Which Should Come First? The Employee or the Customer?
A few weeks ago I posted a guest video from my good friend Joe Calloway, so that I could introduce him to all of you that did not know about his fantastic work. He sent a great video on leadership and disruption. (Click here to watch that video). The video was so well received that I decided to reach out to several of my very favorite authors and ask them to contribute. Today I am extremely pleased to introduce you to Dr. Joseph Michelli, who I would consider the world’s leading expert on customer service/customer experience. Joseph has written several amazing books including “The Starbucks Experience” and “The New Gold Standard” (about the Ritz Carlton). His newest book is called “Driven to Delight” and it looks at how Mercedes Benz catapulted the company to first place rankings in national customer satisfaction studies while at the same time growing sales and profits. ALL of his book have valuable insights that can help any business improve their customer service, satisfaction and loyalty. In this blog Joseph answers a question I get a lot too; Is it customer first or employee first? I will give you my opinion at the end of the blog, but first, here is what Joseph has to say…
Which Should Come First? The Employee or the Customer?
from Joseph Michelli
Ok, I admit the issue of employee versus customer primacy falls into the category of unanswerable debates such as which came first the chicken or the egg. That said, many leaders continue to articulate a mantra that either the customer or the employee “comes first.”
While I personally like to side-step this looping debate by suggesting that “all business is personal,” and that personal connections must be formed with the people we call employees in order for those people to profit and serve other people we call customers or shareholders, I am convinced greater leaders have a penchant for forming meaningful personal connections at all levels of an organization.
The experiences on which I’ve come to concluded the importance of “interpersonal engagement” stems from my work with and the books I have written about companies like the Pike Place Fish Market, Zappos, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Starbucks, and UCLA Health Systems. Here are a few lessons and tools I’ve picked up along the way by watching the consistent care afforded by leaders in these organizations:
1) Employee Engagement Drives Customer Engagement.
While a causal relationship would be difficult to prove, strong correlations exist between employee engagement and customer engagement. As such, leaders in “world class” service organizations measure and actively seek to drive employee and customer connections. Ultimately these leaders seek to have employees who feel their opinions matter, are recognized for work that is well done, are provided opportunities to work and grow and to function in a community environment where employees experience autonomy, mastery, and purposefulness.
2) Customer Engagement Drives Loyalty and Advocacy.
Customer satisfaction does not ensure customer loyalty. In fact, satisfaction alone leaves your customers a coupon away from trying a competitor. As such, great leaders and business owners seek to instill a culture of service excellence through a clear delineation of the optimal customer experience (operationally and emotionally), and by constant discussions of core service values, as well as an emphasis on the overarching purpose of the business. These leaders collect stories of service excellence and link them back to the desired optimal customer experience and to their companies mission, vision, and values
3) Business must be transacted for high efficiency but filtered through the lens of humanity. In my book Leading the Starbucks Way, I share a conversation I had with the company’s CEO Howard Schultz in which he demonstrates this point best, “Take love, humanity, and humility and then place it against a performance driven organization; these are in conflict to the naked eye but …we have become more performance driven than at any other time in our history and the values of the company are at a high level. If we can infuse love, humanity, and humility on a global basis and build it into a performance-driven organization, we are unbeatable.”
So rather than trying to craft a catchy slogan like the customer is king or queen, or the employee is number one, how about redoubling efforts to drive the engagement of both customers and employees while fueling a high-performance organization in which leaders makes decisions through the lens of humanity? That seems like an unbeatable combination to me, how about to you?
From John: I agree with Joseph in large part, but I will sum-up my thoughts with one Awesomely Simple phrase…
The customer’s experience will never exceed the employee’s experience.
I hope you found this helpful, if so, please share it with your network. Thanks so much – John
…….
What is Your Philosophy of Business?
Here is a powerful idea that is fundamental to creating a culture of accountability…
**** The Australia events have passed ***
Several people have asked to see the pyramid I mentioned in the video — here are two of the slides I developed for this program – hope these help!
Irrationally Passionate
I was driving into the office this morning (Saturday – and you notice I didn’t call it work) listening to a podcast about how to increase sales. The person being interviewed said that the best way to grow your business was to focus on “irrationally passionate” customers. People, who are fanatical about the type of products or services you sell. Good examples would be Star Wars fans who will buy just about anything that has to do with Star Wars, or a sports fan who is crazy about their team, someone into golf, knitting, gardening, dogs, cats… a target customer who is so irrationally passionate that they become a raving fan for your business because you offer something that they “have to have.”
