I’m currently attending “B-School” with Marie Forleo which is an online business school for entrepreneurs that want to set up an online business. It was sponsored by SK Chase as part of my personal development! Thank you Kaye & Steph 🙂

In one of the modules, Marie Forleo shares the importance of providing an experience to your customers at every touch point in your business, from Customer Service through to Sales, instead of just providing a service. Marie Forleo does exactly that; the moment you log into B-School there’s a big picture of her smiling at you and welcoming you to the program. There’s personalised e-mails and videos that reflect her personality. The Sales Material before enrolling to B-School is colourful, funky and fun and has pictures of her in there too. Even though Marie Forleo herself wasn’t present apart from a couple of live Question & Answer calls, she was present all the way through B-School via her branded material. WOW! When I think of Marie Forleo, I think of Fun, Hip, Smart and Savvy. I immediately feel like that too when doing B-School without even having met Marie. She definitely provided a cool and hip experience for me!

We recently had a “Setting Free” workshop where we discussed how we want to set ourselves and our customers free in the future, since setting free is our vision, as well as our intent in business. Setting free to us means “Being the source of making things easier, enabling ourselves and others to do what we love.” One of the things we discussed in our workshop was that we don’t just want to provide a ‘vanilla’ service (average service) to our clients we want to be the ‘pistachios’ in our business (excellent & unique in our own way). We identified some of the areas in our business of how we can be more pistachio and less vanilla and over the next few months are working on bringing more of our nutty side, ahem, our pistachio side into the business :-). Watch this space!

So what does it take to be a pistachio and provide a pistachio experience to our customers rather than just providing a vanilla service?

When I think of providing a vanilla service, I think of it as a transaction or an exchange. It’s a bit boring, bland without fun or personality. We’re just doing what it says on the tin. You want something, I’ll give it to you! 🙂 (Sounds a bit like a Neanderthal)!

However providing a pistachio experience means being quirky and fun, it means thinking outside of the box and doing things differently. Providing our customers with more than just what it says on the tin, exceeding expectations and bringing our personality into the business. This is what makes us unique and sets us apart!

It’s a bit like thinking of it in a Disney kind of way and sending our customers on an adventure 🙂 All of the sudden I think of myself more than just being a Sales & Distribution Manager, I think of myself as a “Creator of an Experience” for my customers. How exciting! I think about how I want my customers to feel at every touch point!

So whilst we are turning ourselves into pistachios over the next months and looking at the different areas of our business on where we can be more of “us”, I want to leave you with a quote from Sally Hogshead from How to Fascinate  “You don’t learn how to be fascinating, you unlearn how to be boring…and I’ve changed that to “you don’t learn to be a pistachio, you unlearn how to be a vanilla 🙂

Pistachio Greetings from SK Chase!