Turn Your Company Into A Customer Driven And Employee Centered Business
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The biggest question I get is: How do transform an organization that is not customer driven and not employee centered into one that is? In this presentation we examine exactly what you must do to move in the right direction. Welcome to this important series on how to successfully transform an organization that is not customer driven and not employee centered.
A basic framework is to assess a typical organization with these problems, then consider where you want to go, figure out the gaps, prioritize the work, and then get the project under way so that you realize the benefits. There are four key components to this process. First, start at the top of an organization and examine the executive suite. Everything that executives do leads by behavior, and everyone else throughout the organization follows this behavior. The second key is to review the employee work processes. The third area is to observe employee behaviors; what key points do we observe and can we draw from them. And finally examine enema) customer interactions.
All four components we very important, because without an employee centered workforce, it's not possible to empower and engage customers who really want to stick around and be your customers for a very long time. Let's consider the first key area; assessing executives. Ifs very important to have executives on board in any organization, but if the executives we very comfortable with current operations and don't want to rock the boat, you will not get very far. So have someone in the executive suite committed to taking a serious look at how the business operates and how customers we treated. Ideally, this is a customer experience officer (CEO, if possible). as authority must flow from the CEO downwards.
The first item here is to consider the attitudes, beliefs, character traits, and habits of the executive suite as it relates to how they work with employees, and ultimately with customers. An easy acronym to remember is ABCH: Attitudes, Beliefs. Character traits. Habits.
What attitudes does the executive suite have in relation to employees? How do they regard employees? Are employees considered resources, interchangeable, and movable? Or are they considered as individuals, each having their various strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for growth and to contribute to the bigger picture in the organization? The executive suite must be aware of how it interacts with the team and with customers, its beliefs of how customers should be treated, and it must be able to lead by example. More important than attitudes, beliefs and character traits we the actions taken by the executive suite that speak so much louder than words.
Without understanding how top-line management really thinks about the organization, about empowerment and how to get the most from people, it's not possible to move forward; so a baseline assessment is essential. It's also important to capture 'the voice of the executive. a term I've borrowed from the voice of the customer analysis...
In this series, our focus is how to transform an organization that is not employee centered and not customer driven into one that is. I've explained the importance of doing a current assessment of the executive class and discussed employee work processes. Which is where the rubber hits the road, where employees engage with one another. If those processes are improperly put together, you will not have an employee centered culture. The third group is the employees themselves. This is all part of the current assessment before we then consider the customers.
Similar to taking a hard look at the executive class, you must take a hard look at the employees. Doing a turnaround means that in most cases there is an absence of a well-defined set of values, a set of culture do's and don'ts in place to ensure that employees who join the organization really fit and work together as a team to create a supportive environment where people look forward to being part of and participating in it. You must consider the attitudes, beliefs, character traits, and habits (ARCH) of your workforce relative to how they view themselves in relation to others in the organization, as well as how they view customers. Understanding these attitudes. Beliefs, character traits, and ultimately the actions they take and the habits they form is critical.
"You must take a hard look at the employees. Doing a turnaround means that in most cases there is an absence of a well-defined set of values, a set of culture do's and don'ts in place to ensure that employees who join the organization really fit and work together as a team."
Another critical step is to observe employees and understand what's going on inside their mind: for example, how an employee treats a customer. Without this process, it's hard to do the turnaround.
Let's say that you are in a B2C organization (business to consumer). You have a shop and sell high-end clothes. Let's also say that you have 25 stores across the country and want to do a turnaround, in terms of becoming a more customer driven, employee centered organization. One thing you can do is to examine how employees interact with customers: Do they greet customers? Do they gently probe to understand the needs of customers? Do they ask open-ended questions and fully engage with customers? Do they view the customer as the ultimate boss and one who must be treated like a VIP? Or do they sit at the counter and talk on the phone when a new customer comes in the door? Does the employee basically view the customer as someone they have to talk to, not someone they want to talk to? Are these values ingrained inside the employees?
It's important to understand how employees view themselves relative to other employees. Sometimes one employee has another employee who acts as their internal customer, as in a problem solving situation. If the intemal customer is not properly served, how will employees ultimately be able to serve and empower external customers? Consider how your employees view themselves as a total solution provider. Let's say that you are in a high-tech store selling software and hardware Computer equipment, and someone walks in your door. Do you view yourself as a salesperson, an employee who sells only the products that are in the store, or as someone who is empowered and interested in helping the end customer achieve their objective?
This presentation discusses how to optimize employee work processes within an organization, such that you develop an organization that is employee centered and customer driven. The first topic is hiring practices. How does your organization acquire talent? How do you determine that the requirements of the people you recruit fit with your organization's values and beliefs, and that the person who joins the organization will support a culture that you have architected and carefully put in place?
The ability to recruit capable team members is one of the most important skills any organization must have to attract talented people who add value in the marketplace. A successful practice is to hire for personality and innate skills and then train for job specific skills. During the interview process, look for assets you can't teach them, like being energetic, truthful, honest and organized, having integrity and an attitude of excitement to serve customers and fellow employees to get the job done. A candidate either has or doesn't have such qualities. Attributes were discussed in a previous presentation on attitudes, beliefs, character traits, and habits (ABCH). They are innate and you cannot train people for them.
"During the interview process, look for assets you can't teach them, like being energetic, truthful, honest and organized, having integrity and an attitude of excitement to serve customers and fellow employees to get the job done."
