Culture club

Having a service vision for
your company is only the
first step of developing a top-flight, service-oriented business. Even the most visionary
organizations can’t pull off top
service if they don’t have a
world-class internal culture.
That is accomplished only by
attracting, hiring and retaining
only those people who have
the all-important service DNA.

As business leaders, we need
to have standards that require
prospective employees to earn
the right to be a part of our
company. Having a set of non-negotiable hiring standards will
turn your prospective employees either on or off.

People need to earn the right to work
for you
The main objective of any
human resource person who
conducts first interviews
with prospective hires is to
try to scare the applicant out
of working for you. If the
applicant doesn’t scare,
chances are high that he or
she is a good fit for your company. What “scare” really
means is to help candidates
recognize that a job at
your company may be
either a much bigger commitment than they wanted
or exactly what they have
been looking for. In order
to do this, your company
needs to have its own set
of nonnegotiable hiring
standards.

Very similar to creating
the service vision, there
are two distinct parts of
creating your hiring standards: creating the values
that truly embody what
your company stands for
and being able to articulate those values to potential,
new and seasoned employees so clearly and passionately
that, within minutes, you can
tell if your are turning them on
or off. Otherwise, it will just be
another company slogan.

A world-class culture does
not compromise values; rather,
it remains faithful to values,
even when remaining faithful
means doing things differently
from everyone else. A legendary culture is created in the
head and the heart of the
leader and passed from team
member to team member.

Build the culture and the
customers will come

If you truly want to be a
world-class customer service
organization, then you have to
be the employer of choice. And
to do that, you need to be
known for four things:

  1. Being a great place to work

  2. Providing great training

  3. Having superior customer
    service

  4. Offering unlimited opportunity

If you can create that type of
reputation, you will never have
a shortage of applicants.

The employee career experience

The employee career experience encompasses the traditional stages an employee has
during his or her career with
your company. These stages
are quite consistent from company to company — recruiting,
screening and hiring, orientation and training, 90 days after
hire, six months after hire, one
year after hire, two years after
hire, and five or more years of
employment.

Because the employee’s mentality is different at each stage,
managers need to be trained
how to coach, emphasize and
avoid certain factors at each
stage. By creating this, you are
designing a blueprint on how
to create a positive working
environment. This blueprint
teaches new managers — and
reminds experienced managers
— how to create a great culture throughout an employee’s
career in a way that continually
reinforces his or her emotional
capital in the company.

There are three components
of each stage: service defects,
standards and above-and-beyond opportunities.

Service defects are the things
that the company and management need to avoid at each
stage because those things can
cause the employee’s morale to
take a nosedive.

Standards are actions we
want the company and management to deliver at each
stage because those are the
things that will differentiate the
company from any other company for which the employee
has ever worked.

And finally, above-and-beyond opportunities allow
management to demonstrate a
culture of going out of their
way to care about the individual employee, leaving a reoccurring impression that this
company is unlike any other
for which they have worked.

I have never come across a
world-class customer service
organization that wasn’t a
world-class company to work
for — not only vertically (management to employee) but horizontally (employee to employee), as well.

JOHN R. DIJULIUS III, John is the best-selling author of “What’s The Secret? To Providing a World-Class Customer Experience” (Wiley May 2008). He is also president of The DiJulius Group, a firm specializing in giving companies a superior competitive advantage by helping them differentiate on delivering an experience and making price irrelevant. He can be reached at [email protected].