Your Culture Drives your Customer Experience

American Lean Weekday: Leadership | Lean Culture & Intrapreneurship | Lean Methods | Industry 4.0 | Case Studies

In a recent PwC study, 80% of American consumers say that speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service are the most important elements of a positive experience. How does your organization measure against those elements? It’s important to realize that your culture drives your customer experience. If you want a better customer experience, work on improving your culture.

This article points out that 59% of customers will quit doing business with a company after repeated unpleasant experiences. Imagine losing 60% of your customers over the next year because of bad customer experiences.

Your culture, now more than ever being driven remotely, is the largest element that will affect your customer experience. How can you support a customer experience-driven culture?

1. Start with Values

Your culture can develop over time. It can change as you grow or enter new markets. It’s who you are and who you want to be.

Values are part of your True North. Values should drive the culture. Values are fixed and are what you reflect on when you need to make decisions. Without a True North, and the values of the company what culture do you think will develop? If there is no guidance, who knows what will emerge. Chances are it won’t focus on the customer experience.

2. Who you hire is who your customers will meet

This isn’t just customer service employees. This includes everyone in the organization. Maybe they won’t meet the accounts payable clerk, but if you make hiring decisions as if your customers will meet this person, what do you think happens to your customer experience?

When everyone in the company is focused on delivering an exceptional customer experience, your organization will blow everyone else away! Customer experience will become a True North when you hire across the company this way.

3. Measure your company culture

Yes, company culture can be measured. While not as exact as measuring output per hour or the number of clicks on a website, there are several aspects you can measure.

NPS or Net Promoter Score is a measure of how willing you are to promote a company. It asks a simple question “On a scale of 1-10 how likely is it you would recommend brand X to a friend?” A rating of 9-10 is a promoter, 7-8 is neutral and < 7 is a detractor.

This is why the first question on many surveys is how likely are you to recommend X to a friend and then it gives you a 1-10 scale. They are collecting their NPS information.

You can conduct an NPS for your company internally to measure your culture. Instead of asking if they would recommend brand X, you might ask, “How likely are you to recommend our company as a great place to work?”

Realize that if you go to the trouble to ask, make sure you provide honest feedback to your workforce. Be prepared that your culture isn’t where you want it right now. That’s great. At least you know what you can improve upon.

This information helps you realize that your culture drives your customer experience!

As always, it is an honor to serve you, and I hope that you and your company are getting better every day!

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