Business and Life Lessons From Listening to 100,000 Customer Calls with Tom Vander Well

Tom Vander Well is the CEO of Intelligentics, a customer experience research and training firm. He has spent more than thirty years analyzing over a hundred thousand recorded business conversations across corporate America, which led him to write his book, This Call May Be Monitored: What Eavesdropping on Corporate America Taught Me About Business and Life.

It is not the career anyone plans. If a high school guidance counselor had told him he would spend his life listening to over 100,000 business phone calls, he says he would have asked for antidepressants and a therapist, because it just sounds awful. But one of the things he has learned is that God knows what is better for us than we sometimes know for ourselves. After going down a path he thought he was supposed to be on and becoming clear that it was not the path, the door opened for this really strange job.

It was 1994, and the whole idea of call monitoring and quality assessment was brand new. With his first client they used cassette recorders connected to a phone jack at a customer service representative's desk, waiting for the rep to answer and hitting record. His desk was piles of cassette tapes for years, and his Walkman was his friend. Technology has changed a lot since, but he got in on the ground floor, in the pioneer stages of the whole discipline.

People assume he must have heard some really interesting things, and he has, but the reality is that most customer conversations are routine. Robotic. The same thing over and over. There is a piece of it that is boring. At the same time, it forced him to recognize that there is more going on in a conversation than anybody in the conversation is aware of, and to go deeper to understand the layers of communication happening, because that is where the gold is.

Even today, companies doing quality assessment and call monitoring often focus only on what the customer service representative says, how they say it, and whether they did what was expected of them. There is so much more going on. If you learn how to listen and how to hear, there is enormous information for a business about the pain points customers are experiencing, the systemic issues that are not working for the customer, and the policies and procedures the company has that customers just think are stupid, the ones creating calls and problems. Get to that level of listening and you begin to see a return far beyond what a representative says. You start moving the customer experience to a different level.

The listening skill traces back to an unlikely place. Going into college, he asked several mentors he valued what they would do differently if they had to do it all over again. Multiple people told him they would have focused their undergraduate degree on what they really loved and were passionate about. He was passionate about theater, so he became a theater major. Theater is really about communication, and about understanding not just the text of a role but the subtext, what is really going on. He says he could not have had a better education for what he does.

The book's subtitle points at the same thing. In listening to 100,000 business conversations he learned lessons, spiritual lessons and human lessons, that helped him be a better husband and father. The layers of communication are one of them. Breaking business conversations into levels helped him see that when he and his wife are having a conflict, multiple things are going on. It is not just the words, there is a meta communication happening. That let him step back many times in his marriage and say, let's talk about how we're talking about this conflict, because that is sometimes where the rub really is. If you can figure out how you are miscommunicating, you can come together and resolve it. That happens in every human conflict.

In 2006 he began writing a blog called the Wayfarer Blog, now a podcast as well. The idea was simple: read one chapter of the Bible every weekday, think about what it means for him today, and write about what it makes him think about. He started in 2006 and is still doing it, and has been through the Bible a couple of times. Sometimes he just has a brainstorm and throws it out there instead.

In over twenty years and more than 5,500 blog posts, exactly one has gone viral. It was 2012, and it was not a chapter a day post. He was on a plane home from a business trip thinking about how being a theater major had prepared him for his job and for life, and he typed the post out in ten or fifteen minutes: ten ways being a theater major prepared me for success. His chapter a day posts got twenty or thirty views. That one had over a hundred thousand views in the first month. Actors and producers in Hollywood and on Broadway emailed him saying the whole world needed to hear it. To this day the post shows up on countless university and college theater program websites.

The reason it resonated is that it is true. Theater taught him communication, but it also taught him to improvise when things are not going right. When somebody blows a line you figure it out in the moment, and there are countless times he has been in front of a huge audience where things go wrong and he has to make do with what he has.

Acting also taught him coaching. In actor training you do character analysis, figuring out who a person is and what their motivation is. Coaching people to be better customer service representatives turned out to be no different, because different people are motivated by different things. A sweet person who is altruistically motivated to care for people is a slam dunk. But he has had people motivated only by money, or only by pride, or only by competitiveness and being number one. He had to learn to tailor his coaching to whatever would motivate that particular person. He learned all of that in acting, and he calls it a God thing. Only God could know that this is what he needed to do because this is what would serve him.

