Good afternoon or good evening or good morning, whichever it is. I’m Danny O’Malia. I’m Indy’s Trusted Servant and I want to thank Ryan Henry and INSPIREsmall.biz for this opportunity to speak to all of you. I do customer service training and keynote speaking about customer service. It’s all about the culture of the organization.
I learned all about how to do all of that from my father, the late Joe O’Malia in the retail grocery business here in Indianapolis. If you’re not from Indianapolis, well, we had the best grocery stores with the best service for a long, long time.
Customer service is going to depend on the how good the culture is in the beginning and how well the company is doing when it grows in keeping the culture and in talking about that, let me show you a very difficult start to our program, a quote from my late daughter Shannon O’Malia. Shannon was murdered by her ex-husband, who then committed suicide on July 27th of 2014.
She, right before that, had gone through a divorce and she was talking on Pinterest. My youngest daughter Colleen found this quote, and it was Shannon’s last Pinterest post and she was talking about how difficult going through the divorce was with kids and everything.
“You’ve got what it takes, but it’s going to take everything you’ve got.”
Of course, not knowing what she was facing and what the rest of us were going to face within a very short period of time after that Pinterest quote.
When my youngest daughter Colleen showed me the quote a few years ago, it dawned on me that she was hitting on something that organizations whether they be Not-for-profits, governments, or any business; they don’t spend enough time cultivating their cultures and keeping their cultures and building their cultures because it’s a difficult thing to do in the day-to-day dealings with businesses.
So, we’re going to do some culture statements for you now, and the first one is from the late Joe O’Malia. I was recently told that he probably got this from Teddy Roosevelt. This is something everybody at O’Malia’s knew from day one.
“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
Who are the people? Well, they’re the customers. They’re also the employees. They’re also the vendors. They’re also the community.
When we used to have new employee orientation at O’Malia’s back in the day. We would use this example:
You are a grocery Stocker; you are unloading a truck. You are told a customer is not an interruption of your job, the customers are the reason you have your job. When you hear the announcement “All grocery help to the front” you stop unloading the truck, you get up to the front and you help take care of the customer.
You also lighten the load of the other people upfront and so it’s not an interruption of your job. It’s the reason you have the job. The job will still be there when the when the rush ends. And you can go back to unloading the truck.
Another great culture statement comes from one of my local clients here in Indianapolis, Ossip Optometry. They have about 20 to 25 optometry shops around Indianapolis. Lots of doctors, lots of sales. People fitting people for glasses and so on and so forth and in every store they have this poster.
“Laser technology from Mars, customer service from Mayberry”
It dawned on me when I walked into an awesome store before I did the program, who sees the poster every day. The employees of Ossip have customer service from Mayberry embedded in that culture, and that’s how you can keep opening more stores and keep your culture is keep embedding the culture and the idea of customer service into the brains and hearts and souls of your employees.
The famous business consultant Peter Drucker says this, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” And to give you an example of that, we’ll show you a couple of cultures that are going well and maybe one or two that.
You can contact Danny on INSPIREsmall.biz here.
