What is keeping you from growing your service culture?

Imagine you could develop a customer-focused culture so powerful that your employees always seem to do the right thing.

What's holding you back from doing that now?

Perhaps you don't know where to begin. That part's easy. You can discover a proven step-by-step process in The Service Culture Handbook.

Maybe you're stuck and need some advice. Okay, let's talk. I put my personal phone number and email address right there in the book's introduction.

Many people really do reach out to me. I get to hear what's working, and what isn't.

These conversations illuminate the obstacles executives face when trying to build and scale a customer-focused culture. Here's a summary of the challenges I hear about most often, along with some solutions.

Challenge: Inertia

Some leaders find it difficult to get started, even when the path forward is clear.

The CEO of a global nonprofit told me he wants to build a service culture, but he's struggled to commit to taking action. Over a couple of conversations, I've learned what he really wants is a better score on the annual employee engagement survey.

That survey won't happen for six months, so it's not yet urgent in the CEO's mind, even though the time to start the work is now.

The CEO of a mid-sized logistics company realized that service was the only competitive advantage in his commoditized industry. He wanted to implement the concepts from The Service Culture Handbook, but balked at doing the work.

He was hoping I would do it for him.

While I can guide some of the work, such as helping a company write its mission statement, shaping your unique culture is leadership exercise. It can't be farmed out to a consultant. The CEO paused the initiative when he realized he wasn't ready to commit.

Every leader is pressed for time. So how do you get started?

Solution: Overcome inertia by taking the first step. Start your service culture journey by crafting a customer experience vision. You can do it in two hours with this step-by-step guide or contact me and I'll walk you through it.

Challenge: Events

Some leaders are waiting for their big leadership event to kick off their service culture journey. Unfortunately, many of those events have been postponed or cancelled over the past two years.

A chief marketing officer for a global service company wanted to kick off a service culture initiative at her organization's annual leadership retreat. When that event was postponed, so was the service culture project.

A regional vice president for a construction company wanted to use an in-person meeting to kick off a service culture initiative for his region. That meeting has been postponed several times because his company isn't yet allowing large, in-person meetings. Meanwhile, no progress has been made on culture.

Solution: Don't wait for the annual leadership retreat. Many steps, like writing a customer experience vision statement, can be done virtually.?And when that big meeting finally does happen, you can use it to strengthen your initiative, rather than start it.

Challenge: Priorities

This is one of the more understandable obstacles. Culture-building is visionary work, but sometimes an organization has to put out a few fires first.

The CEO of a small nonprofit lost three key employees the month after they created a new, customer-focused mission statement. She had to quickly transition to focus on business continuity to cover for the employees who left and find their replacements.

Other executives talk a good culture game, but never make it a true business priority. One CEO is a regular on the business speaking circuit, sharing the latest management platitudes and pithy service advice. Meanwhile, he delegated culture building at his own company to a committee comprised of mid-level managers and promptly forgot about it.

Solution: It's hard to grow culture if you don't make it a priority. The trick is to recognize culture is not a side project, but rather a blueprint for how you should operate.

Conclusion

Scaling your culture is a daunting task. It takes true commitment, which is the reason why so few companies pull it off.

Not knowing how to start is one thing that shouldn't hold you back. I've got you covered with a proven and well-documented process.

Get a detailed action plan in The Service Culture Handbook. It's available on Amazon in paperback, ebook, and audio formats. LinkedIn Learning subscribers can access the video version.

You can also download my free toolkit. Or contact me and I'll be happy to walk you through each step.