Category Archives: Empathy

What do customer centric companies do? Create Advocates for Life.

Posted on January 29, 2017 by Dr Linden Brown | Leave a comment

corso281 In my travels in recent weeks I have experienced two examples of how a customer-centric attitude and behavior produce memorable customer experiences. Both of these were in hotels in different countries.

In Rome my wife and I stayed at Hotel Corso 281. We planned to go south for a few days by train and wanted to leave a large case at the hotel and pick it up again on our way from the Amalfi coast via Rome to Venice. Even though there would only be a 45 minute time between our change of trains in Rome, Delia, the front office manager assured me that they would send a taxi with my bag to the station as soon as my train arrived in Rome. So we took the chance. When I nervously called the hotel on the morning of our journey and spoke to the hotel front desk a different person was fully aware of my situation. As we pulled into Rome station I called again and another front desk person was fully aware and organized a taxi to send the bag. When the taxi arrived at the station it had a large sign with my name in the side window and I gratefully took my bag. Soon after I received a call from Delia to tell me the taxi driver reported to her that the bag had been delivered. We made the train connection all because of a display of team collaboration embedded in the belief that the customer’s needs must be met. When next in Rome we are going back to stay at Corso 281.

In Dubai I checked in to the Rihab Rotana hotel after a 7 hour flight from London. The front office manager gave me his card and also the card of the other front office manager who was off duty. He assured me to call them any time if there was a problem or something they could do. This gentleman, Mazen, was gracious, attentive and carefully explained all hotel services. This manner of care could be seen from all staff in the hotel – from housekeeping to concierge to the gym and pool deck.. Soon after checking into my room a bowl of fruit was delivered. Each day in my week long stay I was greeted by the smile of Daryl, a young lady in the restaurant who seemed to be there for all seven days of my stay. She told me that their team of five often had to work long hours and 7 days because when the hotel was very busy they had to make sure all guests received a great experience. Sometimes at the end of the day even though she had already been there 12 hours her greeting and smile never diminished. I will go back and stay at Rotana in Dubai.

While these things are small for service people with the right attitude and attention to customer needs, they are huge for the customer.

Bottom line – I am an advocate of both these hotels, they stick in my mind, I will go back and I will recommend anyone that asks to try them as well.

Do you attract the right talent to your organization? People that focus on the reason their job exists? Does the leadership of your organization focus its attention on delivering a great experience?

You can learn more in our book the Customer Culture Imperative

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Posted in Competitor Insight, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Values, Customer Communications, Customer Experience, Customer Service, Empathy, Employee Engagement, Market Culture in Action, Trust

Tagged customer culture, customer service in action

It’s LEGO, not EGO – collaboration is central to LEGO’s customer-centric culture

Posted on February 28, 2016 by Dr Chris L. Brown | Leave a comment

The name LEGO is an abbreviation of two Danish words “leg godt” meaning “play well”. It was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Kristiansen and remains a family owned company. It has incorporated a number of characteristics specific to the Danish culture, such as a non-hierarchical structure – which translates into a very flat organisation in LEGO. So they look for people who are going to embrace collaboration and have fun. Even in sales teams that are normally very competitive they look for people to be more collaborative to partner and work with their teams to build longer-term customer relationships and brand loyalty.

There is no room for “EGO” at LEGO where employees at every level are expected to challenge their boss as a means of coming up with the best ideas.

LEGO’s CEO, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp says “Blame is not for failure, it is for failing to help OR ask for help.” This is reinforced by the owners of LEGO, who promote collaborative family values.

lego_collaboration_value

David Gauntlett, in his contribution to the book LEGO Studies (Mark Wolf, 2014) sees LEGO bricks (the product made up of interconnecting parts) as a social tool, fostering connection and collaboration spurring the potential of children and adults and their natural imagination. New employees are already customers who use the LEGO system to create new products – in many cases part of the job interview is to design a new LEGO product from a bunch of bricks provided.

