Customer Zealotry: Where 'Soft' Skills Meet Hard Results, Part 1
| 20 | Mar |
| 2013 |
The quality of relationships inside a company is the leading indicator of how
well the organization collectively serves its customers. When employees treat
each other generously and are honest and vulnerable with one another, these
“soft” skills trickle out to affect the brand in surprisingly powerful ways.
Simply put, customer experience is the one place where your employees’ soft
skills have hard business results.
We call the strong internal motivation to not simply satisfy the customer but to genuinely care for what kind of day they're having “customer zealotry.” Companies that excel at customer zealotry don't leave it to chance: They incorporate customer service, explicitly, into their mission and then broadcast it. Zappos is a terrific example of a company that gets it. Its Web site doesn’t mince words: “Customer Service Isn't Just A Department! We've been asked by a lot of people how we've grown so quickly, and the answer is actually really simple. ... We've aligned the entire organization around one mission: to provide the best customer service possible.”
Announcing your aspiration to thrill customers is necessary but insufficient. Your words must be backed by actions; you must go above and beyond to make each customer feel valued. Carl Sewell, a Dallas auto dealer who built his Cadillac dealership into one of the country's largest, transformed his demoralized customer-facing employees by granting them the authority to stay by a customer's side until a problem was resolved. By trusting them to tackle tough decisions in the best interest of the company rather than merely pushing grievances up the chain of command, he got employee engagement — and customer zealotry — to surge.
This link between engagement and customer zealotry is well established. It makes sense on an intuitive level that a collaborative, meaningful environment in which co-workers hold each other accountable positively affects how customers are treated. Being empowered to be a problem solver is a more challenging, but inherently more gratifying, job — and it shows on the sales floor.
The Thrill Is Gone
But how do you build customer zealotry in a company that seems to be at war with its customer-facing representatives? One of our clients, a celebrated American icon with hundreds of franchised retail storefronts, found its market share decreasing as competition in domestic and foreign markets intensified. Financial pressures soured relationships between company managers and store owners. The strain hit paying customers, who would visit stores and be so much less than thrilled that they wouldn't return. As one of the district managers succinctly put it, "We can’t afford to fire any more customers."
Every problem is an opportunity, and the client calculated that each percentage point increase in customer retention would deliver an additional $700 million to the bottom line annually. The problem was, where do you start? To create the mindset shift needed to encourage its employees to look beyond their immediate job descriptions and train their eyes on the customer, we began with a question: “If we're going to get serious about great customer experience, which constituencies need to start behaving differently?” The answer was clear, and we challenged company managers to do just one thing: Improve your relationship with a single store. Don’t just show up with a clipboard and a check list; instead, partner with the store owner and workers to drive the best in customer experience for the company, overall. Start the conversation and see where it goes.
The response was immediately positive and the conversation went to a very good place very quickly.
The Road Back
Our client engagement was a major strategic effort with a number of divisions over an extended period of time (too vast to describe for this story), but the takeaway is this: Managers and store owners began to realize that how well they worked together had a striking effect on how they attracted, sold to and retained their customers. The shift eventually cascaded back to headquarters and across the company. The stories that emerged from the acts of customer zealotry encouraged a groundswell as they were communicated and celebrated throughout the company.
Gone were the customer zealotry "sins" — from playing "gotcha" games (in which employees who extend themselves for customers fear they'll get their knuckles rapped) to tolerance of "but that's not my job!" thinking. In their place were stories that included:
As Cadillac dealer Carl Sewell realized early on, the customer may be king but it’s the employees who open the doors for them again and again: “We realize we only have one way to differentiate ourselves,” he said, “and that’s through our people.”
Stay tuned Part 2 of this story, where we’ll dive into how employees of this client learned to communicate and collaborate, building intimacy and a team bond to truly serve the customer.
We call the strong internal motivation to not simply satisfy the customer but to genuinely care for what kind of day they're having “customer zealotry.” Companies that excel at customer zealotry don't leave it to chance: They incorporate customer service, explicitly, into their mission and then broadcast it. Zappos is a terrific example of a company that gets it. Its Web site doesn’t mince words: “Customer Service Isn't Just A Department! We've been asked by a lot of people how we've grown so quickly, and the answer is actually really simple. ... We've aligned the entire organization around one mission: to provide the best customer service possible.”
