How customer-focused is your culture?
Ask yourself a few questions about your organization: Do customers think you are often hard to do business with? Do your frontline employees deal with a fair amount of customer complaints? Do leaders think it’s your rules and policies that make you successful? Do you have employees who have suggested better ways to serve client needs but have been shot down? Is everyone on your team aware of what potential clients find attractive about your competitors?
The answers deserve to give you a fundamental insight into how customer-centric your culture really is. But then what to do? Here are 8 key things you can do to start focusing your team members more on your customers:
1. Give them more face time.
The way to measure what consumers think is through conversations. That means talking, whether in person or over the phone, not just through surveys. Great leaders take time out of their busy schedules to pay attention to their consumers. And if a visitor gives a suggestion, you rephrase it in your own words to make sure you perceive it correctly and then take notes.
2. Prioritize requests.
When you start asking for input, some customers will have a bevy of requests. Ask these needy souls to order their suggestions by importance. Often a list of twenty suggestions yields only one or two deal-breakers.
3. Thank them.
Most people don’t bother giving feedback to dealers or investors because they’ve been conditioned to ignore those things. Let your consumers know how much you value their feedback by sending them a thank you note or a reduction in your services. And thank them Make them as productive as possible: Inform them by offering fair feedback on what your team has done regarding the recommended change.
4. Listen on social media.
Social media offers us “listening platforms,” a great term coined by Dave Frankland of Forrester Research. Monitoring social media makes it easier than ever to listen to authentic customer concerns, find out what makes them happy, and catch any problems before they fester.
5. Listen to your first line.
Employees get the normal maximum reviews from the consumers they serve every day, so forget about your front-line staff and salespeople at your own risk. Teach them active listening skills and support staff will try to understand in detail what it means to “wow” your customers and what we can do to deliver it better. Over time, smart companies use this top-line knowledge to make improvements to procedures and policies that contribute to a greater experience for everyone.
6. Create a forum.
Create an online forum where consumer teams can connect with each other and with you. Treat consumers who provide feedback this way like super VIPs and pay close attention to what they have to say. You can also assemble a small organization of determined users to form a visitor advisory board. Select a dozen clients who will not only sense where you want to go, but will also tell you directly if you fail.
7. Attract consumers to your team.
At your next workers’ assembly, host a visitor panel of two or three key consumers who talk about what they like about your organization, what frustrates them, and what the competition says to attract them. It will be a workers’ assembly where no one is disconnected.
I have seen this last idea firsthand when I’ve worked with pharmaceutical companies. To close conferences, leaders often ask a customer to speak for a few minutes about how medicines made by their company saved or improved their lives. These emotional addresses make very real the role these professionals have—no matter where they work in the company—and the impact their work is having on patients and their families.
In intelligent organizational cultures, leaders know what they do and how they do it; At giant farms, leaders remind their workers why they do what they do for their customers.
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