– develop and sustain a culture of customer and employee centricity
The role of culture in successfully running any human set-up is pivotal. This could be a family set-up organisation or even a country. The influence of culture cannot be overstated and more so in today’s competitive environment, this has become even more crucial. Culture has been described by some with the analogy of an iceberg. Notice that on the high seas, what is visible will normally be the apex of the iceberg, with the core submerged; thus, if the ship’s captain does not navigate carefully, the consequences are dire. To align your customer experience with the employee experience, you must aim to build a positive internal culture.
Aimee Lucas, a CX Leader, says: “Culture is how employees think, believe, and act”, and “it’s how your employees behave when no one is looking”. According to her, for customer experience to flourish, employees at all levels – operational staff and especially, leadership – must support continuous improvement in employee and customer experience. Birthing, designing, and deploying a fit-for-purpose experience strategy is a process and not just a single event. You will need to weave CX into every fabric of your culture to ensure that all employees are on the same page and are willing partners in the journey.
Ricardo Semler, President of the manufacturing company Semco – based in Brazil, presents an interesting scenario of employee experience with transformational effect. He envisioned and successfully transformed his company into a workplace where most of the employees, including factory workers, set their own working hours and targets, with the vast majority voting on many important corporate decisions. He believes that we can create better workplaces by fostering a culture that encourages people to question why we do things the way we do and by devolving power to employees.
Although many will see his approach as extreme, when we turn it on its head, we can observe a culture of inclusiveness; thus, influencing a move toward an environment where the customer is the main focus of every internal activity ultimately reflecting in the business’ touchpoints, where everyone is engaged in delivering out of world experiences and sharing success stories and lessons for the mutual good. An employee-centric culture for many will require a shift in culture, mindset, and behaviour. According to Deloitte, “companies that are customer-centric are 60 percent more profitable“.
A starting point for the typical customer-centric company would be the mission, vision and purpose. When the vision and the objectives of the company are known, everyone feels part of something consequential and is eager to work collaboratively to make sure the business is successful. A well-defined and clearly-communicated mission, vision, values, and purpose provide a solid foundation for a people-centred culture. A few thoughts about influencing a customer-centric culture to influence customer-centricity – both internally and externally – are as follows.
First, adopt a customer-first mindset. Everyone in the organisation must understand that what they do affects the customer. Second, embrace great ideas and share amazing stories for the benefit of all. Third, be consistent. Being predictable helps to build trust; therefore, treat customers in the way you treat your people. Fourth, be a committed learner. Knowledge is powerful and it enables you to create trust and confidence. Fifth, note that regardless of your reputation, you are only as good as your last customer. Therefore, encourage mentoring as a culture to keep all aligned to the customer-centric mindset.
Customer-first mindset
Dr. Batat, author of the book Experiential Marketing, says something profound about customers. According to her, “People don’t come back because your product is great. They come back because you made them feel great about themselves”. Only brands with a customer-first mindset prioritise the experience to make customers feel great about themselves. When the UK brand Gin 5 decided to produce sanitisers in place of their core brand Gin, they ensured that the connection with customers remained by branding their sanitiser products ‘Gintizer’ to maintain the visibility of the brand and to keep their relationship with customers at the top of mind.
It does not really matter where your involvement is in the company; note that whatever it is that you are doing affects the customer. If you are not directly serving the customer, you are supporting someone who is. You may be a clerk in the Accounts Department; your role will require that you manage customer accounts efficiently so that the information managed for the customer’s transaction will be accurate and will be easily accessible to enable the sales office to deliver positive experiences to the customer at the frontlines. It is imperative that everyone in the organisation has a customer-first mindset.
Walt Disney offers regular training to its staff to keep them aligned with the customer-first mindset. Disney refers to its employees as “cast members”. The role of a cast member in a theme park is threefold. First, to do the job they were hired to do. Second, to take care of the Guest. This makes every job a customer service job, regardless of an employee’s responsibilities. Third, to keep the park clean. It is important to note that everyone – regardless of one’s job responsibility – must understand that every role ultimately affects the customer experience. Simply put, everyone has two jobs, the one you were hired to do and to take care of customers.
Embrace ideas, share stories
The advice here is to resist the urge to stand in front of a group, running through slides of customer data from surveys. What stays in the mind are memorable experiences; therefore, sharing real-life out-of-world encounters can be very uplifting. For example, an encounter about an issue resolved to illustrate areas of the process that need fixing can be more effective than sharing statistics. I had an issue with my car once when I was in the UK. I drove over to my mechanic to have it fixed. It had to do with the head gasket, so his recommendation was that I used a sealant as a temporary measure and save some money for the major work.
Just as he was closing the hood, I noticed the real problem. The fan belt had ripped apart; I had struggled back from work that week on the M1 motorway from London to Milton Keynes. The fact that he was willing to allow me to stand by him while he diagnosed the problem helped in this discovery. He humbly thanked me for the discovery and went on to fix the issue, replacing the fan belt. His calm response and humble acceptance of the oversight was for me a great learning. My experience previously with mechanics was the normal know-it-all attitude and keeping you at arm’s length while they resolved the issue.