The second element in the interview process is to go through multiple rounds. Consider having multiple rounds with multiple goals for each round, with multiple people who interact and interview a candidate conducted in different places. For example, suppose you have a three- round structure and meet at a different place in each round to observe the candidate in different settings. The first place might be in the work environment, the second place in a restaurant, and the third place with other employees in a group panel environment. This allows you to observe as many data points as possible. A key point is for different people to interview the candidate in order to get a 360-degree perspective; someone senior to the candidate, someone who is a peer, and someone junior to the candidate.
The next aspect is to make sure that the job interview is behavioral based. Instead of focusing on things someone can regurgitate off of a resume, focus on watching how someone thinks. You're hiring someone's ability to think, to use their mind, to add value to your organization, to meet and exceed customer expectations. Put them in behavioral based situations and say, 'Imagine you're in situation X, how would you do this: how would you accomplish Y or use historical types of questions: Can you give me an example of when you were in this situation and how you handled it? The more you ask these types of questions, the more you make the candidate think and can observe how they think. Give them pen and paper or a whiteboard if you want them to write or produce a process. But get them to engage in the thinking process, which is actually more important than the final result they give you. Unfortunately, some organizations skip this step and remain at the superficial level.
So far in this series on doing an assessment to understand how to move from an organization that is not employee centered and customer driven into one that is, we have looked at the executive suite, work processes, and employees. Now we need some hard facts about the way in which your organization interacts with customers.
Let's follow the process that begins with acquisition and take a serious look at all of the friction points involved in acquiring a new customer. When a prospect makes any effort to connect with your brand in person, via email, through the telephone or social media, anything that detracts from a positive outcome will be a detractor and a source of pain for your customer. In some cases the pain is small, and in some cases the pain is big. Regardless Of the degree of pain, the prospect keeps track of all these moments of pain, kind of like a bank account. The pain is offset by moments that are fantastic and with an appreciation that you have architected to do a really great job at excelling beyond their expectations, and kind of in the middle when it's indifferent. So the first step is to think about how to acquire a customer and the touch points along the way to ensure that the experience is frictionless.
The keyword for this turnaround strategy is: frictionless.
Friction points can be both direct and indirect. An example of a direct friction point is if a person calls to talk to someone in your office and you tum off the phone system to go to voicemail at 4:45 p.m., while you are supposed to be open until 5 p.m. This creates a problem in the Customer's mind and he gets frustrated. He called you with a specific reason to call and now knows that you turn the phones off early. An indirect friction point might be parking in a garage that is not well lit and potentially unsafe. Which causes a negative experience for your customer or prospect.
Another aspect of acquisition is the percent of new customers from referrals, where you build real customer advocates who share your message, your brand promise with the marketplace, and how many new customers come to you as a result of other channels, like advertising. The more you get new customers from your existing customers or a positive brand image in the marketplace, with an expectation that you will go above and beyond, the better off you are. If the majority of your customers do not come from warm referrals, then you have to ask yourself why.
The next aspect is profitability. How profitable are you with your existing customers and where are those profits coming from? Consider again the touch points and the friction caused by the process of serving your Customers. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to want to do business with you, and be flexible in this. In this day and age of super competition around every corner, this is an area you should really take the heart. In order to acquire and retain customers easily, one of the things you can do is to architect fantastic moments at moments of judgment. A customer or a prospect is judging you all the time; looking at every aspect of how you do business; how clean your operation is, what kind of advertising you do; how you treat people; how you treat them; what your follow-up is: how much value you give. And they are making decisions positively or negatively, impressed or neutral. With that in mind, how can you be a little bit better than everyone else in your field?
This presentation is the last one in the series, and I hope you've gained tremendous value working through some of these ideas and how to apply them in your organization. This subject is very important and one of the core ideas within Customer Engagement Magazine and what we do, in terms of how we work with someone to transform their organization. Hopefully, you've taken lots of notes as you've done an assessment of your current operations. You've taken a look at your executive class, your suite. That's really the starting point.
Everything starts at the top and flows through an organization. You've taken a look at your work processes, your employees, and talked to a number of them. You've captured their key ideas and frustrations, their aspirations and goals for moving forward. You've considered some approaches to create a culture that is truly employee centered to help you become customer driven. We've also taken a look at your observations for how you interact with your existing customers. Wow! That's a lot of work, and I really congratulate you for getting this far into the process.
The first step after understanding where you are is to figure out where you want to go: What is your desired state? Throughout this series, clues, ideas and strategies have been presented to help you understand how to assess where you are, in terms of where you want to go. The next step is to take everything presented so far and draw a line down a page that lists the observations of what you're doing today, and then figure out where you want to go in the future across all of these key points. Once you know where you want to go, the next key aspect is to identify the gap between where you are and where you want to go: What is the biggest problem you face relative to the information you have?
The challenge might be at the executive level. You might be the owner of a business with a group of executives who are not truly on the same page as you. Or you might have a strong executive team that is on board with being employee centered and customer driven, but has challenges with the work processes and operationalizing some hiccups in the process and smoothing it all out.
Now we need to plot a road going forward and figure out how to implement ideas and strategies that can ultimately lead to tangible benefits. Remember, you must have the support of the executive team and be willing to make challenging decisions in order to be reborn as an organization and move forward.
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