6 Reasons Your Customer Experience Plummets When Your Business Skyrockets – and How to Avoid or Fix It
Nothing Ruins a Company’s Customer Experience Faster Than Rapid Growth
Explosive growth! It is the one thing every CEO and Entrepreneur wants, works for, dreams about. However, if your company isn’t ready, it can be the worst thing for your organization. Remember the adage, “Be careful what you wish for.” It has put many successful companies out of business. Rarely does a company go through rapid growth without having their customer and employee experience suffer significantly.
I have personally gone through growing pains in all my businesses. Back when we started our business, we were obsessed with who we hired, if they matched our values, if they had the service DNA. We would interview 15-20 people for every one person we hired. We held every employee to the highest standard of the customer experience they delivered. Fast forward a few years later when our business was exploding. We needed a lot of employees quickly to help handle the demand and we started compromising on who we were hiring, not to mention, making excuses for why we were keeping poor performing employees. All this led to a rapid decay of our internal culture and a decline in our customer experience. I found out anytime you compromise your culture for sales, you end up losing more sales in the long-term as a result.
Back in 2007 Starbucks learned this lesson the hard way and was forced to reinvent itself. “We were growing the company with such speed and aggression that we lost sight of the customer experience,” said then Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz. Schultz sent the infamous and brutally honest memo to his executive team, titled The Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience. The following are some of my favorite excerpts.
“Over the past ten years, in order to achieve the growth, development, and scale necessary to go from less than 1,000 stores to 13,000 stores and beyond, we have had to make a series of decisions that, in retrospect, have led to the watering down of the Starbucks experience, and what some might call the commoditization of our brand.”
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Episode 78 of the CSRevolution Podcast – Making Big Happen
Chief Revolution Officer John DiJulius of The DiJulius Group talks with Mark Moses and Don Schiavone about how their brand-new book Making Big Happen: Applying the “Make Big Happen” System to Grow Big, which came out in January of 2022, has already reached the #1 bestselling business book in the US and #5 on the Wall Street Journal list.
Quote of the Week
“The enemy of great customer experience is variability”
–Kevin Sloan, EVP KeyBank
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