Companies who have grown in this economic downturn did so because their customers become an army of advocates who grew their business for them.  They made decisions in business that were congruent with the decisions they would make in their personal life – in other words, golden rule decisions.  They “earned the right” to their customers’ rave and the growth that ensued because they deliberately made decisions that moved their operation in the direction of their customers and employees.

Here are ten resolutions companies should follow in the New Year to move toward earning financial business prosperity and “beloved“ status in the eyes of their customers:

1. Believe in the integrity of your customers.

The majority of business policies and rules are created to protect business from the minority of customers. Be bold, like Connecticut Griffin Hospital who began sharing hospital records with patients and saw claims against the hospital drop by more than 43%!  Take a leap of faith and believe that trust is reciprocated by customers when they feel that you trust them. Find one rule or policy to relax and watch what happens.

2. Invest in employee trust.

Show your employees that you believe in them. Beloved companies Wegmans and The Container Store invest in their employees by training them in the skills that remove rules, regulations, policies and procedures that pen employees in. This enables Wegmans to throw away the rule book and live by this: “no customer goes away unhappy.” As a result their margins are higher and profitability more steady because they turnover only 7% of employees versus the average in their industry of 19% employee turnover.

3. Practice democratic decision making.

Make sure the best ideas of your company have a way to see the light of day. Give good ideas a chance to prosper no matter what rank they come from inside your organization chart. Innovation and marketplace differentiation comes when employees are respected as part of achieving a mission greater than their set of tasks, and that their voice counts. W.L. Gore has become a $2.7 billion dollar company; named by Fast Company as “pound for pound, the most innovative company in America;” and earned a place on Fortune Magazine’s best companies to work for list since its inception because of how they unleash the spirit and ideas of its people.

4. Grow and invest in customers as a primary asset of your business.

Talk about customers lost and gained in real numbers, not percentages, to bring home the vast number of lives your business impacts. Understand what drives customers out your door, and begin the relationship by investing in your customers by realizing their long term potential. Zane’s cycles in Connecticut has experienced 23% Growth every year for 29 years, with 45% percent margins because they never lose sight of the fact that their average lifetime value is $12,500. And they manage relationships bearing that in mind. Valuing customers makes it easy to make decisions about how to treat them.

5. Know your power source for bonding with customers.

Regularly connect with customers as they experience your products and services. Surveys and reports are great – but the beloved customers are also avid “customer watchers.” Take a page from Trader Joe’s who use employee taste buds at their testing kitchens to determine what items should first make it to their shelves, but employ customer “tasting stations” inside their stores combined with sales to determine what items stay.  This closeness contributes to Trader Joe’s ability to generate $1300 in sales per square foot – twice the supermarket industry average.

6. Have clarity about how you uniquely serve customers’ lives.

Unite your operation to ensure that decisions connect to deliver an experience customers want to repeat and tell others about. This ties cross-silo decision making together and releases the organization from excess bureaucracy.  IKEA for example, designs the price tag first because they know that they serve customers who have less money in their pocket than sweat equity to put together their items themselves at home. Across IKEA, the understanding that the price drives design, innovation, and what they will and will not do drives their growth…sales that increased even in 2009 by 7.7 percent.

7. Deliberately walk in your customers’ shoes.

You need to know your customers’ life to serve their life. Yet as people rise through the ranks or even join organizations, orientation is often more about process and policy than learning about the customer at the heart of the business. Be deliberate in establishing a process for new hires, such as USAA, who require new ‘recruits’ to wear the flak jacket, and helmet many of their enlisted customers wear and to read their letters. All this is done so that at USAA when calls come in, they begin with connecting with the customer first then the process of the business second. 98% of their customers stay with them year after year.

8. Hire partners – make employee selection one of your most important decisions. 

Select your employees as you would customers – for lifelong value. At Chick-fil-A, operators and employees are selected based on their values, ability to build grow and sustain partnerships in all areas of their lives, and then their technical skills.  As a result, Chick-fil-A has operator turnover of just five percent, and they just achieved 43 years of consecutive sales growth.   Hire people who you want to become a part of the story of your business and then watch how your social media story improves.

