Company Values Should Guide Decisions, Products, and Services

I’m often asked how teams can know while planning or working on a project if they are being customer-centric. Is there the right amount of focus on users and what will work best for them?

One excellent telltale sign would be to take your ideas, concepts, or solutions and hold them up against your company’s values.?

I don’t mean the value the company hopes to get from this project. I mean your company’s stated values, the ones that normally go with a mission or vision statement. The ones that HR wants to make sure that job candidates and new hires learn all about.

At some companies, your performance review will look at how well are you exemplifying or upholding company values. Therefore, you must bake company values into every decision that you make.

Company Values Guide Potential Solutions

Let’s say your company leadership passes the word down to your teams that they want to see more new customers signing on and staying longer. This type of large and open request can often bring teams into brainstorming meetings and workshops, where the goal is to figure out what they can make people do so that the business achieves its goal.?

These meetings, exercises, or workshops should include conversations about company values. While we certainly want the company we work for to succeed and grow, we shouldn’t be doing it at the expense of the values that we claim are at the core of our existence and guide our operations.?

Honesty

Is one of your company values honesty? Then you would want to make sure that there is nothing dishonest in the ideas that you brainstorm; no trickery, no deception, no vaguely worded subscription plans. Clear and honest pricing that is easy to understand.?

We earn customers’ trust in every interaction, and we can lose that trust in the blink of an eye. Every concept, product, and service must constantly work to gain and keep customer trust. Deliberately design and architect for trust and honesty.

Integrity

Is one of your company values integrity? Then you would want to make sure that everything you do is transparent and ethical. Ensure that all decisions have the best intentions for your customers and users.?

You will have to balance what the business wants to achieve with what is best for your customers and users. This would require knowledge and evidence clearly telling the team who our target audiences are, their tasks, and their needs and perspectives.

When we work without this evidence, it’s easy to come up with ideas that might run against company values. But we excuse ourselves by saying we think or know that “users will be OK with this idea or feature.”?

We think users will be OK if we sneak an extended warranty into their shopping cart because “extended warranties are good” and “they can benefit users.” Our selfish trick is “really great” for users because they will “appreciate having extra coverage on their purchase.” But will they? Are we acting with integrity? Or are we making up use cases to explain something we want to do whether or not it’s good for customers?

Finding or imagining a benefit to a possible set of users doesn’t mean that you have an idea that would stand up to your company?values.

Respect

Is respect one of your company values? This is often described as respect and acceptance company workers have for each other. It might be about diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.?

Do we have that respect for our target audiences? Have we baked diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility into all aspects and areas of our project? Did we make sure that we researched target audience members of different genders, ethnicities, backgrounds, languages, LGBTQIA+, disabilities, diagnoses, conditions, left-handedness, and more??

We cannot respect our customers if we have not truly seen them, observed them, and brought them into our processes. That doesn’t mean they get pulled into workshops to brainstorm their own solutions. It’s often correctly said that users usually don’t understand their own problems, and even when they do, they are rarely good architects of great solutions that will work for all users.

But to follow through on our respect value, we must have hired diverse staff and teams, supporting our workers and their perspectives and needs, and then actively showing respect for our customers and users.

Empowerment

Is empowerment one of your company values? Similar to respect, this is often meant that internal workers will be empowered. You will have a voice. You will be given the opportunity to do great work or even “your best work.” What company would not want a worker’s best work?

But how are we empowering our target audiences? Are we giving them free choice where they would want to have free choice? Did we make canceling or downgrading easy because they would want it to be easy? Or did we make it tricky, difficult, time consuming, or seemingly impossible? Have we empowered our users to self-service common tasks? Self-service is great for users, and takes unnecessary calls and tickets off of Customer Support, better empowering Support to handle issues that truly need their intervention.?

Empowerment would also mean that we do not treat our target audiences like a pawn we push around the chessboard. We think more about how to optimize and streamline customers’ tasks to improve their efficiency, reduce the likelihood of errors, and create something logical and intuitive that just works.

If your product is cluttered, bloated, or difficult to learn or use, and your solution for that is not a redesign, but is instructional text, tooltips, how-tos, FAQs, or tutorials, then you’re not empowering the user. You are treating them like you know this probably isn’t very easy to use, and you want to send them for lessons, lessons that very few people want to read or think about.

