A Step-by-Step Guide to

etting Your Employees Obsessed

_. with Customer Service
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2021 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/serviceculturena0000tois
The Service Culture Handbook
The Service Culture Handbook
ING

Jeff Toister
Copyright © 2017 Jeff Toister
All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 9780692842003
ISBN-10: 0692842004
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Be Oa CR OT Co ne ele nS eS nen ke, ee Vii

GMtKOGUGUD Teen ey eee oeeel a MEL ek ae ee ix

Part 1: Culture Is the Key to Outstanding Customer Service ........ 1

Chapter 1 How Corporate Culture Guides Your Employees’ Actions... 3
@haprets2 Why Culcure Initiatives: Often Pailin = 22 240. 6s orien ou cas 17

Part 2: Building a Customer-Focused Culture.................... Bi

Ghapter oq Detining Youn Gultiite ge + norteacento 33
Chapter 4 Engaging Employees with Your Culture --.............. 48

Part 3: Changing Your Company’s Service DNA.++---....--...5-. 65

Chapter 5 Aligning Your Business Around a Customer-Focused
Giglio es Aosow ihcoiardh cicomnity BeSacpa bus hnges ald He eee a orswaelhy oye 67
Chapter 6) Setting Goals: That Drive Your Culture 1.2 ss... wees 78
Chapter 7 Hiring Employees Who Will Embrace Your Culture-....... 92
Chapter 8 Training Employees to Embody Your Culture.-.......... 108
Chapter 9 Empowering Employees to Support Your Culture.-....... 1s)
Chapter 10 How Leadership Can Make or Break Your Culture-....... 141
Chapter 11 A Customer-Focused Example: ++ +--+ +++ sees ee eee eeee. 154
Chapter 12 Making the Commitment to a Customer-Focused Culture - - 155
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 Acknowledgements

My FIRST BOOK, SERVICE FAILURE, was published in October 2012. People al-
most immediately started asking me when I would write another.
I resented that question at first. It’s hard enough to write one book and I
couldn’t believe people were already talking about book number two. Now,
I appreciate all the people who asked the question. It showed they saw some-
thing that I didn’t—I had another book to write.
Michelle Burke and Adriana Perez are fantastic friends who helped make
this book possible in a roundabout way. They connected me with repre-
sentatives of the online training video company lynda.com (now LinkedIn
Learning) at a trade show in 2013. One thing led to another, and I was sud-
denly making customer service training videos.
My very first video was filmed in August 2013 and formed the seeds
for this book. It’s called Leading a Customer-Centric Culture, and it outlined
what elite companies do to get employees obsessed with service. (Check it out
at www.lynda.com/JeffToister. You'll need a lynda.com account to view the
course, but you can get a 10-day trial at www.lynda.com/trial/JeffToister.)
Finally, I owe my wife, Sally, an endless amount of gratitude. Her encour-
agement continuously inspires me to write.
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 Introduction

Tony D’AIUTO WANTED TO CREATE an unforgettable experience.

He’s an Airport Operations Center manager at the Tampa International
Airport. Small children often lose a favorite stuffed animal while traveling
through an airport, so D’Aiuto’s goal was to reunite a child with a lost toy in
a fun and unique way.
His plan was to take photos of the toy in various places around the airport
to make it look like the stuffed animal had gone on a big adventure. He would
then return the toy to the child along with photographs of its journey. D’Aiuto
asked a colleague who oversaw the airport’s lost and found department to alert
him the next time a child lost a stuffed animal.
Once the plan was in place, he waited. And waited. It took two months
for it to happen. D’Aiuto was ready when he finally got the call.
A six-year-old boy had lost his stuffed tiger, Hobbes. The boy and his
Tampa-based family had already boarded their outbound flight when Hobbes
was found, so it was too late to return it to them that day. D’Aiuto jumped
into action.
“Being a hobbyist photographer, I thought I could have some fun and
creativity with the ways I took photos of Hobbes’s adventure during my lunch
break,” said D’Aiuto. He enlisted help from various people around the airport
to photograph Hobbes with airport firefighters, riding on a luggage cart, by
the airport control tower, and elsewhere.
D’Aiuto took his photos to Walgreens, where he used a coupon he had
saved to make a hardbound photo book documenting Hobbes’s adventure.
 Jeff Toistei

He then brought Hobbes and the photo book to the airport’s lost and found
department, so the family could retrieve them when they returned from their
trip.
The family had been told that the boy’s stuffed animal was waiting for
them at the airport’s lost and found. They headed there immediately after
their flight landed, eager to reunite Hobbes with their son. It was a touching
reunion, and the boy really enjoyed seeing the pictures of Hobbes on his great
adventure. D’Aiuto’s initiative had taken the traumatic experience of losing a
favorite toy and turned it into something positive and fun. The boy’s mother
was moved to tears at the kindness displayed by D’Aiuto and the rest of the
Tampa Airport staff.
The heartwarming story attracted national media attention. It was picked
up by news outlets such as NPR, CNN, and USA Today.
You just don’t hear customer service stories like this very often.
There are plenty of stories about service failures. Every week, there seems
to be yet another company featured in a news story about shockingly poor
service. Customer service leaders privately tell me they struggle simply to get
their employees to consistently deliver basics such as courtesy, promptness,
and helpfulness.
Why are the stories about outstanding customer service so rare?
It’s not due to a lack of ideas. Bookstores are well stocked with books
explaining how to provide outstanding customer service. Some describe how
companies can create successful service strategies, while others provide tips
and tactics for customer-facing employees.
There are many other places where you can find customer service ideas.
There are conferences, motivational speakers, and seminars galore. Consultants
like me write blog posts, record podcasts, and create videos. Nearly every cus-
tomer service professional has attended a customer service training class at
some point during their career.
The stuffed animal photo adventure certainly isn’t a new concept. D’Aiuto
got the idea after reading a similar story about a child who lost a stuffed lion at
a museum in London, England. It’s also been done by a museum in Canada,
and a Ritz-Carlton in Florida did the same thing with a stuffed giraffe in
 The Service Culture Handbook

2012. The original concept may have come from a story about a lawn gnome
that was stolen from a garden in the mid-1980s and returned to its owner with
a photo album depicting its various adventures. Or it may have originated
from a popular children’s book called Flat Stanley, which was published in
1964.
I asked D’Aiuto why he went to so much trouble on his own time just to
create a memorable experience for one child. “Tampa International Airport
has a long history of being very people-focused, as opposed to plane-focused,”
he told me. He explained that everyone in the airport, from the CEO on
down, is committed to providing exceptional service. “Our CEO, Joe Lopano,
sets the tone for being efficient and hard-working, but he also fosters a sense
of creativity and fun at the airport which makes employees feel comfortable
enough to take a chance like I did with this little boy’s lost tiger.”
That’s the real secret that explains why these types of stories are so rare:
Tampa International Airport has done something that few organizations
achieve. The airport has created an environment where employees are con-
stantly thinking about outstanding service. They proactively look for ways
to make a difference in their customers’ lives, even if it means going far
beyond their regular responsibilities. Employees prioritize passengers over
planes, recognizing that airport operations are really just a means to help
travelers get to wherever they’re trying to go. Perhaps that’s why the airport
is consistently rated one of the best in the U.S. in Condé Nast’s annual
reader’s poll.
In short, employees there are obsessed with service.
The Service Culture Handbook shows you how to create a customer-fo-
cused culture where employees in your organization are obsessed with service.
It’s a step-by-step guide to help customer service teams, business units, and
even entire companies get excited about serving customers at the highest level.
You'll get an inside look at companies—like REI, JetBlue Airlines, and
Publix—that consistently rank near the top of their industries for customer
service. You'll also find profiles of some lesser-known companies that repre-
sent the next wave of legendary customer service organizations. This book
will show you what these elite organizations do that most organizations don’t.

x1
 Jeff Toister

The Service Culture Handbook is organized into three parts. The first part
examines why creating a customer-focused culture is the key to outstanding
customer service. It also offers some cautionary tales about companies whose
culture initiatives failed.
The second part provides detailed instructions for building a customer-
focused culture. When you use these chapters to clearly define your organiza-
tion’s unique culture, you'll transform the way your employees view service.
The ultimate goal is to get your employees obsessed with consistently deliver-
ing service that’s so amazing it becomes part of your company’s brand image.
Finally, the third part of the book helps you embed customer focus in
your company’s DNA, so you can sustain the customer-focused culture you've
created. Companies that get really good at service will tell you they have to
work at it every day. It’s easy to grow weary or lose focus when you've worked
long and hard at achieving a goal. These chapters assist you in keeping your
employees engaged and making outstanding service the way that your com-
pany, department, or team simply does business.
Many chapters contain sample worksheets to help you implement these
concepts. You can download blank copies of the worksheets from this book
at www.serviceculturebook.com/tools. You'll also find additional tools and
resources on the website, such as access to my Customer Service Tip of the
Week email. You and your employees can sign up for these tips for free.
I recommend that you read each chapter in order, to get a clear picture
of what it takes to create a customer-focused culture. You may be tempted to
pick and choose lessons from this book. Please don’t. This is a complete recipe
for building a customer service culture. Just as you wouldn’t try to bake a cake
without flour or eggs, you shouldn’t try to transform your organization’s cus-
tomer service while leaving out an essential ingredient. Also, it’s a good idea
to know exactly what you're getting into before you launch a major initiative.
I wont lie to you. Getting your employees obsessed with customer service
is not easy. It is, however, one of the elements that separates the elite organiza-
tions from the rest. These companies put in the hard work that most aren’t
willing to dedicate themselves to.

x1
 The Service Culture Handbook

Don’t be afraid to use me as a resource as you explore these concepts. I’m

easy to get in touch with:
Call or text: 619-955-7946
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @toister
You'll also find additional analysis, tips, and trends to help you develop
a customer-focused organization on my Jnside Customer Service blog at www.
insidecustomerservice.com.
For now, I encourage you to turn to Chapter 1, where you'll read about
another company whose employees are obsessed with customer service. In
fact, these employees are so customer-focused that they did something that
practically no one else would be willing to do.

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Part 1: Culture Is the Key to Outstanding
Customer Service
 CHAPTER 1

How Corporate Culture Guides Your Employees’ Actions

THE INTERNAL NETWORK AT RACKsPACE went down and took the phone sys-
tem with it. Customers suddenly weren't able to call. Employees couldn’t even
access the company directory to contact each other.
This was a potential disaster.
Rackspace provides computer hosting services for more than 300,000
customers. I’hese companies run their websites, email, and internal computer
systems on its network. It’s all mission-critical stuff. When there’s a problem,
Rackspace customers need help fast.
A lone technical support agent sprang into action. tweeted
He his per-
sonal phone number, letting customers know they could reach him directly
if they needed help. Soon other tech support reps followed suit and tweeted
their numbers, too. For the next four hours, they used ‘Twitter and their cell
phones to serve customers until Rackspace restored its phone service. The sup-
port team typically handles a thousand calls during a four-hour time frame, so
their extraordinary service prevented a lot of unhappy customers.
The stakes were high, but nobody from management told these employees
to tweet their personal phone numbers.

pen el the My pass )

How Cutrure CreaTEs HERO MOMENTS
Imagine the same scenario at nearly any other company. Employees would feel
helpless. A few might lobby their supervisor to go home early. Most would just
sit around and wait for the phone system to come back up.
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The corporate communications department might post a message on the

company’s website to let customers know the phones were down. Somebody
might tweet an update on the status ofthe phone system. That would likely be
the extent of the company’s efforts to alert customers to the problem.
Tweeting personal contact information would be unthinkable. Many cus-
tomer service employees are fearful of giving out their last names, let alone
their phone numbers. Employees at the average company would never take the
kind ofinitiative that happened at Rackspace.
Rackspace isn’t the average company, though. Stories of employees deliv-
ering over-the-top service are common. One rep ordered a pizza for a customer
during a marathon trouble shooting session after she heard him mention that
he was getting hungry. An account manager showed her appreciation for a
visiting client by preparing a home-cooked meal.
The big question is why employees at Rackspace serve their customers in a
way that’s so different from the norm. It’s too simplistic to say that Rackspace
has made a company-wide commitment to provide outstanding service. Lots
of companies make similar claims, but that doesn’t mean they actually do ir
eir exceptional service isn’t just a product of great training, either.
Training works when you want to show someone how to use a specific skill
or follow a particular procedure. Tweeting personal phone numbers, ordering
pizza for a customer, and preparing a home-cooked meal for a client were all
improvised moves. These actions were neither trained nor scripted.
S extraordinary service is their customer-
focused culture. Employees are absolutely obsessed with taking care of their
customers. They have created a unique identity, calling themselves Rackers,
symbolizing the pride employees have in their company. They've developed
a special brand of customer service called Fanatical Support® that promises
customers they'll spring into action and do whatever it takes to help resolve
any issue.
It’s this obsession that leads to customer service hero moments like tweet-
ing a personal phone number so customers can reach you.
A hero moment occurs any time an employee, a team, or an entire compa-
ny rises to the occasion to provide customers with outstanding service. Hero
 The Service Culture Handbook

moments aren't limited to over-the-top actions. They include everyday service

encounters as well. In his book, Be Your Customer's Hero, customer experience
strategist Adam Toporek defines it this way':

“It means being there when the customer needs you and making
your personal interaction with the customer as memorably positive
as possible.”

Let’s face it: the vast majority of customer-service interactions are unremark-
able. They’re neither amazingly good nor frustratingly bad. Think about the
last time you went to the bank, bought a cup of coffee, or ordered something
online. There’s a good chance thatmothing particularly extraordinary hap-
pened. It was business as usual. lo uk We
tare? -.

MM her.°
A few experiences do stand out. We certainly remémb€r the service fail- ss
ures. But we also remember the hero moments. Maybe you remember a kind
bank teller who helped you avoid a fee. Perhaps there’s a barista at your local
coffee shop who makes you feel special every time he’s there because he knows
your name and your favorite drink. Or there may have been a time when you
were shipped the wrong item, but the friendly customer service rep made the
resolution so easy that you vowed to become a customer for life.
Every customer interaction is an opportunity for a hero moment or a ser-
vice failure. Some businesses, like hotels, might have multiple interactions per
day with the same customers. According to the Cornell Center for Hospitality
Research, an average 250-room hotel has 5,000 daily guest interactions with
valets, door people, bell staff, reception, restaurants, housekeeping, engineer-
ing, and other functions.’
The largest businesses might serve millions of customers on a daily basis.
For example, Domino’s Pizza delivers more than one million pizzas per day,
seven days a week. Imagine all the customer service interactions required to
make that happen! About 500,000 of those orders are taken by an employee
(the rest are taken electronically, via their website, smart phone app, etc.).
Employees must also deliver these ope-million pizzas. That means Domino’s
averages about 1.5 rallkotaicee rf ilur opportunities ever 2
 Jeff Toister

Individual employees at some companies might personally serve dozens of

customers per day. For example:

* Atypical airline flight might have 150 passengers served by four flight
attendants.
¢ A retail cashier might serve 20 customers (or more) per hour.
* A contact center agent might serve 10 (or more) customers per hour.

