Many organisations role out marketing, CRM, and loyalty programmes without establishing what is important to the customers they are about to inflict their ideals and offers upon with reckless abandon with little thought as to why
You can encourage your staff to deliver excellent customer service until the cows come home, and you can buy a top-of-the-line CRM system. But if your organisation isn't clear on its values – on what it stands for - you’ll very likely undermine your efforts.
For employees to be fully empowered to consistently create customer experiences that foster loyalty, they must understand and live the organisation’s values – what they are, and how they show up in employee behaviours. Values provide a valuable framework for the day-to-day choices employees make and actions they take toward organisational goals.
Unifying values are the blueprints that drive an organisation's culture. If employees know that ‘excellence’ is an organisational value, they will make more choices toward that end. If 'teamwork’ is a corporate value, they’re more likely to make choices and take actions with the team’s best interests in mind. In addition, values:
* Make it easier for employees to figure out how to ‘do the right thing’
* Foster strong feelings of personal effectiveness and pride
* Facilitate consensus about goals and understanding about job expectations
* Reduce levels of job stress and tension
* Provide a sense of order without imposing ‘rules’
* Promote high levels of company loyalty
One of the biggest mistakes companies make is believing that they're already living the values they feature in public relations and marketing materials. There’s often a huge gap between the values organisations say they have, and the values they’d like to have or are actually living.To close that gap, the following steps are for defining, refining and reinforcing organisational values:
1) Brainstorm, explore and clarify organisational values. Give everyone a clear, common everyday understanding of how you define your values and what they look like in daily behaviour. Just using words like ‘integrity’ or ‘balance’ is not enough since everyone has their own definition of what words mean. The time it takes to zero in on what your organisation is really about is well worth it.
2) To achieve or maintain your competitive edge, make sure your values are ‘customer-focused.’ This means you’ve taken the time to look at what your customer’s value, and usually requires an ‘outside-in’ view of your organisation. Spend some time truly understanding what the customer expects from you, what their goals and dreams are and how they feel about doing business with you.
3) Give each and every employee the opportunity to uncover his or her personal values. Why? Research shows that even if personal values are not in sync with corporate values, employees who are clear on what their own personal values are tend to be more engaged in and committed to their work.
4) Reinforce values. Make sure they’re an integral part of your hiring, orientation and ongoing training programs. Management should consciously model organisational values, and encourage and praise staff members when they exhibit behaviours that support them.
5) Revisit values regularly to determine if they still make sense, or if changes may be necessary.The bottom line companies that live by their values and keep customers more easily create profits. Today’s more cynical, demanding customers are looking for companies that are driven by their values - not just their profit motives. Organisations that know and live their values tend to create great places to work for and to do business with. They enjoy healthy profits as a result of their customers returning to buy more, with their like minded associates in tow.
John Logar
Professional Speaker and Consultant
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