I hate when I start to sound like a scratched record. It’s exhausting for me and I’m sure for those who have to listen to me. However, I recently found myself saying this a lot:
If you’re merely providing a mediocre customer experience, then you may be better off providing a bad customer experience. Because at least if the experience is bad the customer will remember you. If you’re average… you will be forgotten. It’s that simple.
So it is up to today’s organization to figure out exactly how NOT to be forgettable. That of course starts with leadership.
What is leadership’s role in providing customer experience? Well, one could say that the entire failure or success of the customers’ experience with a company comes down to leadership.
Everything falls on leadership. That is why we leaders get paid. A company’s leadership, however, rarely finds its way into customer interactions. Not because they don’t want to, but most often because this becomes too difficult.
As companies grow larger and the hierarchy grows taller, the daily interaction between a customer and an organization’s leadership often become sporadic at best.
That fact doesn’t excuse the leaders from providing unparalleled customer experience. So back to where we started, what is the role of the leader in providing a great customer experience?
Let’s discuss the employee for a minute.
Would it be radical to suggest the experience leadership desires to see delivered to customers should closely mirror the experience leadership delivers to the company’s employees?
Stop and ask yourself this question: In your organization, what does the employee experience look like? Then ask yourself, what would you like to see the customer experience look like? From there you may want to try to see if there is a correlation.
At this point there may be speculation that I’m suggesting you treat your employees really well if you want to see your customers treated really well.
I want to take this a little bit further, though. This isn’t a leadership paradigm shift, this is simply leadership.
In the world we live in today, the leader MUST seek to deliver consistency to their teams. This is a level of integrity that shows the company stands behind its beliefs and that the customer is truly important. Because those who interact with the customer are shown the same respect as the customers themselves.
Leadership teams that desire to deliver an unparalleled customer experience must build a scalable delivery model for great experiences. This means great customer service isn’t something we can just talk about. Instead, we must show this through our treatment of every stakeholder in a businesses path. This includes the employee.
So I’ll ask just one more time: what is the role of the leader in customer experience? Beyond the obvious “leading”, I’ll sum it up in a word…
Continuity
The leader must create continuity in the experience that ALL stakeholders have when dealing with an organization.
If we don’t, then our greatest goals for delivering game-changing customer experience will be flawed when the leader cannot pass the company’s values through the conduit that ultimately reaches the customer.
This post was originally written for Switch and Shift, the best leadership blog on the web and can be found here.
