Stay plugged in
To build customer engagement into your work force, you must first set the example from the top of the company. Stemper has made it a priority to get out of his Philadelphia office and visit Comcast’s field employees in the markets with the most growth potential for the company’s business services division.
Stemper calls it “zero degrees of separation.”
“I spend a lot of time in the field offices, with front-line sales and customer care and technical folks,” he says. “They are the ones who are really out there with zero degrees of separation between them and the customers. And when we get customer complaints, if they find their way to me, I personally follow up with them. I don’t delegate them away.
“You really want to see and understand, touch and feel, what is happening out there, both in the good areas and the areas in which you can improve. You need to do that to understand firsthand what it is your customers need, what they’re happy and not happy about. That’s not something you want to leave to chance and levels of filtration. When a customer or a business prospect comes along, that’s not something you want to leave to chance.”
Staying accessible to customers is something you really have to live. Stemper says you have to believe, as a leader, that what customers have to say is important and can help you improve your business. You need to work each day toward building and maintaining the relationship between customers and all levels of your organization.
When Stemper isn’t traveling to a market, he’s frequently on the phone with Comcast’s representatives in the area, bouncing ideas off of them, getting feedback and taking the pulse of the market. It’s an ongoing process.
“You really have to be that way all the time,” he says. “This isn’t something where you can just read a book and decide to be this way. You really have to believe that this is critical to how you operate, the way you process and take in information. You have to want to get as much firsthand information as possible.
“When I call up someone in one of our markets and ask them what is going on, it drives the culture. It says that those of us in corporate management want to know what is going on. If that is a part of your culture, the people who interact with the customers are going to think very naturally about sending ideas up the chain, and people in leadership are going to think very naturally of reaching back to the people in the field.”
Enabling all levels of the organization to feed ideas upward is critical to the customer interaction process. Once a customer comes to a ground-level employee with a concern or idea, that employee becomes the bearer, and in some cases the advocate, for the customer’s message. If you don’t construct avenues for feedback or you aren’t responsive to feedback, those avenues will wither and you’ll end up with frustrated employees and customers looking to take their business elsewhere.
Like any other aspect of communication, it takes constant maintenance and repeated requests for feedback sent to all of your departments and geographies.
“It’s just being relentless in terms of being hands-on, listening and seeking to understand,” Stemper says. “Then you have to take action. When people see their ideas go into action, the pump is primed. But you can’t let up. You can’t do it for the first six months of a job, and then you get into a routine where you operate differently. This has to be the way it is all the time.”
In many cases, responding to customer needs isn’t about rolling out a new product or service that takes large helpings of time and money or fundamentally alters the way you do business. Sometimes, it’s about taking what you already offer and presenting it in a specific way.
Stemper and his associates have kept their eyes and ears open for those exact types of opportunities — ways to serve up Comcast’s standard business offerings to meet the wants and needs of a given market.
“Because we have a local presence in each of our markets, we know how a market ticks,” he says. “We know what they react to, what is important. It might be a sports team that is the be-all, end-all. It might be a particular business issue that is critically important to the broad geography. I trust the intimate understanding of the people in each of our markets to help us know what is going on.”
