“Success depends on being in touch with the fundamental things that truly contribute to a customer spending money with your organization”
- Today, customers in almost every industry have more choices of similar products, at similar prices, at similar quality levels, with more places of access, than ever before. This puts an emphasis on superior employee performance – not just mediocre performance – in creating loyal customers. Traits to look for when trying to achieve customer loyalty:
1. Brilliant at the Basics – Operational Excellence
- Success depends on being in touch with the fundamental things that truly contribute to a customer spending money with your organization.
- If a company can’t deliver the basic promise that has been made explicitly or implicitly to customers, that company is wasting its time.
- Managers and the groups that support the success of the customer’s experience need to look at the basics. Basics include the right product or service, the right place, the right time, and the right way.
2. Be the Customer
- Being customer-focused is about gaining a clear understanding of exactly how things done in the workgroup and/or department affect the customer and other employees who rely on delivering the basics.
- Details that seem trivial may not be so to customers and other employees. Consider the downstream consequences – to other employees and to the customer – when poor performance results in wasted time, delays, defects, inconveniences, and irritations.
- Employees will become frustrated. Customers won’t bother to return.
- The revenue stream will begin to dry up.
3. Under-Promise/Over-Deliver
- Perhaps the worst situation one can get in with customers, or other people who depend on your results, is to over-promise and underdeliver.
- This creates dissatisfaction and frustration with customers/ other departments, damages reputations, and puts the work process in chaos – all the while, direct reports are performing under anxiety.
Things to look out for include:
- Creating expectations that can’t be met with existing resources or processes.
- Ineffective communication between different departments and divisions.
- Processes and policies that don’t consider the unexpected.
- Attempting to pacify customers in the short term without considering the ability to follow through.
- Not taking into consideration the implicit expectations of customers.
Often there are implicit expectations held by customers and other employees – accuracy, the meaning of “soon,” appropriate attitude, past precedent, etc.
4. Remarkable Recovery
- Fixing errors or handling complaints – especially those coming from external customers – quickly and effectively dramatically impacts business. Remarkable recoveries are done with a sense of urgency, speed, a positive attitude and a clear apology for the inconvenience.
- When a recovery is handled poorly, or without concern, effort, and urgency, the customers or person on the receiving end has two problems: the original problem and, now, the poor recovery – which by then they are most likely taking personally.
- Superior managers, staff and companies understand that customer experience is comprised of all four principles being applied at the same time all the time. This customer-centric focus is the foundation of business acumen.
Key Takeaways
There are two fundamental competencies that every successful supervisor or manager must acquire:
- 1) People skills – the ability to develop, inspire, and influence direct reports (discussed in Chapter 1 and to be discussed further in this book)
- 2) business acumen – acquiring a basic understanding of how the organization makes money. Business acumen requires an understanding that service quality is a management issue, and that happy customers will return – the key to a company surviving and thriving.
“Fixing errors or handling complaints … quickly and effectively dramatically impacts business”