The role of a company’s employee communications operation is, by its name and nature, almost exclusively focused inside the organization. Yet, expanding its responsibilities to the company’s other critical audience – its customers – can reap benefits beyond measure.
That’s not to say that communications managers should take on marketing communications, too. Rather, they should serve as a dialogue facilitator and conduit to the customers’ world to help the internal audience gain a better appreciation for and greater insights into the world of the customer.
Consider your own experiences receiving shoddy treatment at a retail store, versus the outstanding service you may have gotten elsewhere. Why the difference? It’s not purely happenstance that one experience is consistently great while the other is often lousy.
The difference between the two is likely the success (or lack thereof) that the respective organizations have had in getting their employees to appreciate the needs and desires of their customers; the challenges those customers face; and the reason those customers come to them in the first place for fulfillment of their needs or solutions to their challenges.
The purpose of a business is to provide greater ease and comfort for its customers by making their lives simpler on some level, satisfying some desire or need they may have or solving challenges they can’t do on their own. And if the people in your organization that deal directly with your customers aren’t doing that effectively, consistently and courteously, if they are in fact doing the opposite, then organizational failure can’t be far behind.
Think back to bad experiences you’ve had with businesses, big and small. Are those organizations still in business? Have they declared bankruptcy, been acquired or just folded? Without naming names, I can think of a few that I think got their just deserts.
In helping my clients improve their employees’ appreciation for the world of the customer, I’ve done the legwork on their behalf in a few cases. The pay-off in each instance was huge – far bigger than the client had expected.
In two different cases, both industrial companies selling products and services to other businesses, I worked with the sales managers to bring the real world of their customers to the sales team.
I grabbed my home videocam and conducted interviews with a dozen or so different customers at their sites, asking them about their needs, frustrations, and challenges, as well as how our clients and their competitors were or were not measuring up. The raw footage was edited down to cohesive 15-minute videos for sales meetings.
The impact was stunning. Both videos stimulated robust and productive discussions. Salesmen who called on these people were hearing things they’d never heard before – or perhaps they hadn’t listened closely enough.
This doesn’t pertain only to salespeople and those with direct customer contact. It applies equally to all, to back office support personnel, to product developers and manufacturing employees, and everyone else in the company. How better for people to get a sense of why they do what they do, and how they might do it better?
There was another case where I did a similar customer video that was shown across the organization, even to people without direct customer contact. Especially telling was how the IT department gleaned some important insights into the customers’ world. As a result, they enacted some changes to the company’s software that would improve the customers’ experience when they went online to check their account status.
Businesses are launched with a vision of meeting previously unsatisfied needs. If that business succeeds at doing that to the point where it grows, loses touch with its original purpose, and gets too big to continue doing that effectively, then what’s the point of being in business?
The most difficult challenge any company faces in a growth mode, or even just staying ahead of the competition, can be maintaining that awareness and insight into the customer experience among its entire employee population, month after month, year after year.
To the extent that the company’s employee communications professionals can help sustain and enhance that could be its most valuable contribution to the perpetuation and success of that organization.
No comments:
Post a Comment