He has had a few opportunities in the field since. He worked for a number of years with the director of the 1950s camp classic The Blob, the one with Steve McQueen, and appeared in a short film with a couple of people you would know in Hollywood today. Closer to home in Pella, Iowa, he was president of the local community theater for about thirteen years.

That comparison shows up in the book. There is a difference between companies that really care about service excellence and companies that do not, and he likens it to a professional theater or film production, where the difference between good and great is in the details. Most of his clients over the years have taken the journey of deciding they want to be great, that they want customers to have an experience that leaves them wanting to come back, bring their friends, and talk about how great the company is.

Most businesses, though, operate like community theater: throw people up on stage with a memorized line, have fun, do your best. Businesses often say, hey, we have good people, just get on the phone and do your thing, you're a good person, I'm sure you're doing a great job. They may well be a great person. That does not mean they are great at customer service, or that they are delivering an exceptional customer experience. The only way to get there is by listening and coaching and training people how to deliver it. No difference between business and show business.

Some people are naturally wired for customer service and some are not. One client was a cable company back in the era of the big cable companies, with a customer service team and a separate retention team that handled calls from customers wanting to cancel. Retention is essentially a sales process. Over many years working with them it became clear that the people who are really good at care and the people who are really good at retention are different people, motivated by different things. Put the wrong people in the wrong seats and you are going to struggle.

One of his first coaching experiences was with a sales team at a company selling small electronic components that get manufactured into bigger things. One of the salesmen was a young, brash, braggadocio guy. Tom was sitting in the conference room waiting for their first session when he walked in, a big man who towered over him, and delivered an expletive-laden rant about how he did not care what Tom thought and there was nothing Tom could tell him about his job that would help him. He finished, and Tom said, okay, have a seat, we're off to a good start. He coached that young man for over twenty five years, every quarter, sometimes every two months.

Early in the relationship neither of them wanted to be there, so Tom went back to his acting training and asked what motivated him. The answer was obvious: money. He was a young sales guy who wanted to accumulate wealth and be successful. So Tom tried a different tack. He sat down and said, I know you don't want to be here and don't want to go through this process, but hear me out, because we have literally surveyed your customers and they have told us what they want and what drives their satisfaction. When I coach you to apologize because expectations were not met, or to use the customer's name to build rapport, or to be courteous when asking for information, I know it seems trivial and stupid, but this is what your customers say they value. Deliver it, they will be more satisfied, you will get more sales and make more money. Customers will say they buy from a competitor too, but they would much rather buy from their favorite sales guy. It is a no-brainer, and it is worth a shot, because we are only talking about saying a few words.

He would never admit it worked, and he never stopped complaining or having a bad attitude. But as they listened to the calls and analyzed the data, he began doing the things Tom was coaching him to do. Slowly, he built different habits. Tom watched him go from frontline sales to becoming one of the global sales account managers for the entire company.

One of the greatest compliments of Tom's career came about twenty five years later, in a sales meeting full of new salespeople. The former holdout, now the global account manager, told the room: you're going to hate Tom, and you're going to hate doing this call monitoring thing, and you're going to hate the coaching. I get it, because I always hated it. But it's important and it works and it will make you a better salesperson. Sometimes you do the work and you do not feel the warm fuzzy things that come from it, and in the end you succeed anyway.

The relationship never got warm, exactly. He got to the point of accepting that they had to do it, but it was always a rolling of the eyes and an oh, you're here again. Tom knew it was not personal. If they had gone out to lunch or hung out after work they would have gotten along fine. He just hated the process of listening to his own calls and being told he could do it better.

The Intelligentics model has three pieces. At the core it is a market research firm doing customer satisfaction research and voice of the customer work, like any other market research firm. But the founder, Mr. Winger, saw a bigger opportunity. A classic research firm surveys your customers, figures out how satisfied they are and what drives that satisfaction, hands you the report, and from there it is your responsibility to do whatever you are going to do with it.

So the second step is listening to a sample of actual moments of truth where customers interact with the company, whether that is sales, customer service, accounting, or collections. Tom has listened to everything. Those calls get analyzed to find the gaps, the places where customers say this is what really satisfies me and the company is not delivering it. Once the gap is identified, the third step is natural: either team training on the opportunities to improve the experience, or one-on-one coaching, sitting down and listening to a few of someone's calls and talking through the opportunities. It is not off-the-shelf customer service training. It is built on what those specific customers said they want. More satisfied customers are more loyal customers, you retain them longer, and everyone knows it is much harder to get a new customer through the door than to keep an existing one. That is where the return is.

