If you want to install a powerful customer culture in your business, you’ll need everyone on board, not just those departments that are officially dedicated to the customer.
This is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for companies that have great intentions yet are unable to execute them effectively. With that in mind, consider the following strategies to help embed a deeper customer vision across your entire business.
Hiring & Training
If you want everyone in your business to prioritise the customer, you need to hire them accordingly — that’s the first step.
Trader Joe’s, for instance, has an excellent customer experience (CX) reputation, and they are cautious about who they hire. The question ‘Do you like to make people smile?’ is, for instance, included in their job applications.
When you identify those individuals, provide regular training sessions and workshops on understanding customer needs, empathy, effective communication, and problem-solving.
That’s important to keep them on their toes, stimulate their natural propensity towards customer friendliness and keep them aware of all the latest evolutions.
Atlantis the Palm, for instance, hires individuals with the right attitude, initiates them with a comprehensive five-day orientation program, and then continues to train them on the job through ongoing training updates.
Like online courses, Forbes Travel Guide training, collaborations with universities, cross-exposures to other departments, and working at sister hotels, such as One&Only, etc. When it comes to CX, they have a lifelong learning attitude.
Repeat the story
It’s also crucial to keep communicating about your obsession with the customer to everyone within the company.
Every meeting, especially in departments that are not officially responsible for customer experience, should begin and end with a focus on the customer. Yes, process, revenue, sales tactics, the competition, etc., are essential, but “How does this decision affect the customer?” should always be top of mind in every department’s endeavours.
You may need some storytelling to make sure that everyone is on board. That is, for instance, what Amazon did when it put an empty chair in the meeting to symbolise the customer's vote.
Reward & Support
Companies that offer a great customer experience tend to reward their employees for delivering that service. Adobe, for instance, structurally celebrates employee achievements through peer-to-peer recognition, manager appreciation, and company-wide recognition events. This not only allows its employees to feel involved and valued, but it also underscores the importance of customer experience.
It’s not just about reacting when things go great; it’s also about responding right when things go wrong.
When an employee makes a mistake towards a customer, they should also feel heard and appreciated by their leaders.
There is an emotional cost when someone makes a customer misstep, and leaders should acknowledge this and reassure them that such mistakes happen and are understandable.
This helps to install a psychologically safe environment where people feel supported to experiment and go the extra mile for the customer.
Every customer idea is great
When enthusiastic employees come up with ideas for creating a better customer experience, many of these ideas are met with scepticism.
We have all been confronted with idea killers like “But what if every customer wants that?”, “That won’t work”, or “That will cost too much?”. Maybe we’ve even spoken those very words ourselves.
You don’t need to implement every idea your employees come up with, obviously, but treat every customer idea like a great idea. Don’t just dismiss it; consider it from the customer’s point of view and try to envision the potential impact. Congratulate your employees on their creativity and proactivity.
Show them how appreciative you are of what they think. If you don’t, they just won’t come up with any ideas anymore, because they’ll think “no one listens to me anyway”. It’s about making them feel valued and creating a safe space where they can share their ideas.
Even better is to allow dedicated time for new ideas, such as 3M’s unique 15 per cent Culture, which encourages employees to set aside a portion of their work time to cultivate and pursue innovative ideas that excite them proactively.
Lead by example
There is often a significant difference between what company leaders say, such as “we put the customer at the heart of everything we do,” and what they do.
For instance, if an employee was able to turn a frustrated customer into a happy one with a service call that was longer than usual, and the leader’s reaction is “That’s fantastic, but try to keep the call shorter next time to keep the cost per customer down”, that is not the way to convey that the customer is king. It only shows that revenue is king.
Additionally, I appreciate examples from leaders who maintain close contact with customers in the field from time to time.
Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, spent six months living on the premises that he’s been renting out through his platform.
Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan works one half-day a month as a barista to become immersed in the customer culture.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi got behind the wheel as a driver and went through the entire process himself, from signing up as a driver to driving customers and dealing with app glitches and traffic.
Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, spends time every week in the contact centre working through customer support calls. This is how you convey that customer experience is important -by acting on it.
Everyone should have direct contact
Suppose you want everyone in your company to be deeply committed to your customers and understand them.
In that case, they must meet those customers, current and past, especially those employees who are not in customer-facing positions.
At the Belgian subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch (AB InBev), for instance, all top-tier executives had to engage directly with three past customers. Their mission was to have a heart-to-heart on why they parted ways with AB InBev.
This fresh approach led to management strategies brimming with genuine empathy and a deeper understanding of core issues.
Microsoft does something very similar; at the beginning of each executive committee meeting, they hold a 90-minute conversation with two prospects whom they had been unable to turn into customers.
And at DoorDash, all salaried employees are required to make deliveries through its WeDash program, including CEO Tony Xu. You cannot expect all your employees, across the entire business, to prioritise customer needs above all else if they are unaware of that customer.
All metrics are CX metrics
If you want everyone in your company to prioritise the customer, then you should integrate customer experience into your performance metrics and incentives, not just those of the customer-facing departments.
You can tie incentives, bonuses, or performance reviews to customer experience metrics to reinforce the importance of prioritising customer satisfaction and loyalty across all departments.
What is crucial here, though, is that these KPIs are used to manage the customer culture, not the customer score itself. For instance, when you use “low product returns' as a KPI as a proxy for high satisfaction (i.e., “if they love the product, they won’t return it”), the result is not better products, but rather a process that makes it very difficult for customers to return a product. That is always the danger of KPIs.
However, if you have a customer-oriented culture (one that follows one or more of the above strategies), that won’t happen.
Food for thought
Two important patterns are running through all the above approaches.
The first is the importance of silo-breaking: fostering contact and communication across all departments, not just marketing and customer experience.
The second is making these processes structural. Customer experience cannot be an afterthought. You need to embed it across all of these departments structurally.
The common denominator is that all these strategies are deliberate and occur on a regular basis. That’s the only way that you’ll make your customer culture work.
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