You Are The Leader - Customer Excellence Begins With You
Your organization is like an engine - and you are the switch that can ignite excellence..
In today’s competitive marketplace, extending
excellent customer service is essential to the survival of any business. I
hope by now most of us understand the importance of taking care of the
customer and exceeding their expectations.
If some of you are like me, you
spent your leisure time reading books like “Raving Fans” by Ken Blanchard
and Sheldon Bowles, or “In Search of Excellence” by Tom Peters. I read these
books and took them as gospel because they offer sound principles for
creating a vision of what excellent customer service should look like.
I
truly believe that these books and a few others really help us to delve into
the principles for taking care of the people and maintain our customer’s
loyalty.
We have great examples of companies that live by the customer loyalty
principle by constantly striving to be on the cutting edge of services and
products. Such companies that come to mind are Starbucks, Nordstrom, The
Four Seasons, and Virgin Atlantic. These are companies who set the mark for
creative and enlightened organizations that are always finding ways to make
the customer say “wow”. Consumers brag to others about the services they
receive at these customer centered organizations and therefore create a word
of mouth buzz that creates exponential growth and success.
As managers you have probably tried to instil certain campaigns or slogans
at your company. You made sure your employees understood and practiced the
following procedures:
- Greeting the guest with a smile and a salutation.
- Looking for the “moment of truth”, the opportunity to make an impression
on your customer with each interaction.
- Soliciting feedback from the guest or customer.
- Employee empowerment.
- Taking care of the “internal customer” (teamwork)
The list goes on, but in our organizations we have all tried to instil the
above initiatives at one time or another. If your organization is a
progressive one, then many of the above initiatives are common practice and
part of the expected norm. By the way, have you ever walked into one of the
large video store franchises? You walk through the familiar doors in search
of the newest “Rambo” movie on the way you plan to drop off your last rental
– “P.S. – I love You” (My wife made my rent). As you walk in the door, you
are hit with “hello” from two or three employees. Rather than be impressed
by their great service you are actually annoyed by their forced salutation.
They are not sincere and it shows. Some executive at that company decided
long ago that all of the video store employees will greet the guest as they
walk in the door despite if the employee is across the room or not. Forget
about greeting me from across the room as I walk in the door. Instead, try
not to ignore me the rest of the time I am in the store. Say “Hello” to me
when we are face to face or passing in the aisles. Give me an opinion about
a movie that I should see or ask me if I found everything ok. The point is
that when something seems scripted or forced then it is not going to work on
the customer, instead it will cheapen the customer experience. “Do you want
to supersize that?”
Ok! We all know the importance of customer loyalty because it costs less to
get a customer to come back then to create a new one. We all know that the
customer is king because they pay our bills and pay checks. We all know that
our employees have to be friendly and have good attitudes or the customers
won’t come back. We all know that an unsatisfied customer will tell far more
people than a happy customer. So how do we make our employees follow these
initiatives and constantly work toward improving their services? It is easy.
You, be a good leader. Huh? “No, it’s the employees fault.” “It’s hard to
find good people now.” I say B.S. (Bogus Sandwich).
Some of us know that the philosophy of customer loyalty and constant
improvement were studied, researched and taught by the American
statistician, Dr W Edwards Deming. His teachings have been carried out by
such companies as Sony, Fuji, Toyota, Honda and a multitude of others. In
fact every year Japan still honours the most innovative or successful
company with the Deming Award. Deming’s teachings were so simple yet they
are still some of the most powerful management philosophies today which
Deming referred to as “profound knowledge”. Some of the points from his 14
point list from his book “Out of the Crisis” are:
- Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service,
with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide
jobs.
- Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to
improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs
- Institute training on the job
- Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and
machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in
need of an overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers
- Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
- Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design,
sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production
and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.
- Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement
- Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The
transformation is everybody's job.
As you can see, the father of quality and improvement says that quality
begins in the boardroom with the leaders and managers. This especially
counts for service companies. Leaders, owners, and manager make the rules
and the procedures. They can create the empowerment in the employee or tie
their hands and have them afraid to make a decision. They are the ones that
decide how much should be spent on training and what objectives are
important. The owners are the ones that decide if they are going to share
part of the profits with the employee and make them feel like part of the
company.
The leaders and owners are the ones that decide how they are going to treat
the employees on their interactions. Are they going to set goals and work
toward helping the employee to achieve the goal or are they going to leave
them alone and just dump all over them when the employee does something
wrong? The leaders decide if an employee’s or customer’s idea will be
implemented or not. So you can keep blaming the line employee for the bad
customer service or you can take a deep look at the root cause of it all,
leadership and owners.
We want our people to treat our customers with warmth and respect. How do we
treat our people? We want our people to constantly improve their work
standards and output. Do we provide the on-going training and listen to
their feedback? We want our people to be able to serve the customer to the
fullest without making them wait and go through hoops. Are they afraid to
try anything without your approval because they know if they screw up you
will be all over them? Look at yourself and see.
Your store, restaurant, factory or office is like an engine. Then you the
leader are the ignition switch. Your people are the spark plugs, pistons and
other moving parts of the engine. If the spark (behaviour) you provide is
weak or surges then the engine will sputter. Without the oil (training,
goals, feedback, and support), then the engine will quickly burn and seize
up. The parts of the engine all have their function but without the spark,
the engine will never run. Now go take a look at yourself, your other
managers and the system itself. Can you improve something to ignite maximum
performance from your employees and create customer loyalty? Always!
References:
Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service by Ken Blanchard,
Sheldon Bowles, Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers. Date: 1993.
Out of Crisis: Dr W Edwards Deming, 1982 & 1986, Out of the crisis: quality,
productivity and competitive position, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
In Search of Excellence: by Thomas J. Peters, Tom Peters 2004 - Business &
Economics Harper Business Essentials.
About the Author
