Inspire your people to delight customers

To stay in business, you and your employees need to be focused first and foremost on the people who pay the bills: your customers.

Your company doesn’t exist to make cool products or win “Best Workplace” awards. To stay in business, you and your employees need to be focused first and foremost on the people who pay the bills: your customers.

Build a customer-centered culture with this advice:

Rewrite your mission statement. Your organization’s mission statement should emphasize the importance of serving customers, whether they’re internal or external. Post your mission statement prominently as a constant reminder of what employees should focus on.

Set the example. As a manager, you should lead the way by showing that you’re willing to put everything aside to help a customer. When you “don’t have time” to deal with a customer’s issue, you tell employees that customers are less important than other duties—and those employees will act accordingly.

Provide the resources. You can do all the cheerleading you want, but it won’t produce results unless you put your money where your rah-rahs are. Employees can’t effectively serve customer needs unless they’re provided with adequate resources—equipment, training, and time—to do the job.

Analyze your failures. No matter how committed you are to serving customers, you’ll fall short sometimes. Don’t brush aside your mistakes. Do a postmortem to determine where you went wrong and how you can do things better next time.

Recognize employees’ efforts. Put customer service at the forefront of your incentive programs. Give special recognition to those individuals who go above and beyond to keep customers happy. Nothing will sell your message more effectively than shining a spotlight on the behavior you hope to perpetuate.

To your greater success!

Peter Mclees, MS LMFT

Principal

P. S. Smart Development Inc. has an exceptional track record helping restaurants, stores, branches, distrubution centers, food production facilities, and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength and the teamwork necessary for growth. Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

http://smartdevelopmentinc.com/