Collaboration – up, down and across the organization and with suppliers and customers – is a secret to LEGO’s spectacular growth over the last 10 years. It has given them the capability of customer foresight – a cultural ability to develop and deliver new products that excites their customers’ imaginations and creates incredible loyalty and advocacy.

To find out more about how you can create this culture in your business, read our book, “The Customer Culture Imperative“.

AND if you want to build this capability in your organization check out our MarketCulture Academy.

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Posted in C-Level Quotes on MarketCulture, Collaboration, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Centric Values, Customer Experience, Customer Foresight, Empathy, Freedom, Trust

Tagged customer culture; customer foresight;lego; collaboration

Lessons from REI: Aligning your People

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Dr Chris L. Brown | Leave a comment

We have just completed one of the busiest weeks in retail in the United States, with Black Friday for the physical stores and Cyber Monday for the online retailers. This week now blends together with doorbuster deals bombarding us constantly online and instore in the week leading up to Thanksgiving as well as weekend afterwards.

What is different this year is that some major stores have decided to stay closed during this period. In the land of the consumer this a really big deal!

One chain in particular stands out, REI, the outdoor recreation retailer with more than 12,000 employees and 140 stores around the US decided to close this past Black Friday. See below, their CEO, Jerry Stritzke’s 30 second announcement:

“We believe that being outside makes our lives better. And Black Friday is the perfect time to remind ourselves of this essential truth.” – REI CEO, Jerry Stritzke

So what is behind this decision? I believe it is to better align REI’s core values with its actions in the market. REI’s core mission is “to inspire, educate and outfit for a lifetime of outdoor adventure and stewardship.”

What better way to live that mission and align all of their people around it than closing on a day that allows their own people get outside and live the company’s mission.

Now that all sounds great but how does that help their customers? No doubt some customers may be inconvenienced by their physical stores being closed. However they will still have a small number of staff manning their website so they are not completely close for business.

REI are reacting to growing concerns by their customers and others that retail in general is overshadowing the core purpose of thanksgiving which is to celebrate with family and friends. They are betting that this decision will pay off over the longer term by aligning their people with their mission while also meeting the changing expectations of their customers.

Ultimately if you want your people and customers to really buy-in to what your company is about you must walk the talk, for me this is strategic alignment in action!

Interested in what it takes to be truly customer centric? Learn more here

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Posted in Case Study, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Centric Values, Customer Communications, Customer Insight, Customer-Centricity, Empathy, Freedom, Market Culture in Action, Strategic Alignment, Trust

Tagged customer culture, Customer Experience, Customer-Centricity, rei

How do you get employees to care about customers?

Posted on September 30, 2015 by Dr Chris L. Brown | Leave a comment

This is a question I often hear from leaders of large companies that want to create customer centered organizations.

It is one of the key challenges of becoming customer centric. Here are a couple of ideas that we have seen work well.

Recalling your own Personal Customer Experiences

Given we are all customers of someone, at some stage in our lives, we can all recall having a great customer experience or a really bad customer experience.

We run an exercise with leaders and employees of our clients that is a really effective way to build empathy which hopefully leads to compassion for customers.

We ask them to recall the best or worst experience that have had and to break down the elements that made up that experience, why did it stick with them?

More often than not this experience brings back strong emotions, participants get excited or even angry recalling their experiences.

At the end of the exercise we ask participants, has your organization created any of those really great or really poor experiences? Most people will admit yes so the question is why do we as an organization allow those poor experiences to happen when we know how powerful the positive experiences can be?

As you can imagine this fosters great discussion and engages people emotionally and intellectually in firstly understanding why it happens and then what to do about it.

How can we help you

Creating a Service Mindset

Ultimately everyone in an organization is there to help others get their jobs done as well as their own, it is this combination and collaboration of people that creates compelling value. Think about companies like Apple and Amazon where smart teams of people work incredibly hard together to bring their products and services to life for millions of customers.

