Having A Purpose For Putting Your Team First
Michel Falcon is the author of People-First Culture. Over the years, he has built his expertise in customer experience, company culture, and employee engagement. His personal purpose is to keep people safe and expresses his strong value for caring about people versus caring about profits. Today, he talks about engaging with your employees, acquiring customers, hiring the right people, and how to develop your brand.
What We Discuss with Michel Falcon:
- How Michel got the topic for his book
- Discovering his personal purpose of making people safe
- What is the partner promise?
- Breakfast and jam sessions with his teams
- Removing the divide between personal relationships and commerce
- Understanding different customer personality types
- How to find the right people in your team
- The hardest part of getting the words on the page and how to get over it
- On customer acquisition and leveraging customer feedback
- How a brand is developed
[02:02] Finding the Topic for His Book
Michel was first introduced to the topic of customer experience management. Starting off the ground level, he learned about how a company grows, working with two companies and until venturing off to the call center space.
He eventually found a niche in customer experience management, the strategy of building processes to increase customer loyalty and deliver consistent customer experience. He realized this was going to be the topic for his book since not enough companies focus on this.
An organization can’t fully be committed to their customers unless they put their employees first. This started his journey around three areas of expertise: customer experience, company culture, and employee engagement.
[05:53] Personal Purpose Connected to Putting Your Team First
People can be defined by anybody that interacts with the brand including the employees, customers, media, community, etc.
Make your employees feel they’re working in an environment that’s going to invest in them.
Michel’s purpose is to help people feel safe.
[09:12] The Partner Promise
This means we are being open with anyone within the organization.
Keep your communication lines open with your team and have a one-on-one conversation with them.
[12:28] The Breakfast and Jam Sessions
First, he’d ask the management team to connect him with somebody he should be meeting with. Then they’d meet up every Monday morning.
This is something Michel and his team do every Monday morning at 9 AM to gather employee intelligence. He doesn’t talk about work and just gets to know who they are, not as an employee, but as a human being.
Then he leverages the intelligence to create an experience for his employees that they’ve never seen before.
[16:00] How to Build the People-First Culture
Remove the divide between personal relationships and commerce.
Stop thinking about the ROI when doing things for everyone who touches your company.
Michel identifies three different customer personality types: the Director, the Socializer and the Passive.
[21:14] Finding the Right People
Before you post a job description externally, go internally first. Ask if your employees have referrals and then talk to your vendors or business partners. If you can’t find one for that role, then go external.
[26:40] Writing People-First
Prior to writing People-First, Michel has written two other books but he had no idea he was doing.
With People-First, he had more stories to tell.
Not an academic, for him, writing the book was painful. So he sought the services of Scribe Media, which was one of the greatest decisions he ever made.
[31:44] Acquiring New Customers Through Customer Feedback
Michel refers to this as leveraging customer intelligence. Using net promoter score methodology, they ask two questions: would your customer recommend you or not and why or why not. Then they give verbatim comments. Taking that intelligence, you identify the top three reasons why your current customers are loyal to your brand.
If your current customers love you for xyz reasons, your prospective customers might also be attracted to those qualities. So take the current language your current customers are telling you and why they’re loyal to you and put that in your ad campaigns. Use those keywords to attract prospective customers.
If you’re still getting started, go to your target audience and ask them the top three definitions of success in doing business in this industry.
Gather customer feedback and leverage it to attract more customers.
[35:15] Developing Your Brand
Enroll positive emotions in your brands. Your brand is beyond your logo. It’s not something you create, but the perception of your people, the customers, the community, and your employees.
Build your brand around serving people and making them feel safe!
Episode Resources:
Read Michel Falcon’s book People-First Culture and follow him and all the amazing things he’s doing on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
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