PHOTO
Getty
For close to a decade, I worked in an organization that adopted a corporate-wide continuous improvement initiative. Anyone managing personnel within the organization was required to attend a broad spectrum of lessons — from hiring to budgeting, down to even how to run an effective meeting. The transition and impact of the program skyrocketed our productivity double-digits for several years and subsequently resulted in huge gains in employee satisfaction and customer retention.
Working closely with organizations today, I see many leaders manage their departments from spreadsheets, making short-term decisions that have a very real negative impact on the company’s future. Some examples:
• Responsibilities are centralized to simplify and hold leaders accountable.
• Collaboration is abandoned with the goal of increasing agility and responsiveness.
• Employees are treated as the largest expense within the organization rather than an investment.
The results of these may appear positive to the bottom line — less bureaucracy, improved efficiency and cost-cutting are all goals that most organizations are pursuing. However, there are consequences that can destroy a company long term:
• By centralizing responsibility, teams that are closest to the issues are often ignored. Leadership introduces problems that can have disastrous results downstream.
• With collaboration abandoned, employees feel they’re ignored and not valued by the organization, so they leave.
• Employees are replaced and the institutional knowledge they acquired leaves with them — many times to competitors.
I am not opposed to cost-cutting and improving a company’s efficiency, but not at the expense of the company’s culture and brand.
Responsibility For Your Internal Customer
“If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.” — Jan Carlzon, former CEO of SAS Group
Centralizing responsibility is a great method of improving agility and performance. But rather than my being held accountable to the spreadsheet or the bottom line, I was held accountable to my team and their internal customers. My team reviewed me on a quarterly basis on my ability to remove roadblocks from their servicing internal and external customers. My direct reports were my customers. Subsequently, my team members were reviewed by their internal customers. This hierarchy followed, all the way to the end customer.
This flip in hierarchy made me a better leader and manager. I had to ensure that every decision I made didn’t have a negative, downstream impact on my team members, their internal customers, all the way down to the external customers that the company served. When your customers are responsible for your performance, success and, ultimately, your salary, you listen and work with them a lot more closely.
Collaboration With Your Internal Customer
“In the long run, no matter how good or successful you are or how clever or crafty, your business and its future are in the hands of the people you hire.” — Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony
In this era of data, we listen far more to our external customers than ever before. We survey them, have forums for them, meet them for dinner — striving to listen, respond and improve the experience they have in working with our organization. Collaboration with internal customers needs to happen the same way.
As a product manager in a SaaS organization, I met with my customer service teams, product marketing teams, leadership teams, sales teams, leadership and end-customers to research issues and develop priorities and solutions. No one internal or external customer had veto power over my decision-making; I was single-handedly responsible for the product roadmap and timeline.
However, being held accountable by each of these teams ensured that I would develop a comprehensive plan, anticipate any downstream impact, allow people to prepare for the changes and communicate the plan effectively. By them being my customers, I was forced to collaborate and listen to them.
Investing In Your Internal Customer
“Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.” — Jeffrey Gitomer, the King of Sales
We all realize it’s cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire a new one. This is no different within an organization. While we can see salaries as a line-item on a spreadsheet, understanding the institutional knowledge that the employee has isn’t as clear when it comes to value.
Years ago, my employment was terminated when new leadership came in and believed my job could be eliminated. Because I wasn’t an internal customer, just a title and a budget item, I was deemed expendable. However, once I left, the department began to suffer a number of issues because a good percentage of my job was working on issues outside of my job title.
My experience in the company and the industry helped anticipate and remove roadblocks for other departments (my customers), my employees (also my customers) and our actual customers. When I left, those problems reared their ugly head. Revenues plummeted and the leadership that decided to eliminate me was terminated. Because this happened throughout the organization, the company lost its momentum and never recovered.
Steps To Evolve Into A Customer-Centric Organization
To evolve into a customer-centric organization, there are a few steps:
• Every employee must have specific and measurable goals that directly align with their leadership’s goals.
• Every leader must be reviewed by their team members and held accountable to the results.
• Every team must be reviewed by their internal customers and held accountable to the results.
• Every team with external customers must be reviewed and held accountable to their results.
• Reviews must happen on a regular basis (monthly or quarterly) with action plans of what will be improved, who is responsible, the dependencies defined and the timeline of expected results.
If companies treat their employees as internal customers, the hierarchy is flipped and tremendous gains can be seen in both the short and long term. Institutional knowledge is fully leveraged to avoid hardships and to drive innovation. The organization can continuously improve with a strong, collaborative employee culture that strengthens its brand and its bottom line with a customer experience that beats any competition.