Building a service mindset helps all employees think about how they can help other parts of the organization be successful so that they can all win in the marketplace. A service mindset requires all employees to think about the impact of their decisions and work not only on customers but other teams across the organization.

Hear from Customers Directly

A key challenge in large organizations is the distance many leaders and employees have between them and direct customer feedback. There is nothing more powerful than hearing directly from customers. It is simply not the same to hear something second hand as it is usually devoid of emotion and context.

As a result another exercise we encourage is having leaders and employees hear directly from customers in open forums or focus groups. The goal is to not just get information or new insights but to gain a sense of how customers really perceive the organization and their top of mind issues. More often than not participants gain valuable new insights into how customers really think about their organizations.

Give people permission to care about customers and then expect it

It sounds strange but in many organizations customers are an afterthought. People are not encouraged to really think about customers in their decision making processes. There are limited rewards or recognition for people that go the extra mile for customers and as a result there is limited upside or downside.

The result is a lack of real passion for customers outside of a small number of salespeople who live and breath customers as their personal livelihood. We know however that this is simply not enough. Customer passion must be pervasive across the organization for both the customer and the company to benefit.

Leaders can give people permission to care about customers by demonstrating that they care through their actions. Then over time they need to expect employees to care and simply not tolerate bad customer experiences.

A great story comes from the NRMA in Australia (similar to AAA in the US), the leadership gave their employees permission by suggesting they could:

“Break all the rules for the customer”

One of NRMA’s services is roadside assistance. They have many great stories of NRMA staff going the extra mile for customers when they are at their most vulnerable, i.e. stranded with their broken down car. One emergency roadside assistance employee even dropped a customer’s groceries to their home so they would not spoil!

What else can you do to ensure employees act in the best interests of customers as well as the business?

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Posted in C-Level Quotes on MarketCulture, Change Leadership, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Centric Values, Customer Experience, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service, Customer-Centricity, Empathy, Employee Engagement, Empowerment, Trust

Tagged compassion, customer care, empathy, nrma

Empowering Employees to do the right thing for customers

Posted on August 25, 2015 by Dr Chris L. Brown | 1 comment

When we measure the customer-centric culture of organizations around the world, one of the recurring themes is a low score on “empowerment”.

Lack of empowerment – real or perceived – has a huge impact on the ability of frontline staff to solve a customer’s problem. It also has a big impact on costs and is seen in many ways – duplication of work, mixed messages to customers, bottlenecks and slowdowns in customer service, and new product introductions – just to name a few.

For frontline staff to be empowered to solve customer problems or rapidly respond to customers’ requests a business needs a culture that encourages staff to be accountable for ensuring a solution for the customer is delivered. They need to have the confidence to make a decision that is right for the customer without fear of retribution from their managers if it seems to cost the business money. If they can’t fix it themselves they need to be confident that those who are alerted to the issue will fix it for the customer quickly.

A great example of this is seen in the hospitality industry. Chateau Elan, a boutique resort hotel with a property each in the United States and Australia has created an empowered culture in which a customer can ask any member of staff to do something for them – book a restaurant or a cab or get extra towels in their room. The immediate response by the hotel employee is “consider it done!”

This is an emphatic promise to the customer that it will be done. Not only does it give confidence to the customer but it empowers staff to collaborate and ensure the customer is satisfied.

How do you go about creating a customer culture of empowerment in your business?

If you want to build this capability in your organization check out our MarketCulture Academy.

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Posted in Customer Centric Values, Empathy, Empowerment, Freedom, Trust

Tagged chateau elan, customer service, empowerment, frontline employees, trust

Why smashing hierarchy and driving collaboration is essential to customer experience

Posted on October 13, 2014 by Dr Chris L. Brown | Leave a comment

Dr David Cooke, MD of Konica Minolta Australia.
Source: BRW Australia Photo: Nic Walker

When Dr David Cooke was appointed managing director of Konica Minolta in Australia he was faced with a culture of strict hierarchy, strong silos and task oriented behavior. He realized this was the first thing that had to change.

