Here are 8 things that are important to get right as a leader if you're intent on transforming your customer experience and the culture that supports and sustains it.
1. Stand For The Right Thing. Does every employee know what your company stands for? Make sure your organizing principle is meaningful, short and memorable like Ritz-Carlton's "We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen," or Starbucks' "We create inspired moments in each customer's day." Or perhaps the greatest organizing principle of all time, because it is so brief, non-latinate, jargon-free and unequivocal: Mayo Clinic’s “The needs of the patient come first.”
Once you have your one-liner, so to speak, expand (very briefly) on this cultural decision in a short statement. An explicit (but very brief) statement of what that decision looks like: How you’re going to treat customers. How you’re going to support employees. How you’re going to treat vendors. Because making a decision once isn’t enough: you need a clear way to refer back to what you mean by it.
Find out how to make millennials, Boomers and everyone in between fall in love your business.
2. Pay The Right Way. Your company's reputation will be based on the interactions your customers have with your employees. In fact, in one day your employees will connect with more customers than you do in one week. Pay them and offer benefits accordingly.
Paying right has two parts:
• Pay needs to be in line with what people in similar positions outside your company make. (Exception: if there are mitigating reasons that are understood by the employees, for example, at a bootstrapped start-up, a company going through hard times requiring a temporary sacrifice, etc.)
And . . .
• Pay needs to be in line with what people in similar positions/with similar credentials/with similar quality of work inside your company make.
You can’t have a successful culture based on hoping nobody sees someone else’s paycheck or discusses relative pay, either within or across divisions. That just won’t fly in today’s ultra-connected, glassdoor.com-informed world.
3. Remind right - Customer experience and customer service greatness and culture building aren't sa Day One and Done kind of thing. It's a leader's obligation to ensure your employees are reminded of the principles that are the foundation of your service excellence culture. One of the best approaches organizations take is when they model themselves on the the Ritz-Carlton "daily lineup" approach: a few minutes every day discussing just one of your list of cultural values or service standards, with the meeting led by a different employee every time. The result, added up over a year or years, is a lot of reinforcement. And it makes every single one of those days better, in and of itself.
4. Coach right - If the only thing your employees get out of their job is a paycheck, then you've failed as a leader. Employees need more coaching than is offered in an annual performance review. The moon landing was made possible with many course corrections throughout the journey. So it should be, too, with grooming a customer facing associate to deliver exceptional service. It's not "one giant leap", but rather many course corrections offered by the manager, each in the right direction, that will build an employee's confidence and performance.
5. Discipline right - What you ignore is what you allow. Service excellence is defined in its consistency. If you allow employees to perform below the high expectations of your customers then your business will only build a reputation for poor service. Disciplining employees is not easy, but it is necessary to build a culture of service excellence.
6. Use the right metrics, and get rid of the wrong ones: Do you try to have 80% of your calls answered in 20 seconds or less? Hmmm. That’s a nice goal, but it isn’t the most important goal for a customer. More important to the caller is “did this call resolve my issue?” and “do I like the resolution I received?” This example (hat tip here to Colin Taylor) is just one of many I could give you of an organization getting their metrics wrong, and as a result sabotaging their goal of a customer-centric culture.
7. Write Right: Draw up standards that make sense—in a way that your employees understand. Everything that reasonably can be expected to happen to customers needs to be set down as a standard. Important: every standard needs to include the reason for the standard, so that your employees know when it makes sense to deviate from it to accomplish.
8. Empower Right: For all the times when these standards don't cover the unexpected–or turn out to be far from the 'best practice" you thought they would be, you need empowered employees who can help their customers without equivocation, without delay, and without having to track down a manager for assistance.
Micah Solomon is a customer experience consultant, customer service consultant, speaker and the bestselling author most recently of High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service
Credit where credit's due: I was inspired and assisted in putting together this list by Bill Quiseng, whom you should be following starting right now at @billquiseng as well as on Facebook and the web: http://www.billquiseng.com