We must be deliberate about capturing relevant stories and sharing them as part of our training to keep staff appraised of common and unique happenings at our touchpoints. Personal stories demonstrate core values and help to influence corporate culture positively. According to Shep Hyken, we must make it our goal to create and share the next “tribal narrative” that supports the company’s customer-centric culture. It is worthwhile to think of a time when you created an amazing customer service experience for a customer, reflecting on what happened and the outcome of that encounter. This could either be internal or external to the company.
Be consistent
What the average customer seeks in a brand is predictability and consistency. What your brand promise is must reflect in how you engage with your customers. According to Customer Service experts, there are three interrelated service quality experiences associated with brand loyalty. First, the product has to work. If the quality isn’t there, you are in trouble. Second, the customer service level needs to be above average; it doesn’t need to be wow every time, it just needs to be above average. Third, there has to be confidence in the customer’s mind that the first two will happen predictably in the future.
Confidence comes from the customer knowing what to expect and getting it. In today’s world, customers are more closely associated with businesses than ever before, with lines of communication depicting transparency and relationships transcending beyond simple transactions. Consequently, customers can learn in as much detail as they like about how businesses treat their customers. They can share in detail what their support and customer care are like, and the quality of their products and services. Companies must respond to this by tailoring experiences for their customers and building strong, lasting relationships.
When we falter and deliver “Moments of Misery”, what will enable us to maintain the trust and confidence of our customers is the above-average experiences we deliver to them regularly. No matter how good our product or service is, if it does not consistently do what it is supposed to, we are likely to lose the customer. Inconsistency will kill loyalty. For customers to own their experience with you, they must know what to experience all the time. Consistency does not mean you won’t have problems; it means they can count on you when they have problems.
Be a committed learner
In this day and age, the knowledge one needs to add value is easy to come by. What you need to know can be accessed variously, from a traditional book, in an audio course, or on video on YouTube or many other sources – most of which come at no cost. We must get into the habit of accepting and promoting change. You can be virtually anything you desire by pursuing your own personal commitment to learning. When we have a learning mindset, we get into the habit of embracing change. It is important for everyone in the organisation to know what customer experience is and why it is valuable.
The learning culture must be encouraged, both ways. By capturing shop floor and frontline encounters and incidents, we are building a knowledge base that will be useful for teams to create and develop resources to enhance engagements at touchpoints. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a wave of digitisation. Firms had to ensure that their employees developed the right interpersonal skills to nurture healthy, lasting relationships with clients – whether they were relying on digital or in-person communications. Here is a principle I learned from Jo Owen in her book How to Lead, in which she outlines learning capabilities in leadership.
She discusses the three learning sources to develop leadership capabilities. First, learning from role models and leaders. Role models are successful peers and your boss. David Begg, Head of Tanaka Business School, recounts listening to someone deliver his lecture with his own mannerisms and phrases and observes that learning can be unconscious. Second, learning from experience by reflecting on triumphs and disasters. Leaders learn by building up a deep knowledge of their industry. Third, learning from structured observation and (occasional) discovery. The learning principle applies to all levels.
Mentoring
Regardless of how great our customer service reputation is, we are only as good as our last customer. Cultivating a culture of mentoring helps to build the skillsets that will become commonplace and ensure that positive experiences are consistently delivered for the common good. The saying goes that ‘what goes around comes around’. This may be seen in both positive and negative lights. Where the focus is on the customer, there will be a deliberate effort to support teams in cultivating customer-centricity as a habit. There will be no shortage of role models to learn from.
Where mentoring is woven into the culture, it usually starts even before a person is hired or just as a person is hired. New recruits are immediately assigned to associates on the shop floor to serve as an instant source of information. New recruits must be monitored to observe how they interact with clients to ensure that they are aligned with the organisation’s customer-centric culture. During my study years in the UK, I experienced this culture when working for Argos and The Loot Magazine, where line managers paid random calls to call agents and listened in on their calls to determine the extent to which they followed the script for customer engagements.
Here are some examples of mentees who share their experiences. “Everyone needs a mentor, regardless of the type of work they do or the experience they have. Mentoring is a fundamental and natural form of human development, learning and interaction.” These are the words of Mirela Saracevic Trogrlic, a CX Consultant. In the words of Lynet Owuor, Customer Optimisation and Enablement Leader at AWS, “mentorship has paved the way for success in my career. Little did I know that learning and imitating other successful people’s work in the CX field is also referred to as mentorship”.
This quote from Benjamin Disraeli nicely expresses the essence of mentoring: “The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own”. The principle of reciprocity is very relevant to Customer Experience and is pivotal to achieving customer centricity and ultimately, delivering above-average experiences. If we want to deliver out-of-world experiences, we must address both the internal and external customer needs with equal effort.
The Writer is a Management Consultant (Change and Customer Experience). He can be reached on 059 175 7205, [email protected], https://www.linkedin.com/in/km-13b85717/ |