It’s impossible for a boss, a policy, or a system to control all these interactions.
Employees must exercise independent discretion at times. This is a scary real-
ity for customer-service leaders, who worry their employees will do something
wrong.
I've spoken to thousands of customer service employees over the years.
Most want to do a good job and make their customers happy. The vast major-
ity of these employees know how to deliver a hero moment, but they aren't
actively looking for them. Sometimes the moment arises, but the employee
doesn’t feel empowered to spring into action. These are situations where the
right corporate culture can encourage employees to make good decisions.
Culture creates hero moments on an individual level, where an employee
strives to deliver the best customer service possible. That employee feels em-
powered to do what it takes to makes customers happy and takes pride in
the company he or she works for. You see it in the way the employee greets
customers, solves problems, and goes the extra mile when the situation de-
mands it.
Culture also creates hero moments on a team level, where a department
works together to serve its customers at a consistently high level. Team mem-
bers share a passion for service that’s absolutely contagious. You see it in their
pervasive can-do attitudes and in the way they support each other in a collec-
tive effort to make their customers happy. These employees take pride in their
team, yet always push each other to do even better.
Culture can create hero moments on an organizational level, as well, where
an entire company is dedicated to providing outstanding service. Strategy,
goals, policy, and other corporate decisions are made with the customer in
 The Service Culture Handbook

mind. You see the impact of this customer focus in the legions of loyal cus-
tomers who go out of their way to do business with these select companies.
It's no wonder that culture is such a hot topic in customer service. So,
what exactly is it?

THe DEFINITION OF CORPORATE CULTURE

Corporate culture can be a nebulous subject. There’s a lot that goes into it, like
mission, vision, and value statements. But while those are some of its elements,
a company’s culture is broader than that.
I turned to Catherine Mattice to get a clear definition. She’s a consultant
and trainer who specializes in helping organizations create a positive work-
place culture. She’s also the author of Back Off! Your Kick-Ass Guide to Ending
Bullying at Work, and her research on the topic has made her an in-demand
speaker at human resources conferences. Mattice has even served as an expert
witness in court cases where corporate culture was a factor.
We met for coffee on a warm, sunny day. The coffee shop had a patio
with just enough shade to make it comfortable. I thought it might be a short
conversation, but we ended up talking for several hours.
We discovered that the challenge in defining culture is that there are so
many valid perspectives. When Mattice helps companies end workplace bul-
lying, she does so by focusing on their culture. I, too, focus on culture when
I work with companies to help improve customer service. And when another
colleague helps companies with their branding, she begins her efforts by fo-
cusing on their corporate culture, as well. It seems that so many things com-
panies do can be boiled down to their culture.
Mattice and I agreed that while corporate culture can refer to an entire
organization, it can also refer to a business unit, location, or individual team.
It’s not unusual for groups in different parts of a company to share some com-
mon characteristics, yet also have their own unique identity. You can’t easily
change the entire corporate culture if you're a store manager for a retail chain,
but you can influence the culture within your particular store.
Mattice shared this definition, which puts it all together:
 Jeff Toister

“Corporate culture is the way an organization’s members think, act,

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Let’s use ee as an example. Rackers certainly think, act, and under-
stand the world around them differently than employees at most companies.
When faced with an unexpected challenge, such as the phones going down,
Rackers think, “My customers need me. I have to find a way to help them.”
They act to do something about it. Rackers do this because they understand
how critical their services are to their clients’ businesses.
Contrast this to the customer service most of us receive every day. Many
employees think about their job solely in terms of their assigned responsibili-
ties. They act in accordance with company policies and procedures, but rarely
take initiative. They understand their role, but may not understand the com-
pany’s goals. Or, employees might understand the company’s goals, but not
care about helping to achieve them.
All organizations have a culture. It doesn’t have to be something inten-
tionally created. In most organizations, culture organically develops over time
through corporate strategy, the decisions of its leaders, the way employees
interact with each other, and many other factors.
It’s natural for a group of people to develop a certain amount of collec-
tive thinking. When you hear people say, “That’s how we do things around
here,” they’re referring to their company’s culture. A few elite companies, like
Rackspace, intentionally strive to cultivate a positive, customer-focused culture.
That intentionality is what’s missing in many organizations. According to
Mattice, most companies have policies that tell employees what they should
not do. Companies with positive cultures help employees understand what
they should do. Mattice explains that without clear guidance, “People don’t
know how else to act.”
But you cant tell employees specifically what to do in every situation;
there are too many variables. Instead, an intentionally-guided culture acts
as a compass that consistently points employees in the right direction. That
culture is reinforced when employees encounter a hero moment and make the
right decision.
 The Service Culture Handbook

INSIDE RACKSPACE’Ss CUSTOMER-FOCUSED CULTURE

Rob La Gesse is the Vice President of Social Strategy at Rackspace. Most
corporate executives in publicly traded companies are hard to contact. Not La
Gesse. I got his phone number when he sent it to me via Twitter.
I asked La Gesse why he shares this information so freely. His explanation
was simple: “I’m in the people business. I want people to find me.”
He’s not kidding. La Gesse published his cell and home phone numbers
on his blog in 2009. It was 2013 when the Rackspace technical support rep
tweeted his own cell number in order to be accessible to customers in need.
Sharing a personal phone number via social media wasn’t a scripted move, but
it was embedded in the company’s organizational thinking and exemplified
by its leaders.
Accessibility is just one illustration of how Rackspace creates a customer-
focused culture. Another is how it hires employees. According to La Gesse,
the company hires many people who don’t have technical backgrounds. They
come from hospitality, medical, and similar professions that attract people
with natural empathy.
La Gesse shares an example of the type of people they like to hire at
Rackspace. He was attending an offsite meeting at a hotel. The meeting ended
for the day, and the attendees headed off to the hotel’s bar. There were only
three bartenders, who were working like crazy to keep up.
La Gesse ordered a frozen margarita but received a margarita on the rocks.
He was deep in conversation with a colleague and saw the long line at the bar,
so he decided not to bother with getting his order corrected.
A few minutes later, the bartender approached La Gesse with a frozen
margarita. He apologized for the error and told La Gesse that both drinks
were on the house.
La Gesse was impressed. Mistakes can and will happen, especially during
busy times. But it takes a special kind of person to recognize their mistake and
go out of their way to fix it when the customer hadn’t complained.
He waited for the bar to calm down a bit and then approached the bar-
tender. La Gesse handed him his business card and said, “You need to be a
Racker.” The bartender was eventually hired by Rackspace. Although he had
 Jeff Toister

no experience working with computer networks, he turned out to be a perfect

fit. He now has a successful career in technical sales.
“IT can teach anybody [the computer operating system] Linux,” said La
Gesse. “I can’t teach them to actually care.”
Rackspace specifically looks for people like this, who fit the compa-
ny’s customer-focused culture. Here’s a passage from its Fanatical Support
Promise:

We cannot promise that hardware won't break, that software won't fail,
or that we will always be perfect. What we can promise is that ifsome-
thing goes wrong, we will rise to the occasion, take action, and help resolve
the issue.

This isn’t just something that’s tucked into an employee handbook and then
forgotten. This promise is a way of doing business at Rackspace. It’s how
Rackers think, from executive leadership all the way to the employees on the
front lines of customer service.‘
Fanatical Support is the first of the company’s six core values:

Fanatical Support’ in all we do.

Results first. Substance over flash.
Treat Rackers like friends & family.
Passion for our work.
Full disclosure & transparency.
K&N
AW Committed to greatness.

What truly makes these values special is that they’re ingrained in hiring,
training, and all aspects of guiding the employees’ work. The company even
has a “Culture” page on its website to explain it all:°

“Our Core Values came from us, the employees. They are our collec-
tive thoughts and beliefs encompassed by six values. Our leadership
had no input or vote in them. We wouldn’t even let them spell check

10
 The Service Culture Handbook

our values. Luckily for us, our bosses are smart enough to know that
telling employees what to think and believe is a complete waste of
time, and just a bad idea all the way around.”

These values truly represent how Rackspace does business. You see this in
an employee tweeting his cell phone number to be accessible to customers in
need. You see it in a bartender who gets hired after going out of his way to fix
a drink order. In fact, you see examples of Fanatical Support” reinforced every
single day at Rackspace.
“You have to constantly work at it,” said La Gesse. “You have to constantly
talk about.”

THE Dark SIDE OF CORPORATE CULTURE

What leaders constantly work at and talk about has a profound impact on a
company’s culture. It shapes how employees think about, act upon, and un-
derstand service. Focus on the wrong things, and a company can unintention-
ally develop an anti-customer culture.
Comcast provides a clear warning. It’s generally considered to have some
of the worst customer service in the country. It was rated the worst inter-
net service provider in the United States by the 2015 American Customer
Satisfaction Index, and third and fourth worst respectively in subscription
television and phone service. Comcast also ranked dead last in the 2015
Temkin Customer Service Ratings.’
Comcast has been known to attract national media attention with its epic
service failures. One particular example happened in July 2014. A Comcast
subscriber named Ryan Block called to cancel his service. The customer ser-
vice agent inexplicably stonewalled his request. Block was ten minutes into the
call when he decided to record it.*
The recording lasts for approximately eight minutes. On it, you can hear
the Comcast employee repeatedly badgering Block about his decision to can-
cel. Block politely asked the agent to cancel his service multiple times, but the
employee continuously tried to talk him into retaining his account.

Il
 Jeff Toister

Block posted the recording online and it quickly went viral. Major news
outlets reported on it. Tom Karinshak, Comcast’s Senior Vice President of
Customer Experience, issued a statement apologizing for the incident:

“We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with
Mr. Block and are contacting him to personally apologize. The
way in which our representative communicated with him is unac-
ceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service
representatives.” ‘
Le what Galiavees [ue bjhe Yr? pret .
It’s convenient for co panies een bee ee ao 44 tenes for
an embarrassing service failure like this. However, a closer look reveals that
the employee’s actions were completely reflective of Comcast’s corporate
culture.
Canceling an account with Comcast in July 2014 was a difficult task.
The instructions weren’t easy to find on its website. Even searching “cancel
account” failed to point customers to the desired result.
Customers who did find the cancellation instructions were instructed to
call customer support. They could do almost anything online, including add-
ing services, but Comcast wanted them to call to cancel.
Customers who called to cancel their accounts were transferred to some-
one called a “Retention Specialist.” These employees were given training on
step-by-step procedures they were expected to use to discourage customers
from canceling. They received a bonus based on how many customers they
could talk out of canceling their service. The employees received no bonus if
too many customers insisted on canceling anyway.
The Retention Specialist on Ryan Block’s recorded call summarized the
role perfectly. He said, “My job is to have a conversation with you about keep-
ing your service.”
Comcast designed its entire cancellation process around trying to con-
vince customers not to cancel. This philosophy was embedded in its process,
and it was integrated into employee compensation. Retention was what these
employees worked at and talked about.

ue,
 The Service Culture Handbook

It's not hard to understand why Comcast is infamous for its poor ser-
vice. Let’s go back to Catherine Mattice’s definition of corporate culture:
the way a company thinks, acts, and understands the world around them.
Comcast thinks about its customers in terms of revenue. It acts to do what-
ever it can to retain or increase that revenue in the short term. It under-
stands that a lost account equals lost revenue. None of this focuses on
serving customers.
In an interesting twist to the story, Comcast announced in May 2015
that it was implementing a multi-year plan to create a new corporate culture
focusing on exceeding customers’ expectations. It seems that even Comcast,
at some level, understands the importance of having a customer-focused
culture.
Comcast is hardly the only company whose actions create a culture of
poor customer service. In my first book, Service Failure, 1 uncovered many
examples of how a company’s culture can lead to poor service.
In one story, a hotel associate deliberately provided her guests with poor
customer service because she was afraid of being ostracized by her co-workers
if she went out of her way to be helpful. The hotel’s poor culture made it un-
omfortable for her to provide great service.
Another story involved a bank employee who signed off on 400 home
foreclosures per day without actually verifying that the homes met the criteria
for foreclosure. He never stopped to consider the customers who owned those
homes because the bank had a culture that encouraged employees to follow its
procedures without question.
A customer service representative at yet another company told me he rou-
tinely lied to customers because he was instructed to do so by management.
He had recently gotten this job after being out of work for a long time, and he
was worried that he'd be out of work again if he didn’t comply with manage-
ment’s directives. The company’s leaders created a culture of fear, intimida-
tion, and dishonesty.
I discovered something else while researching these stories. We would like
to believe that we wouldn’t act the way those people did if we were placed in
4 similar situation. The truth is, most of us would.

13
 Jeff Toister

We naturally take behavioral cues from the people around us. Some are
conscious, like the customer service employee who lied to customers so he
could keep his job. Others are unconscious, like the bank employee who
mindlessly signed off on home foreclosures. They’re both examples of corpo-
rate culture at work.

GETTING CULTURE TO GUIDE EMPLOYEES’ ACTIONS

People see how employees are obsessed with customer service in a company
like Rackspace and think, “Of course! That’s how it should be!” That’s what
makes creating a customer-focused culture so maddeningly difficult. It seems
like it should be easy, but it isn’t.
The challenge is that culture isn’t attributable to just one thing. There’s no
single initiative tha il magically gétyyour employees to consistently make
customer sepvice a priority eee sum of all the things we do in an
organizatfon. ead = V
ONE eiiAioe ArA Time.
Here até fust a few examples of questionsAe
eee oe influence how
culture oy pep ade,Harwegh

* Are employees given clear guidance on the company’s culture, or are

they expected to just figure it out?
* Are employees invited to help shape the culture, or are they
disengaged?
* Are strategic decisions driven by culture, or are they made without
regard for customers?
* Are goals and metrics aligned with the culture, or do they encourage
shortcuts?
* Are business processes customer-focused, or do they put employees in
awkward situations?
* Are employees empowered to deliver outstanding service, or are they
constrained?
* Do leaders reinforce the desired culture, or do they contradict it?

