First off, I see that Andy beat me by a few hours to posting something up on the FiT blog. Stupid job getting in the way of blogging!

Anyway, I thought I’d make my debut here by pointing out a really interesting career development idea I stumbled across yesterday. The idea of creating a Hero folder in your email client.

The basic concept is that everytime you get an ‘atta boy, or thank you email from a customer, you store it in this folder. Then, on those days when you’re feeling a lack of inspiration toward going the extra mile for your customers, you go into this folder and review all the times that taking the extra step really made them happy. Happy enough to send you a nice email note. Now, as an internal helpdesk jockey, those customers would be my users. I know that there are plenty of days when, no matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to make a user happy. It’s very discouraging to have that sort of experience, and I am going to give this a try to see if I can right myself a bit quicker when I feel that sort of discouraging funk coming on. (Not to mention have some real concrete stuff to fall back on come annual review time.) Only, in my case, I named the folder “Appreciation” so it would show up at the top of my Outlook folders.

As I thought more about it though, I think there could be even more uses for this idea. If you manage a helpdesk or IT staff and you get these sort of messages about your folks, you can forward them for them to store in their hero folder, or you could keep a public folder of happy customer emails and even turn it into a friendly competition among your staff. If you have integrated messaging like we do, you can move your happy customer voice mails into this folder too.

Now I just to figure out a way to get all the comments of appreciation that are made to me in person or on the phone into the folder. Maybe I’ll grab our spare digital voice recorder and start making people repeat them into the microphone.

If you’ve done this sort of thing in your organization, or even just in your own career, let us know how it’s worked for you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Professional Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.