You’re Back!
It was an enthusiastic, yet unexpected and surprising greeting I received at the nail salon one Monday. “You’re back!” Unexpected because I have a standing appointment there. Surprising because it came from the owner’s four-year old daughter. She’d been at the shop two weeks earlier when I was there—Mom was having child-care challenges. What a way to train the future generation!
We talk a great deal about creating a positive employee experience, which leads to a positive customer experience. They are closely tied. When you create positive experiences, you create value for your organization.
In his book, The HR Value Proposition, David Ulrich said that the work of HR begins with the business, not with HR. The same is true for any business function—accounting, marketing, IT or customer service—their work begins with the business. And value is determined by the customer or client.
Seth Godin asks in his blog Welcome Back, “What if your return felt special to the people behind the counter?” He equates such a greeting as a vote of trust and confidence that offers dignity, safety and belonging—something worth working hard to create.
To create value and a positive experience for your customers, consider the following:
Effective Relationships: Do you leverage formal and informal relationships effectively and with integrity?
Achieving Results: Do you focus on achieving desired, timely organizational outcomes more than on rote process?
Communication: Do you accurately formulate and clearly communicate critical messages? How well do you listen, understand, and provide information?
Competence: How knowledgeable and skillful are your customer service or front-line staff?
Speed: How quickly do you give customers what they want (or need)?
Integrity: Can customers trust you to tell the truth? Are you there when they need you? Can you recover from any problems with responsiveness, empathy, persistence, and complete customer satisfaction?
Flexibility: How willing, eager, and able are you to adjust your product or service to meet customer needs, wants, desires or changing behaviors?
Give your customers a good experience. Make customer and client service a part of your organization’s value proposition and culture. As leaders, practice it and lead by example.