14
 The Service Culture Handbook

Addressing these questions isn’t easy. It takes time, energy, and resources.
Building a customer-focused culture is a never-ending journey that tests the
entire organization’s commitment and dedication.
So before showing you how to build a customer-focused culture in your
company, I’ve written the next chapter to explain why so many customer ser-
vice culture initiatives fail.

Clie ye We there fo
Mh bat f —Ho CH ,
Rhut Be dum a Cetvtliv-tda
things Wwe Go
ZA
His behavrer. hin saeaecrenyetal

L RL 2
he sc Ang Tee tak wb

3 ptt & berth brekli

lig direp
ps MMe. etki ors nda theygl
did Lt. |
Agerivgey Yor fle, GateGAME
Lt SayBaa ad
 Jeff Toister

NOTEs:
1 Adam Toporek, Be Your Customer's Hero (New York: AMACOM, 2015).
2 Barbara M. Talbot, “The Power of Personal Service: Why It Matters, What Makes It
Possible, How It Creates Competitive Advantage,” CHR Industry Perspectives, no. 1
(September 2006).
3 “Facts and figures,” Domino's Pizza. https://biz.dominos.com/web/about-dominos-pizza/
fun-facts.
4 The full text of the Rackspace Fanatical Support® Promise can be found on the company
website: http://www.rackspace.com/managed-hosting-support/promise.
5 Learn more about the Rackspace culture here: http://www.rackspace.com/talent/culture.
6 The American Customer Satisfaction Index publishes annual ratings for Comcast and
many of its major competitors on its website: http://www.theacsi.org.
7 The Temkin Group publishes annual customer satisfaction ratings on its website: http://
www.temkinratings.com.
8 Ryan Block. “Ryan Block’s recorded cancellation phone call with Comcast.” SoundCloud.
https://soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-service.
9 Tom Karinshak, “Comcast Statement Regarding Customer Service Call,” ComcastVoices
(July 15, 2014).

16
 GREIPASP
STS ERRe e2

Why Culture Initiatives Often Fail

“I WANT US TO BE like the Apple Store.”

That’s how a Chief Information Officer (CIO) described the goal for his
customer service project. He worked for a company that provided software
and information services to corporate clients around the globe. He managed
several internal departments, including a help-desk team supporting the com-
puting needs for several thousand employees spread across six continents.
The company had an internal customer service survey, and his help desk
wasn't scoring well. There had even been complaints about service quality
from other executives. The CIO decided he needed to change the culture, and
he wanted to get his employees obsessed about providing the type of outstand-
ing customer service the Apple Store was known for.
He called me to ask for help. We talked about his situation, and I pressed
him for more details about his vision. “What is it about the Apple Store that
you want your team to emulate?”
There was a brief silence as the CIO thought. Finally, he said, “I like the
Apple Store because they’re good at customer service.”
That was the best description he could muster. The problem was that the
Apple Store and his company’s internal help desk operations were so differ-
ent that the comparison made little sense. There was no similarity other than
their focus on computers.
The Apple Store is a gleaming showcase for Apple’s latest technology.
Employees are there to educate customers, help them find solutions, and sell
products. Customers are drawn in by Apple’s latest technology, whether it’s an

IW
 Jeff Toister

iPad, iPhone, MacBook, or another of Apple’s latest gadgets. People also come
to the Apple Store to get help with Apple products they'd purchased.
The CIO’s help desk is an internal department, not a retail store. It sup-
ports operations around the globe by phone, email, and internet. It also man-
ages the logistics of configuring various computers, parts, and accessories and
shipping them to various offices.
Ironically, the department’s biggest challenge was employees based in
its corporate office, who acted as if the help desk really was an Apple Store.
They often bypassed the company’s work-order system and walked directly
into the IT department to get help. They used their physical proximity to
jump to the head of the line and prioritize their needs over projects at remote
offices.
For example, a corporate vice president might come in looking for help
with her laptop while a help-desk employee was in the midst of getting a net-
work configured for a new office in Europe. It wasn’t a comfortable position
for the employee. If he dropped everything and helped the vice president, that
could put the network project behind schedule. If he asked the vice president
to follow the appropriate procedure, that could result in the vice president
complaining to the CIO or another executive.
Another challenge was how help-desk employees viewed their role. They
didn’t think of themselves as perky, customer-focused retail associates like
those at the Apple Store. They generally joined the company because they
loved computers and wanted to be near cutting-edge technology. They viewed
their job as fixing computers and setting up networks rather than helping
customers.
The CIO's customer service project had many warning signs that sug-
gested it wouldn’t succeed. He was impatient and hoped to find a shortcut. He
knew he needed to change the help desk’s culture, but he naively thought that
could be accomplished through a couple of training classes. He even signaled
that the project didn’t have his full support by delegating it to one of his man-
agers so he could focus on initiatives he felt were more important.
The biggest challenge of all was that the CIO couldn’t describe a success-
ful project outcome. He had a picture in his mind, but it wasn’t fully formed.

18
 The Service Culture Handbook

The best he could do was point to the Apple Store. This didn’t sound like a
situation where I could be helpful.
I finally asked him, “Have you ever heard of Ron Johnson?” He hadn’t.

RON JOHNSON AND THE [ALE OF [wo COMPANIES

Ron Johnson is widely credited for developing the Apple Store and making it
successful. Apple hired him in 2000 to be its Senior Vice President of Retail,
and he worked closely with CEO Steve Jobs to develop the company’s retail
concept.
The Apple Store’s success is undeniable. In 2011, Johnson’s last year there,
its $5,626 in sales per square foot was the best mark for any retailer in the
U.S."° Apple was also named a J.D. Power Customer Service Champion for
2012, recognizing the company’s outstanding service from the previous year.
The Apple Store took a fresh approach to retailing in many ways. Its stores
were full of products that customers were encouraged to try out. It also had
more associates than typical stores, so customers could get hands-on assis-
tance. There were no cashier lines, either; associates rang up purchases using
a mobile credit-card reader and an app on their phones.
The centerpiece of each store was the Genius Bar, which was something
Johnson invented to help customers get the most out of their Apple products.
Johnson described the Genius Bar in a 2011 interview with Harvard Business
Review: “Imagine a friendly place that dispenses advice and is staffed by the
smartest Mac person in town. He would be like a genius to the customer,
because he knows so much.”"
The Genius Bar concept wasn’t a hit at first, but Johnson stuck with it. “I
had a belief—a conviction—that face-to-face support was going to be much
better for customers than phone and web support, which are often really frus-
trating and ineffective,” he explained. “So we stuck with it, and gradually
customers started coming.”
In November 2011, Johnson was hired away to be the CEO of J.C. Penney.
The company was enamored with Johnson’s results at the Apple Store, as
well as his previous success at Target, where he helped build a strong brand

WD)
 Jeff Toister

reputation. J.C. Penney’s board of directors thought Johnson would be able

to work his magic once again and transform a venerable retail brand that had
stagnated in recent years.
Johnson felt J.C. Penney’s culture was stuck in the past. The company
was trying to hang on to tradition instead of evolving to meet its customers’
changing needs. Employees had a transaction mindset, where constant sales,
coupon programs, and other discounts were used to drive revenue. Perhaps
worst of all, Johnson felt the company’s leaders were too slow to take action.
Johnson quickly developed an ambitious plan to completely change J.C.
Penney’s culture.
There were massive layoffs at the corporate office. Johnson brought in
a new executive team, many of whom were former Apple colleagues. One
of those executives was Michael Kramer, who became J.C. Penney’s Chief
Operating Officer. Kramer told the Wall Street Journal, “I hated the J.C.
Penney culture. It was pathetic.”!
Johnson instituted an autocratic decision-making approach that did away
with market research and in-store testing. He announced sweeping changes
based solely on his experience and gut instincts. “We didn’t test at Apple,” said
Johnson to one colleague who questioned him.
“Every initiative we pursue will be guided by our core value to treat cus-
tomers as we would like to be treated—fair and square,” said Johnson. He
scrapped the company’s traditional discounting programs in favor of an every-
day low price approach called Fair and Square Pricing. Millions were invested
in new store layouts and merchandising agreements with popular brands that
he believed would better resonate with J.C. Penney customers.
Johnson also announced plans to create a section in the middle of each
store called the Town Square. The Town Square would replace the cosmetic
counters and accessories found in the center of a typical department store.
Instead, it would feature various services for customers along with monthly
attractions like free haircuts during back-to-school season. Johnson said the
Town Square concept was similar to the Apple Store’s Genius Bar: “Just like
in the Apple Store, you have to walk through the products to get to the Town
Square.”'?

20
 The Service Culture Handbook

There was one huge group of employees who were missing from Johnson’s
bid to overhaul the company culture: store associates. They held tremendous
influence over the success of the company’s widespread changes because they
interacted with customers on a daily basis. An enthusiastic response might
help convince lifelong customers that the changes were positive, while a lack-
luster reception could convince customers to take their business somewhere
else.
The associates largely disliked the changes. Many associates felt frustrated
that they’d had no input into the company’s new direction, and there were
widespread accounts of plummeting morale. One store associate told Business
Insider, “T hate it. I hate the disorder and I hate having my customers give me
that look, that ‘you don’t have any idea what you're doing and I hate this place
and I’m never coming back’ look.”
There was also no change in how associates treated their customers.
Customers who walked into a J.C. Penney store just before Johnson became
CEO in 2011 were likely to have been ignored. The transactional culture in
J.C. Penney stores at the time was largely one of indifference to helping cus-
tomers on the sales floor. Cashiers believed their job was simply ringing up
transactions. Stock associates believed their job was putting stock on the sales
floor and arranging displays. After Johnson took over as CEO, company lead-
ers did nothing to change this behavior, and employees still routinely ignored
their customers.
Johnson’s efforts to transform J.C. Penney ultimately failed. The com-
pany’s stock sank 40 percent in his first full year. Sales plummeted. J.C.
Penney’s rating on the American Customer Satisfaction Index fell from 82
when Johnson took over in late 2011 to 77 in 2013.
Johnson was fired in April 2013.

Wuy BORROWING ANOTHER COMPANY'S CULTURE

Doesn't Work
The software company CIO and Ron Johnson both failed at their culture ini-
tiatives in part because they tried to copy the Apple Store. Their problem was

21
 Jeff Toister

that neither business was comparable to the one they tried to emulate. Each
had products, operations, and employees that were different. Each had its own
unique history. Even their customers were different.
Johnson built a retail operation from the ground up at Apple. At J.C.
Penney, he was trying to change a company that had been in business for over
a hundred years. Its employees already had a collective way of thinking, act-
ing, and understanding the world around them. Johnson completely ignored
this when he tried to sweep away the J.C. Penney culture and unilaterally
impose his own.
Trying to copy another company’s culture is an exercise in futility. Every
organization is unique. There are too many things that vary from company to
company, such as business models, target customers, product line, organiza-
tional history, and even the skills and personalities of the individual employ-
ees who work there.
That doesn’t stop companies from trying to borrow other companies’ cul-
tures. Bookstores are stocked with business books that profile service cultures
at famous companies, including:

* The Nordstrom Way

* The Disney Way
* The Virgin Way
* The Cleveland Clinic Way
* The Southwest Airlines Way

Executives from successful, high-profile companies are fixtures on the cor-

porate speaking circuit. Some companies—such as Disney, Zappos, and The
Ritz Carlton—have even created business seminars designed to show other
companies the inner workings of their unique cultures. These training pro-
grams all offer valuable insights and takeaways. Unfortunately, participants
mistake the training for a paint-by-numbers blueprint.
People buy the books and attend the trainings hoping to capture the mag-
ic that made those famous companies successful. It’s easy to forget that the
principles and business practices described and discussed weren’t developed

22
 The Service Culture Handbook

overnight. Instead, they’re a by-product of the unique cultures these compa-

nies developed over time. Getting to where they are today took an intense
commitment over multiple years.
A book or seminar will not change your culture. It can inspire you. It can
give you ideas. But you still have to put in the work to bring your own orga-
nization’s unique customer-focused culture to life.
Employees often refer to copycat initiatives as a “flavor-of-the-month pro-
gram.” Their company dedicates training and resources to imitate another
company, but it never really sticks. The other company is just too different.
The other culture doesn’t match how this company’s employees actually think,
act, or understand the world around them. The company’s leaders inevitably
lose interest and move on to chase after another fad.
In a typical example, a company sent its executives and mid-level man-
agers to a seminar organized by the Disney Institute. The participants were
impressed with what they learned, but they compared all the lessons to their
own organization’s culture. “That sounds cool, but it would never work for
us,” they thought. By the end of the seminar, the participants had only picked
up a few tactics they thought would work.
They returned to their office and set out to implement the few ideas
they'd selected. What they didn’t understand was that Disney developed
its culture by doing a// of it. These executives were essentially trying to
bake a cake with only half the ingredients listed in the recipe. Failure was
inevitable.

How Emptoyees Get Lost WITHOUT CLEAR

DIRECTION
It’s hard for any corporate initiative to succeed if you don’t first define a suc-
cessful outcome. Yet executives like the software company CIO frequently
struggle to describe what they want their organization’s unique culture to
be like. This makes it nearly impossible to get employees aligned around a
common way of thinking about, acting upon, and understanding customer
service.

75}
 Jeff Toister

In 2013, I did a survey to see how many companies had created a clear
definition of outstanding customer service. As you'll learn in Chapter 3, this
definition forms the basis of a customer-focused culture because it allows
companies to engage their employees in delivering a consistent brand of cus-
tomer service. Only 62 percent of respondents said their organization had
created this definition.
There are several reasons why companies don’t define outstanding service
for their employees. One reason is that it seems self-evident: people know
good and bad service when they see it.
The problem with this thinking is that people tend to have very different
definitions of what constitutes great service. On a company level, outstand-
ing service at the Apple Store is vastly different from outstanding service at
J.C. Penney. Within a company, different departments have different goals
and objectives. Even individual employees have their own ideas and priorities.
Failure to align employees’ collective thinking typically results in inconsistent
customer service.
Some organizations resist creating a customer service vision because they
think of it as a lot of marketing fluff. For example, one company created a
vision statement that was so long it literally covered the entire wall of their
lobby. It was full of impressive-sounding adjectives, but it was also impossible
to decipher. Employees snicker at attempts like this that feel inauthentic.
Yet employees need clear direction so they know what’s expected of them.
Creating a clear definition of outstanding customer service provides this di-
rection, which is critical to creating a customer-focused culture. Chapter 3
gives you step-by-step instructions for developing your customer service vi-
sion. Everything else you do should be based on that vision.
That makes Chapter 3 the most important chapter in this book.

