The Workshop

I was at a company workshop recently, organized for our team – such an event always anticipated for us to get away from work for the day . Anyway, I had “acid indigestion” just before lunch, lucky enough (and weird too) I have this ENO in my pocket which I bought (first time in many years) the day before so the supposed to be “good” food was rather so-so than enjoyable ( I never fanncy hotel food anyway!).

The topic for the workshop was “How to Delight Customers!”. (Yeah, sounds very much like a hot topic for Sales people). Everybody have their own ideas or definition of delighting customers – Project Managers , technical managers to engineers . The interesting part for me that day was at the end of the session- before leaving, everyone had to write their own version of plan(s) on want to do to delight the customers.

For me the best answer would be giving all what the customer wants but I am not writing that down! Need to have something better than that -not easy for me to come up with some bombastic words .. So, it took me a while to translate my ideas into words , something that (I have to admit) I was not very good at.
Finally, I wrote the following.
i) Listen more to the customers and try help them to achieve their needs (?).
ii) Help the customers to be more efficient – achieve more by doing less- by automating their work!

Skip point (i) which obviously something to start with (general ideas) and most importantly I always wanted to highlight issue (ii) to the upper management, I hope they are listening!
I will elaborate later about things that I have started doing since that day. Its quite a challenging task for me to implement these ideas on Windows environment compared to UNIX/Linux. And I found a good start later the week after, with this simple yet powerful mail tools called Blat – A Win32 Command Line SMTP Mailer

Soon lah!