Car dealers have received some pretty poor press over the years and perhaps rightly so. But there are examples of businesses that now demonstrate great examples of how to WOW their customers.

One of our favourite brands and clients found within the retail automotive sector is the Sytner Group, part of US giant the United Automotive Group. The Sytner Group was founded by Frank Sytner in 1960′s and has become the most successful premium brand dealer group in the UK. The Group aim is “To be famous for delighting customers, employees, manufacturers and shareholders”, which has been their driving ambition since it first came into being in 2001.

Image courtesy of Sytner Sheffield

One of my favourite customer WOW stories was shared to me by Peter Mitchell who at the time was Assistant Bodyshop Manager of Sytner’s dealership in Sheffield. Peter shared his story of how he WOW’d one of his customers.

The customer had just taken delivery of a new BMW and within a...

If your business was a shoe how would it feel to walk in?

Would it be tight and pinch you?

Does it have awkward characteristics that rub and irritate customers?

Are some transactions awkward and painful to experience?

Understanding where the PinchPoints^® are found is key to smoothing the experience for your customers and encouraging repeat business.

As the saying goes....

Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches.

The Emotional Footprint

Your business has a unique feel to it.

We call this your Emotional Footprint^®.

It's what the experience feels like to be a customer or an employee. Understanding the Emotional Footprint^® you are creating is important as it can be used to understand what needs to be changed within the experience in order to create a positive and loyalty building engagement with your brand.

Once you understand how emotional connections drive people to your business or brand, and then make the necessary adjustments to the experience they have...

After over 25 years working in training and development, I've experienced hundreds of different techniques applied in teaching, training, and facilitation. I've experimented with dozens myself and over time have come to learn some key methods for ensuring our workshops are engaging, effective, enjoyable and repeatedly deliver their learning objectives

So to celebrate St Crispins Day (the date we ran our first Customer's Shoes event) I've compiled a list of 15 essential approaches for delivering an engaging workshop. 

How many of these do you experience in the courses delivered by your training providers?

1. Relate the Lessons To Real-Life Scenarios

Often using an example outside of the industry participants work in, helps to illustrate a point just as well as when it relates to their own field. The key, however, is in making it relevant to the real-life scenario in which their learning can be applied. The easier it is for...

It is not the strongest that survives, 
nor the most intelligent, but the one 
most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin

A Clash of Beliefs

This post is essentially about one man's view why fashion design cannot be taught online and one woman's view why it can! 

For anyone interested in understanding the potential for online learning in their profession or business this post will give you confidence that learning outside of the classroom has finally reached a point where it's recognised as being an effective tool.

The post came about through the work we are doing with online learning platforms weteachfashion.com and thefashionstudenthub.com

I had an exchange of comments on LinkedIn by someone describing themselves as a 'Creative Catalyst' who vehemently held a belief that there was no place for teaching fashion design online.

His view was that it is impossible to teach fashion design online and that anyone or any organisation that was adopting this approach...

In this post, we discuss some of the challenges franchise holders when it comes to training franchisees. We'll give you some tips on where to start and where to get further support.

Here's what's covered in the post:

1. Challenges You Face
2. Who Needs Training
3. General Approach to Your Training and Development Path
4. Offering Different Learning Approaches
5. Blended Learning Approach to Franchise training
6. Six Training Trends to Be Mindful of for Your Franchise Training
7. Free Consultation

Challenges You Face

Your role as a franchisor is to build your brand and grow it successfully following the ambitions, vision, and purpose you established when you first embarked upon this format of trading.

You’ve entered into a way of doing business that gives you much control but also leaves you open to the limitations of your franchisees. It's only through adequate training will you be able to deliver on that vision and grow your business.

Here are some of the key challenges you...

In 2001 we embarked upon our first journey into online learning with a membership site targeting the automotive sector, car dealers in particular. This was pre-Facebook and YouTube and social media wasn't even on the agenda and WordPress... that wasn't going to be released for another two years.

We invested in developing a bespoke platform that allowed us to continually add content and online courses with all manner of benefits and features for the end users using our own content management system (CMS.) We had a crude (by today's standards) course creation editor, quizzes and learning logs for users.

Everything was coded and created from scratch. It took months to develop and cost us a small fortune. The product was sold either as a membership offer with a small monthly fee or as a white-label package allowing businesses to brand it as their own for use by their employees or partners. It was a gamble but thankfully we achieved a respectable ROI.

That was then.

...

If your business model is based upon franchising your business then you'll know just how important franchisee results are. Without their success, you fail!

Any competent franchise will be offering relevant and comprehensive training across the board. In this post, we're summarising the key areas that franchisors need to pay attention to in order to build a worthwhile suite of training options that support their franchisees.

A franchisor training program is one of the major benefits of franchising. It lets franchisees acquire skills rapidly through the initial training program, and then gives on-site and ongoing training to reinforce those skills. It's a major selling point so it needs to deliver on its promise.

Franchisee training enables franchisors to ensure consistent delivery of their brand promise and customer experience from site to site regardless of the market.

General Approaches to Training Your Franchisees

1. The Operations Manual

Creating an operations...

Do you have a business book published or one in the making? Have you got a manuscript that you have finished but never got around to actually publishing it? Would you like to generate extra income from the content of your business book?

Well in this post I share with you some advice on how to take your business book and turn it into an online course and use this to generate extra income.

Creating a course is a way of “repurposing content”, to recycle something already written in a different format so that you can squeeze additional income out of the same piece of work. 

If done well it can be highly profitable for the author.

There are numerous ways to repurpose your book content and build upon your expertise and experience. For example:

• Selling related services.
• Selling software relevant to the topic including apps.
• Consulting / Coaching on the topic of your book.
• Speaking at events.
• Facilitating workshops on your book's topic.
• Creating and selling an online...

Is it me or have service standards been dumbed down by the smartness of phones? Everywhere I turn it seems, there are people on their phones catching a quick look at their most recent notification or posting?

In restaurants, shops,  garages, petrol stations, newsagents, hospitals.

Everywhere.

And everyone who owns a device has done it. You are guilty too!

In the last week alone I've witnessed the following examples of people on their phones whilst 'working'.

• An airport security officer while screening passengers hand luggage.
• A shop assistance while checking out a customer at the cash register.
• A forecourt attendant at a petrol station at the payment point.
• A waiter in a restaurant checking his phone in between trips to the kitchen to serve customers.
• A shop assistant standing in the doorway of her shop as customers entered and left.
• Employees checking phone status during meetings.
• Course participants checking email during a course.
• A hotel receptionist checking...

This is a short and simple (can be made more difficult) group challenge that asks participants to arrange themselves in a line according to certain criteria.

These criteria can be anything you choose for fun such as height or colour of shoes. But they have to arrange themselves without speaking to each other.

This energiser not only gets the blood flowing but it also promotes non-verbal communication and teamwork.

Use simple versions in early stages of group development and more creative and complex ones to challenge more established groups or teams.

Step 1

Give the group the task of lining-up in order of height (tallest-shortest) without talking or making any non-verbal sounds.

Step 2

Repeat the challenge two or three times with more challenging tasks that get progressively more difficult. For example:

• Line up by hair color or eye color (lightest-darkest)
•  Line up by date of birth (oldest-youngest)
•  Line up by where you were born (farthest-closest)
• ...