Promote the value of service
In order to develop a strong service-oriented culture, you have to be honest with yourself and know what your strengths and weaknesses are as a company, and that requires speaking directly with your customers.
Asking customers if they are satisfied with your company’s performance is a great indicator of whether your culture is strong and if your message is getting across to employees.
“That will tell you whether you’re going to make money or not,” he says.
Linbeck gives customers two surveys. One rates the company on how satisfied a client is on the project and if their requests were exceeded. The other survey is an overall survey that covers whether a client is happy in general with the organization.
At the beginning of a relationship with a client, Linbeck has a session with the client to find out what that company wants out of the project. The client could come up with three goals or 10 goals, but the questions for a project-specific survey will be centered around if those goals were met and if the client felt the project was a success.
“It might be how we interact with their volunteers. If it’s on campus, how you interact with the sororities and fraternities,” he says. “You’d be surprised with some of the answers. You think they only care about budget or schedule or quality. It goes beyond that. Those are just expectations. They wouldn’t even call us unless they knew we could do that. They’re looking for something beyond that, if you ask them the right way. We will build a series of these things and then we will measure it against it. That’s what the survey will be: How are we satisfying your particular goals for the project?”
If Greco isn’t driving home that he wants a culture of integrity and trust, there’s a good chance those surveys come back negative.
“We’ve probably never made money if a client is not satisfied,” he says
While some companies will have no problem filling out the surveys, you may have to track some down in order to get the feedback you need.
“You either have to take them to lunch and hand them the pencil,” he says. “They get it all kinds of ways. They get it on the Internet, they get it hard copy, you go meet with them and hand it to them. Every client has a certain way to respond, and you have to kind of find that.”
You also need to constantly stress to employees that they are providing a service to the client.
“You just have to constantly put things in that perspective,” he says. “That, without your client, we don’t really have a professional service to give. Then they start to think more like, ‘Maybe I should ask the client more questions. Maybe I should understand their business because I might see something they don’t see.’”
That type of attitude will lead to happier customers.
“Because people who are smart buyers who want to be ahead of their competition know they have to get a high-performance team,” he says. “They know that will only come through trust. They have to be able to trust the people on the team that they are working for their best interest.”
