What’s Holding Companies Back?

Most companies and customer experience consultants believe that the formula for creating a customer centric culture is as follows:
*    Hire the right people
*    Train soft skills
*    Teach managers how to coach the skills
*    Accountability
*    Measure it

All of the points in the formula are valuable and critical to the success of creating a customer experience culture.

• Hire the right people – You don’t want the best people; you want the  RIGHT people. Team members with the customer experience DNA, people that want a career with a sense of purpose, not just a job, people that fit your culture just right.
• Train soft skills – We need to equip our teams to deliver a memorable experience. Here at The DiJulius Group, we teach that it is not the employee’s job to know how to deliver a word class customer experience but it is our job to teach them. We have a fabulous tool to discover what an employee’s Service Aptitude is and we have the soft skill training to address any deficiencies.
• Teach managers how to coach the skills – In the book If Disney Ran Your Hospital, Fred Lee states “people don’t do what organizations expect, they do what their managers pay attention to.” That is one of my favorite quotes because there is so much truth in it. It is the attention and coaching of the direct supervisor that will result in behavioral change.
• Accountability – The Workplace Accountability Study reveals that 82% of respondents have no ability to hold others accountable, but 91% of people rank accountability as one of the top development needs they’d like to see in their organization. Accountability inspires trust. Trust is essential in building and maintaining a strong team.
• Measure it – We all have heard “what gets measured gets managed.” Of course, we need to make sure we are focusing on what really matters to the customer. The only way to do that is to measure it and respond accordingly.

Early in my years as a Customer Experience Consultant, I believed the same thing. I spent my first couple of years fine tuning the formula and getting buy in. I worked hard to get the return on investment for the training and although they yielded results, they were not sustainable. I had to find out why.

What was missing?

I surveyed over 400 participants from seminars I’ve taught in different industries about what was keeping them from significant long-term change. Upon reading the results, it became very clear what the missing link was. 73% of respondents stated there were process hurdles that were leading to service defects. The participants in the survey communicated that they loved the seminars, learned communications skills, developed a sense of purpose in what they did, and bought into changing the way they thought about serving their customer. The problem was they went back to their respective jobs where they spent a good portion of their time in inefficient systems allowing them no margin to implement what they had just enthusiastically bought into.

It is a complete waste of time, if we do not address processes that lead to service defects

“A bad system will beat a good person every time,” W. Edwards Deming. As pointed out in the April 2016 issue of Harvard Business Review’s article, Culture is not the Culprit, “Culture isn’t something you fix. Rather cultural change is what you get after you’ve put new processes or structures in place to tackle tough business challenges like reworking an outdated strategy or business model. The culture evolves as you do that important work.”

You might be thinking, “But wait, I lead customer experience, not operations. Shouldn’t that be left to the person heading up operations in a company?” NO! It was exactly what I should have been diving into earlier in my consulting career.  Helping my clients identify and solve deficiencies was critical to the success of the program. So, I started reading and researching the best ways to do this. It was at that time four years ago that I signed myself up for the Customer eXperience Executive Academy to learn from The DiJulius Group how they helped companies create a Customer Service Revolution. I’ll never forget the day that John DiJulius and his team introduced me to the Customer Experience Cycle (CEC).  The CEC is all the stages of interaction your customers have with your company. The goal is to identify and solve the following:

• Service Defects – What service defects can and do happen at each stage
• Operational Standards – What operational processes & tasks need to get done to complete the sale or service
• Experiential Standards – What are the things we can do and say to create a memorable experience for our customers
• Above and Beyond Opportunities – How can we WOW the customer when the opportunity presents itself

BINGO! It was EXACTLY what I was looking for. Have you ever learned something that you knew was going to create dramatic change? This was one of those times for me. I couldn’t wait to implement the CEC with my consulting clients because I knew without a doubt that this was exactly what was needed to produce an increase in revenue and have it be sustainable.

The next 4 years leading to now have been an amazing journey. I have seen businesses grow exponentially in team and customer retention. I’ve had the honor of being a part of incredible growth in businesses by focusing on the right thing, the customer and the stages of their journey. Through using the CEC with every client, team members are re-ignited for their purpose. Through collaboration during the workshop, they finally felt that their opinions and ideas mattered. I’ve seen countless of processes be solved immediately, allowing margin to focus on the customer experience. It was the ONE thing that changed everything.

I am honored to now be a part of the DiJulius Group, the team that changed the course of my career by training me in their methodologies; methodologies that work. I continue to live my dream of inspiring and equipping businesses to impact customers lives. Only now I get to do it with the group that set me on fire with the teaching from the Customer eXperience Executive Academy. If I have the honor of working with you and your team, expect that I will be relentless in perfecting the Customer Experience Cycle for your organization.

Remove The Word ‘Policy’ From Your Employees’ Vocabulary

Watch this one-minute video of why your employees should never use the  word ‘Policy’ with any customer.