Would You Do That To Your Mother ?

The “Make Mom Proud” Standard for How to Treat Your Customers

Jeanne Bliss
Portfolio Penguin

I bought this book by its cover. It really caught my attention. The title is quite provocative.

The reality is that the inside is even better than the cover.

The idea behind this book is for us to imagine what if starting tomorrow, all your Customers were your Mother. Would you treat them the same way you treat them today?

This is a very interesting reflection. Jeanne Bliss was very successful bringing the “Make Mom Proud” concept into this book.

On the First Chapter it gets you to think what your company would do if all your Customers were your Mom. In other words, it tries to make you think how good is your company treating your Customers.

The Second Chapter is called “Be the Person I Raised You to Be”. The main purpose of this chapter is to talk about Employee Experience. It is about hiring the right people. Those people that align well with your company’s Principles and Values. It is also about enabling those people to bring the best version of themselves to work everyday. It is about empowering your people for them to perform and to prosper, by way of being their best selves while putting the Customer at the Center of everything they do.

The Third Chapter is called “Don’t Make Me Feed You Soap”. This chapter is all about getting rid of bad habits. Its about making it easy for Customers to do business with you. It’s about respecting the Customer time, keeping Customers informed, letting Customers depart gracefully, talking straight and simple, making Customers feel like you know them. It is about removing moments of waiting, complexity, uncertainty, fear and concern from the relationship with your Customer.

The Fourth Chapter is called “Put Other Before Yourself”. This chapter is about realizing that helping others to achieve their goals gets you closer to achieving yours. It’s about empathy and making sure you focus on the Customer success. It is about clarity of Purpose. It’s about thinking about the People you serve before thinking of the rule, the policy, the good old way of doing things. It’s about understanding your impact on people’s lives. It’s about designing the Service and the Experiences to allow for human error, for caring, for willingness to change to meet Customers needs.

The Fifth Chapter is called “Take the High Road”. This chapter is all about Principles. About never falling for the temptation of making money at the expense of the Customer loss. About avoiding one-sided business practices. It is about giving up to follow the herd and making your own way, while staying true to your principles as a business and as a person. It’s about honoring the Customers as assets and avoiding unpleasant surprises. It’s about making the Customer feel like you got their backs.

The Sixth Chapter is called “Stop the Shenanigans”. This chapter is all about taking action. It shows an assessment to evaluate how close you are from “Making Mom Proud”. This helps on the understanding of the concepts discussed in practical terms.

The best part of the book is that besides the concepts I shared above, the book brings a lot of real-life cases that illustrate each one of the concepts depicted. The book brings what the author calls “The Mom Lens”. It is a summary of the concepts, looking from Mom’s perspective. It also brings a lot of cartoons for your reading fun.

Because the book is divided in short pieces of reading, that bring a concept, the case and the Mom Lens, in a sequence, it makes the reading easy, particularly for those that do not have a lot of time. You can read those short pieces in between other commitments.

In summary, it makes you think about the quality of your Service and of the Experiences you deliver to the Customers in a less than traditional way, but it is really fun and entertaining.

Enjoy the reading.