The Heart of the Matter – Positive Spillover Begins Here

I’m loving this opportunity to share some of my thoughts on #PositiveCulture with you all here. And when I talk about positive culture I really like to get back to the basics – what I consider the heart of the matter.

I’ve watched the field of #customerexpereince grow and change (for the better) over the years. But when I am teaching execs and leaders I like to make it really simple. ?After all, we are ALL customers, so we have a personal point of reference. While we don’t all want the same kind of experiences, we do all want our experiences to be at least satisfying. (I want a whole lot more than that!)

Satisfaction is only a door – one you must walk through in order to get to things like retention and loyalty. ??

I believe the Customer Experience is the sum total of the feelings that are evoked as a result of any interaction that takes place at any touch point in the customer’s journey. (That includes your parking lot, your phone answering system, and even things outside your control.)?

It is based on the customer’s perception of the value you delivered, both tangible and intangible. In their mind it’s compared with the value they desired or expected. That’s where this gets complicated.?

The Customer’s Perception IS the Customer’s Reality!

I think that is about the most important thing we can teach people about caring for customers – internal or external. It’s not what YOU think about their experience it’s what they think and feel about it.

That puts us right in a bowl of emotional soup. It’s not about who is right or wrong.

That’s why I’m so happy see more and more companies becoming emotionally intelligent – and I’m proud that I’ve helped move that process along in the companies with whom I work. #emotionalintelligence

When you successfully deliver the kinds of experiences your customers and employees feel good about over and over again they come back, spend more, tell friends. They become advocates, #ravingfans and evangelists. More than ever my friends, #loyalty is an emotional connection.

When you can keep delivering that over and over again you fill up what I call the “Emotional Bank Account” and your reward is #profit. When you think about employees the same way you think about customers and you create emotional attachments with them, you create an organism that can outthink and outperform the competition.

Employees are customers too!

One of the very first books I ever read on Customer Service was Hal Rosenbluth’s “The Customer Comes Second.” It detailed a strategy that propelled his little-known company from a small family business to a global industry leader making billions of dollars. I suppose that reading this book so early on in my career helped inform my thinking about Customer Experience. It all made sense to me!

I started working at the age of 14 and as an employee I responded well to the “bosses” who saw the best in me and encouraged me to grow (without throwing me in over my head too often.) When I felt good about being at work, my customers felt good about being with me – whether that was as a grocery checkout person, a bank teller or division head in a publishing firm.

In fact when I worked in banking (long before what we know now as a “universal queue” where everyone stands on one line) my boss noticed that the line in front of my window was consistently longer than others. At first, he thought I was slow, until he tried to get “my people” to another line. They wouldn’t go. They preferred to wait longer to spend time with me. Eventually he decided this was a good thing and once a month off I went to the main office so I could train all the new tellers. (No pay raise, but the recognition felt good.)

As I grew into my own leadership career, I “trial and errored” my way to success before I took any formal training. Here’s what I learned along the way.

Your job is to create #experiencesthatmatter. What kind of experiences do you want to create for yourself and your employees, and what kind of experiences do you want to create for your customers and community? ?

While this is basic – it bears repeating and remembering.

Every customer – internal and external - has two sets of needs. They have business needs – rational, logical, practical and tangible. External Customers want to buy a product or service that fits some practical set of needs they have – they need software that works and solves a problem, they need shoes that fit and look stylish, and food that tastes good and takes away hunger.

Fill in your own blanks. Tangible needs are usually what gets people in the door.

Employees want a place to work that uses their skills, gives them the right pay, the right tools and the right opportunity on their life path. They may be seeking the right blend of remote and in office work, they may be looking for a steppingstone to the next part of their career puzzle.

But what keeps any customer – internal or external – coming back and showing up? The fulfillment of their #emotionalneeds.

People want to feel… appreciated, included, valued, connected and important. They want to feel confident and supported, secure, acknowledged and recognized, part of something they believe in. They want to feel special, they want to feel proud, respected and trusted and in the case of employees appropriately challenged, accomplished and certainly well-compensated. Most want to feel happy.?

So, you ‘ll find that I talk a lot about feelings. It’s been that way for over 30 years. I’m so grateful to be living in a world where feelings are part of the acceptable conversations at work. It’s about time, since all along we always employed humans. ?

The Positive Spillover Effect starts with your ability to create a specific set of feelings – the ones that matter to the humans that work for you and buy from you. We know that when they are feeling those positive emotions they WILL spread them around. Research shows that happiness is contagious up to 3 degrees of separation (I like to call it 3 degrees of connection.)?

When your employees and customers are happier they spread to others in their networks who spread it in their networks! Voila! Positive Spillover! ?

Please comment and let me know what other feelings you want to feel at work. Fill in the blanks.?

My customers want to feel _________

My employees want to feel _________

And for good measure – figure out what YOU want to feel and let me know if you need some help in making that happen! ?

And you know I greatly appreciate it when you invite 3 more people to subscribe to this newsletter. Spread the love!

?With #gratitude,

JoAnna

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