Making your customers feel valued and happy can be the difference between liquidation or long-term success for your business.

You want to make your customers feel valued and happy, and you want to be able to hold them to that standard.

But it doesn’t have to be a one-way street. You can use a variety of tools to help your customers feel more valuable, and you can also create the environment that creates that feeling. Visit the Salesforce website and get all the details!

Customer service

You can do a lot to make your customers feel valued by improving customer service in several ways, from updating your website to answering customer questions in the right way.

“You want to make your customers feel valued and happy, and you want to be able to hold them to that standard.”

Some of these solutions will come naturally, while others will require work to implement. You’ll also have to be creative in order to find a way to make your customers feel valued, but ultimately the main thing is to find the right way to make your customers feel valued.

Here are some suggestions.

Create an honest relationship with your customers. One of the best ways to engage your customers is by first getting to know them. To do this, ask the following questions about your customers: What do they care about most? What are their complaints about their current business? What are their hopes for the future? “The first thing you have to realize is that you can’t really ask them, ‘What do you care about most? What are your problems?’ They might give you a very short answer, and you might not like it.” James Damore I like to consider “problem statement” to be a common thread that connects people in a web of pain. I’m going to break down the first step in solving each of your problem statements so that you can make your customers feel valued.

Step 1: What do your customers care about most?

To get your customers to care, first you have to find out what they care about most. What do you think they care about most? It’s possible that your customers might be too busy to care about certain areas of the product, but it is also possible that your customers might be interested in other areas and other facets of your product. Do you believe that your customers care the most about: Your products

your services

their own jobs

their personal happiness

or any of a host of other aspects of their life? Do you know what they care most about? Can you offer your customers additional value to them? If so, you should put some thought into how to do it. Make sure you look into what makes your customers happiest. This is one area where you could really help your customers out. It is not enough to just be a good business. You have to be a great business to achieve their satisfaction.

What do you think your customers care about most? It’s possible that your customers might be too busy to care about certain areas of the product, but it is good for them to think about them. Make sure you are keeping your customers in mind by researching the following things to find out what they actually care about: What is the pain point for your customers?

What is the value they get from your service?

How often do they reach out to you?

How frequently do they buy from you?

How often do they return their items?

If they could add something to their shopping cart, what would it be?

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Session “How Agile and Lean Changed My Organization” at OOP Conference

At the OOP Conference 2012 in Munich I presented another version of my session “How Agile and Lean Changed My Organization” (in German, called “Wie Agil und Lean meine Organisation veränderte“). This was actually the outcome of the 2nd iteration of a previous version. Continue reading

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[Slack to the Rescue] The Future

This is post 5 of 5 in the series “Slack to the Rescue”

  1. [Slack to the Rescue] What You Want to Do
  2. [Slack to the Rescue] Culture of Autonomy
  3. [Slack to the Rescue] Harder Than It Sounds
  4. [Slack to the Rescue] Forever in Down Under
  5. [Slack to the Rescue] The Future

So far, so yay! Employees enjoy slack, organizations enjoy innovations resulting from employee’s slack, and teams are formed to drive innovative ideas. But what happens if an idea originating in slack is successful? With all those innovations some ideas have to be successful eventually, right? Continue reading

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[Slack to the Rescue] Forever in Down Under

This is post 4 of 5 in the series “Slack to the Rescue”

  1. [Slack to the Rescue] What You Want to Do
  2. [Slack to the Rescue] Culture of Autonomy
  3. [Slack to the Rescue] Harder Than It Sounds
  4. [Slack to the Rescue] Forever in Down Under
  5. [Slack to the Rescue] The Future


Slack at Atlassian

It’s actually pretty hard to get real data on slack. Most data you can find is diffuse and contains lots of rumours. It seems that especially on Google’s 20 % there are more myths than facts available. 3M and Gore are mostly legend, nothing concrete, almost no details. Atlassian to the rescue! Continue reading

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[Slack to the Rescue] Harder Than It Sounds

This is post 3 of 5 in the series “Slack to the Rescue”

  1. [Slack to the Rescue] What You Want to Do
  2. [Slack to the Rescue] Culture of Autonomy
  3. [Slack to the Rescue] Harder Than It Sounds
  4. [Slack to the Rescue] Forever in Down Under
  5. [Slack to the Rescue] The Future


Introducing slack, very carefully

I don’t know how slack was introduced at Gore, 3M or Google. We at it-agile introduced slack very carefully. We had big discussions about the concept. Though it was very attractive, we feared the costs. Being a company of programmers and consultants, each day a programmer couldn’t program and a consultant couldn’t consult was lost money. Sure, slack should pay off in the long term, but doubts remained. Continue reading

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[Slack to the Rescue] Culture of Autonomy

This is post 2 of 5 in the series “Slack to the Rescue”

  1. [Slack to the Rescue] What You Want to Do
  2. [Slack to the Rescue] Culture of Autonomy
  3. [Slack to the Rescue] Harder Than It Sounds
  4. [Slack to the Rescue] Forever in Down Under
  5. [Slack to the Rescue] The Future


Motivation through slack

Boosting innovation in an organization is one goal, but not the only one. The other one is motivation. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has esteem and self-actualization as the top layers of his famous pyramid, both of which are addressed by slack. Continue reading

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[Slack to the Rescue] What You Want to Do

This is post 1 of 5 in the series “Slack to the Rescue”

  1. [Slack to the Rescue] What You Want to Do
  2. [Slack to the Rescue] Culture of Autonomy
  3. [Slack to the Rescue] Harder Than It Sounds
  4. [Slack to the Rescue] Forever in Down Under
  5. [Slack to the Rescue] The Future


Innovation through slack

This is a seriesof 5 blogposts on slack. Slack is work time in which an employee is free to work on whatever he wants. In this series, I’ll present slack at 3M, Gore, Google, Atlassian, Semco and it-agile, write about the necessary company culture, point out several pitfalls, explain innovation and motivation as the main reasons to introduce slack, and show the possible future of slack from my point of view.

Let’s start with an accident. Continue reading

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Hanlon’s Razor – Comfort in the Assumption of Stupidity

Whenever I’m having a hard time when dealing with the resistance of change at the customer’s; when struggling with the emotionality and unreasonableness of a colleague during a meeting; when facing the stubbornness of a friend in a meeting – so, whenever it seems I’m dealing with some kind of malice, I find a lot of comfort in Hanlon’s Razor. Continue reading

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37 Tasks for a Product Owner’s Job


Product Owner is a full-time job
Engine Order by Ky

In contrast to the Scrum master role which is often questioned whether it is a full-time job, the product owner role is almost never questioned being a full-time job. One exception: Roman Pichler presented “The Partial Product Owner” in his book Agile Product Management with Scrum.

However, in my experience a lot of product owners have problems to focus on their job. Often they are part of some kind of speciality department with lots of commitments not directly related to the product they should develop in their Scrum team.

Continue reading
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