Customer Culture
To enable customer focus is to have the organization align its values to its actions. Big, fancy slogans become just words if a company is not acting on its promises.
In order to provide personalized experiences, you need to have a culture and mindset that aid their delivery. Employees should be aligned with your brand's mission and core corporate values. Those who are will demonstrate that alignment in their behavior and actions. To be a customer-centric organization, you want to connect employee behavior and daily work to the outcome, which will inspire them to strive for higher levels of performance.
Management has to be accountable for:
- Sharing the company’s purpose.
- Uniting teams around total experience.
- Promoting customer-focused behaviors.
- Empowering the teams.
Department leaders have to be accountable for:
- Bringing on the right people for the job.
- Hiring for an employee’s CX DNA.
- Empowering employees to go above and beyond.
- Giving time to learn and innovate.
Operations have to be accountable for:
- Clear and transparent communication.
- Making it easy for employees and customers to do business.
- Using data to act and improve.
- Keeping the customer in mind during processes design.
When a company is fully aligned on delivering customer experiences that are personal and human, it shows across the organization. In 2019, I was invited to speak on a panel at an employee forum. It was invigorating to hear how every employee was committed to their customers. This company attributed its ability to build a corporate culture that truly focused on the customer to the way it related NPS feedback to each employee's job. It was no longer just the frontline employees' sole purpose to make a positive experience for the customer; the back-office employees were just as integral in delivering the right experience for a customer. Going beyond the scores allows the employee to build empathy for the customer by bringing customer stories and actual verbatims to the forefront — this humanizes why we do what we do.
Author Jeanne Bliss captures the importance of humanizing the process in her latest book, Would You Do That to Your Mother? “High tech without a human connection may make interactions more efficient, but it's important to know when to blend humanity and caring into the customer experience.”