With that electronic components company they ran that circle again and again for over twenty five years. Every year a survey to find out what customers were saying, ongoing listening to the sales team, quarterly coaching. They became that company's research and quality team until it sold to a large German conglomerate.

Across all those clients, common themes do emerge. There are always nuances by customer base, industry, and market, but there are three universals, and Tom calls them the holy trinity of customer satisfaction. They come in the same order regardless of the company. Number one is one contact resolution: I have a problem or a question, I contact you, and I want it resolved in one contact. Number two is feeling like you care about me as a customer, the courtesy and friendliness and the sense of a personal relationship, that you care my expectations have not been met.

Number three did not exist for the first fifteen years of his career. There were only two. Then in 2007 Apple introduced the smartphone, and the research began showing time-related dimensions of service growing as a driver of satisfaction across the board, with every client in every industry. It only got bigger when Amazon entered the picture. Technology created the third member of the trinity: respect my time.

The nuance matters, and it is where a life lesson lives. In research there are penalty variables and reward variables. A penalty variable is a dimension of service where the customer will not reward you for delivering it because they simply expect it, but will definitely penalize you with diminished satisfaction if you do not. The data is consistent. Ask customers how many contacts it took to resolve their issue, then look at overall satisfaction. Among those resolved in one contact, satisfaction runs about 95 to 100 percent. At two contacts it drops about 25 points. At three it drops another 15. By four contacts, only around 20 percent are satisfied or very satisfied with the company.

Contacts are counted from the customer's side: how many times did I have to talk to the company. And it gets more nuanced. Say a customer calls about a problem with an order and is told someone will look into it and call back. The callback never comes. A day passes, two days, three, and the customer picks up the phone again. In the customer's mind that is the third contact, even though physically it is only the second, because the second was promised and not delivered. With each additional contact the customer has to prompt, overall satisfaction with the company drops.

Time-related service works the same way. You said you would call back, but you did not say when, so I do not know whether to expect it today, tomorrow, or next week. Tom had exactly that happen recently, calling a company about a refund he was owed. They said they would send it to billing and billing would take a look and take care of it if he deserved it. When he asked when that would happen, the answer was just that it would go to billing. Next month? Next week? Tomorrow? That is an important question, because he wants to know what to expect and does not want to assume tomorrow when the real answer is at least a week. Customers are no longer content with we'll get back to you shortly. What is shortly?

So resolution and time are penalty variables. Courtesy, friendliness, empathy, and personal service relationship are the only reward variable of the three.

The life application came naturally. Most households have an org chart, written down or not. In the Vander Well house, Wendy is at the top of the food chain for the laundry room, where Tom has emergency privileges only. Tom is at the top for everything outside: landscaping, lawn work, and getting the garbage and recycling bins to the curb. The trucks come Monday morning and his job is to have the bins out by 7:30. He is notoriously bad at it, because on the weekend he is not thinking about it, and suddenly it is Monday and Wendy hears the truck coming down the street and asks whether he put the bins out.

That is a penalty variable. The Sunday he set his Apple Watch to remind him and got everything to the curb, Wendy was not standing in the mud room thanking him for it, because it is not a reward variable. She expects it, and he is penalized when he misses. But when he comes back up the driveway, sees the rosebush in bloom, quietly clips a bud, puts it in a little bud vase, and sets it in front of her in her office, it never fails to get an oh, it's beautiful, thank you. Reward variable.

So his business tells him this is the same thing in life. If he knows what his loved ones expect and knows which things are reward variables and which are penalty variables, he can cater to them. One way he applies it: Wendy does the laundry faithfully every week, and Tom made it a habit that he never walks downstairs and finds her doing it without saying thank you. Likewise, when he comes in from the lawn sweaty and dirty and dripping, she never fails to thank him for taking care of it.

People have told him that is stupid, that you should not have to thank your spouse for something they are expected to do. His answer is that he wants a great marriage, and saying thank you is about the easiest thing he can do that will reap rewards in the relationship. A few weeks before this conversation he read about a study of 40,000 married couples across the United States on marriage satisfaction. The number one differentiator between happy marriages and dissatisfied ones was the words thank you. Couples who are grateful and say thank you to one another make the biggest difference. He learned that a long time ago from what he does for a living.