Wat HappENS WHEN CULTURE BECOMES A SIDE

PROJECT
Executives are impatient for results. They look for shortcuts and silver-
bullet solutions. Furthermore, culture initiatives can easily get relegated to

24
 The Service Culture Handbook

side-project status. Many executives feel these initiatives seem mushy and less
easily defined than other activities whose results are simpler to measure.
Here are just a few of the excuses I’ve heard for delaying a culture initiative:

* “We're knee deep in implementing a new computer system right now.”

® “We'd like to work on culture, but we don’t have the budget.”
* “We're focused on employee engagement this year.”

These statements reflect a complete disconnect from what culture really is.
Culture should be guiding these initiatives, not taking a back seat. How you
approach a system upgrade should be influenced by your culture. It doesn’t
take a hefty budget to reorient your culture around serving customers.
Employee engagement is, by definition, a culture initiative.
One Chief Financial Officer told me his company wasn’t ready to focus
on culture because they were working on improving customer experience.
He told me his executive team didn’t see a clear connection between internal
culture and customer experience (what a customer thinks and feels about your
business). Of course, this link is critical since it’s the employees who design
and execute the factors that create customer experience.
Some customer service culture initiatives fail because they don’t have the
appropriate level of executive commitment. A 2015 Harvard Business Review
report revealed that 51 percent of customer-centricity initiatives are led by
someone who isn’t a senior executive.”” The same report found that 64 percent
of these projects lack a dedicated team and budget.
One explanation for this is that many companies feel they’re already cus-
tomer-focused. A 2014 study by Execs in the Know and Digital Roots showed
that 88 percent of companies felt they were generally meeting the needs and
expectations of their customers.
Only 22 percent of customers felt the same way.'°
Another explanation is that companies underestimate the level of time
and resources required to build a customer-focused culture. The CEO of one
organization delegated a culture initiative to a project team made up of sev-
eral mid-level managers. It’s okay to delegate work, but the CEO completely

2)
 Jeff Toister

removed himself from the loop. He assumed the team would keep working on
the project without his involvement.
Those project team members had other responsibilities as part of their
regular jobs. The CEO focused his communication with these managers
on their normal roles and largely ignored the culture project. The initiative
quickly took a back seat to day-to-day work, and ultimately stalled out com-
pletely. Yet the CEO didn’t realize that it was his management that made
culture seem unimportant.
Some companies think they can change their culture just by sending
frontline employees to training. This rarely works. Training can help employ-
ees develop knowledge, skills, or abilities, but while important, these are only
a few of the many factors that influence an employee’s actual performance.
An employee’s attitude, influence from their co-workers, and direction from
their leaders also play pivotal roles. Likewise, policies, procedures, tools, and
resources all impact an employee’s ability to serve customers.
I once facilitated a training class for a small organization. It was supposed
to be an all-hands meeting, but when I arrived, I learned the organization’s
leaders had abruptly decided not to attend. Apparently, they felt they had
more important things to do.
Two employees approached me after the class. Both were near tears. They
told me that they had appreciated the training and learned a lot, but they were
concerned that none of it would make a difference. “The people that really
needed to be here were our bosses,” one of them said. “We really want to serve
our customers, but the leaders around here aren’t committed to it.”
This organization’s leaders sent a clear message to their employees that
day by skipping out on training that was mandatory for everyone else. They
demonstrated that they weren't fully committed. They naively hoped the
training would somehow “fix” their employees when it was really their leader-
ship that needed fixing.
Culture isn’t a side project. It’s a way of doing business that should be
integrated into everything you do, and it needs unmistakable executive spon-
sorship if it’s going to work. Building a strong culture takes time and full
commitment.

26
 The Service Culture Handbook

Chapters 5 through 10 are dedicated to providing step-by-step instruc-

tions for aligning the most critical aspects of your business with your culture.

Way Cutrure Initiatives NEED A FULL COMMITMENT

A client invited me to attend her company’s quarterly employee meeting.
Employees gathered to hear updates from the CEO and other top executives
about financial performance, strategy, key initiatives, and other business is-
sues. The CEO kicked off the meeting by discussing the importance of the
company’s values.
This wasn't unusual. The CEO talked about the company’s values all the
time. They represented the company’s way of doing business, and the CEO
wanted to emphasize their importance. The values described how they wanted
to treat their customers, each other, and even their vendors.
Culture wasn’t just the CEO’s pet project. Every executive at the com-
pany regarded culture as a top priority. They used their culture to guide all
decisions, whether it was spending money, developing strategy, or training em-
ployees. The company’s strategy gradually changed over the years as it grew
and became even more successful, but the CEO and his top executives never
wavered in their full and open commitment to supporting the company’s cul-
ture. In their minds, it was the culture—above everything else—that made
the company successful.
Employees were constantly reminded of the corporate culture. It was em-
bedded in the recruiting process, new hire training, employee development
programs, and employees’ discussions with their managers. Alignment with
corporate culture was assessed during the performance evaluation process.
Culture was baked into policies, procedures, and job descriptions.
Culture was deliberately integrated into every aspect of the job.
The company’s service obsession paid off. Its customers were consistently
delighted, which led to greater loyalty and a lot of word of mouth advertising.
At the same time, its employees were highly engaged in delivering the com-
pany’s unique brand of customer service. Even its vendors embraced the com-
pany’s service culture and worked hard to provide the company with superior

27
 Jeff Toister

value and service. All these factors combined to help the company achieve a
steady growth rate and financial returns well above average.
Their culture emphasized the expectation that they constantly reinforce
the culture. They thought culture was important, acted to make it important,
and understood it was what helped make them successful.
Other organizations may see some short-term improvement, but find it
difficult to sustain a customer-focused culture over the long run.
The wireless communications company Sprint provides an excellent ex-
ample. The company had never really been known for outstanding customer
service, but it sunk to a new low in 2007. That year, it earned a 61 on the
American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), which put it well behind its
major competitors AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. The company lost over
1,000,000 customers that year, including 1,000 customers whose contracts
were infamously terminated for making what the company deemed to be an
excessive number of customer service calls.'”
Dan Hesse was hired as Sprint’s CEO in December 2007 to turn the
company around. He immediately set about re-focusing the company on cus-
tomer service. This included establishing a set of core values to guide employ-
ee behavior, simplifying pricing plans to make them easier for customers to
understand, and making improved customer service a part of every employee’s
compensation plan. The initial results were promising, with Sprint’s ACSI rat-
ing climbing from a low point of 56 in 2008 (just a few months into Hesse’s
tenure) to an industry-leading 72 in 2011.
Remaining at the top proved difficult as other distractions took the focus
away from service. In late 2010, Sprint announced a multi-year, $5 billion plan
to consolidate its existing network of three different wireless technologies into
a single platform.'* In 2012, SoftBank reached an agreement to acquire Sprint
by purchasing 70 percent of its stock. In 2013, Sprint and rival T-Mobile began
negotiating a merger that never materialized. By 2014, Sprint’s ACSI rating
declined down to 68, and its number of retail wireless subscribers decreased 5.6
percent from 2012 to 2014. Hesse left the company by the end of 2014.
A 2013 Towers Watson survey found that only 25 percent of corporate
change initiatives succeed.’” The few companies that do succeed at change

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 The Service Culture Handbook

initiatives do so through culture. As the Towers Watson report points out,

“The best actively build a culture to support and drive behaviors aligned with
their business strategy.”
Building the right culture is simply too much work for most companies.
The few that break through work at it every day. They resist the urge to take
shortcuts, and they stick with the initiative for the long-term. These elite few
companies understand that culture isn’t easy, and they embrace that challenge.
Are you ready for the challenge? Let’s go to Chapter 3 where we'll start
the process.

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 Jeff Toister

NOTEs:
10 Don Reisinger, “Another Apple Win: Retail Sales Per Square Foot,” CNET, August 24,
2011. http://www.cnet.com/news/another-apple-win-retail-sales-per-square-foot/.
11 “Retail Isn’t Broken. Stores Are,” Harvard Business Review, December 2011. https://hbr.
org/2011/12/retail-isnt-broken-stores-are.
12 Dana Mattioli, “For Penney’s Heralded Boss, the Shine Is Off the Apple,” Wall Street
Journal, February 24, 2013.
13 Dana Mattioli, “J.C. Penney Chief Thinks Different,” Wall Street Journal, January 26,
2012.
14 Kim Bhasin, “Inside J.C. Penney: Widespread Fear, Anxiety, And Distrust Of Ron
Johnson And His New Management Team,” Business Insider, February 22, 2013. http://
www.businessinsider.com/inside-jcpenney-2013-2.
15 “Making Customer-Centric Strategies Take Hold.” Harvard Business Review report, 2015.
16 “Supporting the Connected Consumer in a Multi-Channel Environment:
A Comprehensive Survey,” Customer Experience Management Benchmark Series, 2014
Corporate Edition, Execs In the Know and Digital Roots report, February 2015.
17 Tom Ryan, “Sprint Fires Customers,” Retail Wire. June, 2007. https://www.retailwire.
com/discussion/sprint-fires-customers/.
18 “Sprint Announces Network Vision — A Cutting-Edge Network Evolution Plan With
Partners Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Samsung,” Sprint, December 6, 2010. http://newsroom.
sprint.com/news-releases/sprint-announces-network-vision-network-evolution-plan.htm.
19 “Only One-Quarter of Employers Are Sustaining Gains From Change Management
Initiatives, Towers Watson Survey Finds,” Towers Watson, August 29, 2013. https://www.
towerswatson.com/en/Press/2013/08/Only-One-Quarter-of-Employers-A re-Sustaining-Gains-
From-Change-Management.

30
Part 2: Building a Customer-Focused Culture
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 CHAPTER 3

Defining Your Culture

REI’s CUSTOMER SERVICE SAVED CHERYL Strayed’s feet.

In Wild, her bestselling memoir, she chronicles her 1,100-mile solo hike
along the Pacific Crest Trail from California’s Mojave Desert to the Oregon
and Washington border. Halfway through her journey, Strayed developed
constant pain in her feet because her hiking boots were too small. She lost
four toenails from them rubbing against the toe boxes of her boots.
Replacing her hiking boots could have been a major problem. Strayed was
traveling through a remote part of the wilderness and only encountered civili-
zation every few days. Even then, “civilization” typically meant a campground
or small general store where it was unlikely they'd have hiking boots for sale.
Her journey took place in 1995, before you could readily order hiking boots,
camping equipment, or anything else on the Internet. In any event, she didn’t
have enough money to replace the pair she was wearing.
Outdoor gear and apparel retailer REI came to the rescue. Strayed had
purchased the boots from the retailer, and when a fellow hiker reminded her
of its satisfaction guarantee, she called the company to order a replacement
pair in a larger size. The customer service representative agreed to ship them
to her at no charge.
The timing was incredibly fortuitous. After contacting REI, Strayed still
had to hike in her old boots for several days, while her new boots were being
shipped to the next post office along the trail. One day, she took off her old
boots while resting and accidentally knocked one of them down the moun-
tainside. Since the remaining boot was useless by itself, in a fit of frustration,

38
 Jeff Toister

she threw it down the mountain after the first one. Strayed was forced to walk
in camp sandals reinforced with duct tape for the next few days, but she even-
tually received her new boots.
This wasn’t the only way REI’s customer service helped Strayed. She’d
never been backpacking before starting on her trip, so she relied on knowl-
edgeable associates at an REI store to help her get outfitted with the appropri-
ate equipment. Strayed described her encounters with REI employees in her
book: “Every last one of them could talk about gear, and with interest and
nuance, for a length of time that was so dumbfounding that I was ultimately
bedazzled by it.””°
In 2014, Wild was released as a major motion picture starring Reese
Witherspoon. The film stayed true to the story and highlighted REI’s role in
Strayed’s journey without the company having to pay any product placement
fees. It was terrific exposure for REI, introducing moviegoers to the outstand-
ing customer service that millions of its customers already knew so well.
It’s too simplistic to credit REI’s success only to great products and help-
ful associates. At the heart of all that REI does so well is a customer-focused
culture that helps people like Cheryl Strayed enjoy the outdoors.

How REI Provipes EMPLOYEES WITH A CLEAR VISION

One piece of equipment Strayed acquired at REI was a compass. She used it
to help find her way when the trail wasn’t clear.
REI employees have a different sort of compass. The REI mission state-
ment exemplifies a collective way of thinking that points employees in the
right direction when taking action to serve customers: We inspire, educate and
outfit for a lifetime of outdoor adventure and stewardship.
This mission is evident throughout the entire company. Associates are
knowledgeable about their products because they're typically inspired to ex-
plore the outdoors themselves. In fact, many loyal customers get part-time
jobs at REI because they want the employee discount.
REI educates its customers on how to safely tackle new adventures by offer-
ing classes on a wide variety of topics such as hiking, climbing, and kayaking.

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 The Service Culture Handbook

Policies—such as the 100 percent satisfaction guarantee—are crafted to make

it easy for people to get outfitted with the right equipment. The company also
invests a great deal of time and money into natural conservation efforts as part
of its commitment to environmental stewardship.
REI’s mission statement is an example of what I call a customer service
vision: a statement that clearly defines the quality of customer service em-
ployees are expected to provide. The statement is the foundation upon which
a customer-focused culture is formed because it describes a collective way for
employees to think about their customers, act to provide outstanding service,
and understand how service enables the organization to succeed.
A customer service vision can take many forms. It might be the com-
pany’s mission statement, like REI, or a customer service guarantee, like
Rackspace’s Fanatical Support Promise. It might be a corporate vision state-
ment, a set of company values, a customer service slogan, or an internal guide
for employees.
What’s important is that the customer service vision provides clarity on
how to serve customers.
Having a clear customer service vision is a common theme among com-
panies whose employees are obsessed with delivering outstanding customer
service. Here are just a few examples from companies with strong customer-
focused cultures that you'll learn about later in this book:

* Shake Shack (Chapter 5): Stand For Something Good

* Publix (Chapter 7): Where Shopping Is a Pleasure
® Safelite AutoGlass (Chapter 9): Achieve extraordinary results by looking
at our business through the eyes of our customers and making it easy for
them to do business with us and ensuring their experience is memorable.