9. Proactively solve mistakes when they occur.

When mistakes happen (and they will) get out in front of customers and admit the flaw – then make peace with your customers. Repair the emotional connection, reduce the concern, and solve problem. Southwest Airlines reviews every flight every day to know when they interrupted their customers’ lives, whether it was their fault or not. And they contact customers to explain what happened and when warranted send out LUV bucks for a future flight. Being proactive earned them a net revenue increase from those bucks of $1.9 million in 2010.  What can you be proactive on?

10. Accept the order and the accountability.

In a world where customers are holding a megaphone in their hand where they broadcast on the internet the experience you are delivering, invest in reliability. Don’t make the customer wonder where the order is, how long ‘til it gets there or what happens when it backorders. If a customer can’t tell another customer what they get from you, how they get it or how it feels when they receive it, they you don’t have a story to tell (at least one you want heard). Invest in reliability…earn the right to grow.

“Beloved companies never lose sight of the people affected by everything they do. Their reward is an army of beloved customers who urge friends and colleagues to try these companies and embrace them as well,” notes Bliss.

The Container Store Grows Because they Trust their People

Trusted Employees Feel and Act Like Partners.

The Container Store, which provides storage and organization solutions through an “uber” friendly and helpful retail experience, is a privately held company. Over 3,300 employees work in 47 stores across the United States and in a distribution center and home office in Coppell, Texas. And every single one of them knows the company’s detailed financials. The Container Store’s hiring philosophy is “One great person equals three good people.” So once the company brings someone on board, that person is considered a partner. This partnership commitment with employees equals absolute trust. “The Container Store’s goal is to be able to provide all employees with as much information as the executives have,” according to Chairman and CEO Kip Tindell. To live up to this promise, two or three times a year its full profit-and-loss status and all other financial topics are shared in a 30-page briefing given to each and every employee.

Open Communication Breeds Employee Passion and Partnership.

“The way to retain employees, to make them care, is to communicate everything to them,” says Tindell. Knowing the companywide impact of everyone’s efforts on business performance and how the overall business is doing bring an understanding of how each individual impacts the company’s growth and marketplace position. Distribution folks know their support to the stores means getting products delivered on time and in good condition. Store folks deliver the customer experience. People at the home office create and source the innovative  products which pull customers into the stores. They all connect to fuel the growth of the company. Knowing the details of financial investments in each area and the overall business results connects the dots between each position and each contributor.

Trusted Employees Want to Stay and Grow the Company.

The Container Store decided that all employees should know their sensitive financial information. Sharing information guides employees and elevates their purpose.

• What actions can you take, or policies can you remove to show employees you believe in them?
• How can you decide to honor the intelligence of employees?
• Can you “skinny down” your rule book?
• How would you rate you intent and ability to show your employees you believe in them?
• How would your employees say you are doing?
• Do employees rave about your trust in them today?
• How does your decision to fan the flames of trust compare with this beloved company?
• Do your decisions for creating an environment of trust earn you “beloved” status today?
• What do you need to do differently to move toward earning the rave of customers and employees?
• Can you identify one “stupid rule” and unleash power by removing it.
• Beloved companies throw away the rule book. What actions can you take, or policies can you remove, to show employees you believe in them? Do You Fan the Flames of Trust?

Every business has customers who have departed.

There are a variety of reasons that prompt departure. And how you react to the departure will either validate that they left for a good reason, or begin the process of bringing back that customer and that customer revenue.

In fact, companies that do a great job of winning back departed customers will frequently have a stronger relationship as a result.

Follow these five steps to identify and regain customer trust and relationships:

1. Track customers who have departed.

Most companies only track customer retention as a percentage of their business. They often don’t get down to the number and the actual customers who have departed. This effort must be about caring about the customers who left not just the percentage or how they impact your balance sheet. So the first is to quantify the volume of customer and the volume of business that departed. This can be done monthly or quarterly, depending on the volume of your business model.

2. Segment and identify those who have departed.

All customers who have departed, especially if you have a high volume business, are not contributing the same value to your business. So now you need to make some hard decisions.  Segment the customer base of departed customers and make a determination which you will reach out to for recovery.

