Employees shouldn’t be expected to deliver first-rate service if management can’t first define it.
—Horst Schulze
CEO of Capella Hotels and Founder of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company
A cattle rancher will tell you that moving a large herd requires bifocal vision: Without close attention to the herd, a feisty steer can double back or break away, making the rancher waste important time retrieving the malcontent. But if you don’t also keep an eye on the distant gate—your ultimate destination—you may never funnel the herd through it.
When it comes to Knock Your Socks Off Service, focusing on the ultimate as well as the immediate is equally critical. “Bifocal” service vision comes from a clear focus on purpose: Defining in detail and in writing—and then repeating constantly and consistently—what your organization means when it says “Quality customer service is our goal.” Your focus on purpose—your service strategy and vision—is your tool for aligning the day-to-day actions of your employees with the distant gate of Knock Your Socks Off Service.
All organizations have various strategies for ensuring success in the marketplace. A price strategy is laced with competitive analyses; a product strategy contains lessons learned from prototypes and test markets. A service strategy is the deliberate determination of the role that service will play in delivering value to customers. In a service-driven culture, it is typically the preeminent strategy since it contains the principles linked to growth. In other words, a great product, powerful brand, or competitive price may be the primary source of customer attraction, but the service experience is the chief reason for retention and loyalty.
Crafting a service strategy begins with the definition of the level of service an organization is committed to consistently providing to customers. Service at a Ritz-Carlton Hotel is different than service at a Hampton Inn, even though both might be great for the market or target guest served and the price point required. Once the level of service has been defined, the next step is to craft the organization’s service vision. A service vision is a guide that succinctly communicates the organization’s unique, distinctive service experience in the market it serves. Unlike a mission or purpose that states “who and what we are,” a service vision focuses on the customer side of the business with a goal of communicating a clear vision of “what we strive to be famous for in the eyes of our customers.” It is a tool for driving customer value into the heart of the organization.
Being excellent at customer service is not about what organizations claim; it is about how their customers consistently experience the organization. When consulting firm Bain and Company asked the senior leaders of a large number of major companies if they believed their company delivered a superior proposition to their customers, 80 percent indicated that they did. However, only 8 percent of their customers agreed with them.20
Let’s pretend you want to open a competitive shoe store. You pick the perfect location and a clever name for your company. But, one of the first key decisions you must make is the breadth and diversity of your product offering. Are you going to carry both sports and dress shoes? High-end or budget-pleasing shoes, or both? Shoes for a certain market but not others? Shoes produced by one, several, or many shoe makers? Will you specialize in hard-to-find shoes or hard-to-fit customers? All of these product strategy decisions will impact your success with the market you hope to serve.
Service is less about product and more about experience. Instead of being an “object seller,” you become a “memory maker.” And, the choice of the strategy you select will impact just how big a positive memory you create. Consider this: You might not remember your last trip to the grocery store, post office, or retail website, but with the right intensity of focus zeroed in on the experience you create, you can turn a hohum, same-old-same-old incident into a delightful, memory-making encounter.
Just as customer loyalty is a much higher level of affinity than simply customer satisfaction (think Nordstrom versus Sears) and customer devotion is even a higher level above customer loyalty (think Lexus versus Jaguar), we consider customer centric to be the pinnacle of dedication to the customer by an organization. It reflects the intensity and pervasiveness of an organization’s focus on the customer. The less the customer’s experience dominates how an organization is led and managed, the lower the customer’s evaluation. One way to think about the intensity and pervasiveness of focus is by using the labels that follow. The organization that lives, eats, and sleeps a great customer experience is likely to have a very different positive memory-making success than an organization that views the customer more as a necessary interruption to their preferred focus.
Let’s examine each of the five customer strategies in more detail. Keep in mind that having a poor customer reputation is likely to be the result of a series of decisions even if it is a decision to be negligent or inattentive.