Note that these definitions are all different. Outstanding customer service at
a retail store that sells outdoor gear isn’t the same as that provided by a fast
casual restaurant, a grocery store, or a windshield repair company. There isn’t
one customer service vision that’s right for every organization. You need some-
thing unique to your organization.

gD
 Jeff Toister

Perhaps you're not the CEO or owner of a company, but that doesn’t mean
you can’t create a customer-focused culture within your own area of respon-
sibility. Business units, locations, and even individual teams can each create
their own customer service vision.
The Center for Sustainable Energy is a nonprofit organization that fa-
cilitates clean energy projects for consumers, businesses, and governments.
One example is California's Clean Vehicle Rebate Project (CVRP). The State
of California provides a rebate for the purchase of zero-emission and plug-in
hybrid vehicles. The Center for Sustainable Energy administers the rebate
program on behalf of the state.
The customer service team that supports the CVRP has its own customer
service vision: Make it easy to join the clean vehicle movement. This vision aligns
with the organization’s overall mission statement: Accelerating the transition
to a sustainable world powered by clean energy. Having a separate-but-aligned
team vision gives the CVRP team specific focus and direction about what
they're trying to do for their customers.
Jennifer Rey is the Senior Operations Manager overseeing the CVRP. She
uses the department’s vision statement to continuously emphasize the impor-
tance of customer service with her team. It guides the way employees interact
with customers, how the application process is designed, and even the design
of the rebate application website. “It has to permeate through everything that
you do,” Rey explained.
One example of this is a video her team made to educate automotive
dealers on the clean vehicle rebate process. Customers often learn details
about the rebate program from the salesperson who sold them their vehicle,
so it’s important for salespeople to provide clear and accurate information.
The training video makes it easy for the CVRP team to deliver a consistent
message to the large network of dealers selling vehicles that qualify for a
rebate.
Culture needs to be clearly defined, whether it’s in a large company with
thousands of employees or a single team within a small nonprofit. As we dis-
cussed in Chapter 2, employees can get lost if they don’t have a shared cus-
tomer service vision or the vision isn’t clear.

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 The Service Culture Handbook

Wat Can Happen WHEN THERE'S No CLEar VISION

Chances are that your company already has something that could be consid-
ered a customer service vision. There might be a mission statement, a list of
core values, or a set of service standards. Perhaps your organization has several
of these. However, none of them define your company or team culture unless
employees can consistently point to one clear message that guides how they
serve customers.
One restaurant chain wanted to create a customer-focused culture, but it
gave its servers too much to think about. There was a mission statement, an
internal service slogan, a set of four service standards, and a 17-step service
procedure for serving every guest. All these elements pointed to outstanding
customer service, but each sent a slightly different message.
These elements can be called cultural artifacts. A cultural artifact is any
statement, symbol, or physical item that helps define an organization’s cul-
ture. A challenge occurs when an organization has multiple cultural artifacts
that don’t provide a single direction.
The bevy of cultural artifacts at the restaurant chain created confusion
for the servers. Should they focus on the mission, which prioritized creating a
great guest experience? Or should they follow their 17-step service procedure,
which prioritized consistency and upselling?
I was asked to give a presentation about developing a customer-focused
culture at the company’s leadership retreat. The senior leadership team and
the chain’s store managers were all gathered in the room. | displayed a list of
all their cultural artifacts and asked, “Which of these is the most important?”
At first, there was silence. Nobody knew the answer because it was some-
thing they’d never talked about. Until that moment, these leaders had looked
at each cultural artifact individually, but never all together. They suddenly
realized why servers were frequently confused about the best way to serve their
guests.
The CEO fidgeted uncomfortably in his seat. It’s not easy being a leader
when your entire team suddenly sees a glaring blind spot in the corporate
strategy. But once that blind spot comes to light, it’s an important aspect of
leadership courage to acknowledge and address the issue head-on.

By
 Jeff Toister

The CEO turned to the group and asked them to weigh in on which of
the cultural artifacts was the priority. As they talked, it became evident that
the mission statement resonated most strongly with the leadership team. The
group eventually determined that statement should serve as the customer ser-
vice vision, emphasized over everything else.
This meeting led to some important changes. The restaurant chain pared
down its 17-step service procedure to just 10 steps. It aligned the service pro-
cedure with the mission statement so the two sent a consistent message. And it
integrated the service slogan and service standards into the service procedure
itself, so the servers had fewer cultural artifacts to keep in mind.
Many organizations have multiple cultural artifacts that have no real
meaning to employees. They have mission statements, vision statements,
corporate values, and brand slogans that send conflicting messages or are
written in such unclear language that employees don’t understand them.
Individual departments have their own service slogans and standards, and
these don’t always align with their corporate counterparts. Employees in
these organizations naturally became confused as to what’s really most
important.
A good customer service vision creates clarity, not confusion. It’s okay
to have multiple cultural artifacts, but they should all support a single over-
arching customer service vision that serves as the primary definition of your
culture. Employees at all levels of the organization, from the CEO to the front
lines, need to have agreement on what their organization’s culture stands for.

How To CreaTE A CUSTOMER SERVICE VISION

Many companies over-engineer the process of creating their customer service
vision. Expensive consultants are hired to spend months conducting research
and writing drafts before presenting their recommendations to senior leaders
at an executive retreat. The final product is inevitably so convoluted or out of
touch with reality that it fails to resonate with employees.
It doesn’t have to be that way. A simple, straightforward approach usually
works better. There are three steps to creating a customer service vision. The

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first is gathering input from all stakeholders. The second is writing the vision
itself. The third step is validating the vision statement with key stakeholders.
Let’s take a closer look at each.

STEP 1: GATHER INPUT

Creating a customer service vision shouldn't be an autocratic process driven
by a few executives. You want the vision to feel right to employees if it’s going
to guide their behavior. Therefore, you need to include them in the process.
Here are examples of employee groups you might want to include:

* Frontline Employees
* Middle Management
® Senior Executives

If you're creating a vision for a team or department, you might have a different
set to consider:

* Employees on your team

* Your boss
* Key partners in other departments

Customers are the one group you shouldn’t consult in this process because this
is a future-focused exercise. This may seem counterintuitive, but customers
are notoriously bad at telling you what they want. You'll get their input later,
when you ask for feedback on how well you're executing the customer service
vision.
Once you've identified the stakeholder groups from whom you want in-
put, it’s time to gather data. Modern technology makes this easy. You can use
an online survey, an internal chat program, or even old-fashioned email.
Even large corporations use this process. In 2003, IBM rewrote its cor-
porate values by holding an online forum that gave every employee the op-
portunity to contribute their perspective. An estimated 50,000 employees

BY)
 Jeff Toister

participated from around the world, and the massive discussion generated
nearly 10,000 comments. The entire event took place over a span ofjust 72
hours.”
When I help my clients create a customer service vision, I usually gather
stakeholder input with an online survey. It’s a fast, easy, and inexpensive way
to gather data from a large group of people. I use Survey Monkey (www.sur-
veymonkey.com), but there are many other survey programs available.
You can capture everyone’s input with just one open-ended question:
What would you like customers to think of when they think about the service we
provide?
The question allows participants to weigh in using their own words. This
approach provides a lot of unstructured data in the form of their comments,
but it’s actually very easy to analyze. I use a text analytics program to create
a word cloud, which is a visual depiction of the written comments. The most
commonly used words are large and bold, while infrequently used words are
less prominent.
Premium Survey Monkey users have access to a word cloud feature, but
there are other free word-cloud programs available. One example is Wordle,
which allows you to create a word cloud in just a few minutes. You can see
some examples and create your own word cloud for free at www.wordle.net.
The word cloud provides a quick visualization of the organization’s collec-
tive thinking around customer service. For example, when I worked with the
Center for Sustainable Energy to create its customer service vision, the three
most prominent words in its word cloud were friendly, like, and helpful. When
the group wrote its customer service vision, members of the group discussed
these words and why they were important. A consensus quickly emerged: they
wanted customers to picture the organization as a friendly person who was
so helpful that customers would actually like the process of buying a clean
vehicle. That discussion led to what became the organization’s final vision
statement: Make it easy to join the clean vehicle movement. (You can see the
team’s word cloud here: http://bit.ly/1PpxPSz.)
It’s also important to gather examples of existing cultural artifacts rel-
evant to customer service. This may include a company mission statement,

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 The Service Culture Handbook

vision, values, customer service slogan, or service standards. These will be

helpful guides when it comes time to write the customer service vision. If
youre writing a customer service vision for an individual team or department,
having these cultural artifacts handy will help you align what you create with
the organization’s overall culture. In some cases, such as the restaurant chain
I mentioned earlier, an existing artifact might be chosen to become the cus-
tomer service vision.

STEP 2: WRITING THE VISION

The next step in creating a customer service vision is to convene a meeting to
draft the statement.
You'll accomplish two things in this meeting. The first is the actual writ-
ing of the customer service vision; the second is clearly articulating what the
vision means through illustrative examples.
I’ve found through trial and error that the optimal group size for this
meeting is seven to 10 people. With more than that, it’s too hard to integrate
everyone's opinion while you're word-smithing; with fewer, you won't include
enough perspectives.
The composition of the group is also important. It should include a repre-
sentative sample of all levels of the organization, including at least one frontline
customer service employee. This will help ensure that multiple perspectives
are represented. I’ve facilitated this exercise many times where a frontline em-
ployee has made an important contribution that never would have dawned on
a mid-level or senior-level leader.
The meeting should last no more than two hours. This is enough time
to write the customer service vision statement while giving people just a little
bit of tire pressure. Limiting the time causes people to go with their gut and
avoid overthinking. This is desirable for writing a customer service vision be-
cause we want it to immediately resonate with employees when they read it.
Figure 3.1 is a sample meeting agenda. You can download the agenda
from The Service Culture Handbook to help write your own vision by visiting
www.serviceculturebook.com/tools.

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 Jeff Toister

Figure 3.1 Customer Service Vision Writing Agenda

Time: 2 hours

— . Clarify objectives.
* Write a customer service vision statement (share examples)
* Identify illustrative examples
2. Review data.
* Review survey data (i.e., word cloud)
* Review existing cultural artifacts (mission, vision, etc.)
3. Draft vision.
Split into two teams
Each team drafts a vision statement (15 minutes)
Share drafts and compare
Edit down to one draft
ie
IS)
Se
ES
WD Gut check with the group:
1. Is the customer service vision simple and easily understood?
2. Is it focused on customers?
3. Does it reflect both who we are now and who we aspire to be
in the future?
4, Capture examples.
* Identify illustrative stories that exemplify employees living the
vision

The first step in the meeting is to clarify the purpose of the meeting: to write
a customer service vision statement and identify illustrative examples that help ex-
plain what the vision means. Be sure to share a few examples of good customer
service vision statements from other companies, so participants have an idea
of what the end result should look like. (You can find examples from REI,
Shake Shack, Publix, and Safelite AutoGlass earlier in this chapter, and more
examples throughout the rest of this book.)
The second step is to review the data you've gathered. I typically do
this by sharing the word cloud representing all the survey results, plus any

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 The Service Culture Handbook

existing cultural artifacts pertaining to customer service. We spend just a

few minutes as a group discussing our general impressions of the input. (To
save time, you may want to share this information with the group prior to
the meeting.)
The third step in the meeting is to draft the customer service vision state-
ment. Some organizations already have something that could pass for a cus-
tomer service vision statement; if you have something like this, start there. As
a group, compare the existing statement to the feedback collected to see if it’s a
match. If so, keep it. If it’s close, but not quite there, modify it. If the existing
artifact isn’t a great match, set it aside and start from scratch. (In my experi-
ence, nine times out of ten the group decides to start from scratch.)
Writing even a simple statement is difficult when there are too many opin-
ions involved. To counteract this, divide the group into two teams of three to
five people. Give them 15 minutes to draft a vision statement reflecting the
input gathered from key stakeholders.
A good customer service vision statement follows these three guidelines:

1. It’s simple and easily understood.

2. It’s focused on customers.
3. It reflects both who you are now and who you aspire to be in the
future.

Let’s pause for a moment and look once again at REI’s mission statement,
which is also its customer service vision. We inspire, educate and outfit for a
lifetime of outdoor adventure and stewardship. Notice how it fulfills the three
criteria: it’s simple and direct; it’s implicitly customer-focused, even though
the word “customer” isn’t mentioned; and it’s an accurate depiction of who
REI is now in addition to being an aspiration for the future.
Okay, let’s get back to the writing. Sometimes, groups will finish in
less than 15 minutes, but don’t let them go longer; time pressure sharpens
their thinking. Once both groups have finished, ask them to write their
drafts on a piece of flip chart paper or a white board so you can view both
simultaneously.

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 Jeff Toister

At this point, let the group take a short break: a five-minute pause lets
everyone clear their minds, use the restroom if needed, and refill their coffee
or water. Ask them not to work on the vision statement while they're taking
their break; you want their subconscious brain to take over. Taking a short
break allows the participants’ strongest thoughts and feelings to percolate to
the surface, versus overthinking the process.
When you reconvene, try to reconcile the two team’s statements. One way
to start is by asking members of one team to describe what they like about
the other team’s statement. (This is a brainstorming exercise, so don’t discuss
what’s wrong with it!) Then the other team gets to describe what they like
about the first team’s statement.
Invariably, a few key themes emerge. Sometimes, it’s just a key word or
two that both groups feel are important. Help the groups combine the best
aspects of both drafts until you're able to edit the two drafts down to one
clear, simple statement.
Then step back and do a final assessment to see if the statement resonates.
You know you've achieved your goal if the entire group is excited that the cus-
tomer service vision accurately describes the type of service they'd like to deliver.
You still have work to do if anyone is uncertain. Even a lone voice of dis-
sent can signal that something’s not quite right. I’ve often seen groups discover
a weakness in their vision statement because a single person played the role
of devil’s advocate. If this happens, keep making adjustments until the vision
statement clicks with the whole group.
The final step is to develop illustrative examples. These are anecdotes
that clearly define behaviors that are aligned with the customer service vi-
sion. Later, when you share the vision with the entire organization (or team,
department, etc.), the examples will help individuals understand how they can
contribute. (We'll cover that part of the process in Chapter 4.)
The examples should be true stories because focusing on what people have
already done helps anchor the authenticity of your vision statement. In my
experience, if the customer service vision statement is an accurate reflection of
the culture, the group never has difficulty coming up with multiple examples.