So the universals are: resolve my issue, be nice and courteous and friendly and empathetic, and respect my time. None of it is complicated, which raises the question of why so many businesses struggle with it. Tom's answer is that first, they do not think about it and do not necessarily know these things. And it is easy for businesses to get wrapped up in the emotional felt need of the moment, the tyranny of the urgent. What is the fire we are dealing with today? A product went out that is not working, so the immediate thing becomes the issue in front of them. They are constantly handling the momentary problem and never looking at the larger strategic question of how to build an operation that consistently delivers an excellent experience for every customer, no matter who picks up the phone.

It comes down to whether you focus on what is important or what is urgent, and most businesses choose urgent. He thinks it is getting worse in the current corporate culture, in an age of start a company and sell it for a billion dollars, where everyone is focused on the short term. Build it, get it going, find somebody who will buy it. When you are doing that you are not thinking about longevity, and the customer is the one who loses.

The clients Tom has enjoyed most typically hire Intelligentics because they do care about their customers and their people and want to build something excellent that lasts and is profitable over time. They understand the long view of what that investment takes. Most of the time he has worked with really great people who really do care. But he has worked for clients where it really is about the money, and it is harder still when you walk into the C-suite and the lip service is to the people while the entire operation is built around profit. It becomes hypocritical.

In the book he calls himself the man in the middle. He listens to the customers and the calls, and then he is charged with helping the company improve, which means sitting down with frontline agents who tell him management does not care about them, that they have flagged broken things that never get fixed. He has to ask them for some trust, because their bosses would not have hired his firm and would not be investing if they truly did not care, and to ask them to do the best they can with what they have been given while he takes their side of it upstairs. Then he goes into the C-suite and tells the vice president or the CEO that the data clearly shows customers are angry and the team has not been equipped with the tools and knowledge to handle those situations, and that failing to fix it will alienate both customers and employees. It is a both and. Both sides have to take the data and address their piece if the needle is going to move.

Candor like that was not natural at first. Coming into the business he was really intimidated, especially talking to upper management and executives, as a young man who had not been part of business. The company's founder and older colleagues mentored him and set the example, and it grew over time. He also points out that when you are working with data, it just is what it is. When you are dealing with truth, there is a piece of it that is simply true, and the other person has to decide whether to accept it.

One story from the book: a sales manager brought them in to assess a team of about twelve who made outbound cold calls from a list and also took inbound orders. They pulled the recorded calls, and it became clear the outbound cold calls that were supposed to happen every day simply were not happening. If they had been, the recordings would exist. They did not. Tom took the sales manager to lunch and told him there were no cold calls in the report because his team was not making them. The manager said that was impossible, that they gave him a list every day of the calls they were making. Tom pointed out that real calls would exist as recordings.

The manager looked at him and said the report could not see the light of day, that his boss could not see it. Tom's recommendation was different. He knew the boss and the owner and considered them good people of integrity. He told the manager he had a choice: take the report and bury it, and Tom would not say a word. Or go in and say that Tom and the Intelligentics team had discovered something he had not been aware of, that he was embarrassed, that he clearly had a blind spot but now knows, and here is his plan, here is how he will create accountability, and here is the upside, because if they are not making cold calls today and he fixes it, sales are going to go through the roof. Tom was convinced the boss would have said, all right, make it happen. The manager chose not to. He buried the report. Intelligentics never worked for them again, and he left the job about six months later.

Those experiences leave Tom with the same conclusion. He can give a client all the data they want and the path to success, but they are the one who has to walk it. He cannot walk it for them. It does not happen often, but he has multiple stories where the person responsible was so embarrassed by the results, and so worried about how it would look on them personally inside the corporate culture, that they chose to bury the findings rather than use them to make things better. At the end of the day he has laid it all out and done everything he could, and he is not responsible for what someone else chooses.

Intelligentics qualifies its own clients too, something they have gotten better at over the years. Typically they run a pilot project: one customer survey to establish a baseline of satisfaction and what drives it, then one quality assessment of a hundred or three hundred calls based on what they learned from those customers, then one round of follow-up training or coaching. It lets a client experience every piece. They will know where their customers are and what they are thinking, find out where the team is inconsistent, and get equipped with tactics and service techniques to fill those gaps, all without a huge long-term commitment. From there a client can continue and customize it or take the information and go. Many have stayed five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty five years because they found value in it.

Asked about the best and hardest parts of being in business, Tom names the clients and the people and the relationships he has been allowed to build. He had thought he was going to go into pastoral ministry. That was what he believed he was supposed to do, and then God said no, you're supposed to be over here. Over thirty plus years he has gotten to walk with people not just in their jobs but in their lives. When you coach someone every quarter for twenty years, you get to know who they are and you talk about life.