3. Reach out to customers with respect, reason and reconciliation.

Now that you know who you want to save, reach out to them with a phone call. My suggestion is to have two groups within your company make the calls. First, executives should call a handful (1-10) of departed customers in every “rescue” cycle to keep them close to the issues driving customers out the door. The second group is a specially prepared group of people who are trained in a recovery conversation with the customer. This is not a sales pitch. The first part of the conversation is apologizing that the customer left. The second part is listening, intently to the customers’ explanation. The third part is diagnosing and verifying back to the customer why they departed, and cataloging this information for the company. And the fourth part is extending support and immediate assistance in resolving the issue. Finally, there should be an offer (not a pitch) extended to the customer to bring them back. These skills need to be developed and this can be a very rewarding project for your best call center folks, or for exceptional managers within your company. I would not outsource this.

4. Categorize reasons for departure.

Take action.After the calls, there is major opportunity for your company to identify the issues that came from all of the calls and trend and track these issues. By attaching them to the revenue of the departed customers, these issues can also be prioritized. Within the second session of customer recovery, the most critical issues will emerge and there will be no question what you should focus on. There may also be opportunities that arise from these calls about the frontline service that can provide immediate and specific feedback to the frontline that served the customer and potentially contributed to the customers’ departure. Creating a closed loop process for this feedback is very potent, in that very specific information usually comes out of these calls that are productive for coaching.

5. Put returned customers into “Intensive Care”

Once a customer has agreed to come back into your business, to be rescued, keep an eye on them. Conduct a review every six months of their experiences, tracking customer service calls, purchasing, support and other indicators which will identify the health of the restarted relationship. Then reach out again. Your close attention will not go unnoticed.

Results you can expect from customer recovery:

The process of customer recovery has been fruitful in every vertical business where I have seen this practiced. In financial services, with high levels of customer departure, we experienced as high as 30% customer recovery. We also achieved an improvement in frontline service as the feedback gleaned from these calls was provided immediately to the managers of account reps serving customers who departed.  In an automotive client, we experienced 10-15% return for service work following calls and rescue efforts to customers who had lapsed. The key is to ensure that there is a planned process to contact, resolve and reconcile the issues with the customers who have departed. But then there must also be an intention and commitment to fix the issues which pushed the customers out the door. The focus must be to fix the customers AND to fix the company. In this way, the customer rescue process brings back in revenue and prevents future revenue from departing from your business.

Satmetrix’ 2011 Net Promoter Industry Benchmarks study found that bad customer experience forced 22 percent of consumers to stop doing business with a company during the second half of 2010.

Factors that have an immediate impact on the customer’s personal experience with a company were the primary reasons consumers gave for defecting. Interacting with a rude or disinterested employee was cited most frequently (34 percent). When you scratch away beneath the surface of what causes disinterested employees, it is almost always because of how employees are treated that causes disinterest. It is about how they are hired, and about how they are enabled to honor customers by being honored themselves.

L.L. Bean is a company grows because they honor the frontline.  In this great example, customer Alma Rettew bought a holiday gift for a friend, and asked L.L. Bean, whom she bought it from, to get it to her friend on a specific date (the company has a service to do this). Unfortunately, there was a glitch in the system, and the gift arrived before the holiday, spoiling Alma’s surprise for her friend. When Alma called in to L.L. Bean to register her complaint, her fear and “dukes up” concern that she might have to fight to get her situation addressed was quickly disarmed by the quick and rapid response she received. Ms. Rettew was offered two options for solving her problem. She could receive a refund, or have a complimentary duplicate of her gift sent to her recipient at the correct time. In addition, she received a sincere apology and a promise that the company would contact her friend and explain what had transpired. The burden would fall on L.L. Bean, not her, to make things right with her friend. After all, it was their mistake, and they were accountable. All corrective actions were successfully completed. And while this solution was probably an unusual experience for Ms. Rettew, it is not an uncommon occurrence at L.L. Bean.

Empower employees to do the right thing

The L.L. Bean guarantee gives customers peace of mind, it frees the company’s front line to do the right thing, and it keeps them close to their small-town company culture. “Sell good merchandise at a reasonable profit; treat your customers like human beings and they’ll always come back for more,” Leon Leonwood Bean said in 1912 when he founded the company. It remains true today. Bean also said, “A lot of people have fancy things to say about Customer Service, but it’s just a day-in, day-out, ongoing, never-ending, persevering, compassionate kind of activity.”

This most recent Satmetrix information provides additional proof that Leon Leonwood Bean was correct in asserting that training employees to excel in customer service and selling quality merchandise would create return business. The study cites that the top reason U.S. consumers defect is rude or disinterested employees. And the second reason is poor product or service quality. Mr. Bean knew that hiring and training good people, to do an excellent job at selling his superior products would be the best way to keep customers coming back.

