Walking Your Talk: Cultivating Authentic Customer Service (Part 2 of 2)

Let’s build on last week’s post, which focused on authentic customer experiences provided by legendary brands I’ve worked with and written about, such as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Zappos, and Starbucks.

Becoming known for extraordinary customer experiences requires consistently delivering expectation-exceeding service. It also requires creative, present, kind, and patient people to deliver or create tools that deliver experiences where customers wonder, “How do you do that?”

Here are a few questions to consider based on my deep dive into Zappos (as captured in my book The Zappos Experience. I hope they will help you think about the steps needed to move toward legendary and authentic customer service delivery:

• Do you have explicit corporate values? If so, do they reflect a blend of founding principles and the evolving demands of the marketplace? Or are those values static and immutable?

• How prominent are your values in the prospective applicant’s journey to your job posting?

• Does your onboarding process immerse participants in your culture or simply preview it?

• How effectively does your orientation process build empathy for the customer experience and create interdepartmental connections?

• What do your customers value? How do your corporate values match up with the wants, needs, and desires of your customers?

• Since values can be explicit (stated) and implicit (unstated), do your corporate actions align with stated values? If not, what do your business’s major decisions suggest about your company’s fundamental values?

• If this exercise reveals your real values differ from your stated values, how willing are you to consider revising stated values to match your demonstrated actions or revising actions to match your stated values?

Based on those Questions – Here are a few Takeaways

• Align Corporate Values with Customer Values: Regularly review and adjust your corporate values to ensure they align with your customers’ evolving needs and desires.

• Enhance Onboarding and Orientation: Design your onboarding and orientation processes to fully immerse new employees in your company culture and build strong empathy for the customer experience.

• Demonstrate Consistent Values in Actions and Decisions: Ensure that your company’s actions consistently reflect its stated values. Align your business practices with your core principles to maintain authenticity.

• Evaluate and Revise Values: Be open to revising your corporate values or actions if discrepancies arise. This flexibility demonstrates a commitment to genuine value-driven service

Walking the talk with customers requires you to know what you value and what they value and then chart a course to walk together with integrity!

To learn more about cultivating authentic customer service, please get in touch with me at josephmichelli.com/contact.