Communicate service as a culture. I have 1,800 customers and 400 employees. Is it sitting down with certain customers? Sure. But it’s got to be more than me saying it. It’s got to be a culture.
You’ve got to have a consistent repeatable process, whether you’re delivering a new implementation to a customer, whether you’re building some special capability for them, whether you’re solving day-in- and day-out problems. You’ve got to have this culture of establishing those expectations and delivering upon them.
It isn’t just something I do; it’s got to be a culture of our business.
You also need to have a culture of being invested in your customer’s success and a willingness in leading from the front, a willingness to, when there’s a problem, drop everything and take care of it.
I think culture gets established over time. If the culture isn’t something you can grow upon and, as the CEO, you enter a situation and you need to instill that or change the culture as we’ve sort of done with some of our acquisitions, at that point, it’s about lead from the front.
There are probably two schools of thoughts (on communicating that culture). There is the personal leadership that flows down through the organization. If you can get your C-team and your executive management team to live that, as well, that moves down to the vice president and that moves down to the directors and that moves out into the field.
That’s the organizational behavior side of this.
There are lots of things that you can do and that we do to communicate that. You have to measure everything you do.
You can have this lead by example, this sense of urgency, but I think you have to measure and incentivize.
Let me give you an example. We have call centers for customer support. We measure the performance of those call centers not by how many calls they close or how many calls are open; we measure performance based on customer surveys.
We survey every customer twice a year with the same questions. How are we doing? Are you happy with the level of service, the knowledge of the person helping you, the responsiveness? There’s a 12-question survey that goes out.
We incent the support group in each one of our businesses based upon the results of that survey, so there’s a monetary incentive.
If that survey is greater than a certain threshold, then there’s a bonus payout. If it’s not by a hundredth of a point, then there isn’t.
You measure and incent people based upon the results of those objective measures.
That alone I don’t think will do it, but it is a way to really enforce that culture and put the focus where it is.
You build the culture, you lead by example, you propagate that through, you measure and incent.
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