7 Tenets of Taxi Terry by Scott McKain

Author:Scott McKain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2014-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

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Let’s say you coach young kids on a team in a local sports league. You align with them because you understand a bit about the challenges they are facing as they learn a sport and compete with other teams. You engage them as you call each one by his or her name, share a smile and some encouragement, and attempt to keep their spirits high.

Every young person on the team is pretty terrific. However, one of the kids is your daughter. To you, which person on the team is the most special?

Pretty obvious, right? Although you are aligned and engaged with every young person, you have a commitment to your own child that runs deeper than words can describe. That commitment makes all the difference.

To be blunt, there is no way you will ever possess a commitment to a customer as strong as your bond with your offspring (nor should you). However, this example should illustrate that when there is true commitment, there is additional—and significant—emotional intensity.

In our personal lives, we have acquaintances, friends, and true commitments. With individuals with whom we have shared commitments—whether romantic or platonic—we develop a higher level of concentration on making certain we are contributing to their well-being in a positive, productive manner.

It’s a similar phenomenon when we exhibit a commitment to our customers. We simply develop and display a higher level of concentration and intensity in regard to creating an experience that contributes to their personal and professional success.

If you are willing to align your thinking with your customers’ logical point of view, engage them in a dialogue regarding their perspective, and commit to deal with them by intensely focusing on their needs, you’ve met the first standard of this tenet.

However, as with many aspects of business and life, there are exceptions.

There is nothing here about aligning with another’s point of view that should make you believe that you have to sacrifice your own beliefs. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”5 You don’t have to change your beliefs; just use your first-rate intelligence to hold the customer’s point of view in your mind.

Along a similar line, there is nothing in this material about engaging and committing that should imply that any conversation with any customer is ever permitted to cross a line of ethical behavior and good manners. Taxi Terry is a perfect example to me of the Ultimate Customer Experience, yet I promise that if a customer in his backseat crossed the line of reasonable behavior, Terry would have the offender’s butt out of the taxi and on the sidewalk even after promising the best cab ride of his or her life. The fact that you’re engaging at a higher level with the customer doesn’t mean that you have to put up with anything that makes you feel uncomfortable.

Now that we have repositioned our logical thinking

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