How do you expect your team to behave towards the customer? While there are guidelines and work systems that will help them serve you well, customer orientation is essential and complementary.
If you can impress on their mind that everything they do should result in excellent customer service (we call this "customer orientation"), each rule, each task, and even what is not scheduled, acquire meaning and correct orientation.
A customer-oriented worker
I have had an informal chat these days with Luis, a worker from a private security service. He told me that, naturally, he directs his actions based on the needs he sees in clients.
For example, he knows the routines and habitual movements of the residents of the neighborhood where he provides his services and, when the change of shift approaches, he makes sure not to vacate his position without first having left through the gate that he watches, all the people who normally circulate at that time (even if their relief has not arrived on time).
Also, when a neighbor goes out to do exercises in the neighborhood, Luis moves through the different sectors where he can observe him to make sure everything is in order.
He commented to me that it is not strange to receive comments, observations or calls for attention from people who walk through the neighborhood about abnormalities that merit reporting to the administration. These opportunities are always well taken advantage of thanks to their proximity and availability to receive that information.
But is this behavior established as work guidelines? It could, but even when it doesn't, workers like Luis don't need it. Why? For its effective customer orientation.
Customer orientation directs effective actions
It is encouraging to note that customer orientation fills in gaps in work systems. In any service, it is impossible to contemplate all situations and take them into account as procedures or work rules.
Even the standards that are established may not be remembered or interpreted correctly by every worker. However, if you take care of laying good foundations, orienting your team to the client, infusing this culture of service, you will be covering any gaps, and also giving the appropriate framework for them to suggest and help create new working methods, or refine existing ones, to make sure you constantly improve the result you offer your customers.
Benefits of customer orientation
So what are the benefits of creating a customer-oriented mindset in your team?
- The established norms make sense, and are better applied. In addition, if something needs to be changed to improve the result, each worker will know exactly how to behave and will be able to contribute to improving work systems. It allows covering the gaps, or regulatory gaps. If something is not scheduled, or an unexpected situation arises, customer orientation offers the answers. It empowers the worker in front of the customer. If customer orientation is the basis of the entire work system, it is enough to remember this single premise to ensure that you are moving in the right direction, without fear of being "out of the norm". This insecurity can make operations inflexible, always requiring authorization from a higher level, which gives a perception of poor quality of service to the customer.
Customer orientation begins with management
But the truth is that the only way to convey clear customer orientation is for management to be convinced that it is the way to ensure long-term business success.
Without this premise, any message will be contradictory, and it will kill the initiative to create this culture of customer orientation. In your role as leader, are you convinced of this, to be able to transmit that conviction to your team, with consistency and determination?
