What should businesses do when one hundred percent of their customers expect a consistently great experience, but only thirty percent of their employees are customer-centric? Get busy reversing the statistical split between those employees who are happy to serve customers and those who are not.
While many businesses may not know the exact number of their employees who are apathetic about service delivery, the percentage spread may hover between thirty and fifty percent, given the abundance of service and customer experience failures that occur daily.
Thirty percent is high and I daresay, unacceptable, for any business that functions in a competitive sector. It means that a minority of employees are keeping customers happy, whilst the business is paying seventy percent to drag their feet, every day. When one adds the resultant revenue loss and opportunity cost to this statistical picture, executives should be experiencing many sober moments.
Unfortunately, some businesses in this position, choose to do nothing, whilst others believe that exposing the entire employee community to customer service improvement training will fix the imbalance.
One of the first acts of service interrogation to be undertaken by a business, is to know its employee value contribution ratio and to ensure that management is seen to be taking responsible action to address the imbalance.
The real hero businesses however, recognize that the most viable solution may be a combination of resetting their business models, overhauling their current talent stock and re-engineering their service delivery and customer experience infrastructure.
While these hero businesses understand the Pareto Principle all too well; namely, that often, twenty percent of the inputs, (the minority), delivers eighty percent (the majority), of the output, they are adamant about not allowing this principle to take root and forfeit revenue.
Let’s take a quick look at how revenue is forfeited, all other factors being equal, (as the economists would say), when businesses do nothing about the thirty, versus seventy, split, in employee value contribution.
When businesses do nothing, revenue forfeiture becomes normalized, alongside what I would call, a disturbing level of apathy, towards embracing customer centricity as a revenue driver. When only thirty percent of the employee population is carrying the weight of revenue generation, discontent with seeing their less customer-oriented colleagues being allowed to maintain lower levels of productivity, without being sanctioned, will turn into animosity. Eventually, animosity, when left un-remediated, will turn into toxicity and ruin business culture.
Reversing the split requires a comprehensive strategy, powered by corporate courage to act decisively with those employees who are deemed incompatible with a business intention to be world class in customer experience.
The takeaway here is that one of the first acts of service interrogation to be undertaken by a business, is to know its employee value contribution ratio and to ensure that management is seen to be taking responsible action to address the imbalance.
Can you imagine if the split were reversed, with seventy percent of the employee population being customer centric? Just think of the explosive revenue gains.
Reversing the split requires a comprehensive strategy, powered by corporate courage to act decisively with those employees who are deemed incompatible with a business intention to be world class in customer experience.
Armed with a fairly accurate understanding of its customer-centric employee statistic, a business can move on to creating and enforcing the parameters that support performance accountability, especially in the area of customer experience management. This means getting serious about sustaining talent bench strength, as well as employee compliance with standards of care.
Customer-centric businesses are made, not born. So too, are customer-centric employees.
An employee competency profile establishes the attitude, skills, qualifications and value-adding markers that a business determines as its minimum fitness thresholds for hiring and retaining employees. Every business should have this profile in its human resource arsenal. Performance accountability is the utilization of the performance management (oversight) systems to extract performance excellence. Standards of care, when enforced effectively, ensure that the customer experience is consistent and across all engagement channels.
Customer-centric businesses are made, not born. So too, are customer-centric employees. Having a comprehensive customer experience infrastructure that aligns the business to the customer’s perspective, brings the curtain down on customer success, which is the ability of the business to keep its customers happy, even as their value expectations shift and accelerate to unprecedented levels.
Now, a word on corporate courage. It takes a fair amount of steely decision-making to sustain a customer-centric business that is populated with customer-loving employees. One non-negotiable feature of courage, is the ability to do what is necessary to maintain firstly, excellence as a core business value and secondly, to maintain an unswerving pilgrimage to the goal of becoming a brand that wins with its customers, every time.
One non-negotiable feature of courage, is the ability to do what is necessary to maintain firstly, excellence as a core business value and secondly, to maintain an unswerving pilgrimage to the goal of becoming a brand that wins with its customers, every time.
Getting to the future state of customer-centricity means getting out of the current state of a thirty, versus seventy percent split and becoming an above eighty percent business.
I like to espouse that businesses should stop saying that they want to be customer-centric, if they are unwilling to do what is necessary to achieve this status. No business gets to the finish line with one stroke.