Pay it forward

No company is perfect, and, eventually, a big mistake may cost you a
big customer. But when you begin losing customers over small issues, it
may be a sign that it’s time to revisit
your commitment to being a customer-focused company.

When a trend of losing customers
develops, many leaders make a beeline
for their customer service department.
After all, isn’t it responsible for keeping
clients satisfied? Not if your goal is to
become customer-focused. The best
customer-focused initiatives run from
the top all the way down, and the speed
at which customers run to your competitor is, in fact, directly related to the
depth of their relationship with your
front-line employees.

“When you have emotional connections with your customers, it really
binds you together,” says Kathy Riley
Cuff, senior consulting partner, The Ken
Blanchard Companies. “And to get that
connection, your front-line employees
have to be passionate— if you don’t
have great employees dealing with your
clients, you’re going to continue turning
over customers.”

Smart Business recently spoke with
Cuff about why every company really is
in the business of customer service and,
while your products or services may
bring customers to your door, how it’s
the relationships that keep them coming
back.

Is there a growth stage in organizations
when customer service typically suffers?

Yes. It happens when a company tries
to grow too big, too fast — bigger than
its ability to manage the process. You’ve
got to do your homework and have a
plan.

A lot of successful companies are successful in spite of themselves. You might
open up 10 new offices, but if your systems do not support that growth, your
internal folks, your employees, are the
ones that suffer, hearing the frustrations
from external customers doing business
with you. They’d like to serve the customer, but the current systems you have don’t support them. You need to set
them up for success so they can better
serve the external customer.

Can you describe an emotional customer
connection?

Here’s a grassroots example of building emotional connections. There’s a little restaurant where I live, with good
food and moderate prices. When my
kids were young, if the restaurant wasn’t busy, the owner would come over
and take my kids and say ‘come on kids,
let’s go look at the rabbits out the back
door.’ There were probably never any
rabbits there, but the owner wanted to
give us 10 minutes of peace and quiet at
the table alone together.

What happened was, the times we
went in and the service wasn’t great or
they were really busy and short-staffed,
I was willing to make exceptions for
that. I even got up and poured my own
water. The moral of the story is if you
don’t have an emotional connection
with your customers, it’s much easier
for them to find fault with you.

What is the most difficult aspect of creating a customer-focused company?

It’s getting people to buy in from the top
down and then getting them to live it. Top
management must walk the talk and really be good role models to the service initiatives. They can’t just say it and go
along with it to appease others — they’ve
got to be living it day in and day out and
promoting the beliefs. Beliefs drive
behaviors. For example, if you have a
customer service department, everybody
in the company may believe that department is the only one that deals with customer service. Instead, you have to get
everybody in the organization to believe
that it is everyone’s responsibility to
deliver service. The other difficult aspect
is keeping it front of mind. This shouldn’t
be the training program of the month;
you should be promoting that: We are
going to be a customer-focused company,
and we are going to consistently and persistently keep it in front of you.

How can you turn front-line employees into
customer-focused employees?

There’s been a lot of research by my
colleagues around the leadership profit
chain. They found three aspects that
make an organization vital, including
financial success, employee passion and
customer devotion. The results have
shown a direct correlation between
employee passion and customer devotion and, if you have those two, financial
success happens.

Your people need to be asked for their
input on things and need to feel like
they’re listened to and that their ideas
matter. And I’m a true believer that there
is very little information that should be
withheld from your employees, because
you want to create ownership in these
folks — you want them to feel like this is
their business. An employee who feels
valued and supported by the systems is
going to be happier dealing with your
external customers.

KATHY RILEY CUFF is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies in San Diego. Reach her through The Ken
Blanchard Companies Web site at www.kenblanchard.com/cuff.