Honor the employees who serve the customers

L.L. Bean has sustained their respect for customers and the front line throughout the entire history of the company. From a one-man operation to its place as a global organization with sales of $1.5 billion today, the company has grown by honoring its customers—and by honoring the employees who serve customers by giving them the trust and the tools to do what’s right. In 2008, L.L. Bean was ranked the number one “Online Leader” by Women’s Wear Daily. BusinessWeek magazine named L.L. Bean as one of its top 25 service “champs” in 2008, 2009, and in 2010, L.L. Bean was named the number one service “champ.” Also, in 2010, L.L. Bean ranks in the top two of clothing catalog companies in the Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Index.

Can Our Front Line Rescue Customers?

L.L. Bean’s guarantee puts power in the hands of their front line. It gives them freedom to think on their feet and offer options without putting the customer on hold or checking with a manager.

• When a customer calls who is unhappy, does your front line have “permission” to do the right thing?
• Are there options for them to evaluate and exercise using their own good judgment?
• Do you nurture the ability in the front line to think on its feet?

Customer experiences are delivered year after year in many industries without challenging or changing process, policy or approach in what they do.  And when questioned the answer is “this is how we always do this.”  And then they wonder why they don’t stand out in the marketplace.

Perhaps the answer is that they never took the time to determine how they would stand out.

The banking industry is one of those perennially steadfast industries. Standing firm on legacy practices and policies, there is real opportunity for those who grasp that customers will respond to an experience delivered from their point of view.

Just recently, new research by Peppers & Rogers shows that “experience” in retail banking is essentially lacking. Their key findings included that less than one-third of the banks surveyed have a clear definition of their customer experience. I call this ‘clarity of purpose.’  And it is one of the key defining characteristics of organizations that thrive in good times and bad. Clarity of purpose unites the organization from executing tasks to delivering an experience customers want to experience and tell others about.  It unleashes the organization’s ability across the silos – to make decisions guided by its purpose, its promise.

Umpqua Bank Decided to Get Rid of the Ropes.

We’ve all stood in that bank line. Walking between two ropes that force us into a single-file lane, we shuffle slowly, waiting our turn, with nothing to do but watch the person at the counter, look at our watches, and wait for it all to be over. And if there’s a request that the teller can’t handle, there’s another line, and more shuffling. Well, they got rid of those ropes and the lines at Umpqua Bank. As part of Umpqua’s metamorphosis from “bank” to “store,” led by CEO Ray Davis, they shed the ropes and most standard banking practices to get rid of the feeling that banking was a chore.

Here CEO Ray Davis Explains His Decision to Change Umpqua’s Purpose:

Umpqua Bank has a quirky, lighthearted nature for a financial services company, perhaps because they started with the simple goal to help loggers and farmers with their banking. But despite their heartfelt purpose of being “the loggers’ bank,” customer experiences prior to 1994 were not consistently strong. Service levels varied from one day to the next, from one teller to the next. I call this “biorhythmic” service, in which customer experiences vary by service provider and by what kind of day he or she is having. Observing Umpqua’s lack of a clear customer-service approach, CEO Ray Davis decided to make a change. In a move away from traditional banking, he renamed Umpqua locations “stores.” In redesigned “stores,” “shoppers” could browse products and services, stay as long as they wanted, sit a spell with their legs up on a comfy chair, and sip a cup of coffee. And when they were ready, they could tap an Umpqua associate to help them with their banking needs—all without the red ropes.

At Umpqua, customers are not herded into a line for service, and they don’t have to stand in separate lines to get different services. Dedicated associates assist each customer from start to finish.

Decide with Clarity to Shed Old Industry Practices

“Umpqua Bank is part Internet café, part community center, and part bank. The coffee’s good and it’s not a bad place to sit and read a book.” By shedding old industry practices and warming up and humanizing the experience of banking, Umpqua draws customers to them. Through transforming banking into an enjoyable shopping experience, its original five branches from 1994 are now part of a bank network of over 148 “stores,” across two states with more than $8.6 billion in assets. And they continue to grow! This recent article announces their increasing expansion in their market area.

Do you have your own version of banking lines that you make customers shuffle through to get help from you? Can you find a way to get rid of your version of the “red ropes”?

