If you owned a coffee shop, you would have your team try the coffee. Not once, but everyday. The daily sip would help them correct problems quickly and be familiar with what the customer was experiencing.
If your organization provides tangible goods and services to customers, it is easy to try the coffee. Far too many organizations ignore this simple routine, but it can be done with little cost or effort.
What about all the intangible customer experiences such as interactions with your team that reveal an organization’s attitude, vision and values? How does your team get a taste of the intangibles everyday to make quick corrections and be familiar with the customer experience?
This is where effective leadership come in. This is where culture makes a tremendous difference.
An organization must find ways to parallel internally the intangible experiences they aspire for their customers to experience externally.
If you want customers greeted with joy and excitement, employees must be greeted with joy and excitement.
If you want customers to believe that the company genuinely cares about their wants and needs, employees must see that the company genuinely cares about their wants and needs.
If you want customers to feel appreciated, employees must feel appreciated.
Organizations that fail to parallel internally what they aspire to deliver externally are pretending. In time, the ruse is exposed. The best employees leave. The best customers leave. All because no one is trying the coffee.
Question: How could your team more effectively try the coffee everyday, especially the intangibles that customers experience? Post your ideas in the comment section below.
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2 Comments
There’s a great documentary on Netflix called Yiro Loves Sushi. It’s about a sushi restauranteur in a Tokyo subway station who has been making sushi for the last 50 years. It is considered the finest sushi restaurant in Tokyo by many. It starts at somewhere around $300 a person to eat there, and is booked for six months in advance.
There are many interesting parts to the story, but perhaps the most interesting is watching Jiro apply his craft. Every day the staff prepares the fish for that night. They are very particular about what fish they buy at the market. They make the sauces and other accompaniments. And they taste it. Every single day, they taste it.
When they are done, Jiro tastes it. Every day. He tastes everything they are about to serve. He is completely intolerant of anything less than perfection, and is training his staff to be the same way.
It’s a different, but applicable, example of what you are talking about here. People want to work around someone who inspires them to be their best, someone who demands their best.
Whether eating your own dog food or tasting your own coffee, using the things you make forces you to make things which matter.
I love the line, “People want to work around someone who inspires them to be their best.”