What Customer Focus Is and Is Not About...

What Customer Focus IS About:

Creating an organizational competence: Customer-Focus is an aligned whole-organization approach to customer satisfaction and service in which Leadership, Processes and People are all customer-aligned.

In broad stokes, this means that:

• Every action is shaped by a relentless commitment to meeting and exceeding its' customers expectations regarding product and service quality;
• Internal processes are constantly evaluated and improved to meet or exceed those expectations;
• Employees are aware of their role in maintaining a valued relationship with their customers.

What Customer Focus IS NOT About - Five Blunders

While howls of protest over poor customer service continue to fill the air, there remain some businesses that manage to consistently deliver superior customer service year in and year out. These are the places where turbo-charged employees pursue customer delight with a passion, places that ignite a flashpoint of contagious enthusiasm in employees and customers alike.

Foremost among the lessons to be learned from such flashpoint businesses are the blunders* to avoid those fatal mistakes that trip up just about everybody else.

1. Making customer service a training issue. Businesses of all kinds invest huge amounts in training programs that do not and simply cannot work. The function of such training is to identify the behaviors workers are supposed to engage in, and then coax, bully, or legislate these behaviors into the workplace. At best, this is almost always a recipe for conduct that feels mechanized and insincere; at worst, it intensifies worker resentment and cynicism. Instead of dictating what workers should be doing to delight customers, the better approach is to give workers opportunities to brainstorm their own ideas for delivering delight. Managements role then becomes to help employees implement these ideas, and to allow workers to savor the motivational effect of the positive feedback that ensues from delighted customers. This level of employee ownership and involvement is a key cultural characteristic of virtually all flashpoint business.
2. Blaming poor service on employee demotivation. Businesses looking for ways to motivate their workers are almost always looking in the wrong places. Employee cynicism is the direct product of an organizations visible preoccupation with self-interest above all else a purely internal focus. The focus in flashpoint businesses is directed outward, toward the interests of customers and the community at large. This shift in cultural focus changes the way the business operates at all levels. The reality in most business settings is that employees are demotivated because they cant deliver delight. The existing policies and procedures make it impossible. Instead of fixing their employees, flashpoint business set out to build a culture that unblocks them. Workers are encouraged to identify operational obstacles to customer delight, and participate in finding ways around them.
3. Using customer feedback to uncover whats wrong. Businesses often use surveys and other feedback mechanisms to get to the causes of customer problems and complaints. Employees come to dread these measurement and data-gathering efforts, since they so often lead to what feels like witch-hunts for employee scapegoats, formal exercises in finger-pointing and the assigning of blame. Flashpoint businesses use customer feedback very differently. In these organizations the object is to uncover everything that's going right. Managers are forever on the lookout for "hero stories" - examples of employees going the extra mile to deliver delight. Such feedback becomes the basis for ongoing recognition and celebration. Employees see themselves as winners on a winning team, because in their workplace there's always some new "win" being celebrated.
   
4. Reserving top recognition for splashy recoveries. It happens all the time: something goes terribly wrong in a customer order or transaction, and a dedicated employee goes to tremendous lengths to make things right. The delighted customer brings this employees wonderful recovery to managements attention, and the employee receives special recognition for his or her efforts. This is a blunder? It is when such recoveries are the primary - if not the only - catalysts for employee recognition. In such a culture, foul-ups become almost a good thing from the workers point of view. By creating opportunities for splashy recoveries, foul-ups represent the only chance employees have to feel appreciated on the job. Attempts to correct operational problems wont win much support if employees see these problems as their only opportunity to shine. Flashpoint businesses celebrate splashy recoveries, of course, but they're also careful to uncover and celebrate employee efforts to delight customers where no mistakes or problems were involved. This makes it easier to get workers participating in efforts to permanently eliminate the sources of problems at the systems level.


5. Competing on price. Its one of the most common (and most costly) mistakes in business. Price becomes the deciding factor in purchasing decisions only when everything else is equal. However, everything else is almost never equal. Businesses compete on the perception of value, and this includes more than price. It's shaped by the total customer experience and aspects such as helpfulness, friendliness, and the personal touch often give the competitive advantage to businesses that actually charge slightly more for their basic goods and services.
   

Those businesses that deliver a superior total experience from the inside out (that is, as a product of a strongly customer-focused culture) are typically those that enjoy a long-term competitive advantage, along with virtual immunity from the kinds of headaches that plague everybody else.

What say you? Any comments, ideas, thoughts?

*) The blunders are from Paul Levesque's book "Customer Service From The Inside Out Made Easy".