Marcia's Leadership Q and As: What Matters to YOUR Customers?
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Q. Our executives are driving us hard to grow the business numbers such as revenues, numbers of locations, customers, etc. However, with their drive for numbers, they don’t seem to care about our quality or delivering what our customers have paid for. My team is uncomfortable with the lack of ethics and customer responsiveness. What do we do?
A. Your company is on a path of decline. When executives lose their strategic compass, they shift their focus to numbers. By trying to manage a business with myopic conversations about forecasts, budgets, cost cutting, incentives, and sales, they forget their purpose is to serve the current customers. When current customers feel ignored or do not receive the value for what they have paid for, the reputation suffers, and the customers will disappear. What grade would your business get today?
Internally a business begins to implode when customers aren’t served and employees see and hear the complaints from customers--they disconnect. The business suffers without a collaborating team. Devastating company traits emerge: internal competition, silos, poor communication, waste and complexity, a lack of workflow, etc.
There are multiple symptoms of poor leadership. People try to solve the same problems for months and years because they’re working on the symptoms, not on the root causes. The leaders are asking the wrong questions. It’s time to step back and ask for help outside of the company to get a new perspective and transform the company before it fails.
Q. As a frequent customer of great restaurants, airlines, hotels, etc., I am surprised when some companies seem so out of touch with their customers! Why?
A. Leading any business can be a tough job. The key to success is developing communities of both employees and customers who are loyal. Why do some restaurants, manufacturers, airlines, etc. have such loyal communities?
The answer is easy! Leaders who focus on providing quality in everything they do build loyalty for their organization—inside and out. The challenge for executive teams is to be aware—and stay aware of what matters to their customers, focusing on those few key quality characteristics, and creating the systems and processes and culture of employees who are thrilled to delivering that level of excellent quality.
Start conversations about, what’s important to our customers? How do they define a quality experience? Everything that is important to the customer then becomes some of the measures of success. The measures may be speed of service, responsiveness, care and engagement, cleanliness, safety standards, innovation, and more. It’s up to leadership to connect the dots from defining the key traits that matter to the customer and the operational flow that makes the customer think, “Wow!”
The two traits your best customers want to feel are: focus on delivering the best quality consistently, and care about their experience. Two winning traits: quality and service.