I love this idea. It makes perfect sense for how to identify your key target market. If you start your focus on this potential group of customers, you will also appeal greatly to the folks that are not quite as passionate but still very interested. It also makes it so much easier to sell when you are offering your products and services to people that are enthusiastic about buying them. I see a lot of businesses waste time and money trying to sell to people that either don’t want or can’t afford their product. Here is a quote I use a lot when I’m delivering sales training, “Don’t try to sell to broke people.”
However, I also saw another application for the idea of “irrationally passionate.” This is the exact same thing that YOU need to be about your business/career if you want to achieve a high level of success. It’s very hard to become superb at something you are not deeply excited about. If you want to be one of the best of the best you must be fully committed… irrationally passionate… and willingly do what unsuccessful people are unwilling to do. So here are a few questions for you.
Are YOU irrationally passionate about…
- Being better prepared than any of your competition?
- Being insanely customer focused?
- Delivering the highest quality products and services?
- Delivering world-class customer service?
- Operating with 100% honesty and integrity?
Is your company irrationally passionate about…
- Hiring only top talent?
- Building a winning culture of highly engaged employees?
- Being fair and generous with your customers and employees?
- Creating high levels of accountability across your entire organization?
- Fostering lots of open, honest and transparent communication within your company?
- Focusing intently on disciplined execution?
- Demanding excellence and refusing to tolerate mediocrity?
These are just a few questions; I could easily add another twenty. The point is, you will never become truly great at something if you are not irrationally passionate about achieving greatness in that area. I know that sounds simplistic, but it is the truth. Unfortunately, I see a lot of people today that think that they can attain great success without great effort. That has never happened and it never will. All success comes from work, usually very hard work, and excellence comes from being irrationally passionate about the pursuit of excellence.
What are you irrationally passionate about?
The Single Most Important Leadership Characteristic
For more than 20 years I have taught leadership at startup companies to the Fortune 50 and the single most important trait for highly effective leaders has always been the exact same thing. I can show you dozens of major research studies from around the world, representing millions of respondents, and they all say the exact same thing. When I teach classes on leadership and ask the attendees what they look for in a leader they would willingly follow, it’s always the exact same thing…
HONESTY
However, it is getting harder and harder for people to believe this. In nearly every arena; business, politics, religion, science, education…there are “leaders” who have no problem lying. I’m not talking about small mistruths, or perhaps twisting the facts a little bit, I’m talking about boldface, in-your-face, complete and utter lies. So-called “leaders” who can look you straight in the eye and tell you something that they know is absolutely false.
I am NOT taking any sides here. Every side of everything now has people who seem to have no regard for the truth and are willing to say anything, no matter how outlandish, to advance their position. When I open the floor for questions at my events, inevitably someone will ask, “If telling the truth is so important, then why do we have so many leaders who don’t?” My response: “I don’t know. It does not make any sense to me. I would not consider those people leaders; however, they are in leadership positions. I don’t understand how people like that rise to the top positions in organizations. It drives me crazy.”
The Death of Honesty?
I refuse to believe that we have come to a place in society where lying is an acceptable, even expected, behavior. I’m at the point where I question the validity everything I hear and read and that is painful and frustrating. It makes me physically tired to listen to the news and hear the constant stream of stories about “leaders” who have been lying, cheating, stealing, killing… and mostly getting away with it. I cannot fathom the damage this has done to our society and the example it is setting for our youth. It terrifies me to think about a generation of young people who have been raised watching authority figures lie, and then lie about their lies.
But I believe there is a solution and it starts with you and me.
Now more than ever I feel that it is essential to be a living example of honesty and integrity. It is only through modeling these behaviors, in even the most challenging situations, that we can demonstrate that character, authenticity and truth telling are truly the most essential characteristics of leadership. We need to make more of an effort to highlight and showcase successful leaders who build great companies on a foundation of honesty, fairness respect and generosity. We also need to call out “leaders” when they are dishonest, when they mislead us, and hold them accountable for their destructive actions and behaviors.
This will not be easy. There is a tsunami of misinformation, lies, fake news and manipulation coming from all directions. Again, I am not taking any sides here, I am simply saying that it is up to you and me to hold ourselves to the highest standard of honesty and integrity in our personal and business lives. I will end with one of my favorite value statements, from one of the greatest leadership institutions in the world, West Point.
“A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.”
Sounds like a good plan to me.
For more of John’s ideas on leadership here is a link to his book
Let’s Talk About Vision
In 23 years serving as a management advisor to companies of every size, all over the world, I have yet to encounter an organization that does not struggle with some form of “communication” challenges. Although this can impact companies from several different angles, there is one communication breakdown that has the most significant impact on the overall success of the business.
