The Lighting of the Beacons

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For all of you who are new to The Hero's Voice, welcome! This column is dedicated to showing real-world examples of the ideas outlined in our Hero's Quest, a process which helps companies build loyalty by examining your business in a way that's easy to relate to: how to be a hero to your customer or member.

One of the classic hero quest stories is The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. In the third part, The Return of the King, the city of Gondor is in dire straits and needs the aid of their neighbor Rohan, located miles away to the north. To signal their distress, a 20-foot emergency beacon is set on fire. As soon as the first beacon is lit, the keepers of the next beacon see it and light their beacon. This in turn lights beacon after beacon, until they reach Rohan. There, the king is summoned by an urgent call of "The beacons are lit. Gondor calls for aid." He immediately springs into action, and summons his warriors to ride to Gondor's aid, along with the other neighbors who have seen the beacons.

When a "cry for help" comes through your "Bat Phone" (click here to see last week's column), do you have a beacon system in place so your company knows to spring into action? How does information about a problem get communicated througout your company so everyone knows how to provide the solution and be the hero?

Here's what one reader, Mike Fletcher, sent after last week's column which provides an example of "Lighting the Beacons":

"I've been thinking about how I can facilitate our credit union doing a better job of being more than order takers (offering a bat-phone level of service, I suppose).

I started an internal newsletter a few months ago, as part of it I list four questions every staff member should know the answer to. One of our branch managers requires her staff to send her the answers. When they swing and miss it gives us an opportunity to re-train. I recently had a big ah-ha moment when the majority of our staff answered a question incorrectly. We have made an effort to communicate the services of a specific vendor multiple times (and it's a vendor that really adds significant and FREE value for our members). Our staff just doesn't understand what they do...why... because they've never been through the process! SO, at staff training day we are actually going to walk them through one of the tools this vendor uses, have them personally use it."

Do you have a "Lighting the Beacons" example you'd be willing to share? If so, just click on the "Share Your Story" link above to submit it. If you'd like help developing your own beacon system, give Creative Abandon a buzz. We'll do our best to help you light some fires.

Lisa and the Creative Abandon team