Would You Do That to Your Mother?: The "Make Mom Proud" Standard for How to Treat Your Customers

Customer experience pioneer Jeanne Bliss shows why “Make Mom Proud” companies outperform their competition. Her 5-step guide to customer experience and culture transformation makes this achievement possible. 
 
Bliss urges companies to make business personal to earn ardent fans and admirers, by focusing on one deceptively simple question: "Would you do that to your mother?" 
 
“Make Mom Proud” companies give customers the treatment they desire, and employees the ability to deliver it. They turn “gotcha” moments into “we’ve got your back” moments by rethinking business practices, and they enable employees to be part of the solution to fix customer frustrations.  
 
Bliss scoured the marketplace seeking companies who excel at living their core values, grounded in what we all learned as kids. She offers a five-step plan for evaluating your current behaviors and implementing actions at every level of the organization. 
 
Step 1.“Be the Person I Raised You to Be” 
Understand how you are hiring, developing and trusting employees to bring the best version of themselves to work. Vail resorts, for example, the world's largest ski resort operator, banned the three words "Our policy is..." from their vocabulary, freeing employees to take spirited actions to deliver "the experience of a lifetime." 
 
Step 2. “Don’t Make Me Feed You Soap” 
Learn the eight key frustrations that bind us as customers (waiting, fear, anxiety, the black hole of no communication, etc.) and how to apply actions from companies who are delivering a seamless, frictionless and easy experience.
 
Step 3.“Put Others Before Yourself”
Determine if your focus is on helping customers achieve their goals – and evaluate how that is fueling your growth. Canada's Mayfair Diagnostics, for example, spent over a year studying the emotions of patients entering an imaging clinic, so they could redesign their welcome to deliver warmth and caring over procedure and process. The newly designed clinic achieved profitability in record time.
 
Step 4.  “Take the High Road”
Learn how companies who do the right thing rise above the competition. Virgin Hotels, for example, named #1 U.S. hotel by Conde Nast Reader's Choice Awards, walked away from price gouging at the mini bar, so you'll never pay more for that Snickers bar than what you'd pay at the corner market.
 
Step 5.  “Stop the Shenanigans!”
Evaluate your current company behaviors and identify the key actions that you can begin immediately.   
 
With 32 case studies and examples from more than 85 companies, this is a practical and easy to follow guide for your experience and culture transformation. Filled with comics to snapshot our experiences as customers, a “mom lens” to reflect continuously on your performance, and a “make-mom-proud-ometer” quiz – the book makes Bliss’s approach accessible and approachable.
 
Join the movement to #MakeMomProud by applying this book across your organization. Whether you're contemplating your company's returns policy, its social media presence, or its big-picture strategy, this approach will help your company anticipate both employee and customer needs, extend patience, and show respect at all times.

"Jeanne Bliss's book is for anyone who's serious about improving the customer experience. I loved her inspiring and practical case studies." 
—Dan Heath, co-author of Made to Stick, Switch, and The Power of Moments

“An actionable, smart, and fun book everyone in hospitality should read. It gets us back to why we’re in business in the first place.”
—Raul Leal, CEO of Virgin Hotels

“A fun read that gets to the heart of why the best companies prosper- because they let people be the best version of themselves at work.”
 —Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com and author of Delivering Happiness

“Jeanne Bliss has written a masterpiece, filled with commonsense ideas that will hit you in the heart. It’s a book that every employee will want to read, and every leader should.”
—Colleen Barrett, president emeritus, Southwest Airlines

“Jeanne Bliss gets us to the core of designing moments that matter most to our employees and those we serve–the most brilliant strategy in any business.”  
—Dr. Adrienne Boissy, chief experience officer, Cleveland Clinic

 “Jeanne Bliss has made the complex simple by articulating customer experience in concepts that resonate and inspire action.”
—Allison Circle, chief customer experience officer, Columbus Metropolitan Library
 
“This is a practical real-world book that transcends business to address our lives as customers.  In her straight talk and whimsical manner, Jeanne gently prods us toward behaviors that elevate companies and earn growth through customer admiration and word of mouth.”
—Martin Hand, Chief Donor Officer, ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

Jeanne Bliss is one of the foremost experts on customer-centric leadership and the role of the chief customer officer. For over 20 years, she led customer experience executive at Lands’ End, Coldwell Banker, Allstate, Mazda, and Microsoft. Since 2002 she has guided customer experience transformations for major global organizations through her firm, CustomerBliss, and has inspired audiences through her keynote speeches.  She is the co-founder of the Customer Experience Professional’s Association and has been called the “godmother of customer experience.” This is her fourth book.

