Award Winning Customers
Good companies often win awards but what about their customers? Shouldn’t they be recognized? Are they not part of the reason for the award? At Flaman Group of Companies this year we have won two awards:
Consumer Choice Award
SABEX Marketing Award
With both of these awards, it would be easy to position the employee efforts as the reason for the awards. Certainly the Consumer Choice Award is directly correlated to outstanding customer service by the staff and a marketing award is due the creative efforts of the marketing team. While both of these facts are true, there is more to each story.
Let’s start with the Consumer Choice Award. Obviously customer service is an important factor, but so is customer convenience and variety of choice for product offerings. Customer Service is the number one value of Flaman Group of Companies (FGC) so we will take credit for that, but how did the other two factors, convenience and variety of choice evolve?
The other two evolved by listening to loyal, engaged customers – customers who asked for more from FGC: more hours of operation, more product choice. It is these award-winning customers who pushed us to be better and by meeting their needs we ended up serving more people, more effectively. Without these loyal customers we would not have won the Consumer Choice Award.
But how do customers influence marketing? Is not marketing self serving for a company, designed solely to convince customers to buy product? Advertising can be, but The Great Stuck in Muck Photo Contest and Sled’N Snap contest are both examples of customers coming to Flaman Group of Companies with an idea. FGC then took the idea and marketed it because we have the resources. Additionally, both contests rely on user generated content to make them come alive. So in the case of these marketing contests all FGC did was build the ball park,so to speak. It was our customers that showed up and played a great game that drew in the crowds, some of whom purchased our products.
In 2012 FGC won two awards. The staff worked hard and deserved to be recognized for their efforts, but our customers worked hard and should be recognized as well.
Steve Whittington is President of Roadmap Agency Inc. He has also served for over a decade as a member of the Executive Team of Flaman Group of Companies an award-winning organization and has over 25 years of executive experience. Steve’s current board work includes serving as; President of Glenora Child Care Society; and Co-Chair of the Marketing Program Advisory Committee for NAIT’s JR Shaw School of Business. Previous notable board work included, Chair of the board for Flaman Fitness Canada, a national retailer, a Director for a meal prep internet Startup Mealife and Chair of Lethbridge Housing authority, the third-largest Social housing NGO in Alberta.
Academically, Steve was an instructor of Project Management at Lethbridge College for seven years. Steve holds a Bachelor of Commerce Honours degree; he is a Certified Sales Professional (CSP), Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified Marketing Specialist (CMS) and (CCXP) Certified Customer Experience Professional.
Steve’s first book Thriving in the Customer Age – 8 Key Metrics to Transform your Business Results teaches about the customer journey and provides a guiding framework spanning all stages of the customer experience. The book explains how every metric impacts an organization and how leaders can best utilize each metric to provide a stellar customer experience. Everyone knows the customer is the most important part of a business. This book provides the tools to improve an organization’s customer experience and drastically transform business results.
Recently Steve’s Blog has been profiled as one of the Top 75 Customer Experience blogs