267,000 YouTube views and counting – customer’s photos now sell Domino’s pizza for them!

"If we're going to be real and honest about the taste of our product, we want to be as authentic as possible about how it looks," says Russell Weiner, Domino's CMO.

In late June, Domino’s began reaching out to consumers in a photo contest where they gave $6,000 to 12 people ($500 each) who submit the best unretouched photos of Domino's pizzas. The winning shots are also "likely" to end up in ads, says the chain. The site they set up, called "Show Us Your Pizza," has thousands of pictures of pizzas—often accompanied by dogs, babies or kittens.

On that site Russell Wiener, Chief Marketing Officer, makes this set of promises:

“Here at Domino's, we don't think our inspired Domino's pizza needs the ‘extra’ things typically done to food at photo shoots to look mouth watering. Our pizza is good enough to stand on its own. That's why we're making the following promises about how we photograph our pizzas from this day forward.”

• We will only photograph real honest to goodness pizzas.

That means fresh from our own ovens, with exactly the same ingredients we deliver to your doorstep. Nothing else added.

• Our employees will make the pizza we shoot.
  

Not an art director or model maker or food stylist. A Domino's employee trained to make pizzas the only way they know how: by hand.

• We will not artificially manipulate the food we shoot.
  

No tweezers, no steam guns, no model knives cutting perfect perforations in the cheese. The only thing that will touch the pizzas we shoot is the pizza-maker's hands and a standard Domino's pizza cutter.

Traditionally, just to get a shot of pizza to sell you, a food stylist (now that’s a job I want!) would spend at least a half-hour of preparation, and require up to 129 other people’s involvement on a photo shoot to make your mouth water for a $6 buck piece of pizza!

But no more. Domino’s is taking it to the people and the people are responding enthusiastically.

This connects directly back to one of the core ways that Beloved Companies decide to grow. They decide to “Be there” – by providing products and services from their customer’s point of view.

These companies connect with customers by being bold enough to get out from behind the corporate packaging (literally, in this case) and connect human to human with their customers. This often leads to new and unexpected methods of product development, as customers have a hand in product design and feedback, because they feel a real connection with the organization, and believe it’s worth their time to invest their time.

Take Threadless T-shirts as another example of a company that thrives because of customer involvement. Threadless.com sells out of every product they sell because their T-shirts are designed voted on, and bought by their customer community of over 700,000 members. Beloved companies tap the passionate energy of their customers to grow and prosper.

In the beginning, the “Threadless” community was created to give artists and designers a place to submit their design ideas and give those designs a home—on the unexpected canvas of a T-shirt. This idea exploded into a fast-growing community. Customers embraced the idea of being involved in the design, selection, and the purchasing of the products they had a hand in creating. As a result, the Threadless.com community exploded.

Domino’s Pizza and Threadless.com are two companies striving to involve their customers, and because they encourage this active participation these companies continue to grow and prosper.
Here’s your challenge question from my book, 'I Love You More than My Dog: Five Decisions for Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad.'

Go try this to blur your line between your customers and your company:

1. Review your product development cycle. Where does it begin? With your customers, or with your own internal priorities? Make sure research and development doesn’t start until you’ve talked to customers.
2. Ask your customers to contribute. Find your version of Domino’s asking customers to send in pizza pictures or Threadless asking customers to submit designs.
3. If you are subscribe and use the Net Promoter® methodology, reach out to your “Promoters.” Ask them to come in quarterly and participate with you in product design, improvement and brainstorming. These folks already have an affinity for you and will likely jump at the chance to participate in improving a company they love.

Want to learn about other tools to help you earn customers who drive the success and growth of your business? Pick up a copy of: 'I Love You More Than My Dog: Five Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad.'

It’s a given, at some point your business will suffer a failure that disappoints customers. How your company reacts, explains, removes the pain, and takes accountability for actions signals how you think about customers, and the collective heart of your organization. It has been proven that a genuine apology strengthens the emotional connection that a customer has with a company. Being human and prone to making mistakes, we’re in luck. We have the opportunity regularly to make amends. There’s a difference between the way an “everyday” company decides to make amends and the manner in which a beloved company (one that customers grow) decides to make amends…

Apology Decisions that Drive Business Growth (in good times and bad):
Here are five recent decisions that beloved companies have made on how to decide to earn back customers’ good graces when a misstep occurred. They are five apologies to bolster your faith that business can connect commerce with humanity … and win!

