A group becomes a team when each member is sure enough of himself and his contribution to praise the skills of the others.

-Norman G. Shidle

It's easy to find information on how to build a team, but how do you know once you've got one?

In the course of our consulting work, we've helped hundreds of companies.  With each new client, we often start by asking one simple question: "What do you want your customers to feel and experience when they are interacting with you?"  Seems easy enough to answer, right?  Perhaps - but here's the catch: We ask people to limit their answer to three words.

- Roy Barnes and Bob Kelleher, Customer Experience for Dummies

The reason inclusion is so important is simple: When everyone matters and everyone knows he or she matters, employees are happy to come to work, and they're eager to give you their energy, creativity, and loyalty.  On the other hand, when people don't feel included, they become apathetic and perform at less than their full capacity.  To put it simply, all people want exactly what you want.  You want to be included, listened to, respected, and involved, don't you?  You want to be asked your opinion and have it taken seriously.  You want to feel valued.  And you want to be known as an individual and treated as such.  Well, so does everyone else.  That's why great leaders make sure that everyone in the workplace-no matter the rank or position-feels included and no one feels left out.

-Lee Cockerell, Creating Magic

It's true that many…marketing channels are primarily geared toward reaching current and potential customers, but you should also endeavor to reach another very important constituency through your full-spectrum marketing efforts—your employees.

-Kirk Kazanjian, Driving Loyalty

“Customer Service is not a department…it’s an attitude.”  How true is this phrase? As much as we try to complicate what great service is…it can be pretty simple. Customer Love, by Mac Anderson, is a great book that highlights unforgettable true stories about individuals and companies who have created extraordinary service experiences for their customers. WOW's! Companies like Nordstrom, Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, and others. What makes this little book so good is that the stories collectively inspire and remind us of what great service can look like and that it doesn't have to be complicated. 

Great service organizations know how to read their customers and respond.  Businesses who lose site or misunderstand who their customers are and what they want, or what matters most to them, are at risk.  It's the little misses that really weigh on me. For example,my husband and I were recently at a well-known home improvement store purchasing bags of mulch, 22 to be exact, and some plants.  As my husband was paying for our purchases, he asked if someone could load the mulch in our car.  The cashier said she would call for someone while my husband went and pulled the car around. As I was leaving, I didn't see the large rolls of plastic to line the back of our car, so I asked the cashier about it.  She scrambled around looking and finally told me that I would need to go to the front of the store to get the plastic.  I think we all know that the distance between lawn and garden and the front of the store isn't exactly close.  At this point, the car had been pulled up for the "someone" to load our car.  "Someone" casually strolled over to our car as I finished loading the last 3 bags of mulch into the car.  Big service misses here, don't you think?