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STEP 3: VALIDATING THE VISION

The final step in the process is to validate the vision with key stakeholders.
This involves sharing that vision with people who weren't part of the writing
process to get their reaction.
There are two important reasons for doing this. The first is that the group
that wrote the customer service vision statement is susceptible to group think,
a phenomenon where group members naturally start thinking alike in a sub-
conscious effort to preserve harmony. Validating the customer service vision
with a larger group of stakeholders helps ensure that it clearly resonates with
people who didn’t write it.
The second reason for getting a reaction from key stakeholders is that
these are the people who will help achieve buy-in from the rest of the or-
ganization. For example, the vision needs enthusiastic support from senior
executives since their actions have a significant impact on organizational
culture.
Here are a few groups to consider for an organization-wide initiative:

# Senior executives (especially the CEO)

* Junior executives
* Influential departments
* Long-term employees

You may also want to consult union leaders if your employees work under a
collective bargaining agreement.
There are multiple ways to engage stakeholders.

* You can accomplish this via one-on-one or small group meetings, es-
pecially with busy people like senior executives.
* You can hold focus groups, town hall meetings, or department meet-
ings to share the customer service vision.
* If your group is particularly large, you can use a survey to get input
from your stakeholders.

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 Jeff Toister

This process is much simpler if you're creating a customer service vision for
a single team, department, or business unit. It’s easy to share the vision with
everyone on the team to get their reaction.
You'll know whether your customer service vision is on target if it receives
enthusiastic support. Ideally, you want people to read the statement for the
first time and think “Yes! That’s us!
»

A lukewarm reception generally means there’s something that doesn’t

fully click with employees, which does occasionally happen. If this happens
to you, take time to carefully consider the feedback you receive. Think about
what adjustments you can make to resolve their concerns. The solution is of-
ten as simple as changing one or two words in the statement to get it just right.
In rare cases, you may need to reconvene the vision writing team to produce
another draft.
Once you've finalized your customer service vision, you're ready to share
it with the entire organization (or team, department, etc.). This gives everyone
clear and consistent guidance on how your organization wants its customers
to be served. It will become the cornerstone of your customer-focused culture.
We'll cover how to do that in Chapter 4.

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NOTEs:
20 Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (New York: Vintage
Books, 2013).
21 Paul Hemp and Thomas Stewart, “Leading Change When Business Is Good,”
Harvard Business Review, December 2004. https://hbr.org/2004/12/leading-change-when-
business-is-good.

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 CHAPTER 4

Engaging Employees with Your Culture

IN 2016, JETBLUE Arrways was honored as the top-rated airline for the 12"
consecutive year in global market research company J.D. Power’s North
American Airline rankings. The airline also led all airlines on the American
Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) for the fourth straight year. This puts
JetBlue’s customer satisfaction ahead of even the iconic Southwest Airlines.
Leading a competitive industry in customer service for 12 straight years is
an astonishing feat. A company has to consistently do a lot right just to lead
the pack for one year, let alone for multiple years in a row.
JetBlue regularly does many things that delight its customers. For in-
stance, the airline offers the most legroom in its economy class of any airline.”
Passengers can access free in-flight television and free internet on most aircraft.
JetBlue is also known for its friendly, caring, and helpful employees, whose
consistency in serving customers has helped cement its reputation as a customer
service leader.
It shouldn’t be surprising that JetBlue’s CEO, Robin Hayes, credits the
company’s culture for its success. “JetBlue’s distinctive culture is a key com-
petitive advantage. Our 18,000 crewmembers are highly engaged, proud to
work for JetBlue and provide outstanding customer service on a daily basis.
They truly Inspire Humanity.”
JetBlue has numerous initiatives and programs aimed at helping its em-
ployees engage with the culture. This tremendous level of engagement is a
big part of why JetBlue employees are so obsessed with consistently delivering
outstanding service—and why it earned a Top 10 ranking on Forbes’s 2016

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 The Service Culture Handbook

list of America’s Best Employers. “Our people are the heart of the special
culture that we cherish,” said Hayes. “Our customers feel that—and it’s what
they love about JetBlue.”

How JeTBiue EncacEs Its EMPLOYEES

An engaged employee is someone who is purposefully contributing to organi-
zational success. This is more elusive than you might think.
Before employees can be engaged with providing outstanding customer ser-
vice, they must first understand the organization’s customer service vision and
how they can contribute. A 2013 study by the employee engagement consulting
firm BlessingWhite found that the number one employee engagement driver
was “greater clarity about what the organization needs me to do—and why.”
Employees also need to be committed to actually achieving the company’s
customer service vision. It’s not enough for them to merely complete their as-
signed tasks; they must buy in to the company culture. Engaged employees
regularly look beyond their job description to see how they can make a differ-
ence for their customers.
The company’s customer service vision consists of its mission statement,
Inspire Humanity, and its five core values: safety, caring, integrity, passion, and
fun. In a time when many airline passengers feel like livestock being herded
into an uncomfortable plane by gruff and uncaring employees, JetBlue’s cus-
tomer service vision emphasizes connecting with its customers on a human-
to-human level. The airline does much to ensure that its employees, called
crewmembers, understand the company’s customer service vision and are
committed to helping achieve it.
JetBlue is careful to hire people who reflect its culture. In 2015, the com-
pany hired only five percent of the more than 140,000 people who applied to
work there. Job applicants learn about the JetBlue culture during the screen-
ing process, and are selected in part for their compatibility with the customer
service vision.
Once they’re hired, the airline provides crewmembers with extensive train-
ing to ensure that they understand the business and know what's expected. All

49
 Jeff Toister

JetBlue crewmembers attend a two-day orientation program that introduces

new hires to JetBlue’s culture and its core business strategies, so they know
right up front how they can contribute. Crewmembers also receive specialized
training for their individual role (flight attendant, gate agent, etc.), as well as
ongoing training that reinforces the importance of the customer service vision
and the company’s strategic priorities.
The company makes a concerted effort to seek input from crewmembers
on managing the business. Executive leaders visit JetBlue locations every quar-
ter to discuss business updates with crewmembers in person, and the company
conducts both annual and monthly engagement surveys to solicit crewmem-
ber feedback on the quality of their working experience.
JetBlue also has six Values Committees that provide guidance on work-
place policies. Each Values Committee represents a different group of em-
ployees (airport operations, flight attendants, pilots, etc.), and committees are
comprised of crewmembers elected by their peers. The committees influence
company policies, work with executive leadership to resolve workplace chal-
lenges, and help support company culture.°
JetBlue’s individual leaders play a pivotal role in keeping crewmembers en-
gaged with the /nspire Humanity vision. Laurie Meacham, who leads JetBlue’s
Social Media, Customer Commitment, and Corporate Recovery Specialist
teams, provides a great example. Her teams assist passengers via social media
and email, and help resolve passenger complaints that require coordination
across multiple departments. She emphasizes the JetBlue culture in nearly ev-
erything she does as a leader.
Her teams primarily work remotely out of home offices, but Meacham
keeps everyone connected through daily briefings. She also brings her teams
together once a quarter for a face-to-face meeting, so people can stay con-
nected on a more personal level while strengthening their commitment to the
culture.”It’s really important to have regular touch points,” said Meacham. “If
you don’t encourage touch points, you risk cultural drift.”
Crewmembers also acknowledge each other for outstanding ser-
vice through a peer-to-peer recognition program. “We like to give shout
outs to the team,’ Meacham explained. Sharing frequent feedback helps

50
 The Service Culture Handbook

crewmembers take responsibility for maintaining the culture amongst their

colleagues.
Meacham encourages these interactions between crewmembers because
building relationships is a big part of JetBlue’s Jnspire Humanity culture. “It’s
walking the talk,” said Meacham. “We need to do the same thing for our
crewmembers that we do for our customers.”
This translates to a,;company that’s known for connecting with its custom-
ers. For example, some customers are such aviation enthusiasts that they regu-
larly track individual planes in JetBlue’s network. When a passenger posted a
picture of a particular plane on JetBlue’s Facebook page and asked, “Why is this
aircraft in San Salvador?” the crewmember who responded knew the details
would be important. The crewmember took the time to research the answer,
even contacting other departments, before responding. These little details may
seem trivial, but they’re hugely important to the person who asked the question.
A highly-engaged workforce is a common theme among organizations
with customer-focused cultures. Rackspace employees call themselves Rackers
because they’re passionate about delivering Fanatical Service. REI employees
join the company because they’re active people who enjoy sharing their enthu-
siasm for the outdoors with others. Employees at the Center for Sustainable
Energy tend to drive fuel efficient cars and carpool to work because they’re
personally committed to the organization’s mission.
Some organizations overlook the importance of employee engagement
because many of the people who serve their customers are not company em-
ployees. A fast food chain might consist of independently-owned franchises.
A start-up consumer products company might outsource its contact center. A
furniture store might contract a delivery company to deliver furniture to its
customers.
Major League Soccer’s Chicago Fire provides an excellent example of
how to engage employees who serve your customers, but don’t actually work
for your company. Their customer service vision is: To Create the Friendliest,
Cleanest & Most Enjoyable Fan Experience in Major League Soccer. In sports,
the outcome of a match has a big impact on the fan’s experience, but there
are other factors, too. Nicolette Trobaugh, the Fire’s Director of Fan Services,

51
 Jeff Toister

says, “We really try to focus on every other aspect of the game to make it the
best experience possible.”
Most of the people who serve fans at a Chicago Fire match don’t actually
work for the soccer club. The concessions are run by a contractor who uses a
combination of employees and volunteers to serve guests. The stadium itself
is owned and managed by the Village of Bridgeview, the town just outside
Chicago where the stadium is located. Trobaugh has only a small internal
team of employees to help ensure everyone serving guests is delivering a con-
sistent experience.
One factor is making sure staff members are well informed so they can
quickly and accurately answer questions and offer assistance. On game days,
a member of Trobaugh’s team patrols the stadium and quizzes employees on
product knowledge, asking questions ranging from the Fire’s customer service
standards (called Fire Fundamentals) to specific information about that day’s
match. Employees who correctly answer five out of five questions are given a
special chip. Once an employee collects five chips, they can redeem them for
Fire merchandise.
The on-the-spot recognition element is key to this program’s success.
“Nobody likes to be quizzed,” says Trobaugh, “but people get competitive
when they know they can win a prize.” During the 2015 season, more than
50 employees were quizzed at each match with 99 percent of them answering
five out of five questions correctly.
Another way the Fire leverages informal communication to improve ser-
vice is through something called Spark Training. This is a short, pre-shift
training session that’s focused on helping a specific department (conces-
sions, parking, etc.) address a particular problem. Trobaugh and her team
comb through guest survey results to find trends they can address with Spark
Training. They use the training to help the vendor “spark” an immediate
improvement in that area.
Organizations like JetBlue and the Chicago Fire work hard to develop
an engaged workforce. Leaders in these companies understand their success
hinges on getting employees to understand and commit to the customer-fo-
cused culture.

DZ
 The Service Culture Handbook

Numerous studies have linked employee engagement to a better-quali-

ty of customer service. For example, Gallup’s 2013 State of the American
Workplace Report revealed that companies with highly-engaged employees
averaged customer satisfaction ratings that were 10 percent higher than com-
panies with a disengaged workforce.””

Wuat Can Happen Ir You Don’t ENGAGE YouR

EMPLOYEES
A lack of employee engagement causes many problems. Companies struggle
to provide consistent service when there isn’t a shared customer service vision.
Employees are less likely to go the extra mile to serve a customer when they
aren't committed to their organization’s success. And talented people are more
likely to leave a company when they don’t feel passionate about the culture.
One organization embarked on an employee engagement initiative de-
signed to get employees to commit to the organization’s goal of being the
best in its industry. Unfortunately, a series of missteps by senior leaders led to
disengaged employees and declining service quality.
One problem was the overall approach. They hired a consulting firm to
conduct an employee engagement survey. Cross-functional committees were
then formed to study the survey results and recommend improvements to
the executive team. This became a bureaucratic process that dragged on for
months, with few changes ever being implemented. Even worse, employees
weren't surveyed again until 18 months later to see if engagement had im-
proved. By then, many of the employees who had participated in the first
survey had left.
Meanwhile, the organization experienced massive budget cuts and layofts.
An initiative designed to help the organization create a customer-focused cul-
ture was put on hold and then cancelled due to lack of funding. Employees
were now being asked to achieve the same results with fewer resources, and
became frustrated and disillusioned with what they saw as unreasonable ex-
pectations from senior leaders. Service quality declined as experienced em-
ployees left the organization.

28
 Jeff Toister

Organizations struggle to engage their employees with a customer-focused

culture for three reasons.
The first is that a customer service vision has not been clearly delineated,
or employees aren’t aware of it. Employees can’t make a purposeful contribu-
tion if the organization hasn't sufficiently defined success and then shared
that definition.
The second reason is that employees’ commitment hasn’t been secured.
Amazingly, many organizations aren't even trying to engage their employees.
A 2015 study from the consulting firm Deloitte found that just 28 percent of
respondents agree that their organization had an up-to-date employee engage-
ment strategy.”®
The third reason companies struggle with employee engagement is that
senior leaders themselves aren’t fully committed. Some companies just focus
on engaging new employees, which can result in the more tenured employees
becoming disengaged. A 2015 study by the employee engagement software
provider Quantum Workplace found that employees who have been on the
job for three to five years are 17 percent less engaged than employees who are
still in their first year with the company.”
Deloitte’s 2015 survey revealed that engaging employees with the cor-
porate culture was the most important human resources challenge faced by
organizations around the world. The same study found that less than half of
the participants felt their companies were ready to address the issue.
Many companies treat their employee engagement efforts like a side proj-
ect rather than an essential part of their business. A typical organization ap-
proaches engagement by administering an organizational climate survey to
employees every 12 to 18 months. These surveys look at core drivers of job
satisfaction, but often don’t assess the two essential elements of engagement:

1. Does the employee understand the customer service vision?

2. Is the employee committed to helping achieve it?

Conducting a survey only every 12 to 18 months makes it difficult to en-

act meaningful changes or assess the effectiveness of whatever improvements

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 The Service Culture Handbook

are attempted. Most companies following this model appoint a committee to

study the results and make recommendations to the executive team. It typi-
cally becomes a long, drawn-out bureaucratic process where few changes or
improvements are actually implemented.
Engaging employees isn’t for the faint of heart. It requires a lot of work
and commitment that many leaders aren’t prepared for. But if you're up for it,
you can use the following step-by-step plan to get there.

