Excerpted From
Know What You’re FOR
By Jeff Henderson
I’m so inspired by business leaders like Dana Spinola. Dana is the founder and CEO of fab’rik, a growing women’s boutique with 40 locations. The vision of fab’rik is to “create boutiques where everyone can afford to feel beautiful, one piece of fabric at a time.”
The core values of fab’rik are Dream, Hustle, Inspire, Wow and Heart.
There’s so much to learn from Dana and her team, but let me point out how they systematize the idea of “Wow.” Like you and me, they inherently know it is no small thing when a customer is “Wowed.” It has a ripple effect. But Dana doesn’t leave this to good intentions. She has created a system.
“Delivering Wow is one of our key performance indicators,” she said. “Each day, every one of our stores must report one Wow from the day. They send this along with their sales reports.”
Every day, when the franchise owners of fab’rik open their doors, they know one of their goals is to deliver at least one Wow to a customer.
An example of a Wow was one Valentine’s Day when a customer came in looking for something to wear for dinner that night. She mentioned to one of the staff members that she was concerned that they might not be able to go because they couldn’t find a babysitter.
“I’ll babysit for you,” the staff member said. “You are such a loyal customer. It would be a great way for us to help you.”
To which the customer said, “Wow!” Along with, “Here’s our address. See you at 6:00 p.m.”
You can’t babysit everyone’s kids; you can babysit someone’s kids. Wowing one customer each day is a way to grow small.
As Truett said, “We built Chick-fil-A one sandwich at a time.”
We’ve applied this thinking to our Guest Services strategy at Gwinnett Church. Each Sunday, we serve around 5,000 adults, children and students. It’s impossible for our volunteers and staff to create a personal interaction with everyone, but that shouldn’t stop us from a personal interaction with someone.
One of our Guest Services values is to deliver Wow—to serve our guests so well that they literally say, “Wow!”
To do that, we remind everyone that our goal every Sunday is for each of us to Wow one person. If each of us will commit to doing this individually, we will collectively Wow hundreds of our guests every Sunday.
It was easy to do this when our church was really small. It would also be easy to conclude that it’s not possible to maintain this “small” feeling with thousands. I refuse to think that way. We can grow large. We can grow small. We can choose both.
This is a mantra to repeat to yourself and the team each and every day: Personable leads to remarkable. Remarkable leads to memorable.
The greater the WOW factor, the more memorable we become. Customers feel less like customers and more like friends.
They will remember how you made them feel, and they’ll tell others about this memorable feeling.
The challenge is to not talk ourselves out of the small interactions our business or organization provides each and every day. In a very real way, this answers the HOW question from the previous chapter: How do we create sustainable, meaningful interactions with customers? Sure, there are lots of ways, but what if we just start simple, which is always the better way.
Let’s WOW one person every day.
This humanizes the business. It keeps the heart and focus on where it should be—our customers. When we Wow a customer, we are reminded they aren’t numbers. They’re people. And chances are they’re breathing.
And as Truett has said, if they’re breathing, they need encouraging.
So encourage them. Wow them. Cheer them on.
And when you do, something powerful happens.
They start cheering for you.
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Excerpted from Know What You’re FOR by Jeff Henderson. Copyright © 2019 by Jeff Henderson. Used by permission of Zondervan. Zondervan.com