Developing your people to create better customer experiences requires clear understanding of the future status of your organization.
Too often organization are focused on past performance when planning their people development, but past performance is a poor indicator of how to develop better experience-focused people.
It’s often said that hindsight is 20/20, but in reality it’s quite the opposite. Past performance can be extremely limited in helping future development. Primary because past performance is heavily skewed given specific circumstance, lack of clear understanding of current events, and unique details specific to the interaction.
People generally act to the best of their knowledge. So what happened in the past is often what is possible given the current state of your people involved in service engagements. Instead of focusing on what people have done in the past, great leaders focus instead on what they want their people to become.
Customer experience leaders understand that developing great experiences is a process of developing great people. Great people create great systems. Great people accomplish great things.
Developing a Customer-Centric Culture of Great People
Identify your champions. Great experience creating cultures clearly understand what success looks like. Identify your champions of service experience and what a winning experience culture looks like. Clearly communicate the expectation of greatness and ensure that all individuals, systems, and process know how they fit into the process of creating it and have the resources and capabilities to achieve it.
Create ownership. If you want to get commitment from the people involved, you must create a sense of ownership. Engagement is good, but ownership is better. Getting people engaged into the process encourages participation, but having people feel ownership over processes, directives, and culture, gets them deeply committed and willing to what whatever it takes to see it succeed.
Eliminate barriers to action. Ask service agents what keeps them from being able to serve customers. Red tape can’t always be eliminated, but you can find ways to navigate the bureaucracies of operations and enable quicker pathways to action. Learn to roll out pilot programs for testing out ideas, rather than scrutinizing all of the intricate details behind the scenes. Evaluate and adapt the process on the go.
Developing great people for customer experience requires clear understanding of your future goals. Create ownership and eliminate barriers to action and you’ll see the customer experience results you want.