Customer indifference is a dangerous characterization by customers. Indifference is not viewed as uncaring; it is seen as arrogant—one of the traits most loathed by customers. Organizations that are hostile to customers do not remain in business. There might be a few examples of highly inwardly focused organizations that can be antagonistic toward customers and hang on for a long time. Some public institutions might be painted with such a “customer hostile” brush. Most do not regularly mistreat customers as much as they remain uninterested in the customer’s needs or issues. Customers avoid such organizations if at all possible and repeatedly speak ill of them to others.
Customer aware cultures are those that are aware of the customer since they are reminded of their presence via frequent complaints. However, their overall attitude is one of accommodation rather than support. This can be found in highly regulated industries that are preoccupied with the regulation to the exclusion of the customer’s experience. Think of many discount retail stores, fast-food restaurants, and some modes of public transportation. Policies and practices are crafted for organizational convenience even if they leave customers confused and/or frustrated. These organizations typically survive if they lack competition or if they have a product, price, or convenience that customers desire and simply put up with the poor service in order to get it. Their customers are often consistently disappointed with their experience.
Customer friendly is a label reserved for organizations that give enough lip service to customer service that it shows up in pockets of service delivery, but not consistently. A typical bank might be one example, with a friendly branch in one location and another branch simply going through the motions. It might be found in a moderately priced retail store where sales clerks are polite and respectful, but far from assertive. They often complain to customers about their own company’s rules or procedures. The stance yields customers who are generally satisfied. Satisfied customers only remain as long as a better option is unavailable; they essentially take the organization for granted! Customer-friendly organizations can survive if they can keep the price-service-product (or outcome) in proper balance. However, such organizations are vulnerable to the appearance of a competitor offering a better product or outcome, cheaper price, or better service.
Customer-focused cultures are found in organizations that get consistently good marks from their customers. They not only do the basics exceedingly well, but they also periodically take actions that yield a great story customers enjoy repeating. They place extensive effort on ensuring that offerings are based on up-to-date customer intelligence and feedback. They ensure employees are resourced, supported, empowered, and motivated. They ensure service is comfortable and convenient. Leaders spend time in the field; customer experience metrics are valued; and customer-facing units are well trained in customer-handling manners. Their efforts produce customers who are dependably loyal.
Customer-centric cultures are rare. A positive customer experience is almost guaranteed. Leaders’ obsession with superior service dominates their agendas, priorities, and accolades. Employees seem to have unlimited authority to take care of customers and exercise obvious initiative to ensure customers get a consistently great experience. Enormous effort is placed on training and continuous improvement. These organizations hire the best, expect the best performance, treat their employees as the best, and hold leaders accountable for achieving the best. Their over-the-top service creates a strong, almost cult-like following among customers. Their customers enthusiastically speak of them in terms that reflect devotion, even love.
Obviously, customers enjoy the service performance that typically comes from a customer-centric organization. However, as any responsible chief financial officer (CFO) can tell you, there are more components to success than the customer’s evaluation on the quality of the service they receive. L.L. Bean and Starbucks depend on a good product to go with the customer’s experience. Lexus and Trader Joe’s count on having showrooms and grocery stores in the right location to reach their target customer. USAA Insurance and Amazon.com depend on great information systems to support their super-friendly customer contact people. Great customer service can only go so far in covering mediocrity in other aspects of the value proposition.
There is also the issue of the economics of operation. If a budget hotel decided to start delivering customer-centric service like that found in a luxury hotel, it not only might irresponsibly exceed their customers’ requirements, it might also bankrupt the hotel. We expect to get great service when we pay extremely high prices. This is not to say that great service is reliant on high prices, as both Zappos.com and Lands’ End have proven. It is simply that if a high price is paid by the customer, the customer’s expectations elevate with the investment he or she makes. There is also the issue of the role that great customer service plays in gaining competitive advantage. When Lexus tries to one up Infiniti, it is more likely customer service that tips the scale for consumers. Wise organizations must examine an array of components that make up their unique offering juxtapositioned against other operating factors (opportunities, threats, costs, etc.) and then decide the proper level of service to pursue.
