Business Intelligence

It’s Never Too Late to Build a Customer-Focused Company 

by Ken Blanchard (11300)

Set your sights on the right target

If you set a goal of making more money, your customers and your people become a means to an end at best. A better idea is to set a triple bottom line target-view profits as the applause your organization gets for taking good care of your customers and for creating a highly motivating environment for your people. You don’t have to choose between people and results, but organize yourself to achieve both. Your ultimate aim should be to become:

1. The provider of choice - because you have created raving fans for what you offer.
2. The employer of choice-because you people are free to become customer maniacs.
3. The investment of choice-because your profits are both strong and sustainable.

Great organizations are not one dimensional. Instead, everyone’s energy gets focused on a “Triple Bottom Line”.

1. To become the provider of choice within your industry, you have to take care of customers better than your competitors do. This means converting ordinary customers into “raving fans” for your product or service - customers who are so enthusiastic about the way they were treated they want to tell everyone else. When you exceed the customer’s expectations, the chances increase that you can and will create a raving fan.
2. These days there is much more competition for top talent. To become the employer of choice is smart. Employees are far more likely to stay where they feel empowered and motivated. It makes good sense to do everything you can to retain your best people who can and will provide top service to customers.
3. To reduce costs and increase profits, the best idea is to treat your people like business partners rather than hired hands. Business partners can read your profit-and-loss statements and know precisely how your organization makes money. They’re prepared to roll up their sleeves and help out because they have enough information to make meaningful decisions. By keeping your people well-informed and letting them use their brains, you’ll probably be pleasantly surprised by the ideas they come up with on how best to manage your costs. With any luck, these well-informed people will also evolve into customer maniacs who will go out of their way to turn your employees into raving fans. Customers who love what you do, combined with knowledgeable employees who comprehend the full impact of their actions is a great combination. When you have these factors going for you, investors will stand up and take notice.

To achieve the Triple Bottom Line, everyone in your enterprise will need a clear picture of the direction they should be heading. In other words, everyone will need to have a compelling vision of the future.

A compelling vision of the future will have three essential elements.
1. Your purpose should describe to people both inside and outside your organization who you are and what business you’re in. For example, Walt Disney described himself as being in the happiness business when he started his theme parks.
2. An effective vision of the future will detail what the future will look like when everything is up and running as planned. Walk Disney wanted people to leave his theme parks smiling and happy.
3. Values drive your people’s behavior as they work to bring about your vision of the future. They describe how you want people inside your organization to act. In this area, less is more-three or four values is far more effective than expecting people to remember ten to twelve different values. You also have to rank your values in order of priority so if there is a conflict, people know how they are expected to act. For example, Disneyland’s values are: (1) Safety; (2) Courtesy; (3) The show and (4) Efficiency.

A compelling vision will provide long-term direction to an organization. Once the vision is set, goals can be established to tell everyone what they need to be focusing on at present. Good performance always requires clear goals, but these goals need to be made within the context of the vision rather than as discrete and disconnected entities. This vision and clear goals need to come from the organization’s leadership. Everyone else is then expected to be responsive tot his vision.

2. Treat your customers the right way

Instead of viewing customers as an unwanted distraction, all your organization’s energy needs to be focused on creating a Customer Mania culture. Don’t’ try to and create satisfied customers. Instead, your aim should be to turn customers into raving fans. Put together a heritage library of stories of people who went the extra mile to create customers who want to brag about what you do to others. Never forget the customer writes everyone’s paycheck, and is the reason for your existence. Treat them accordingly.

To turn your customers into raving fans, you can’t just announce that’s what you want to do. Rather, you have to plan specific ways to make it happen. You have to prepare everything that’s required for the customer to have a great experience when they do business with you.

The key to turning customers into raving fans is to focus on the “moments of truth” when customers come into contact with your business or your people. This concept was first suggested by Jan Carlzon when he was president of the Scandinavian Airlines System:

“A moment of truth is anytime a customer comes in contact with anyone in our organization in a way that they can get an impression. How do we answer the phone? How do we check people in? How do we greet them on our planes? How do we interact with them during flight? How do we handle baggage claim? What happens when a problem occurs?

Actively attempting to turn customers into raving fans is a three-step process:

1. Determine what exactly you want customers to feel and experience when they do business with you. Develop a vivid image of the kind of experience you hope customers will have. Go through and analyze all your moments of truth and decide in advance how you want each to play out. To do this effectively, you’ll need to walk in your customer’s shoes and see things from that perspective. For example, a service station owner in the 1970s realized customers don’t buy gas because they want to but because they have to. Therefore, he made it possible for the customer to get in and out as quickly as possible. He even set up teams of service station attendants to race out to the car and pump the gas, check the oil and clean the windshield as if it were a pit stop during the Indianapolis 500. Customers loved the service concept, and soon the business grew rapidly through word-of-mouth endorsements. Word of this got around and well-known television station sent a crew in to film what was going on, generating a huge amount of publicity.
2. Find out what would make the customer experience even better by asking them what they want. Customers don’t really know what’s possible, so you may have to ask them a leading question which cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no”. Be genuinely interested in the ideas customers come up with, even if those ideas turn out to be of little value on further reflection. Don’t be defensive. Listen to what they have to say. With luck, there may be a spark of a new idea somewhere in there that can be picked up on and utilized.
3. Live your customer service vision by putting your customer contact people at the top of your organization’s hierarchy, not at the bottom. This is the implementation phase where you equip your people with everything they need so they will deliver what you visualized. For this to happen, your customer contact people must have the power to respond to the customer’s requirements rather than being compelled to follow the organization’s rule, policies and procedures. In effect, doing this gives the frontline people permission to use their brains and become customer maniacs.

Creating raving fans of your customers doesn’t happen by accident. It is the result of deliberate actions on your organization’s part, combined with sufficient forethought and empowerment.

3. Treat your people the right way

Never talk about your people as being “hired hands”. Nor should you ever even contemplate getting rid of people during tough economic times. Rather you should acknowledge that without enthused and motivated people, you have nothing. It’s impossible to treat your people poorly and then expect them to create raving fans of your customers. Instead, you need to empower your people and encourage them to think and act like business owners. Never lose sight of the fact that when your people leave work at the end of each day, so does your entire business operation.

If you treat your own people like winners, they will treat your customers as if they’re the most important people in the world. That’s the key to creating raving fans who will want to do business with you again and again.

To turn your employees into customer maniacs, you have to organize and integrate the four key functions of human resource departments.

Customer Mania!