by Sandy Rogers

Hi, I’m Sandy Rogers, and I lead FranklinCovey’s Customer Loyalty Practice.

Every chain wants to grow faster. And it’s your Promoters – customers who love your company and recommend you to their friends – that drive profitable growth. The manager and team at your locations play the leading role in delighting your customers. If you’re like most retail chains, you have strong managers, weak managers, and a lot of average managers in between.

Many chains struggle with getting their location managers and front line teams to deliver consistently great service. To create more Promoters, you need every person fully engaged in delighting your customers. To satisfy a customer, solve their problem. To delight a customer, solve their problem in a way that makes them feel great.

Moving from satisfying to truly delighting each customer requires some of your front line people to change their behavior, and that’s where FranklinCovey can help. You need 4 things to build a culture that consistently delights your customers:

First, your executive team must be fully engaged. Simply paying lip service to delighting customers doesn’t cut it.

Second, you need an accurate and representative customer service metric that correctly identifies your strong, average, and weak locations every month. Store receipt surveys provide anecdotal feedback but fail to identify strong and weak locations correctly.

Here’s why: less satisfied customers are less likely to take receipt surveys and the scores are easily gamed by frontline employees. We’ll show you how to get accurate data that represents the views of all your customers.

Third, you need to recognize and reward employees for creating more Promoters. Hold your teams accountable and give them meaningful rewards and recognition for delivering exceptional service.

And finally, you need a simple way to clone the behaviors of your strongest managers. The problem in most chains is not in knowing what to do to delight customers; it’s in motivating your average managers to act like your best managers more often. We’ll show you how to identify and share best practices from locations that are not only above average in customer service, but also above average in employee engagement, growth, and profit.

You have campfires around your chain – locations that are providing exceptional service and doing so profitably. At FC we help you turn these campfires into bonfires and eventually a wild fire across the chain. We help you create a culture where delighting customers is a red hot priority so that you are creating more Promoters than your competitors.

As my partner Fred Reichheld shows in his best-selling book The Ultimate Question, the company that creates the most Promoters almost always wins the war for profitable growth.

FranklinCovey helps you to create a culture where every manager and team is highly engaged to delight each customer — every time!

To find out more about our customer loyalty practice please visit us at FranklinCovey.com.

Sandy Rogers

While my weekly guest leaders address the specific question of what great leadership looks like to them, I asked Sandy Rogers to discuss the subject of customer satisfaction. He is an astute, experienced proponent of an approach to develop a system to assure that customers receive great service, consistently across all locations.

When I was with Johnson & Higgins as our Practice Leader focused on client service and satisfaction, one of the very top experts in the field was Fred Reichheld of Bain Consulting, author of The Loyalty Effect. I visited Fred in his office and spoke with him several times about our initiatives.

Sandy is now Fred’s partner and is equally knowledgeable and qualified on this very important subject. Here is his background.

Sandy serves as Managing Director of FranklinCovey’s customer loyalty practice, which is focused on helping large multi-unit operators in retail, healthcare, grocery, food service, lodging, and financial services to accelerate growth through increased customer loyalty. FranklinCovey provides each location in the chain with an accurate and reliable measure of customer service along with a process to improve it through more consistent frontline execution. Most of the retail chains they work with already know how to delight customers to increase conversion and revenue per transaction; their primary challenge is in getting their frontline employees to actually do the things they know work more consistently at each location every day.

Previously, Sandy spent 14 years with Enterprise Rent-A-Car, most recently as Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy. During his time at Enterprise, he led the turn-around of Enterprise’s London operation, after serving as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development. He led the teams that developed Enterprise’s consumer marketing strategy including the “Pick Enterprise…We’ll Pick You Up” television campaign and ESQi, Enterprise’s comprehensive system for measuring and improving customer service across their 7,000 branch network.

Earlier in his career, Sandy held positions at Apple Computer, and before that, Procter & Gamble. Sandy is an advisor to the board of Advance Auto Parts. He serves on the executive committee for Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri and the Leadership Council for the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. Sandy holds a bachelor’s degree from Duke University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

He is a great family man and a fine athlete.