1.

Picture Your Mom.

Our childhood. Mom's lessons. And our business life.

They share freely. They have our back. They are there, in good times and bad. They always have our best interest in mind. They are brave.

This describes our moms.

It also describes companies that follow her lead in how they grow their businesses.

The lessons we learned as kids stick with us. And often they have our mom's face all over them. Her guidance, her rules, and her sayings are still in our heads. You probably grew up that way too, with a simple, clear understanding of what to do and what not to do.

We were taught to share, trust each other, play nice in the sandbox, and treat others like we'd want to be treated. Those lessons remain some of the best advice we've ever been given.

They also remain some of our most sound advice for how to behave in business.

Companies that "Make Mom Proud" grow by living those lessons. They remove practices that might curb the extension of care, or limit employees to act in good conscience. They work to remove boundaries and pressures that prohibit customer-driven decision making. Their actions honor the human at the end of their decisions, establish a balanced relationship with customers and partners, and put employees in positions to act at work like they'd act at home. Like they were raised.

I grew up Italian, the third of seven kids. We lived a loud and crazy life. But we had a set of behaviors that guided us, which we learned by watching our parents. Their actions, more than words, showed us the path to follow. And their character was on display in how they acted.

The women in my life were particularly animated. My mom, Lydia, would sew until all hours of the night, fashioning custom-made Halloween costumes for each of us, and teeny tiny Barbie doll dresses for my sisters and me. My dad's mom, Ermalinda, rarely sat down for a meal she had prepared. Hovering around the perimeter of the table, she would carry large plates of food, spooning it onto our plates whether we wanted it or not, exclaiming "Mangia! Mangia!" ("Eat! Eat!").

And my mom's mom, Virginia, would roll out dough every Christmas to make homemade ravioli. Never satisfied unless they were perfect for us, she would throw out mounds of dough she had rolled out but deemed imperfect, even when it meant putting in hours to begin again. Neither grandma let us leave their homes without handing each of us a bag of groceries, scooping whatever food they had in their pantry for us to take home. They were selfless. They were nourishing. They were perfectionists. They thought of us first.

These are the behaviors that have become the standard for me, and for most of us, for how to act in our lives. We strive to apply the lessons we learned as kids to the way we behave at work. As both employees and customers, we gravitate to companies that create environments to encourage and celebrate these behaviors. These are the make-mom-proud companies we celebrate and learn from in this little book.

As we learn about their paths, it's important to note that each of the make-mom-proud companies did not achieve this state overnight. It took one action, then another, and then another to give people permission and examples to model. That's why, in this book, we offer a simple way to help prompt these actions: a lens to guide your company decisions, by thinking of one person in particular at the end of each of them-your mom.

Imagine Mom as your customer.

Within this book, I'm ever so gently delivering a bit of tough love wrapped in velvet to ask you to think about what you do and how you do it-from the perspective of your mother.

I encourage you to ask yourself when you act, speak, respond, or decide, "What would Mom have to say about this?" "Would we do this thing we are contemplating, to her?"

So take a minute. Picture your mom. What's she doing? Picture her picking up the phone to call an 800 number. Then picture her waiting. Picture the frustration of the wait and then her joy as someone connects. And then picture her face as she's asked to repeat all the numbers and facts that she punched in before waiting on hold. Picture her life at the auto dealership. Or walking into a retail store. Picture her nervously waiting for a doctor's appointment. Picture her trying to figure out how to program her phone.