Why? Because the market for multifunction copiers and printers was changing. The market for these products was declining and the demand for outsourced solutions and services was emerging. The hardware was less important than it was in the past, customers just expected the devices to all work well and be built with high quality engineering. Quality products did not differentiate, customers wanted more, they wanted more sophisticated services and solutions to help them manage the costs of running their fleets and value add solutions that would streamline workflows and improve their operational effectiveness.

These new market conditions required a more flexible, agile and collaborative culture that focused on the changing customer needs if Konica Minolta was to thrive in the future. So his vision of KMA as the “company that cares” for its customers and its community was a means to differentiate KMA from its large competitors, promote a unified company view of improved service and value for customers and one that he felt his staff could buy in to.

His view was validated by a staff survey that benchmarked the level of customer-focused culture in the business by measuring market responsiveness on a 7 factor index. It showed that there was some work to do, but that staff were overwhelmingly ready for change, wanted transparency of information across the organization and expected the senior leadership to lead it and show the way.

David immediately looked for tangible initiatives that would demonstrate a unified company with increased collaboration and communication. In the first few months of his tenure he made the following changes:

the large corner office that was originally the haven of the previous managing directors was re-purposed as a “quiet lounge” for all staff
he moved into a glass fronted office next to the lunch room where he could wave or nod to his staff as they used this heavily used walk-way.
he replaced several of the functional heads with new leaders to strengthen the cultural change program and break down the silos
he increased transparency in the HR function by moving it from closed office walls to join others in the open plan office and appointed a new leader to facilitate the change program
he promoted an external focus by encouraging all staff to work for non-profit community organizations by enabling them to take days off to directly contribute

David’s approach to creating a less hierarchical structure, sharing of financial results and customer successes across the business is leading to more engaged staff, better customer service and growth in revenues at a time when overall market revenue is declining.

What’s the secret? Customer Focused Leadership – leaders that genuinely care about creating value for customers, the business and the communities that operate in.

If you want to build this capability in your organization check out our MarketCulture Academy.

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Posted in Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Experience, Customer Value, Customer-Centricity, Empathy, Market Culture in Action, Strategic Alignment, Trust

Tagged customer culture, customer focused leadership, Customer-Centricity, david cooke, konica-minolta australia

3 Traits a Company Culture must have to create great customer experiences

Posted on October 9, 2014 by Dr Chris L. Brown | 1 comment

The way customers are treated by your company is a direct reflection of your company culture. If you have a culture based on fear and mistrust, customers will experience the ramifications. Have you ever felt like you were being treated like a criminal for returning a product or complaining about a service? It is highly likely that employees are punished for not following the rules, as a result customers are also punished for mistakes or speaking up.

Company culture can be a difficult thing to define, but just about everyone that works for a company can feel it or describe it in some way.

Software Advice, an online reviewer of HR technology, recently conducted some interesting research that demonstrates the wide range of views from employees on what makes for an attractive company culture. The most cited cultural trait that would attract employees? Honesty and Transparency.

Source: Software Advice

Transparency

This leads us to the first of 3 must have traits, Transparency. Employees want to know where they stand, if the leadership is opaque and vague about performance expectations or what success looks like this is a recipe for low morale and poor customer experiences.

Empathy

The second must have trait is empathy. Empathy is about understanding the other person’s position, in this case understanding the customer’s point of view. What do customer’s experience? What are they trying to achieve? What are their frustrations and how can we eliminate them? A culture of empathy extends to how employees work with each other, what are the other department’s goals and how do we help them achieve their goals as well as our own. Companies that lack empathy end up with unhappy customers that leave.

Trust

The final must have trait is Trust. This relates back to my opening point, a culture of fear results in employees not trusting customers. The customer is out to get them, scam them, take advantage of them just like everyone else in this place! Low levels of trust narrows our thinking, employees go into a survival mode that results in short term wins at the expense of long term relationships.

