Culture of Service-3
To spark innovation, motivation and commitment, people need something to care about and that's where customer impact stories come in. These stories are going to sustain your team through tough times, through brainstorming and the natural ebbs and flows of business.
Customer impact stories are different from case studies.
Case studies are usually purely factual and they have hard numbers and the proof of the ROI. They're typically written on a large scale, they talk about the company as a whole, not individual people and they're usually product or solution specific.
Case studies are great and they can be very helpful in a sales pitch or for someone who's learning about all the different solutions you offer but if you want to build a culture of service, you need to add in customer impact stories.
A customer impact story is more specific and it's more emotional.
They focus more on impact and less on product. Customer impact stories validate the purpose of your business.
Let me share an example from one of my friend working in medical devices company. He works in maintenance team. They tell him our work is not just repairing some machine. We are helping patients through right diagnostics. As soon as the patient is rightfully diagnosed; he or she can be treated appropriately. They might recover better with reports generated through our devices.Stories like these are so important that we as a maintenance team communicate with each other to get the parts out on time and the hospital; who is who our client helps their patients through us..!
It's an inspiring story, right? You probably have one that is just as inspiring about your business.
Question: When should you tell customer impact stories?
Answer: All the time, especially when your team is not customer-facing. Tell the stories in team meetings, in town halls, during on-boarding and even during performance reviews. These stories help connect people to the end result and they make service to those customers and each other a pleasure, not just a grind. There really isn't a bad time or place to bring up the importance of customer impact. It'll take you a few minutes but customer impact stories are critical for building that neural pathway between a culture of service and the resulting impact on an actual customer.
please do share your thoughts in comment section & help others to learn.
Happy Learning..!
image courtesy: Photo by Jessica Lewis on Unsplash