Of course, it's not that simple. It's not the asking of the question "Would we do that to our mother?" that elevates behavior and companies. Conditions must be right for the asking. Leaders must encourage and establish a safe environment where asking that question is celebrated and rewarded. People must be encouraged and enabled to act-by imagining someone they love at the end of decisions.

When asking this question is genuinely enabled, it can benefit every part of your organization. For individuals on the front line, this "Mom lens" can help recalibrate personal responses with customers. Inside the organization and with teams, it prompts collaboration to improve experiences. For leaders, it can be a litmus test to determine actions that the company will, or will not, take to grow.

We need to take how we are treating customers personally. This is what prompts actions that elevate a company and its people. Thinking of our moms at the end of our decisions helps to get us there. That's why I suggest that you imagine her in moments when you're making decisions or taking personal actions. The image of her, of what she's meant to you and what you've learned from her, can be a powerful and instant reality check. It can make us pause.

What imagining Mom, and this book, will do for you.

This book is assembled for you to use inside of your company to get traction on the things that impact and matter in relationships with customers and employees. It is packaged to help you advance your work to "Make Mom Proud." Each of the case studies is organized as a unit for your use inside your organization. You can use them as daily huddles in meetings with leaders or as the content for workshops where you dig deeper.

Each of the four main chapters captures a different aspect of our customer experiences. "Be the Person I Raised You to Be" (chapter 2) addresses the employee experience and the opportunity to elevate and inspire employees' work. "Don't Make Me Feed You Soap!" (chapter 3) concentrates on common issues that define each of our lives as customers and celebrates companies that simplify or extinguish them. "Put Others Before Yourself" (chapter 4) showcases the imperative to redefine what companies offer and how they deliver, starting with customer goals and how they live their lives. "Take the High Road" (chapter 5) celebrates the character and values that live within make-mom-proud companies, and how they overturn or resist traditional business practices to earn goodness-driven growth.

You'll learn actions these companies take to improve, of course. But most important, you'll learn "how" they were able to get traction. I'll share the "inside of their clock" to showcase their decisions and actions and to provide you with decisions you can make to earn the right to growth by improving employee and customer lives. Prodding questions after each case study ask you to look at your company through the "Mom lens" so that you can assess where you are now.

The thirty-two case studies provide you with a mini tool kit to use inside your organization. Each is built with lessons that are easily consumable, broken into individual learning modules, and immediately available to you. Chapter 6, "Stop the Shenanigans!," summarizes all of the "Mom lens" challenges as a quiz or assessment, to determine where you are today on your journey.

I encourage you to join our movement to market hope to customers and encouragement to each other, that improving customer experiences is achievable, and that progress is being made. A dedicated website (http://www.make-mom-proud) is now live, where you can honor your mom and be recognized for your progress. Post a picture of your mom and a summary of what you've done to improve customer and employee experiences (more about this later), so that we can learn your advances. We will use the hashtag #MakeMomProud on social media to broadcast your efforts.

This is a celebration book and a "tell it like it is" book, because we need both. There are many, many companies that are overturning and redesigning "frustrated mom moments" to create "Make Mom Proud" moments all around the world. In the thirty-two case studies, and numerous anecdotes throughout this book, we celebrate actions that companies have taken to move from "everyday" behavior to acts that elevate a company and its people.

In addition to celebrating these great moments, I'll be "noodging" you, as my Italian grandmas would say, to make change where warranted. As friends, we'll look at some moments where we know we can do better: those "you can't make this stuff up" times in customers' lives when we make it hard on them, though not intentionally. The plain fact of the matter is that sometimes our lives as customers are not as easy as they're cracked up to be.

To describe these peccadilloes in our businesses, I've turned to humor as shorthand to convey those moments-again, as a friend and as someone living this stuff the same as you are. The custom-created comics smattered across these pages in one brief snippet are intended to capture the customer perspective. And I'll be offering them to you as teaching tools you can access on my website customerbliss.com if you find, as I do, that humor can be both a salve and a catalyst for recognizing an opportunity and driving change.