The lack of a sharply focused, easily understood and extremely well-communicated vision and strategy for growth.
In most businesses, the executive team and senior managers are constantly talking about the vision and strategy, it’s part of their meetings, it’s what they lay awake at night thinking about, but typically if you go just one or two layers down in the organization nobody has a clue about the actual meaning of the vision and how they are supposed to implement the strategy. Remember this: without a clearly communicated vision there is no way to achieve alignment across the organization, act strategically, empower fast decision-making or create a high level of accountability.
When people do not know where they’re going, it is impossible for them to get there successfully!
The key point here is, to effectively communicate the organization’s vision and strategy you must talk about them all the time, using multiple communications channels, at all levels of the organization, delivering a consistent and focused message. I once had the CEO of a company ask me, “When do you know that you have communicated the vision enough?” I replied, “When you get to point that if you have to explain it one more time… you’ll vomit… that’s when the lowest person in your organization just heard the vision for the very first time.”
The answer is simple: communicate, communicate, communicate… and then communicate some more.
This Determines the Future Success of Your Business…
As I look back across two decades of working with companies around the world, there are a few key ideas that I think are fundamental to business success, here is one of them:
The success of your business is directly tied to the quality of the people that you can get, grow and keep on your team – and the relationships they create with your customers.
I have yet to meet a single business leader that does not strongly agree with this idea, however I see a lot of businesses where they do not actually live this idea. Today I want to talk about the growth and development of top talent.
Once you get somebody on your team, there is absolutely no excuse for not investing time, energy and money in helping that person continuously improve.
Frankly, I believe this is the single most important investment you can make in your company, because without highly talented people who are steadily getting better and better, you have no chance of making your company better and better. I also write above that there is, “no excuse” because never in the history of humankind has there been more information available, much of it for free, to assist you in delivering world-class training to your people.
Here are just a few of the things that you should be doing:
- Formal mentoring program
- Creating a formal development plan for each employee
- Creating an internal training department
- Training classes taught by qualified outside instructors
- Cross training
- Benchmarking your training efforts against leading companies
- Buying a copy of a book for each of your employees
- Creating a lending library of top business books
- Creating a lending library of training CDs
- Getting your employees a membership to an audiobook service
- Getting your employees a membership to a book summary service
- Bringing in outside experts for a “lunch and learn”
- Taking your employees to visit other companies
- Sending out a newsletter with good information for your employees
- Sending out a list of top podcasts they should be listening to
- Sending out a list of YouTube videos they should watch
- Investing in online/virtual training for your employees
- Taking your employees to a major training seminar by an expert
- Taking your employees to an industry event
- Annual or semiannual company training conferences
These are just a few things that I came up with off the top of my head, I’m sure there are several more you could add to this list. But here is my point: if you are not doing all or most of this then you’re not truly serious about helping your people (and your company) to be as successful as possible. A good deal of what I have listed is absolutely free, much of it is very inexpensive, and only a few things require significant financial investment. But I can tell you this, not doing the things on this list is very, very expensive.
If you found value in this blog, I hope you will share it with your network.
*** I wanted to let you know about a very special event I will be participating in on March 12-14 at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in the incredibly beautiful town of Banff, Canada. It will be an exclusive retreat for leaders of fast growth businesses who are looking to engage with other leaders in pursuit of higher levels of performance. We have done this event twice in the past and it has been a resounding success. If you’re interested, here is a link to learn more about the program, we would love to have you join us!
The Foundation of Business Success
After more than two decades of working with organizations around the world, the single biggest issue I see in company after company is: Lack of Disciplined Execution.
I meet plenty of brilliant people, who have developed amazing products and services and have unique and compelling strategies for how to win in the marketplace. Yet time and again I see those strategies fail because they are not effectively executed. Below is a article that was created by an amazing company out of New Zealand called Advisory Works. They are among the world’s leading experts in helping companies execute their plans, which is why I am extremely proud to announce that we have formed a partnership so that the team at Advisory Works can assist my clients who are struggling to implement the plans that I help them create.
I believe you’ll find some very powerful ideas in this PDF, things that you can apply right away to help you be more successful in taking the exciting ideas in your company and turning them into action in the marketplace.
Please feel free to share this article with anyone you want to and if you think you might need a little bit of help, don’t hesitate to contact the folks at Advisory Works, you will be extremely impressed.
The Four Cornerstones of Strategic Execution 06
