Teddy Roosevelt may have said it best: "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."
That's good advice for teachers, leaders, coaches, politicians, physicians, and anyone else interested in exercising influence and earning trust and loyalty.
And it's certainly good advice for anyone dealing with customers.
No business can afford to regard customer service excellence as just a feel-good slogan. Customer trust and loyalty are strategic imperatives for any business that's serious about creating and maintaining a competitive advantage. And as clear acknowledgement of this, a growing number of companies are adding a new role to the C-suite: Chief Customer Officer.
An expert is this field is Jeanne Bliss. She's held customer leadership executive posts at Lands' End, Mazda Motor of America, Coldwell Banker, Allstate and Microsoft. Her latest book is Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine. Her insights are worth noting by leaders in any industry.
Rodger Dean Duncan: “Customer service” has a variety of meanings. How do you define the term, and what are its components in relation to things like reputation, responsiveness, and reliability?
Jeanne Bliss: The work we do is defined as “Customer Experience” rather than “Customer Service.” Customer Experience is the proactive and deliberate orchestrating of an end-to-end journey between a customer and a company. Each stage of the journey is architected to understand the emotions and needs of the customer, and what he or she is trying to achieve. The work then is to unite the organizational silos to deliver a one-company experience to deliver value at each stage, and across the journey.
Duncan: Many companies pay good lip service to customer service, but there’s often a gap between what’s said and what’s delivered. How can you tell when a leader is truly serious on the delivery?
1. A united leadership team. They are in unison on decisions they make about how they will and will not grow the business. There is clarity of purpose for how the business should conduct itself to improve customers’ lives and decisions are consistent and aligned.
2. Leaders that give permission and behaviors to model. They make decisions that prove commitment, such as standards about what conditions must be met before a product is sent to customers, or tools and materials and support that must exist for the field. And they give employees authority to halt the process if standards are not in place. Leaders themselves live to these standards, so that others in the company have permission to model the behaviors.
3. Proving commitment with action. This means holding people accountable and uniting the leadership team. Unite as a leadership team to focus, commit the resources to a few priorities in customers’ lives, and to take the time to improve the experiences comprehensively. This drives improved customer experiences and earns more customer-driven growth.
Duncan: You say “five customer leadership competencies” connect to tell the story of customers’ lives as they interact with a business. What are those competencies?
Bliss: Competency 1 is Honor and Manage Customers as Assets. This is about knowing what customers actually did to impact business growth or loss versus what they say they might do via survey results. What this means is to know and care about, at the executive level, the shifting behavior within your customer base that indicates if their bond with you is growing or shrinking. And, importantly, it’s about engaging your executives in caring about the “WHY?” Why did customers stay or leave, buy more or less, or actively use your products or services more or less?
Competency 2 is Align Around Experience. This gives leaders a framework for guiding the work of the organization: requiring cross-silo accountability to deliver deliberate customer experiences. It unites the organization in building a framework for ‘Earning the Right’ to customer asset growth. The role of the CCO is to unite leaders and the organization in building a one-company version of their customer journey. Over time, this will evolve leadership language to drive performance along the customer journey, driving accountability to journey stages, not only down silos.
Competency 3 is Build a Customer Listening Path. This unites your organization to build a one-company listening system that is constantly refreshed to tell the story of your customers’ experience, guided by the customer journey framework. Feedback volunteered from customers as they interact with you, survey and social feedback, ethnography, and other sources of gathered input are assembled into one complete picture, presenting customer perception and value, stage by stage. This alignment of multiple sources of feedback focuses and galvanizes the organization to focus on key areas of improvement connected to customer growth, driving greater results and greater understanding of this work.
Competency 4 is Proactive Experience Reliability & Innovation. This competency builds out your “Revenue Erosion Early-Warning Process.”We need leaders to care about how we are performing in the processes that impact the priority moments in your customers’ journey with you. These are the intersection points that impact customer decisions to stay, leave, buy more, and recommend you to others. This is where you build your discipline to know before customers tell you if your operation is reliable or unreliable in experience delivery in the moments that matter most.
Competency 5 is One-Company Leadership, Accountability & Culture. This is your “prove it to me” competency. For this work to be transformative and sustainable, it must be more than a customer manifesto. Commitment to customer-driven growth is proven with actions and choices. To emulate culture, people need examples. They need proof. Culture must be proven with decisions, and operational actions that are deliberate in steering how a company will and will not treat customers and employees. Competency 5 puts into practice united leadership behaviors to enable and earn sustainable customer asset growth. It focuses them on what they will and will not do to grow the business.
Duncan: How can leaders be held appropriately accountable for excellence in customer service?
Bliss: Leaders need to unite to comprehensively understand and focus on the intersection points in the customers’ journey that are most important to them. They need to dedicate the resources, give people capacity and focus as a united leadership team on the performance standards that improve or interrupt customers’ lives. Most important they need to start their language and accountability with moving the company from “getting a survey score” to “earning the right to growth, by improving customers’ lives.”
Duncan: What role are social media platforms playing in today’s “customer experience,” and what are some of the best social media practices you see?
Bliss: Social media has given customers the ability to speak out about their experiences, and has become an intense motivator for leaders and organizations to focus on experience, reliability, and differentiation. I’m supremely enthused about this forcing function! Lagging survey metrics can’t catch surges of happiness and unhappiness that customers express in social media to make an impact on customer growth and profitability. And the cherry-picked, silo-based projects that emerge from these results are not solving the problems causing customers to depart or grow.
Rodger Dean Duncan is the bestselling author of CHANGE-friendly LEADERSHIP: How to Transform Good Intentions into Great Performance. Follow him on @DoctorDuncan
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