Your organization probably has a mission statement. That’s great. But to keep your unit focus sharp, you need your own well-defined, carefully worded service vision statement. Your statement may be unique to your unit or a variation on the organization’s central strategy. It should contain a profile of your core customer base, describe what you do that is of value to them, and explain how you—and they—will know it when your goal of customer delight is achieved. It should also clarify the aspects of your service approach that separate you from competitors in customers’ eyes.
Customers relish consistency. Texas A&M researcher Leonard Berry and colleagues found that the number one attribute customers value in the service they receive is reliability—your ability to provide what was promised, dependably and accurately. Customers want the service from branch A to be as good as branch B; they don’t like having to choose a specific location—or a specific teller, floor salesperson, or waiter—because opting for others represents a roll of the dice. We want them all to be effective. How do you get everyone in the organization “rowing together as one” to deliver a consistently high level of service? It starts with a compelling and actionable service vision.
Defining what you are trying to ultimately accomplish with and for customers helps your people understand the rhyme and reason of the work they do. Your service vision statement should be so well defined that your people always know which side to come down on when they face decisions about how to provide truly superior service. It’s not magic. It’s simply the power of purpose.
Your service vision statement, when done well, will:
• Ensure that everyone in your unit is working with the same idea of “what’s important around here.”
• Act as the “lens” through which front liners view every decision they make or action they take that impacts customers.
• Help individual employees understand the rationale behind organizational policy so they have confidence in resolving unique and unusual situations.
• Serve as the foundation for service standards, norms, metrics, and aligned processes.
• Describe what makes your approach to service distinct in the marketplace.
• Provide a tool for aligning strategy and effort so customers enjoy consistency and reliability in service quality.
Here’s what our research has found about the “power of purpose” in creating Knock Your Socks Off Service:
• If you do not have a definition of what good service means, your chances of getting high marks from your customers are about three in ten.
• If you have a very general definition, your chances of getting high marks from your customers improve to about 50/50.
• If you have a detailed definition of what good service means—if it is defined in the context of both the company and the customer, if it is well communicated to employees, and if it is tied to specific standards and measures—your chances of getting high marks from your customers are close to 90 percent.
A service vision statement isn’t something simply to hang on the wall or pass out on laminated wallet cards. Once it exists, there are a multitude of ways to give it life and power.
• Test decisions against your service vision. Enlist one, two, perhaps even all of your employees to give you feedback on the consistency between your actions and the vision statement. And thank them for their help!
• Ask front liners to use it to evaluate your unit’s policies, procedures, and general “ways of doing things.” Are they consistent with the vision? Do they really help get things done for the customers? If not, where do they interfere with giving good service? And how can they be changed?
• Hold “what’s stupid around here?” meetings. Use the vision statement to help identify outmoded practices, timewasters, repeated trouble spots, and customer-vexing aspects of your business that make you look dumb to your customers—and each other.
• Set “stop, start, and measure” objectives. Perhaps once a quarter, ask every employee to come with a list of items under three headings:
1. Things we should stop doing around here
2. Things we should start doing around here
3. Things we don’t track or measure—but should
• Hold a “focus fantasy” meeting with your employees. Ask your people to discuss who they would like to be like: If they could model the business in general and their behaviors in particular after a famous or respected organization, who would it be and why? Universal Orlando? Virgin Airlines? The Container Store? In-N-Out Burger? Cadillac? Their neighborhood grocer or hardware store? Or discuss what you would have to do differently to make the cover of the leading trade journal in your industry. Then act on what you hear.
The power of purpose is the power of knowing what to do, and when and how to do it, without having to be told. It helps your people take control of their work and frees them from the adolescent dependence on “management” that characterizes too many businesses today. It allows you to stop acting like a parent and start working with your people as adults.
If you use your service vision as a lens through which to look from the inside out, you should see the things that customers value and can set your organization apart. If you use it as a lens to look from the outside in, you should get a consistent service focus that helps your people to work in “sync,” with their actions in alignment with strategic goals.
If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.
—David Campbell
Industrial Psychologist