He has sat down for a scheduled call coaching session with someone who had just received a terminal cancer diagnosis and said, we're not going to call coach, let's just talk about this. He has been in the room with a salesman who realized he had hit the glass ceiling after giving thirty years to a company and being told he would never advance further, breaking down in front of him. Tom got to talk to him as a human being in that moment and try to encourage him. It has been like pastoral ministry through the business piece of it.

The greatest compliments have come from people who tell him that what he taught them made them better at their job, but that it also made them a better human being, because the things apply to their life and relationships outside of work. When he hears that, his response is thank you, God, that is why I do what I do. People are what motivate him, not the money or the profits. That is just how he is wired.

The hardest part is the faith required to be in your own business. He does not know where the money is coming from, whether clients will stay, or what projects are in the pipeline next quarter. With one phone call, a twenty-year client who has been a bedrock of annual revenue for two decades can say they decided not to renew. That has happened more times than he can count, and it always brings the same questions about how to replace that income and that client. But looking back, he has never not gotten a paycheck and never not paid his bills. God has always been faithful. There have been seasons of tightening the belt and seasons that were really good, and learning to be content and walk that walk of faith has been a big spiritual lesson from his business, and the hardest piece.

The clearest example came in 2014. He and Wendy both work from home, and their house was not working for them. They tried to make it work and hired someone to help reconfigure it, and it still did not work, and God made it clear he would open the door for them to build a house that met their needs. So they bought the property, hired the contractor, and helped design the house. The day the earth movers arrived on the property to begin digging, they were excited. Then the phone rang. Their largest and most long-tenured client, twenty three years at that point and 63 percent of gross annual revenues, said they were not renewing. Tom called the contractor and asked him not to start digging, to give them the weekend to pray.

That morning's chapter a day post had been on 2 Samuel 4, where Abner has died and the people of Israel find out Saul's last son is dead, and everyone is scrambling and panicking. The only person not panicking is David. Tom saw the parallel. David was not going to take the crown by seizing it for himself, or by killing Saul's son, or by honoring the fact that Saul's son was assassinated. If he was going to be king, it was going to be because he trusted God and God put him there, not because he took it. Tom and Wendy found themselves in the same position, asking whether they were really going to trust or not. They had felt God had led them to this point. So facing the uncertainty they said, go ahead, start digging. We're just going to trust.

Eleven years later he cannot remember how they made it. Some unexpected clients came in and there was work that had not been there before. It was not one big thing. It was a million little ways that God was faithful. They built the house, everything was fine, and the company has continued to prosper. He sees the season as a lesson, God asking whether he really trusted him or was trusting his own abilities and human effort in the business.

Fifteen or twenty years ago their local gathering of believers did a series on what they call the chain reaction of praise: you praise God in every circumstance, which activates faith to pray powerful prayers, to overcome evil, and to learn to live and reign with Christ. It begins with praise in every circumstance. Tom and Wendy embraced it and now call them chain reaction of praise moments. When that phone call came in, they had trained themselves that the first thing they do is get on their knees and praise God, thanking him for his faithfulness and goodness and acknowledging all he has done. Doing that activates the faith to then ask God what the next step is and where he is leading. It has revolutionized how they approach those circumstances.

The founder of Intelligentics had discipled Tom in high school, so he was a spiritual mentor Tom trusted and knew. The company is founded on biblical principles and its mission statement says so, which gave him comfort taking a job he could believe in. Still, he had no interest in business, zero experience, no business education, and took zero business classes. He avoided econ even in high school. It did not feel like a natural fit.

But he has had three experiences in his journey where he clearly, in his spirit, audibly heard God's voice. The first was at fourteen, when God said, you are going to proclaim my word. The second came after he was offered this job. He was praying, driving his blue 1993 Volkswagen Fox up the driveway to their house, asking whether he was supposed to take it, and the voice said: take this job, stick with it, you will be blessed. Over the thirty-plus years since, he has gone back to that voice many times. He has been close to quitting more than once for different reasons, and every time it comes back to God telling him to stick with it and that he would be blessed. He is totally blessed, and he will not give up on it until God leads him elsewhere. Having that call let him put his whole heart into it.

The book started with journaling. He was sitting at his local pub in Pella one afternoon with a pint, thinking about the spiritual and life lessons that came out of his career, and decided to write down as many as he could come up with. He kept writing and ended up with over thirty, around thirty two, and when he looked at the list he realized it was a book. That was over a decade ago. He told God that if it was supposed to happen, it would happen. Over the years he talked with a couple of publishers who loved the title and the idea, but the timing was never right and the door was never quite the right one. Then last year everything fell into place, the right time and the right publisher.