Decision #1. Netflix, the DVD-by-mail service with 10 million subscribers, prescribes to decision making that “honesty is the best recovery.” They let ALL of their customers know when something goes wrong, not just those who experienced the occasional interruption in service. In fact, on August 31, 2009, Netflix emailed a large number of its subscribers to apologize for an Xbox Live streaming outage that occurred the day before. Netflix emailed everyone that could have possibly seen this blip in their service and offered a refund—including users who didn’t suffer through it at all.

The question is: Do YOU confess to customers when a misstep occurs in your operation? Is this when you show your true colors?

Decision #2. The University of Michigan Health System decided to enable doctors, nurses and all hospital staff to exercise their natural instinct and to say “sorry” when something went wrong. An early adopter of a process that encourages transparency with healthcare providers and patients and their families, the University of Michigan encourages (without fear) a swift and caring explanation, and when appropriate, a heartfelt apology. Doctors and lawyers worried that this level of transparency and just uttering the words “sorry” would drive an increase in claims and malpractice suits. But when put into practice, the complete opposite occurred.

The question is: Can YOU suspend the fear and say “We’re sorry?”

Are you able to table the corporate response and deliver one that connects on a personal level?

Decision #3. Saying sorry well in most cases should not require a committee, consortium or legal review. Most apologies should occur spontaneously, the moment the company knows a problem occurred. And the person who first hears the news should be in a position to respond appropriately. L.L. Bean’s guarantee frees their frontline to do the right thing. It keeps them close to their small-town company culture, “Sell good merchandise at a reasonable profit; treat your customers like human beings and they’ll always come back for more.” True to those words, L.L. Bean’s frontline is trusted to take action, using their own best judgment to deliver a response warranted by the situation.

The question is: Can YOUR frontline rescue customers? When an unhappy customer contacts you, does your frontline have “permission” to do the right thing?

Decision #4. Southwest Airlines proactively says “sorry” to its customers every day. Each morning a group assembles to learn about passenger experiences the previous day and to anticipate passenger experiences in the current day. BEFORE customers contact them, Southwest reaches out, acknowledges any mistakes and extends an olive branch commensurate with the experience the customer encountered. A customized letter is created for each incident. Written with humility, remorse and whimsy when called for, this uniquely “Southwest” rigor won back $1,900,000 of return flights from customers in 2009.

The question is: How proactive are YOU? Do you have a recovery plan to wow customers when things go wrong?

Decision #5. Vancouver based home health care company, Nurse Next Door was born when the owners, struggling to find appropriate caregivers for their aging parents, became fed up with company after company making errors in service. Frustrated with their lack of options, they started Nurse Next Door, and decided that any errors in service would be promptly addressed with a sincere and heartfelt apology. When they slip up, Nurse Next Door sends a freshly baked “Humble Pie,” along with a note that says, “We are very humbled by our mistake and sincerely apologize for the poor service.” Nurse Next Door thrived in 2008, experiencing an increase in client growth over 25 percent. John DeHart, one of the owners, estimates that the company spent $1,500 on humble pies, but saved about $100,000 in sales.

The question is: Is your humility oven lit? Can you bake a humble pie? Acknowledging a mistake shows that you’re human. Admitting it is hard. But it’s what customers crave. Do you have the DNA to say “sorry” and mean it?

Go try this

1. Every day, or at the end of each week, bring your folks together to discuss what experiences disappointed customers. Reach out personally to those customers and acknowledge what went wrong and extend an "olive branch" to right what went wrong.
2. Inventory all the common glitches that sometimes get in the way of a great customer experience. Proactively create and prepare the actions as a "hero kit" that your folks can have readily available to deliver. Let them decide which is best for each situation.
3. Follow up with your customers who have experienced your gesture of apology. The follow up will seal in their memory that you were genuine and that you are a "company to keep."

Beloved companies don’t consider the job done until the emotional connection with customers is restored. Why do they decide to apologize in this manner? Because it’s the right thing to do. Our mothers told us that when you hurt someone, intentionally or not, you apologize and you mean it. You right the wrong. You make peace.

(Editor's note: You can watch Jeanne interview leaders from several beloved companies, including Fred Taylor, Jr., head of Proactive Customer Service Communications at Southwest Airlines, in this video from the Net Promoter Conference in New York, February 2010.)