Creating a Customer-Driven Vision

Customers don't always stay loyal to a company, but what lies behind their decision to switch companies? Much research is done to answer this question, including companies surveying their customers directly, outsourcing the survey process to a third party, or participating in a general and anonymous industry-wide survey. What all the research boils down to is that customers leave companies because they received too little contact and individual attention, or the attention they did receive was poor in quality.

To combat customers leaving because of little or poor attention, organizations must create a customer-driven company. This is accomplished by creating a customer-keeping vision and then saturating the company with the "voice of the customer." Achieving customer-winning performance means walking the talk and leading by example at the highest management levels.

So what is a customer-keeping vision? It is a vivid picture of ambitions and a desirable future state that is connected to the customer and better than the current state in some important way. An ideal vision statement is clear, involving, memorable, aligned with company values, linked to customer needs, and seen as a stretch ?‚? or something difficult but not impossible. Your vision should serve two vital functions: as a source of inspiration and as a decision-making guide, aligning all of your organization's parts so they work together for a common goal.

A market-share-building company constantly challenges itself by understanding its customers' needs and expectations and calculating how well those needs and expectations are being met. But it goes even deeper. You have to determine how your competitors are meeting these needs and then create a plan that outlines how you can go beyond the minimum that will satisfy your customers to how to truly delight them. Study the winners in your industry and measure and benchmark their performance. Benchmarking the competition is a careful search for excellence, taking the absolute best as a standard and trying to surpass it.

Remember, quality of service is your ability to provide what was promised, dependably and accurately. It also is your ability to convey trust and confidence through the caring and attention you pay to customers and your willingness to help them and provide prompt service.

To deliver quality service, help your employees serve customers well and enjoy doing it. Engage every person's whole mind in improving your organization. It is important that you set an unwavering goal of putting customer satisfaction above all other objectives. You can reinforce this by telling everyone about this obsession, measuring customer satisfaction daily, posting the results, and rewarding employees when it is achieved.

Let employees know what to expect and what is expected. But keep in mind that your existing employees may not be the best fit for this role. With that in mind, be prepared to hire new people who will embrace your vision. In addition, you need to continuously train and educate employees. Then you can work on creating an environment that makes employees feel good, and one that supports the enthusiastic pursuit of customer satisfaction.

Finding and motivating excellent people is both possible and profitable. You can do this by developing a hiring profile and sticking to it when selecting employees. Show employees how you expect them to serve customers and that creating happy customers is at the heart of your organization. Employees knowing that they are expected to use their abilities to serve the customer makes them feel they are part of the action and encourages them to stay with your company.

Train and educate people well and continuously, because it creates an opportunity to communicate and reemphasize the vision, it provides the concrete skills employees need, and it opens the organization to continuous improvement. When you engage your employees' minds, you will discover hidden skills that make people promotable.

People want to serve customers well and have the ability to do so, but they need support from customer-driven leadership, an unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction, constant communication of that objective, careful measurement, intelligent hiring practices, continuous education, a well-managed environment, respect, and a chance to use their minds to improve the workplace.

Smash the barriers to customer-winning performance by eliminating the barriers that prevent your people from serving customers efficiently and predictably. When you are able to accomplish this, you get both customer satisfaction and lower costs.

To smash these barriers, ask employees to tell you about the barriers preventing your organization from serving your customers and ask for their ideas on how to remove these barriers. Also, analyze current processes. Then design an improved process and establish measurable and achievable objectives. Then manage performance.

The more complex an organization, the more the customer can become a vague, far-off entity, and the traditions of the people in the organization become the driving force in people's behavior. Create customer-friendly policies. The most fundamental element of your organization is its vision statement. It shows what your organization strives to be. For a customer-driven company, policies must be aligned with its vision.

Use measurement to deliver more of what the customer wants by knowing why you are measuring and letting customers tell you which end results to measure. But never rest. Always ask how well you are doing and track the internal procedures that are suppose to produce the results customers want. Then tell your people everything you learn.

All measurement is an opportunity to focus on and exceed customer needs. Customer-focused measurement inevitably sticks its nose into every part of the company. So let customers' desires establish standards. When you set standards, focus your organization's efforts on the most important issues your customers tell you. Make yourself a world leader on the five issues that matter most to your customer. Then choose the next five and the next five and so on.

Take customer-focused measurement of internal processes everywhere in your organization. Tell the whole company the news, whether wanted or not, to change behavior.

Seven leadership behaviors distinguish pivotal people in a successful customer-driven organization. In essence, they personally put the customer first; they promote their organization's vision; they become "students for life" by seeking new ways to learn; they believe in and invest in their people through training, preparing them to do more, helping them to use what they have learned to remake their jobs; they make teams work together to solve problems; they stay the course, realizing that customer-focused quality takes time and constant energy; and they live the organization's purpose by leading by example.

So how do you know if you are moving towards being a customer-driven organization? There are always telltale signs. You will see yourself moving from motivation through fear and loyalty to motivation through a shared vision. Your previous attitude that said "it's their problem" is now ownership of every problem that affects a customer. Instead of saying "we've always done it that way," you will always be looking for ways to continuously improve. Decisions that were once based on assumptions and judgment calls now become decisions based upon data and facts.

Everything that once began and ended with management will now begin and end with customers. Departmental decision-making using a department's own criteria now becomes cross-functional cooperation. Organizations that were good at crisis management and recovery will now find that they are doing it right the first time.

You will no longer be dependent on heroics. You will drive variability out of the process and what was once a choice between participative or scientific management now becomes participative and scientific management.

Operating as a customer-driven organization is generally more satisfying for everyone involved customers, employees and management. And the result is improved customer loyalty, an outcome that reaps rewards on many levels.