You know you’ve got unhappy customers so you’ve decided it’s time to do a complete service overhaul. You’ve spent hours with your C-level executives crafting a strategic plan and making sure your i’s are dotted and your t’s are crossed. The idea is to roll out the new plan in one area of your company—for example, your call center—and get things under control there before you move on to the next department. Over time, as you get your strategy perfected and everyone buys in, you’ll surely reap the benefits. Makes sense, right?
Sorry, but that’s no way to start a revolution. When you’re transforming a company culture to be more service-focused and effective, you have to move more boldly and get the message out to everyone more quickly. You don’t have time to let culture change drip down to the masses or bubble up from the bottom in one or two departments. You must cascade your transformational effort in a much wider and deeper effort from the beginning.
Creating a superior service culture throughout an organization is like getting a new rocket into orbit. You need a massive and focused effort at the beginning to overcome the gravity of old attitudes and behaviors. And soon after your first new service successes, you need another enormous booster to keep momentum going and get into a sustainable orbit.
The results are well worth the efforts. When people at all levels and departments throughout an organization step up together—at the same time—to deliver better service, then full engagement occurs and the culture “tips” into a new and better direction.
Of course, there will be obstacles along the way. It’s how you deal with those obstacles that counts.
Companies sometimes receive push back from employees and even high-level leaders. Without the right framework for building an uplifting service culture, as laid out in my book, a company’s transformation will slow to a halt and nothing much will change. Good customers will leave, and often high-performing employees will head for the door.
And that’s where my book, Uplifting Service: The Proven Path to Delighting Your Customers, Colleagues, and Everyone Else You Meet comes in. Rather than sit back and wait for others to “go first,” the book enables and empowers employees—whether they’re in the C-suite or a cluttered cubicle—to change the game from their level and position and follow the path to an uplifting service transformation.
In the next part of this post, I will outline seven lessons learned the hard way that will help you keep your efforts to uplift service on the right track.