How To ENGAGE YouR EMPLOYEES

There are three major steps to getting your employees to commit to a customer-
focused culture:

1. The initial roll-out of your customer service vision.

2. Reinforcing your vision.
3. Assessing employee engagement levels.

Each of these steps is essential to engaging employees, whether your focus is

on the entire workforce or an individual team within an organization.

STEP 1: ROLLING OuT YouR CUSTOMER SERVICE VISION

This step begins with the assumption that you've already created a cus-
tomer service vision that clearly defines the level of service your employees
are expected to provide. You can’t engage your employees without this
unambiguous statement of purpose, so it’s an important starting point.
(You'll find a step-by-step guide for creating a customer service vision in
Chapter 3.)
With your vision in place, the first step to getting your employees to com-
mit to it is to develop a communication plan for introducing it to the entire
organization (or individual team, department, or location if that’s the scope
of your initiative). Start by creating a goal for developing this plan, and then
work backwards to determine how you can accomplish it.

>)
 Jeff Toister

Your communication goal should be to ensure that all employees can an-
swer three specific questions about the customer service vision:

1. What is it?
2. What does it mean?
3. How do I personally contribute?

You should, of course, know the answers to these questions yourself before
designing your communication plan. If you haven’t done this already, now is a
good time to create an answer key. The answer key should outline the types of
answers youd expect to see, rather than required verbatim responses. It’s actu-
ally best if employees answer these questions in their own words; this isn’t an
exercise in memorization. What’s important is that employees understand the
customer service vision and know how to use it to guide their performance.
Creating an answer key for the third question can be tricky because em-
ployees in different roles, departments, or locations generally make different
contributions to customer service. For example, imagine a restaurant that strives
to provide a comfortable, family-friendly experience for guests. The hosts might
say they contribute by making families feel welcome. The servers might say they
ensure families have an enjoyable experience during their meal. Bussers might
say they keep tables clean and glasses filled so families remain comfortable.
The cooks might say they prepare delicious meals so families enjoy dining out
without having to wait too long. All of these answers tie back to an overarching
theme, but in each instance, they’re also tied to the employee’s specific role.
Once you've created your answer key, identify a communication plan to
ensure employees know the answers. There’s no single best way to commu-
nicate your customer service vision. Your specific plan will depend on how
many employees you need to reach, where they’re located, and what commu-
nication systems your company already has in place. There are many ways to
do this, but here are a few examples:

* Have the CEO announce the customer service vision in a company-

wide communication.

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 The Service Culture Handbook

Leverage existing communication vehicles, such as internal chat pro-

grams, email, employee newsletters, bulletin boards, and intranet
sites.
Produce a short video that explains the customer service vision.
(You can see a great example from Rackspace here: https://youtu.be/
WhhpzZW XBk8)
Create signs, posters, and job aids to distribute to various parts of the
company.
Develop a short training program to introduce the customer service
vision to employees.
Conduct a train-the-trainer session for organizational leaders, so
they'll know how to introduce the customer service vision to their
teams in a consistent way.
Ask team leaders to meet with their employees as a team or one-on-
one to discuss the customer service vision.

A good communication plan includes both variety and repetition.

You want to communicate through a variety of methods so you capture
your audience’s attention and they don’t tune you out. And you should repeat
the same message through each of those communication methods because
repetition is the key to anchoring new ideas into long-term memory.
You can download a communication plan worksheet at www.servicecul-
turebook.com/tools. Figure 4.1 is a sample communication plan from a mid-
sized software company I worked with.

Figure 4.1: Customer Service Vision Communication Plan

Phase One: Announcement

AS Share the customer service vision via company-wide communication
from the CEO
B. Reinforce the vision via messaging from the corporate communica-
tions department
Display the vision on signage and posters at all company locations

By
 Jeff Toister

Phase Two: Initial Training

D. Hold town hall-style kick-off meetings at each location to discuss the
vision
E. Create one-page job aids to distribute to all employees
F. Provide employees with mugs, t-shirts, and other items to support the
vision

Phase Three: In-Depth Training

G. Integrate the customer service vision into existing customer service
training programs
H. Have managers follow up with employees after the training to observe
them using the vision to guide their daily work
I. Integrate the vision into an existing employee feedback form used by
managers to coach employees on their performance

The communication plan helped ensure all the software company’s employees
understood the customer service vision and how they contributed. This trans-
lated to higher engagement levels, where employees understood what made
the company successful and took the initiative to solve pressing customer ser-
vice challenges on their own without prompting from their managers.

STEP 2: REINFORCING THE CULTURE

Many customer-focus initiatives fail when there’s a big rollout with a lot
of fanfare but no plan to sustain it. Slowly but surely the initiative fades
from employees’ memories as they’re consumed with daily tasks and work
assignments.
The way to avoid this problem is by continuously reinforcing the culture
with employees long after the initial rollout, consistently reminding them of
the customer service vision and fostering employee commitment.
Just like the rollout communication plan, there’s no one-size-fits-all solu-
tion. The size of your organization, your existing culture, and whether you're
engaging an entire company or an individual team all have an impact on how

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 The Service Culture Handbook

you approach ongoing reinforcement. What matters is that you create rein-
forcement programs that are right for your situation.
For example, let’s recap some of the ways JetBlue reinforces its customer-
focused culture with crewmembers:

* Reinforcement messages from the CEO in corporate communications.

® Quarterly in-person business updates from executive leaders.
# Values Committees that support and reinforce the culture.
* A peer-to-peer program where crewmembers recognize their
co-workers.
* Leaders like Laurie Meacham who model the culture on a daily basis.

Companies with highly-engaged employees often use the performance evalu-

ation process to reinforce the culture. Employees receive feedback on behav-
iors that align with the culture, as well as suggestions for improvement. In
some organizations, the performance review process helps ensure employees
are championing the culture before they can be considered for a promotion.
No matter how much coaching, training, or feedback they get, there
are still some employees who can’t or won't fit in. Keeping these employees
in the organization can be toxic, since it sends an implicit signal to oth-
ers that these employees’ actions are acceptable. Also, sometimes employees
who don’t fit in actively attempt to persuade other employees to undermine
the culture, as well. In this case, it’s imperative to act quickly to terminate
these employees.
This is a true test for many organizations. Some customer service leaders
are willing to overlook an employee who doesn’t fit with the culture, as long
as they’re productive. Other leaders just don’t have the heart to let someone
go, even if their presence is hurting the performance of other employees or
causing good employees to leave the organization. But companies with highly-
engaged employees actively work to remove employees who can’t or won't fit
with their culture.
Letting an employee go doesn’t have to be heartless. One of my favorite
examples involved a manager named Mike. He was a productive employee

oh)
 Jeff Toister

who just couldn’t fit in with his company’s culture. His boss finally reached a
point where it was time to cut Mike loose.
The Human Resources Director at the company knew Mike had the po-
tential to be a good employee, so he called a colleague at another company
in town where he thought Mike would be a better fit. The HR Director ar-
ranged for Mike to have an interview at the other company later that day.
When Mike was called in to meet with his boss and the HR Director, he was
informed that he was being let go, but he was also told about the interview.
Mike ended up getting the job at the new company, where he became a terrific
employee who was a good fit with that company’s culture.

STEP 3: ASSESSING EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

It’s critical that you periodically assess employee engagement. The purpose of
the assessment should be to evaluate existing levels of employee engagement
and identify opportunities to make things even better. The stronger your em-
ployees’ understanding of the customer service vision, and the stronger their
commitment to helping achieve it, the stronger your culture will be.
Many people instantly think of an annual employee engagement survey,
but there are other options to consider. One alternative is to use the perfor-
mance review process to assess engagement, since engagement and performance
are both measures of contributions to organizational success. This helps you
identify individuals and teams whose contributions to the culture are flagging,
and initiate honest dialogue with these people to understand the reasons why.
One of my clients provided its managers with leadership training to help
them become more comfortable with having these performance discussions
on a regular basis. Individual contributors were also trained in a parallel pro-
gram, so they could do a better job of handling their end of the feedback
discussion with their manager. My client then hired me to facilitate meetings
with each of its locations and departments to help managers and their employ-
ees establish team norms for engaging in an ongoing performance dialogue.
As you might have guessed, these discussions were all centered on reinforcing
the company’s culture.

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 The Service Culture Handbook

Another option is to rely on direct, informal dialogues with employees.

This approach works particularly well in smaller organizations or on individ-
ual teams. For example, you might have regular conversations with employees
to assess whether or not they have clarity on those three essential questions:

1. What is the customer service vision?

2. What does the customer service vision mean?
3. How doI personally contribute to the customer service vision?

Nicolette Trobaugh and her Fan Experience team at the Chicago Fire used a
version of this approach with their match day quizzes. Coming up with a fun
way to spot check employees’ knowledge of their customer service expecta-
tions helped generate enthusiasm for the fan-focused culture.
Here are a few suggestions if you decide to conduct an employee engage-
ment survey. First and foremost, I suggest measuring employee engagement
more than once per year. Imagine measuring anything else that’s important
to the business just once a year! How could you manage your budget if you
only looked at your finances annually? Similarly, how can you improve cus-
tomer service if you only ask for feedback on customer service levels once
every twelve months?
The problem is that a survey is just a snapshot in time. Employee engage-
ment survey results are primarily impacted by an employee’s most recent expe-
riences. That means a positive or negative experience shortly before the survey
is launched has a disproportionate effect on the results. There’s even a joke
among some managers that the best way to boost your employee engagement
scores is to throw a pizza party for your team right before the annual survey
goes out. A few managers I know have actually held off on disciplinary action
with employees until after the engagement survey to avoid getting a low score
from a potentially disgruntled team member.
The other problem with only doing an annual survey is that if you imple-
ment any changes as a result of the feedback, you won't know if they're ef-
fective until a year later. That’s too long to make the survey a meaningful
measurement, since so many other changes will happen during that time.

61
 Jeff Toister

The economy could rise or fall, the company could launch a new product or
close down a division, or a wave of new employees could join the company.
Variables such as these make it difficult to compare survey results from year
to year.
An alternative for larger companies is to divide your employee base into 12
random groups and survey one group every month. This provides a monthly
snapshot of employee engagement while surveying each employee only once
per year. Or you can survey all employees once per year, but conduct short
check-in surveys with sample groups of employees once per month.
However you choose to do it, getting engagement data more frequently
than once a year will help you be more responsive to workplace climate issues,
since you'll be able to compare your progress from month to month.
This may seem like a lot of work, but we're actually just getting started.
Engaged employees will only stay engaged if they perceive their company
truly believes in the customer service vision. They want to see the organiza-
tion and its leaders walk the talk. That’s difficult to do on a consistent basis,
but we'll lay out a plan for making it happen in Part 3.

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 The Service Culture Handbook

Nores:
22 Most legroom in coach claim,” JetBlue, December 21, 2016. http://www.jetblue.com/
travel/planes/.
23 JetBlue, “Hayes’s letter to shareholders” (excerpt), JetBlue 2015 Annual Report.
24 “JetBlue Named Top 10 Place to Work in Forbes’ ‘America’s Best Employers of 2016’
List,” JetBlue, March 23, 2016. http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160323006015/
en/JetBlue-Named-Top-10-Place-Work-Forbes’.
25 BlessingWhite, Employee Engagement Research Report 2013, 2013.
26 JetBlue, Business, Social, and Environmental Sustainability, 2015. https://www.jetblue.
com/p/JetBlueResponsibilityReport2015.pdf.
27 Gallup, Inc., 2013 State of The American Workplace, 2013. http://employeeengagement.
com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Gallup-2013-State-of-the-A merican-Workplace-Report.
pdf.
28 Dan Brown, Sonny Chheng, Veronica Melian, Kathy Parker, and Marc Solow, “Global
Human Capital Trends 2015,” Deloitte University Press, February 2015.
29 Quantum Workplace, 2015 Employee Engagement Trends Report, 2015.

63
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7
Part 3: Changing Your Company's Service DNA
 CAHVAS
DST SERS 5

Aligning Your Business Around a Customer-Focused Culture

SHAKE SHACK Is A New York City institution. It originated in 2001 as a tem-

porary hot dog cart in Madison Square Park to help fund the park’s revital-
ization. The cart became an instant hit, drawing huge crowds and long lines
when the weather was nice.
In 2004, the city decided to replace the hot dog cart and install a per-
manent food kiosk in the park. Restaurateur Danny Meyers’s Union Square
Hospitality Group had been running the hot dog cart even though his compa-
ny was best known for its fine dining restaurants, including the Union Square
Café and Gramercy Tavern. The company decided to bring its fine dining
expertise to a reimagined version of a roadside burger stand, which led to the
opening of the first Shake Shack, a fast casual restaurant selling burgers, hot
dogs, fries, and frozen custard.
Today, Shake Shack’s popularity is stunning. At this writing, there are
eight locations in New York City alone, and a total of 19 in New York State.
The lines are so famously long at its original Madison Square Park location
that the company installed a Shack Cam so people could go online and judge
the size of the crowd before deciding whether to head over. In 2015, the Wall
Street Journal published an article outlining the optimal times to get in the
Shake Shack line at Citi Field when attending a New York Mets baseball
game. Many tourists who come to New York include Shake Shack on their
“must visit” list.
The chain’s popularity is also growing outside New York City. By 2016,
Shake Shack had locations in 14 states, the District of Columbia, and a

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 Jeff Toister

growing list of international restaurants in cities such as London, Istanbul,

Dubai, Moscow, and Tokyo.
The company has won a string of accolades as it’s grown. It was named
one of the 25 Most Innovative Consumer and Retail Brands in 2014 by
Entrepreneur.com. And in 2015, Shake Shack won the Wisetail Award,
which recognizes innovators in Learning and Development, for its employee
engagement.
People flock to Shake Shack because of its outstanding food and for the
experience. Employees are friendly, outgoing, and well trained. Despite the
huge crowds, they're attentive to their customers and keep their restaurants
clean. In some strange way, many people feel that waiting in line at Shack
Shake along with all the other enthusiastic customers is part of the fun.
The company went public in 2015. Its first annual report highlighted the
customer-focused culture as its top competitive strength: “We believe that the
culture ofour team is the single most important factor in our success.”*°

How SHAKE SHACK ALIGNS EVERYTHING AROUND

CULTURE
Shake Shack’s customer service vision is Stand For Something Good. This vi-
sion stretches beyond the high level of customer service it tries to deliver: it’s a
strategic guide for managing the entire company.
Shake Shack aligns key operational decisions around its customer service
vision, ensuring that everything it does reinforces the culture. You can see this
alignment in five key areas:

1. Goals
2. Hiring
3. Training
4. Empowerment
5. Leadership

Let’s take a closer look at each of them.

