrum. I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with a broad set customers that have a laser focus on leveraging feedback as a strategic asset in their business. I met customers like Sykes’s Mike Clarkin and Marsha Jones, Oracle’s Jeremy Whyte (join him for a customer feedback webinar next week!), Serco’s Pam Holloway, and a host of others from companies like Cisco, Plymouth Rock, BDO, Harte-Hanks, Fellowes at our Vision2010 User’s Conference.
For me, it has been quite an education to understand how feedback professionals think and act in order to gain the data they need for various efforts. I’ve also been lucky enough to listen to and engage with our own internal leaders, Jeffrey Henning, Brian Koma and Nancy Porte. All three of these executives are industry leaders and help shape how Vovici helps our customers (and other feedback professionals) be successful. Recently I got to experience how valued that expertise is by being involved in a couple of activities with Jeffrey. In addition to his day job of being a prolific blogger and general MR wizard, Jeffrey is always asked to share his expertise. Last week he put the finishing touches on a whitepaper for the Chief Customer Officer Council around Enterprise Feedback Management Best Practices. The week before he was asked to provide input on a survey that a major, brand-recognizable, analyst firm was putting out to its clients. In both cases, as with his blog, Jeffrey set out to fulfill a core Vovici value. Make the “customer” successful.
Another great example here at Vovici is Nancy Porte. Nancy is our VP of Customer Experience and a real advocate for our customers : always on the hunt for innovative thinking regarding customer experience. A couple weeks back she was telling me a great story about a recent trip to a conference at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas where she saw an advertisement from a company “offering a great customer experience for both veterans of the tattoo community and first time clients, as well as building a brand around high-quality tattoo artwork”. The typical person would have looked at the flyer, thrown it out and headed to the blackjack tables. But not Nancy. Nancy is a customer experience professional and wanted, no needed, to find out about how they delivered a great customer experience. Fast forward 30 minutes and she’s talking to the Operations Manager, Mooch. I won’t convey the contents of the discussion and steal Nancy’s material but let me say it is a compelling story to hear Nancy describe a giant of a man discussing what makes a great customer experience when getting a tattoo. Her message to me: although most of us work in industries very different from a tattoo company, we are similar in our goals to provide superior and consistent customer experience.
That brings me back to our Core Values and “Customers Rule”. Whether you use surveys, online communities, social media or some other method, finding out how customers feel about doing business with you and focusing on making them successful needs to be a core value for everyone.