Timing is one of his struggles with the culture around business. All the rah-rah executive coaches and inspirational business people say to go for the gusto, make it happen, do the thing. He thinks there is value in that, but it has to be balanced. Back to David again: if he was going to be king, it was going to happen in God's way and God's timing, and he was not going to try to make it happen. Tom sees people in business and in life desperately trying to make things happen and then getting angry with God when it does not work, and the question is whether it is God's plan or their plan. He has learned to trust God's plan and try to stay open and faithful to what he is called to do, while trying to find the balance between listening and grasping.

That tension is one of the hardest things about how the world says to do business, where no one is coming to save you and you have to make things happen, work harder, work longer, work smarter, grasp it. God's way of doing business is different, and there is a lot of waiting in it. There have been visions that God clearly gave, where trying to go make them happen alone meant every door slammed shut, because the vision was real but the heart and the character were not yet where they needed to be. There is a process. And looking back, most of the things that actually happened were not made to happen at all. The doors that opened were ones nobody knew to ask for.

That is true of Tom's own calling. God told him at fourteen that he would proclaim his word, and the gift for preaching and teaching showed itself immediately. He assumed that meant pastoral ministry, so he spent two years as a youth pastor, three as a senior pastor, and one in parachurch ministry. He did have the gift, but nearly every other aspect of pastoral ministry shriveled his soul. Christian education committee meetings, administration, church politics, angry people complaining about which Bible translation goes in the pews or what color the sanctuary curtains should be. All of it drove him crazy.

Looking back at God's providence, in every place he has lived and every church he has attended over thirty-some years in this business, he has been given the opportunity to preach and teach. He still preaches about twice a month at his local church. He gets to do the thing God gifted him to do without dealing with everything else, because he is not on staff and does not have to. He can use his gift without being a burden on the church and without them paying him a salary. He points out that this is what Paul did, making tents so he could use his gifts and not be a burden on the church. And the call monitoring world opened a door to meaningful conversations with people he would never otherwise have crossed paths with, people who would never darken the door of a church, where he gets to have a relationship and hopefully some influence in their lives.

He has ideas for more books. The next one is a paradigm he has been developing about how God works, drawn from my ways are not your ways, looking at life on four levels and how the world operates versus how God operates. Another would be the story of the times he has heard God's voice and what listening to it has meant in his journey. A third would be about the things Christians always get wrong. His example: praying God, please be present, which he hears almost every Sunday. Scripture makes clear that Jesus is the one holding all things together, the dark matter holding the atoms of a chair together. He is never not present, and you cannot go anywhere he is not present, so why pray for him to be present? What that reveals is that something in us feels like he is not present, which is not true, and thinking that way carries consequences that are not healthy.

Hearing that voice mattered practically. Wendy had to talk him off the ledge multiple times, reminding him to remember what God promised him and what God told him. Because she knew the promise, she could be an instrument to hold him accountable and remind him when he needed it. He guarantees that if he had not heard that voice, he would have quit multiple times over. Promises work that way. Before getting married, God made clear who the right person was, and in hard seasons of marriage that promise was something to hold onto for dear life. The same in business, gripping a word and standing on it, because his word does not return void. Then the testimony itself becomes the powerful thing: here was the Red Sea and the army and everything that was against me, and I had this promise and held onto it, and God showed himself faithful.

In the book Tom calls this the service excellence journey. A client comes in wanting a culture of service excellence delivered consistently, and what he has learned is that every company has a journey to get from point A to the promised land of service excellence. It is a long journey, and it parallels the Exodus perfectly. There is a road out and an initial excitement and progress, then a long slog of wilderness before you ever reach the promised land. Each step requires a certain amount of faith to stick with it and believe you will get there. If the leaders do not have that faith and trust, they never will, and he has had plenty of clients who never do. But he has clients who do. And when you get there and realize the promised land and the blessings that come with a great service excellence system and great people, everyone wins.

You can find Tom Vander Well's book, This Call May Be Monitored, on Amazon, and his company Intelligentics if you need help listening to and understanding what your customers are looking for. The Wayfarer podcast is on all major platforms, and the Wayfarer blog is at TomVanderWell.com, with the podcast link posted on every daily post. He is also available to speak at Christian business conferences, church business conferences, and industry events.