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Introduction

In this book you will learn effective ways to use Empowerment to ramp up your career, to build your business, and to take your corporation to the top. Before we launch in, I’d like to tell you a story about Empowerment from my personal experience.

The story starts in a little bodega (grocery store) in the San Isidro District of Lima, Peru in 1942. The store, which is named E Wong, is owned by Chinese immigrants, Erasmo and Angela Wong. Dedicated and hard working, they focus on providing the best possible service to their customers. As you can imagine, hours are long and there’s never a shortage of work. Life revolves around the little store. The children learn the business from the ground up by helping out after school and on weekends. They are successful. You can tell because the store gets busier and busier. After a few years, E Wong is so crowded that they need more space. They expand and hire a few employees.

Assuming the increased shopping area and additional staff would make the store less crowded, the Wongs are surprised when the expansion has little effect. Soon they expand again and hire more employees. Their focus remains on customer service, and when they have 25 employees they purchase my Feelings Customer Service Program. That was over 20 years ago.

At my first public seminar in Lima, about 15 years ago, the entire Wong family attended. During that presentation I asked, “Who is the most customer service driven firm in Peru?” Over two thirds of the audience said “Wong”. (About 99 percent of the time in my seminars the audience has trouble coming up with any answers at all to that question.)

Every few years the Wong family would have me train their entire work force. My sessions were big events. I would train between 1,000 to 2,800 employees at a time. In order to accommodate groups of this size, they had to erect an auditorium for my presentations. It would have been impossible for a staff member not to understand the level of importance that the Wongs placed on my message. The heaviest focus was always on Empowerment. I would teach all their employees to bend the rules, in favor of the customer, and to use Empowerment every day. I would come up with crazy things -- sure to surprise customers -- such as, if a child drops his ice cream cone, replacing it for free and delivering groceries for an elderly person who has trouble carrying them.

Many of their employees were very young. Invariably one person would raise a hand and say, “Mr. Tschohl, if we did this we’d be fired.” The entire audience would erupt with applause and stamp their feet in agreement. Each time, I would ask Eduardo Wong, who would sit in the back of the auditorium, to come up and reinforce my message. I would say, with him standing on stage right beside me, that the Wong family would not miss a meal if employees spent company money taking care of customers.

In 2005, E. Wong changed its company name to The Wong Group to better reflect the business. It had become the largest supermarket and retailer in Peru. In the city of Lima, with about 9 million inhabitants in a country of approximately 29 million people, the Wongs built a reputation for service. The last time I worked with them they had over 10,000 employees, 34 stores and an internationally recognized online presence. Sales were approximately $1.1 billion dollars. Wong’s had a 63 percent market share, and NO company had a better reputation for caring for its employees.

On December 17, 2007 the Wong Group sold the company for approximately $900 million to Cencosud, a Chilean company. To date there has been a sharp decline in stock value, and the future of Peru’s former king of supermarkets isn’t looking bright.

The problem is the new firm apparently doesn’t know what it bought. The focus on Empowerment, customer service and caring for employees has eroded. The Wong Group remains number one although it’s rapidly losing market share to its competitor, Supermercados Peruanos.

Once management takes its eyes off the service strategy, that company loses sight of its service to customers. Along with it goes market share and revenue and, unfortunately, they are almost impossible to recover. In two short years Wongs’ brand and market share have been gutted. The Wong Group was an example of a firm that focused on driving an empowered workforce to offer superior service. It understood the power of Empowerment and its economic impact at Wong. Its caring for customers and employees fueled revenue. The Wong family still understands the power of customer service. It’s new mall, Plaza Norte, is the largest and most luxurious in Peru and will be built on a solid brand formed on service strategy.

On a recent trip to Peru, I met up with Eduardo Wong again, and he quickly repeated the words I had taught thousands of Wong’s employees. I chuckled as I heard my exact phrase pop out his mouth: “Empowerment is having millions and millions and millions and millions of overhappy customers.”

The Wong Group story is not an isolated incident; I have many other examples of Empowerment – all leading to success. Still the Wongs are one of the best examples because of their time in business and the abundance of well-documented information on how that success was achieved.

Read on to learn how Empowerment: A Way of Life can fuel your success…