Announcing your aspiration to thrill customers is necessary but insufficient. Your words must be backed by actions; you must go above and beyond to make each customer feel valued. Carl Sewell, a Dallas auto dealer who built his Cadillac dealership into one of the country's largest, transformed his demoralized customer-facing employees by granting them the authority to stay by a customer's side until a problem was resolved. By trusting them to tackle tough decisions in the best interest of the company rather than merely pushing grievances up the chain of command, he got employee engagement — and customer zealotry — to surge.
This link between engagement and customer zealotry is well established. It makes sense on an intuitive level that a collaborative, meaningful environment in which co-workers hold each other accountable positively affects how customers are treated. Being empowered to be a problem solver is a more challenging, but inherently more gratifying, job — and it shows on the sales floor.
The Thrill Is Gone
But how do you build customer zealotry in a company that seems to be at war with its customer-facing representatives? One of our clients, a celebrated American icon with hundreds of franchised retail storefronts, found its market share decreasing as competition in domestic and foreign markets intensified. Financial pressures soured relationships between company managers and store owners. The strain hit paying customers, who would visit stores and be so much less than thrilled that they wouldn't return. As one of the district managers succinctly put it, "We can’t afford to fire any more customers."
Every problem is an opportunity, and the client calculated that each percentage point increase in customer retention would deliver an additional $700 million to the bottom line annually. The problem was, where do you start? To create the mindset shift needed to encourage its employees to look beyond their immediate job descriptions and train their eyes on the customer, we began with a question: “If we're going to get serious about great customer experience, which constituencies need to start behaving differently?” The answer was clear, and we challenged company managers to do just one thing: Improve your relationship with a single store. Don’t just show up with a clipboard and a check list; instead, partner with the store owner and workers to drive the best in customer experience for the company, overall. Start the conversation and see where it goes.
The response was immediately positive and the conversation went to a very good place very quickly.
The Road Back
Our client engagement was a major strategic effort with a number of divisions over an extended period of time (too vast to describe for this story), but the takeaway is this: Managers and store owners began to realize that how well they worked together had a striking effect on how they attracted, sold to and retained their customers. The shift eventually cascaded back to headquarters and across the company. The stories that emerged from the acts of customer zealotry encouraged a groundswell as they were communicated and celebrated throughout the company.
Gone were the customer zealotry "sins" — from playing "gotcha" games (in which employees who extend themselves for customers fear they'll get their knuckles rapped) to tolerance of "but that's not my job!" thinking. In their place were stories that included:
- Random acts of generosity: Said a district manager, "I’ll go in sometimes and just say, 'Let’s just wow a customer today.' Not because they have a problem, but just because. Pick someone and tell them you’ll give them [X]. Just anything, just do it."
- The 10' Rule: A manager created an informal diagnostic to assess customer zealotry and/or readiness to deliver on better customer service. She created this rule for the store: "If a mess happens within 10 feet of me, it's my mess to clean up. If a customer comes within 10 feet of me, it's my customer to greet, smile at and offer to help."
The turnaround included a new willingness to forgo an immediate sale if long-term customer satisfaction might suffer and conveying a communal spirit of "we" that included the customer. Our field consultants also found that when senior leadership spent time in the trenches with customer-facing employees, the act generated powerful empathy — with greater communication and process improvements an added "hard-business-results" bonus.
- Helping customers feel good about spending their hard-earned money: One store owner held a "Focus on the Customer" kick-off meeting for his staff and asked them to commit to the following: “Customers should be able to feel good about coming into the store for any reason; and if a customer asks where something is, ‘I'll gladly take them where they need to go and introduce them to a colleague who can assist them (if not me).’”
As Cadillac dealer Carl Sewell realized early on, the customer may be king but it’s the employees who open the doors for them again and again: “We realize we only have one way to differentiate ourselves,” he said, “and that’s through our people.”
Stay tuned Part 2 of this story, where we’ll dive into how employees of this client learned to communicate and collaborate, building intimacy and a team bond to truly serve the customer.
No comments:
Post a Comment