“Business starts and stops with one thing – the Customer!”
There aren’t many in the business world who would disagree with that. Or with the follow up words of the recent newsletter that said that this means:
• You need to be better at listening to customers.
• You need to be better at understanding their wants and needs.
• You need to be better at aligning your offering and value proposition.
• You need to be better at building rapport.
• You need to be better at keeping your promises.
• You need to be better at making them feel special.
• You need to be better at anticipating their future needs and market trends.
One word, however, stands out in all this – YOU.
This reminded me of an amusing anecdote. My nephew was asked by his grandmother, “How do you like your new car?” With a two year old’s gravity, he replied, “No Granny, I don’t have a new car. Only Daddy does!”
As my nephew still had to learn, one of the quirks of English is that the same word denotes both singular and plural, something even adults sometimes fail to appreciate, particularly when referring to organisations which, although a collection of people, actually have their own legal identity. Thus it is worth asking here, who is the ‘you’ being referred to?
Of course it is a generic you, used to denote whichever organisation the manager audience happens to belong to. But it is much broader than that. It could be personal, underscoring the basic lesson that anyone can improve their situation, by “being better.” One could add any one of a thousand statements and it would still be applicable to someone. However, there is an important corporate lesson here too, because neither the persona of the organisation nor the individual manager-reader is capable of single-handedly meeting any of these requirements. Thus in practice the ‘you’ actually refers to every single person in the organisation.
Your customers’ experience depends on the way people interact in any given situation. It may thus well be different in every single instance. So if you want to ensure a consistently good customer experience, where the odds are stacked in your favour to the extent that you can count on your customer service being better most times, then you have to ensure that you have responsive people who are talented, trained and motivated to deliver consistently.
Being better is therefore a people thing. It relies on having people who are happy, fulfilled and motivated; who consider their business colleagues as team-mates and who are thus sufficiently aligned and aware to make a difference.
Is this the case in your organisation? If not, now, with all the talk of possible recession, is precisely the time to redress this!