It is most often the case. Front liners are sent to customer service training hoping that they’ll get better at serving customers. Most of what they learn is how to be nice because they can do very little about the snags that negatively affect customer experience. Application of learning is often short-lived too, because there are bigger hindrances that impact employees’ ability to serve which leads to less motivation to work hard for better customer experience. Improving customer experience through service culture building is one of the most important things that an organization must pay attention to if it is to win in this highly competitive world. I have a few suggestions on how to start.
Marvin Weisbord identified 6 factors that affect organizational culture and performance that I wish to use as an inspiration for driving home the point on service culture building. They are;
Purposes
Who are the customers that you serve? How do you wish to serve them? What is your philosophy on service? An important part of developing a service culture is identifying the values that guide the organization in serving its customers. This should be communicated all across the organization with matching real stories of how it has been done in the past and how the company intends to perpetuate it.
Structure:
How is the organization set up to achieve optimal customer experience? Is serving customers part of the key responsibilities of people in different positions and not just the front lines? A Customer-obsessed organization doesn’t have a customer service department that handles customer complaints, it has customer-focused departments that are obsessed about making customers happy.
Relationships:
The organizational dynamics have a significant effect on customer experience. As it takes an entire organization to serve the customers, it is important to ask how work is coordinated, conflicts managed, and overall communication handled so that the whole organization is optimally serving the customers? The organizational climate can easily wreck havoc on a well-designed customer service program when people are not motivated to work with each other. It is important for the organization to have a mechanism for equipping people for better communication.
Rewards:
What get rewarded gets repeated. How does your company recognize desired behaviors that support positive customer experience? How is the company’s performance management system helping identify customer-focused performance and reward them? Rewards and recognition plays a vital part in building a service culture. It is important for organizational leaders to identify service success indicators and and have a way of knowing when it occurs, and then consistently provide the necessary celebration of service success. If you wish to build a strong service culture, it is necessary to ensure that your performance management system is motivating your people to engage in building that culture.
Leadership:
This factor has the most weight among all factors because it has the capacity to make or break all the other factors. An important question is how customer-focused are your leaders? Second, how equipped are they to lead service culture building? Most often, company leaders excuse themselves from attending customer service training because of the assumption that they already know these things. The leaders’ lack of knowledge in service culture building is one of the biggest source of front line frustrations. If we are to start building a service culture, we need to prioritize building Service Leadership
Helpful Mechanisms:
There are several them; your company policies, performance management system, training and development, etc. The basic question is are they are really helpful? If not, how can you change them so that they are? This is an important element in service culture building. The company champion needs to look at how company policies, procedures, guidelines, and systems can be made customer-focused. It is also important to have a effective competency-development strategy for training everyone in the organization to fulfill their customer-focused responsibilities and make them accountable for applying the learning in the workplace.
ExeQserve helps companies navigate through the process of developing or enhancing their service culture. Let me know if you need help. Talk to us!
