Thrill Your Customers With Empowered Employees

It may seem obvious, but the more satisfied your employees are the more satisfied your customers will be. The quality of relationships inside a company is the leading indicator of how well the organization collectively serves its customers. When employees treat each other generously and are honest and vulnerable with one another, these “soft” skills trickle out to affect the brand in surprisingly powerful ways. Simply put, customer experience is the one place where your employees’ soft skills have hard business results.

The strong internal motivations to not just simply satisfy the customer but to genuinely care about making them happy is what we like to call “customer zealotry.” Companies that excel at customer zealotry don't leave it to chance. It’s built into their DNA. They incorporate exceptional customer service, explicitly, into their mission and then broadcast it, loudly, and with a smile.

Zappos is a terrific example of a company that understands this. Its website doesn’t mince words: “Customer Service Isn't Just a Department! We've been asked by a lot of people how we've grown so quickly, and the answer is actually really simple. ... We've aligned the entire organization around one mission: to provide the best customer service possible.”

But just announcing your aspiration to thrill customers is not enough. Your words must be backed by actions; you have to go above and beyond the baseline to make each customer feel valued. In his book “Customers for Life,” Carl Sewell, a Dallas auto dealer who built his Cadillac dealership into one of the country's largest, details how he transformed his demoralized customer-facing employees by granting them the authority to stay by a customer's side until a problem was resolved. By trusting them to tackle tough decisions in the best interest of the company, rather than merely pushing grievances up the chain of command, he got employee engagement — and customer zealotry — to surge.

This link between engagement and customer zealotry is well established. It makes sense on an intuitive level that a collaborative, meaningful environment in which co-workers hold each other accountable positively affects how customers are treated. Being empowered to be a problem solver may be more challenging, but it is also an inherently more gratifying job, which shows on the sales floor.

The Thrill Is Gone

But how do you build customer zealotry in a company that seems to be at odds with its customer-facing representatives? One of our clients found its market share decreasing as competition in domestic and foreign markets intensified. Financial pressures soured relationships between company managers and store owners. This strain eventually hit paying customers who weren’t exactly thrilled with their customer experience and, worse, weren’t returning. As one of company’s field employees succinctly put it, "We can’t afford to fire any more customers."

Every problem is an opportunity, though, and the client calculated that even a percentage point increase in customer retention could deliver hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the bottom line. To create the mindset shift needed, we encouraged the client’s employees to train their eyes on the customer instead of their own job description. We began with a question: “If we're going to get serious about great customer experience, which constituencies need to start behaving differently?” 

The answer was clear, and we challenged company managers to do just one thing: Improve your relationship with a single store. Rather than showing up with a clipboard and a check list, these managers were empowered to partner with the store management and workers to strive for the best in customer experience.

The response was immediately positive and the conversation went to a very good place very quickly.

The Road Back

Our client engagement was a major strategic effort with a number of divisions over an extended period of time, and a blog isn’t necessarily the place to get into the details of implementation,  but the takeaway is this: Managers and store personnel began to realize that how well they worked together had a striking effect on how they attracted, sold to and retained their customers. The shift eventually cascaded back to headquarters and across the company. The stories that emerged from the acts of customer zealotry encouraged a groundswell as they were communicated and celebrated throughout the company.

Gone were the customer zealotry "sins" — from playing "gotcha" games where employees feared getting reprimanded if they extended themselves for customers to accepting, and even encouraging, “that’s not my job!" thinking. In their place were stories that included such creative solutions as setting a goal to impress a certain number of customers daily, taking ownership of stores to keep them appealing and inviting, and staying with a customer until their issue was resolved, regardless of which department was responsible.

The turnaround included a new willingness to forgo an immediate sale if long-term customer satisfaction might suffer and conveying a communal spirit of "we" that included the customer. Our field consultants also found that when senior leadership spent time in the trenches with customer-facing employees, the act generated powerful empathy — with greater communication and process improvements as an added "hard-business-results" bonus.

As Carl Sewell realized early on, the customer may be king but it’s the employees who open the doors for them again and again: “We realize we only have one way to differentiate ourselves,” he said, “and that’s through our people.”

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