Six Must-Do Steps To Building A Service Culture
Tough economic times breed even tougher, more demanding customers. At least that’s the lament of those serving on the front lines of customer service. Customer expectations are at ever-increasing highs, while customer loyalty, seemingly, is at ever-decreasing lows.
Through it all, there remains one inescapable fact: building a business depends on an organization’s ability to profitably deliver some superior proposition of value to some set of customers. If those customers don’t perceive superior value from you, they’ll turn their attentions, and their wallets, to the alternatives that do.
Superior value can be rooted in many nooks and crannies of the customer relationship. Sometimes it’s driven by innovation and product excellence. Other times by economics — maybe you’re the low cost producer. But often, superior perceived value is driven by the intimacy or quality of your customer relationship. A customer must feel comfortable that your organization understands, cares about, and is committed to his or her business like none other. This feeling of comfort on the part of the customer may result from a variety of service factors like speed, convenience, and intimacy.
Superior customer service demands that everyone in the organization embrace the notion that delivering the value we promise, profitably, to the customers we serve is everything. Great businesses don’t give customers everything they want, regardless of what it costs them to do it.
But they do deliver everything and more they promise to their most valuable customers — what they can deliver best and profitably — better than anyone else can.
This clarity is the essence of the much written about and ballyhooed "service culture." Superior service may not be strategically critical for every organization. But if it is for yours, and one indicator may be if customer wailings are becoming an ever-growing barrier to growth and profitability, chances are you could probably benefit from taking steps to grow and imbed a service culture in your organization.
Six Must-Do Steps To Building A Service Culture
1. Know Your Customer Expectations, Then Commit to Exceed Them
Building a service culture, for many organizations, requires a major shift in mindset, a shift that recognizes the need to mold and create from the outside in — to shift away from an internal focus and towards a customer focus. Start by getting your customers to define what they expect from you and what they don’t. Encourage them to define their expectations for you and then build a business that considers their needs and reflects their wants in the context of what you can deliver. Remember your goal is to be customer focused, not customer compelled. What you do has to be good for your customer, and for you. Never ignore a customer’s emotional expectations. To a large extent, a customer’s satisfaction may be based on how comfortable they are with you on a largely emotional level.
2. Lead with Strategic Clarity Built on Serving Your Best Customers
If the organization’s strategy depends on customer service, the organization’s leadership must make that fact clear and unavoidable to all. Leaders must define what superior customer service means, and what each individual’s role is in delivering it. Leaders must reiterate this mandate, passionately, at every turn, while hacking away archaic rules, bureaucracy, and internal fiefdoms that get in the way. Employees must be given clear goals and measurement criteria, and they must be held accountable. In turn, they must be given authority — that is, the power that comes with widespread recognition that anyone who speaks for the customer speaks with authority. Clarity demands leadership by example — a culture can be no more customer-centric than what is allowed by the everyday example set by senior management.
3. Act with Strategic Commitment
A truism of cultural change is that it requires radical and inspired commitment at the top or it’s doomed to fail. Organizational inertia is an almost irresistible force that only the strongest can overcome. People in the workplace have seen "change initiatives" come, and they’ve seen them go. "This, too, will pass," they say. Good people will resist and perhaps sabotage your efforts. Not always maliciously, but always to the same end result: failure. And if you’ve false-started before, your own credibility, with regard to your own commitment, may be an obstacle.
The only remedy is burning strategic clarity and commitment from top management. And burning clarity, more often than not, results when it’s clear that change is the only option. If your instincts are telling you that you need to bolster your "service culture," odds are that your business is at or near a crossroads where a misstep could send you into a troubling morass. Understand your truths, and then share them with your people. Inspire them to join in. Demand it. And lead by example. Make customers the focus in everything you say and do.
4. Load Your Front Lines with Service Generals
In a service culture, decisions on behalf of the customer are made by those in the line of fire. Professionals at the point of contact need the power and authority to act in the best interest of the customer. The birth of a service culture doesn’t result from blind adherence to aging rules and boundaries that outline limits of responsibility and decision making authority. Regaining or losing a customer’s trust can happen in a nanosecond. Provide your service generals with the resources and training they require. And free them to make mistakes. You don’t improve customer service unless you benefit from your mistakes -- and to benefit from them, you have to be free to admit you made one.
Finally, give your generals the tools they need. Throughout history, cultural victors have shown that victory begins with "owning" the schools, the media, and the police. Give your generals training programs that instill and reinforce a culture of service. Leverage communications, both internally and externally, to drive the message at every turn. Fine tune the goals, measurement, and supervisory engine to assure that people "lead, follow, or get out of the way," and that you know which people fall into each camp.
5. Recognize that Customer Service is a Contact Sport
You can’t learn from customers and you certainly can’t service them if you aren’t constantly making contact. That means reaching out to them by creating as many contact points as you can. A contact point is simply a place or vehicle that a customer can use to make noise about your products and services. It can be either good or bad noise -- a service culture benefits from both. Service centers, comment cards, telephone hotlines, web sites, e-mail and a host of other contact devices should be employed to encourage and solicit customer response and comments. Most important, your front line service generals should be charged with maintaining regular contact with customers. Feedback should be captured and analyzed: are there trends or issues that need your attention? Any feedback you receive must be addressed quickly, thoroughly and with authority.
6. Communicate, Collaborate, and Celebrate
It is impossible for your employees to treat their customers in a way that significantly exceeds the way they are treated by you. A service culture is one of communication, collaboration, and celebration with customers — the same should be true internally. You need your workplace to understand clearly your strategy and direction. Everyone needs to see the imperative of excellent customer service. Each individual needs to understand what he or she can do to help. All of this requires substantial and continuous communications — in the form of internal and external communications, training, informal one-on-one management chats, or even location-wide town hall meetings. Communication is two-way — a dialogue — where information is collected and shared formally and informally to benefit all.
Just as important is measurement. The organization has to know, continuously, how it’s doing, and what it needs to adjust to improve. The measurement and reward picture serves as a constant reminder and reinforcement, with bonus incentives, promotions, exciting workplace challenges, or a good pat on the back serving as a part of the celebration for a job well done. Let your customers be your guide — ask them how you’re doing in polls, surveys, questionnaires, and the like. Take time to ask them about a "day in their life" — where you can dig into the substance behind why they feel the way they do. You’ll be amazed at what you’ll learn.
Analyze your failures and your successes. Learn from both. Celebrate your successes — including what you’ve learned from failing. Make it clear that the culture is here to stay. Those who intend to prosper should come quickly on board.
Our Conclusion
Building a service culture is not a complicated ordeal requiring guru-like skills. In fact, it’s a relatively simple process if your organization’s leadership is willing to make the commitment to lead. It will be a tough road for some, especially those unaccustomed to sharing information or serving customers. Internal dialogue must be encouraged and facilitated. There are no secrets where the customer is concerned. Finally, front line generals must be given the authority to make decisions on behalf of the customer and management must encourage and support this shift in power. A customer-centric culture is focused on the outside world, where exceeding the customer’s expectations is everybody’s task at hand.