Have you ever had the feeling you are not welcome when you walk into a retail store? (See the image at the top of this post) Unfortunately in retail, theft is a major problem, however, as with most major problems it is subject to the 80/20 rule. In other words most people are not thieves but the signage and the retail staff’s attitude can make everyone feel that way – not good for business…

Are these cultural traits present in your company?

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Posted in Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Centric Values, Customer Experience, Empathy, Freedom, Trust

Tagged cultural traits, customer culture, Customer Experience, customer focus, empathy, transparency, trust

How stupid companies hold their customers hostage

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Dr Chris L. Brown | Leave a comment

It never ceases to amaze me how some companies continue to make it hard for customers to leave. As though making it difficult for customers to leave will make them want to stay. Why do you think businesses continue with such short sighted practices?

In my experience businesses that rely on monthly membership fees are the worst offenders. Of course there is the notorious case of AOL that lit off a firestorm online a number years ago and continues to be talked about today.

This is clearly a leadership and corporate culture issue. It happens when leaders behave in a way that suggests it is ok to make it hard for customers to leave. They probably say things like “what ever you do don’t let a customer go without doing everything you possibly can to keep them!” This is great in theory but in practice not every customer wants to stay and its not necessarily because they don’t like what you are offering.

Sometimes customer’s needs change, they grow out of using your product and need to move on. Don’t you think it would be a good idea to let them go on a positive note rather than kick them on the way out?

Why do you think this still happens?

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Posted in Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Values, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service, Empathy, Trust

Tagged customer experience; customer trust;customer centricity

Stop doing stupid things to customers

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Dr Chris L. Brown | 1 comment

A good friend of mine in Sydney recently relayed a story I have heard many times over. Yes it involves buying a car and yes the experience was less than ideal to say the least…..

This particular story comes down to three underlying emotions – fear, trust and anger.

Here is what happened:

My friend’s wife decided on the car she wanted at a local car dealership. The car was actually a demo model on the lot and had everything she was looking for apart from leather seats. She told the sales rep she would take the car so long as the seats could be upgraded to a black leather with a white colored highlight on the trim. Of course this could be done – “no problem just sign here!”

When the car was finally ready for delivery, my friend’s wife went to pick it up and noticed the highlight was red rather than white. When she mentioned this to the sales representative he suggested she had requested the red rather than the white. I guess this is often where many customer service problems begin – mis-communications….

Unfortunately this is also where the emotions kick into gear. Perhaps out of fear (loss of commission, loss of job, loss of face) the sales person stupidly persisted with the suggestion that this customer (my friend’s wife) had made the mistake and essentially it was up to her to cover the cost of any changes. The customer understandability did not respond well to being told she made the mistake – there was an immediate loss of trust. This always leads to anger and frustration on the part of the customer.

This is where the death from a thousand cuts begins. Many people take the attitude that its just one customer with one problem, it will just go away. When emotions are involved things don’t just go away they are remembered vividly and recalled often. This customer will never have a good thing to say about this dealership for the rest of her life. She will actively recommend against going there to her circle of influence.

In the future the dealership will miss out on business not only from this one customer but the many customers she and her husband influence.

All this for a few hundred dollars on the part of the dealership to make things right. It’s obvious you have to think of this as a marketing investment rather than a customer service cost.

As a leader at your organization what are you doing to make sure your people are not doing “stupid things” to customers? Do you have the type of culture that reinforces the lifetime value of customers?

What do you think?

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Posted in Customer Centric Values, Customer Experience, Empathy, Market Culture Inaction, Trust

How customer centric companies make service recovery a priority

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Dr Chris L. Brown | Leave a comment

In the below video, Chris Zane of Zane’s cycles, probably the most customer centric bike store on the planet, tells the story of how they got things wrong.

Not only did they gets things wrong but on Valentine’s Day of all days!

We all get things wrong from time to time, what matters is how we handle things when we make a mistake. People that work for customer centric companies take ownership, take charge and make things right for the customer.

Is this how your team operates?