Removing obstacles is really a three level process.
First you have to look at addressing any obstacles in your internal service cooperation.
Often times that can mean eliminating a policy that has outlived its useful life. Or, streamlining policies, procedures or approvals that don’t cause any fiduciary risk.
Second, is eliminating obstacles in your sales or delivery channel. It is important for you to focus on expertise beyond the transaction level and focus on how you support customers throughout their life cycle.
Third, you need to look at removing any obstacles that would impair an exceptional experience with your customers.
You need to ensure that you examine all customer touch points (anytime a customer can make a sweeping judgment about you and your organization) and actively work on removing any distractors and adding as many delighters as possible.
If you are in a leadership position, one of the most important things you can do to create employee engagement while simultaneously improving the customer experience is to remove obstacles inside of your work group.
This means taking the time as a leader to solicit input and feedback from your team members about obstacles, policies or procedures that they feel get in their way of providing faster and better service experiences.
Asking and acting on these ideas will increase employee engagement and momentum for service experience improvement.
If you are an individual contributor it is important for you to view all of our customer touch points from the perspective of our customers.
It is also important for you to bring any ideas, suggestions, or improvements that you believe would remove obstacles, improve the customer experience or our responsiveness or ease of doing business.
It is important to note that one of the common characteristics of the best service organizations around the world is they proactively solicit customer input to find obstacles in the service experience process.
You and your organization can meet the ever-rising bar of service expectations for your customers by listening to your customers and acting on what they tell you.
I challenge you to take these thoughts and ideas to develop your own personal action plan!!!
List at least one obstacle you would like to see be removed to improve the experiences and loyalty with our customers.
Or, if you are really honest, go ahead and list the multiple issues and obstacles to exceptional experiences you and your team face.
After all, it is your most important job!!!