Accountability and Responsibility

Is one of your company values accountability or responsibility? This is one for our internal teams and our leadership. Many people like to say they will be “held responsible” for a decision or a project. But what does that look like? I have not yet seen it in action anywhere I have worked or consulted.

Time after time, people make informed decisions to rush something low quality out to paying customers, or to deliver something that might achieve business goals but works against users. Or ship something we already know now is broken. We say things like, “We’ll fix it later.”?

Knowingly delivering low quality runs against one or more core company values. How will we hold a person or team responsible for a decision to create something we know now is of low or dubious quality? So many of our projects are a roll of the dice, hoping that a guess or assumption we have about users and what they would like will work out, and that the user will find five-star value in what we deliver.

But nearly all of us have worked at companies where we have had disaster projects that failed in small or large ways, often because there was a guess or assumption that turned out to be incorrect or a bad idea.

We didn’t take the right steps early on to get to know our target users and determine what types of solutions would best fit them. We didn’t want to add learning before a build, test, learn cycle. After we built and released, what did we learn and how did we learn it? Teams are often measuring the wrong things, and we wait a long time to get back data, complaints, or survey responses that tell us — sometimes six months into a project or longer — that we’re going in the wrong direction.?

At that point, someone who should be accountable and responsible often makes a decision to leave the feature the way it is, or just make some small changes. After all, if we make large changes, completely rethink the product, roll it back, or remove it, we would have to admit that it failed. But if we just iterate or make some small changes, we can pretend that that was our plan all along, and that it was OK to release something that probably made some customers leave us or lose trust for us.?

How do we hold a person or team accountable?

• Could someone be demoted for making bad decisions??
• Could they be given less budget or a lot more oversight next time because of the money they wasted?
• Could they be put on a performance improvement plan and coached on how to make better decisions that match our company values?
• There are many things that can look like accountability short of firing someone, though firing is an option if the poor decisions are egregious or create enough disaster.

When Company Values Don’t Exist Or Are?Fluffy

There are some companies whose stated values appear to be vague if not fluffy. I saw one value that said something like, “We act with a radical heart.” Well, what does that mean? What does it look like to act with a radical heart? What does a non-radical heart look like? What do you mean by heart??

Meta’s “values” include “build awesome things,” “live in the future,” “move fast,” and “focus on long-term impact.” None of these say honesty, integrity, ethics, diversity, accessibility, or customer-centricity, and let’s not assume they are implied. Meta’s actions and decisions tell us they follow these values closely, and that “impact” can mean a lot of things including unethical crap that the company finds acceptable and possibly “awesome.”

If you are working at a company where the values seem a bit fluffy, vague, or they don’t exist, create a set of values for your team. Make them part of your team charter or documented ways of working. Bake them into your decisions and Definitions of Ready and Done.?

Don’t let your company having vague values or no stated values give you permission to make dishonest or unethical decisions that your customers are like are likely to hate… unless, of course, your company is all about those types of decisions and welcomes — if not expects — them.

Company Values Are Your Guiding North?Star

They are supposed to be a North Star for hiring people who already exhibit these traits. They are supposed to be a North Star for the behavior and decisions of everybody in the company, from the teams on the ground to mid-level and executive leadership.

Let your company values guide your decisions.?

• When considering new or improved products and services, are you upholding company values??
• Are you being honest, ethical, transparent, and clear??
• Are you giving people choice and autonomy??
• Have you baked diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility into every conversation, decision, concept, and design?
• Do your Definitions of Ready or Done require that the project has included diverse audiences with different needs? Do these definitions include coding and testing for all accessibility needs? You are not living by any of your company values if you treat accessibility as a feature you might add later or something you wait and see if users upvote.

Make things easy, logical, intuitive, clear, transparent, and honest for your customers. They’ll reward you with loyalty and other things your company wants like higher utilization, more frequent purchases, etc.

Be guided by the values your company has… or should have.

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Delta CX is a full-service CX and UX agency and consultancy. We offer training, product and service strategy, and business change and business design consulting, including CX and UX research and design. We help businesses make and save money by improving teams, collaboration, processes, empowerment, agility, efficiency, and customer-centricity. Check us out at https://customercentricity.com.

Also please check out our new book, Customers Know You Suck. https://cxcc.to/ckys