The 8th Habit of Effective Customer Experience

0
228

Share on LinkedIn

I recently talked about how Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits apply to create an exceptional customer experience. I had a chance recently to review Covey’s follow-up work “The 8th Habit”, where Covey shares how we can supercharge our ability to develop a great customer experience, by implementing this 8th habit into our customer service.

Customer experience will decide the winners and losers in the years ahead. Here’s why: RAVING FANS

Excellent customer experiences are still so novel that, when we have one, we talk about it.

Covey’s principles teach that a great customer experience is the overlap of 3 types of types greatness: Personal Greatness, Leadership Greatness, and Organizational Greatness. These 3 types of greatness help you connect with customers to develop lasting relationships.

Customer Experience Through Personal Greatness

  • Do your front-line people aspire to and consistently work to implement and model the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Customer Experience?
  • Are you people always seeking to learn, improve, do better, and perfect their work with customers?
  • Does building effective customer relationships matter to your customer service people?

Customer Experience Through Leadership Greatness

  • Do your customer service leaders effectively create a blueprint for customer relationship success?
  • Are your leaders consistently evaluating the customer flow and what can be done to improve the overall experience from the customer’s point-of-view?
  • Are leaders working on aligning the individuals in the team to the goals and desires of the organization?
  • Are you leaders model of the ultimate customer-focused employees in your organization?

Customer Experience Through Organization Greatness

  • Is your whole organization aligned towards thinking about customers and the customer experience?
  • Is the customer considered when decisions are made that will affect the experience?
  • Does the word “customer” appear in your organization’s mission statement?
  • Does it appear in the every day language of your employees?

As you find your inner customer voice and enable the people in your organization to express the desire to delight customers freely, openly, and personally, you’ll develop the type of relationships with customers that will create lasting impressions and loyal customers.

Greatness is not found in shinny logos, mission statements, or marketing material. All those things have their place. They assist in helping you tell your story. Greatness comes through the daily words, actions, and behaviors demonstrated by customer-facing people, backend support employees, and the vision and aspirations of your organization. Aligning the whole organization, it’s leaders and people around a customer-focused mission, an exceptional customer experience is created.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Flavio Martins
Flavio Martins is the VP of Operations and Customer Support at DigiCert, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise authentication services and high-assurance SSL certificates trusted by thousands of government, education, and Fortune 500 organizations. Flavio is an award-winning customer service blogger, customer service fanatic, and on a mission to show that organizations can use customer experience as a competitive advantage win customer loyalty. Blog: Win the Customer!

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Please use comments to add value to the discussion. Maximum one link to an educational blog post or article. We will NOT PUBLISH brief comments like "good post," comments that mainly promote links, or comments with links to companies, products, or services.

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here