Every Wednesday I encourage people to do ONE thing to put the power of love to work in their organization, through my newsletter Amare Wave Wednesday. These consistent actions are collectively growing the wave and making people happier and businesses better.
You want happy customers and they want you to succeed. That’s the foundation for effective collaboration – shared interests and mutual benefit. Plus trust, and a willingness to be vulnerable and let go of total control. Companies that collaborate well do better – that’s why you should collaborate with customers.
Amare companies (companies built on a foundation of love) collaborate with customers as real partners, not just vendors trying to sell more stuff. In these deeper collaborations, customers notice when you listen, appreciate when you act on their input, and become your best resource for knowing how to keep them happy and loyal.
- Is customer collaboration integral to how you do business?
- Do customers see you as a partner or merely a vendor?
- When you do collaborate, are you honest about your aims?
- Do you enable your employees to collaborate with customers?
Note: Learn more on collaboration with customers, employees, and even competitors in the ABCs of the Amare Way Practice (C is for collaboration!) in my book, The Amare Wave: Uplifting Business by Putting Love to Work.
Five Amare Ways to Turn Customers into Collaborators
1. Invite them in! Audit how and when you invite customers to provide meaningful input. Work with your team to maximize those opportunities.
2. Listen, listen, listen. Commit to keeping the pulse of your customers – and reward when it is done. Consider every customer interaction as a chance to do a little research, however informal, and do it!
3. Use Zoom. We’re all using tools like Zoom these days. Have your people commit to doing one short customer call on a video meeting platform every week. Video makes for deeper connection.
4. Co-create. As an experiment, when next solving a relevant problem, involve customers throughout – from understanding the problem to designing the solution.
5. Provide megaphones. Make it super easy for customers to be your ambassadors and naturally share their enthusiasm for you. That’s another powerful form of collaboration.
Next Level Collaborating with Customers
Customer collaboration is here to stay. It’s integral to approaches like Agile and Human-Centered Design, and fundamental to the whole notion of a sharing economy.
In the Amare Way, organizations take collaboration to the next level— elevating it to mean that we’re in this together, that we’re aligned in uplifting energy and connected in purpose, and that we’re actively working toward shared goals and creating greater value jointly. Customer collaboration becomes central to the company ethos and culture.
Here are some of the ways collaboration shows up in Amare Way companies, as a way of thinking and a way of doing:
• Your company mindset is that you are better together and create greater value by collaborating with your multiple stakeholders.
• You acknowledge that you don’t know everything, and you actively seek and combine fresh, outside points of view with your inside perspectives to make better decisions.
• You have methods and systems in place that make it easy for people to work together in meaningful ways.
• High levels of employee and customer engagement are the norm and evident to all.
• Collaboration is built into the ways teams work, without overdoing it to the point of burnout.
• You regularly observe and engage customers, and you sincerely pay attention to what they have to say.
• Customers want you to succeed, and they spread the word as raving fans.
• You look for opportunities to work together with competitors toward shared aims that uplift all.
The fact that you are reading this is testament to your openness to doing business differently. If this article resonated with you, please share it widely and help grow the Amare Wave! Together, we can develop and support Amare leaders who reject the old, war-like ways of doing business and encourage a new world built on love, collaboration, alignment, and good ethical decision-making.
Today’s Amare Wave Wednesday Quote
“None of us is as smart as all of us.”
―Ken Blanchard
Originally published on MosheEngelberg.com
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To learn more about the Amare Way movement and purchase the book, visit www.MosheEngelberg.com