Use this book to tell the story of your customersÕ

lives. Then take actions to ÒMake Mom Proud.Ó

This book leads us back to those memories of our childhood, of how we were reared, to simplify how we make decisions in business. It's the simplicity of those childhood lessons that made them easy to follow.

Below is a summary of the chapters of the book, organized to help you cut through the clutter and focus decision making and actions on what matters most so that you can inspire new behaviors inside your company. And grow your business by improving customers' lives.

Chapter 2: "Be the Person I Raised You to Be."

The make-mom-proud companies find the people whose upbringing and values align with what they want their company to stand for. And then they enable them to bring the best version of themselves to work. Selecting who will, and will not, become members of these companies is job number one. But after that, the focus is to help them to prosper. To enable them to achieve, and be true to how they were raised. They nurture memory creators who take joy in their work. And enable people to thrive.

Chapter 3: "Don't Make Me Feed You Soap!"

The make-mom-proud companies are steadfast in removing "bar of soap" moments from customers' lives. These are the moments that make it hard to be a customer: waiting, complexity, uncertainty, and sometimes fear and concern. These companies work to show up more humanely where customers have to put in an inordinate amount of time and effort to get what they need. They turn these moments of struggle into ones of reliability, respect, and caring.

Chapter 4: "Put Others Before Yourself."

The Make-mom-proud companies prove with their actions that they have their customers' best interest in mind. This is at the heart of companies that grow most organically, earning ardent admirers. Operating at this level remains elusive until the paradoxical realization kicks in, which is that to achieve your goals, you need to help others achieve theirs.

To take this approach to growth means opening up everyone to a new order of design and decision making. It goes well beyond "whack-a-moling" problems away to imagining people and emotions and their lives. This starting point enables make-mom-proud companies to design moments that elevate their place in customers' lives.

Chapter 5: "Take the High Road."

Make-mom-proud companies over turn or resist one-sided business practices. They take the road less traveled to earn honor-bound relationships with customers, partners, and employees. They choose to reverse the trend of business practices that have defined their industries.

They establish balanced relationships where both sides win, where both customer and company are better off because they are in each other's lives. They honor customers as assets. They work to flip "Gotcha!" moments to "We've got your back" moments. They applaud accountability. They practice reciprocal trust. Their goal is for customers to prosper.

Six Actions That Build Make-Mom-Proud Companies.

Throughout this book, you will be receiving what I found to be a constant source of joy: learning about actions, often bravely undertaken, that elevate companies, and forge genuine and caring bonds between employees, customers, and companies. After studying hundreds of these forward-thinking organizations and leaders, I've distilled their impact down to six most common among them in advancing their practices and operations. In this book, you'll learn about many companies whose actions changed the course of an entire industry. Then you'll learn about others whose strikingly simple actions had lasting impact on their culture and business.

One Action Can Open the Door.

The power of make-mom-proud actions is that, once put into place, they set others in motion. They give people permission to do the right thing. As you'll see in the case studies, any one of these simple actions can start a groundswell for good. For example, in the chapter "Be the Person I Raised You to Be," you'll learn about Cleveland Clinic's transformation. It began with the commitment, accompanied by an investment in training and communication, that everyone in the organization was considered and given permission to act as a "caregiver." Years of actions later, which built upon that commitment, they are rated the number two hospital in the United States by U.S. News & World Report.

Actions for Hiring and Development Set the Tone.

You will see the deliberate and well-orchestrated actions that make-mom-proud companies take to hire people whose values and behaviors are in sync with their own. Pal's Sudden Service, a drive-through restaurant based in Tennessee with twenty-six locations, enlists a 60-point psychometric survey to determine whether the teenagers who will deliver food to your drive-in window or make your burger will sync with the values of the company and the team they will join. They then receive more than 120 hours of training and ongoing mentoring. Their turnover is one-third the industry average, and they have lost just seven general managers in thirty-three years. Pal's enjoys one of the highest revenues per square foot in the quick-serve restaurant industry. CEO Thom Crosby connects this to the company's teams, and how they are hired and developed.