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 The Service Culture Handbook

Goals
The company has a goal of adding 10 new domestic company-operated Shake
Shacks per year. Given its popularity, it could easily grow at a much faster rate.
However, the operation has limited its growth rate to ensure it can maintain
focus on its Stand For Something Good culture. It’s concerned that growing too
rapidly could compromise the supply chain, food quality, hiring, training, site
selection, or other factors that give the chain its unique identity.
Every Shake Shack employee is given a stake in the company’s success
through a revenue-sharing program paying one percent of top line revenue on
a monthly basis. The program, called Shack Bucks, adds two dollars per hour
to the average employee’s paycheck.” The Shack Bucks program helps every
employee stay focused on the company’s overall success.

Hiring
Shake Shack hires employees who embrace its customer service vision. The
company looks for what they call “51% ers”: people who are warm, friendly,
motivated, caring, self-aware, and intellectually curious.” The idea is to hire
for fit with the company’s culture and then train employees on the technical
skills required to do their jobs. This hiring practice helps reinforce the culture
because new employees are already known to be a good fit.
The company has a web page that offers extensive information about its
culture, core values, and what it’s like to work at Shake Shack. This makes it
easy for prospective hires to understand exactly what type of person the com-
pany is looking for.

Training
Shake Shack employees receive extensive training, and the first priority for
every new hire is to learn about the company’s culture. Employees are taught
how to incorporate the company’s five core values into their daily work. Of
course, they also receive training on customer service, the Shake Shack menu,
their individual jobs, and food safety.

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Shake Shack has a promote-from-within philosophy focused on develop-

ing employees into future leaders who can help others follow its customer ser-
vice vision. The company cross-trains employees to help them learn a variety
of skills, and publishes a career ladder showing how they can advance to high-
er positions within the company. Leadership training is also available to help
employees develop the skills necessary to move into management positions.

Empowerment
Employees are empowered to go beyond their normal routine to delight their
customers. The company’s CEO, Randy Garutti, described the company’s
empowerment philosophy to a group of new employees before a store opening:
“Put us out of business because you are so damn generous with what you give
the people who walk in this door. If there’s a kid crying, who’s going to walk
over with a free cup of custard? I challenge you to put us out of business with
how generous you are. Go do it. Give away free stuff.”??
Empowerment involves more than just giving employees the authority to
go above and beyond to serve customers. It also includes processes carefully
designed to make it easy for Shake Shack’s employees consistently fulfill the
vision. Employees receive detailed instructions on best practices for complet-
ing daily tasks, such as food preparation, maintaining restaurant cleanliness,
and serving guests. These processes prioritize quality over speed. For example,
Shake Shack’s burgers are cooked following a highly detailed procedure that
takes far more time and effort than a typical fast casual restaurant. It’s de-
signed to create the unique flavor that customers love.

Leadership
Finally, Shake Shack’s leaders are fully committed to its vision. Senior man-
agement uses Stand For Something Good to guide all their decisions. The com-
pany provides extensive leadership training so its store-level leaders know how
to use the vision as their guide. Garutti visits multiple locations every week to
reinforce the company’s vision with store managers and employees. Managers

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meet with their employees daily to review goals and discuss opportunities for
continued improvement.
Aligning all of these actions around Shake Shack’s Stand For Something
Good vision enables the company to consistently reinforce the culture. The
company even works with external stakeholders, such as suppliers, to help
them understand the customer service vision so they can operate under the
same guidelines when doing business with Shake Shack. This alignment is the
secret to its ability to consistently impress its customers in a way that bedevils
most other companies.
The other customer-service-obsessed companies profiled in this book
follow a similar blueprint. Rackspace hires people who can embrace giving
Fanatical Support and then empowers those employees to consistently go
above and beyond. Bright House Networks, a cable company you'll meet in
Chapter 9, designed a new process to make it easier for customer service reps
to make judgment calls on giving account credit, and then tasked its manag-
ers with coaching reps to ensure those judgment calls consistently align with
the vision. Zendesk, a software company you'll meet in Chapter 12, created a
customer service vision, and then its senior leaders aligned the organization’s
management philosophy around those values.
Culture at these companies is constantly reinforced by aligning multiple
operational facets around the specific customer service vision. This process is
so rigorous in customer-focused companies that it becomes embedded in the
organizational DNA, making service a fundamental part of how employees at
these companies think, act, and understand the world around them.

Wuat Can HappeEN IF YOUR BUSINESS AND CULTURE

ARENT ALIGNED
Alignment can support and reinforce an organization’s culture, but a lack of
alignment can undermine any culture-building efforts. It’s not enough to de-
velop a clear customer service vision and communicate that vision to employ-
ees. The vision only becomes real if it matches what people are actually doing.
This means it must be constantly reinforced within employees’ daily work.

Ve
 Jeff Toister

Let’s look back at the Comcast account cancellation example from

Chapter 1 to see how misalignment contributed to that company’s dismal
customer service reputation. ie you recall, a Comcast customer named Ryan
Block had such a difficult time trying to cancel his account that he started
recording the call halfway through. Block posted the recording online and it
quickly went viral.
We can start by assuming that Comcast doesn’t actually provide poor
customer service on purpose. After all, its public apology to Block described
this situation as an unusual occurrence:

“While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard

to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate ex-
perience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers
with the utmost respect.”

However, Comcast’s core business processes in the summer of 2014 were mis-
aligned with this notion of always treating customers with the utmost respect.
You can see this in a strategy that prioritizes short-term revenue over long-term
customer satisfaction. That's why the company hired Retention Specialists
whose goal is to keep customers from canceling. These Retention Specialists
have goals and incentives for preventing cancellations, not for keeping cus-
tomers happy. They receive extensive training on overcoming objections and
preventing cancellations, not for how they can make the cancellation process
as easy as possible.
The account cancellation process itself was intentionally designed to
make canceling an account difficult. Customers are required to call, even
though they can handle many other transactions through the company’s on-
line self-service function. When a customer got a Retention Specialist on the
phone, that employee wasn’t empowered to deviate from a process carefully
designed to block cancellation attempts. Respect for the customer’s time was
outweighed by the company’s goal to secure short-term revenue.
Finally, Comcast’s leaders reinforced the notion that capturing short-
term revenue was more important than customer satisfaction. They evaluated

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employees based upon their retention statistics, not their service quality.
Bonus programs were implemented to reward employees for talking custom-
ers out of canceling, and employees could actually lose money if they weren't
successful.
All those things pointed employees toward stonewalling customers who
tried to cancel. An employee who politely canceled a customer’s account with-
out hesitation would have been violating Comcast policy.
Clearly, the company’s operations were misaligned with the notion of pro-
viding outstanding service.
Comcast is an easy target for this discussion because so many parts of its
operation have been directly opposed to serving customers. Other companies
may have a few business practices pointed towards a customer-focused cul-
ture, but employees still receive confusing messages because the organization
isn't fully aligned.
One example happens when managers set a target score for a customer
satisfaction survey, and then become fixated on achieving the goal without
regard for how it’s achieved. They implement incentives to encourage em-
ployees to achieve high scores or threaten to punish employees with write-ups
or termination if their scores fall below a certain level. This has the effect
of encouraging employees to manipulate customers into giving them a good
survey score rather than using the survey for its intended purpose of gathering
constructive customer feedback.
Getting too focused on achieving a goal without understanding its con-
nection to the customer service vision is just one of the potentia! problems
caused by misalignment. Companies routinely hire employees who are a poor
fit for their culture because leaders are anxious to fill positions at a low cost.
New employees in many companies are given little to no customer service
training, so they can’t possibly know how to fit in with the company culture
or live up to the customer service vision. Processes are frequently designed
to control and standardize behavior rather than empowering employees to
delight their customers. And leaders in many companies spend shockingly
little time coaching and training their teams to reinforce the customer service
culture.

fe)
 Jeff Toister

Another misalignment occurs when different departments within an or-

ganization fail to embrace the same customer service vision. This inevitably
causes inconsistent service and harms the company’s reputation.
Customer service channel management provides an excellent example. A
customer service channel refers to the method a customer uses to contact
a company for customer service. Customers typically have multiple channel
options when contacting a company, such as the phone, email, a self-service
website, or one of several social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook. A
customer might also be able to visit one of the company’s physical locations to
try to resolve the problem in person.
In many companies, misalignment occurs because these various channels
are managed by different departments. Phone and email could be operated by
a contact center, the website might be run by the marketing department, and
social media by the company’s communications department. The physical
locations could be managed by another department known as retail opera-
tions. If these departments approach customer service differently, they create
an uneven experience for the customer—and that hurts the company’s brand.
One side effect happens when companies inadvertently encourage cus-
tomers to air their grievances on Twitter. A 2016 study by Execs in the Know,
a customer experience networking organization, found that social media was
solely managed by the Marketing or PR function in 46 percent of compa-
nies, with no involvement by the customer service department. The managers
in these departments are often more empowered to resolve issues than their
counterparts answering phone calls, emails, or other contacts.*4
This means that angry customers who vent their frustration on Twitter
about a go-nowhere customer service call often get a fast response and a swift
resolution. Many customer service leaders tell me social media complaints
get higher priority than complaints submitted via other channels. Since these
complaints are public, corporate executives worry about a negative image. As
a result, customers soon realize that they can complain via Twitter any time
they need assistance.
This kind of misalignment can create mistrust among employees. People
in one department might blame another team for poor service, and vice versa.
These issues rarely get fixed, and instead are allowed to continue. A 2016

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study by my consulting firm, Toister Performance Solutions, revealed that 36

percent of contact center employees facing a severe risk of burnout at work felt
their coworkers did not deliver outstanding customer service.»
You can see from these examples that alignment is at fault when a com-
pany espouses a certain brand of customer service while employees act in a
completely different way.

How To CHECK YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE ALIGNMENT

Chapters 6 through 10 detail how to align the five operational cornerstones of
a customer-focused culture: goals, hiring, training, empowerment, and lead-
ership. Each chapter focuses on a specific concept and provides step-by-step
guidance for aligning that concept with your customer service vision.
For now, a good starting point is to check your organization’s overall align-
ment using a short assessment. It’s a quick way to determine areas of strength
and identify opportunities for improvement. I’ve listed the five assessment
questions below, or you can download a copy at www.serviceculturebook.
com/tools. (You can also use this tool to assess the alignment of an individual
team within your organization.)
Having a customer service vision is a prerequisite for completing this. You
can’t gauge your company’s cultural alignment unless you have something
with which you're trying to align. If you haven't done this yet, I suggest revis-
iting Chapter 3 for step-by-step instructions on creating your vision.
Start by rating your organization on the five statements contained in the
assessment. Use a scale of 1 (Almost Never) to 5 (Almost Always). Be brutally
honest about your scores, since an artificially high score will only hide oppor-
tunities for improvement.

1. We set business goals that represent progress toward our customer

service vision.
2. We hire employees who are passionate about our customer service
vision.
3. Employees are given sufficient training to teach them how to deliver
service that fits our customer service vision.

7)
 Jeff Toister

4. Employees are empowered with the authority, resources, and work

procedures they need to fulfill our customer service vision.
5. Organizational leaders reinforce our customer service vision with
their employees on a daily basis.

Tally up your scores to get your total. This gives you a summary alignment
score for your organization or team. Compare your total score to the align-
ment key below.

Alignment Key:

* A score of 20 to 25 indicates alignment. Your organization is well

positioned to deliver outstanding customer service.
* A score of 15 to 19 indicates partial alignment. Many aspects of
the organization are aligned with your culture, but there are some
areas for improvement.
* A score of 14 or less indicates misalignment. Your organization’s
lack of alignment may be causing poor customer service. There are
significant areas for improvement.

Looking at your overall score as well as the individual ratings for each catego-
ry, try to identify areas where you feel your organization or team is aligned—
and also look for specific areas where there can be improvement.
The categories are there to be helpful, but don’t get too hung up on where
your organization falls. This assessment is meant to be more of a conversation
starter than a definitive analysis of your organization’s alignment.
It’s interesting to complete this assessment for multiple departments to
see how they compare. Start by assessing your organization as a whole. Next,
complete the same assessment for individual departments that have direct or
indirect customer contact. Compare the results to see if some teams are more
aligned than others.
Now youre ready to read the following chapters, which give you step-by-
step instructions for each of the five cornerstones of a customer-focused culture.

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NOTEs:
30 Shake Shack, 2014 Annual Report
31 Rob Brunner, “Shake Shack leads the better burger revolution,” Fast Company, June 2015.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3046753/shake-shack-leads-the-better-burger-revolution.
32 Shake Shack, 20/4 Annual Report.
33 Rob Brunner, “Shake Shack leads the better burger revolution,” Fast Company, June 2015.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3046753/shake-shack-leads-the-better-burger-revolution.
34 Execs In The Know, The Corporate Perspective: Exploring Multi-Channel Customer Care,
Customer Experience Management Benchmark Series, February 2016.
35 Jeff Toister, “How to Battle Agent Burnout.” Toister Performance Solutions white paper,
2016: www.toistersolutions.com/burnout.

Vl
 CHAPTER 6

Setting Goals That Drive Your Culture

SHOPPING FOR A CAR CAN be a daunting task. There is an overwhelming num-

ber of makes and models to choose from, and it’s hard to know if you're get-
ting a good deal. That’s why many car buyers use an independent review site
like Cars.com.
Cars.com helps consumers research new and used vehicles and find the
make and model that best fits their needs. They can use the site to get pric-
ing information and check to see if dealers in their area have the car or truck
they want in stock. Customers also use the website to search for reputable
mechanics.
Cars.com has built a reputation for outstanding customer service. In 2015,
it was ranked as the top automotive review site for the third straight year.*°
The company has an industry-leading 85 percent customer satisfaction rating
for its phone support. And its contact center won the International Customer
Management Institute’s 2014 award for best customer care team in the small-
to medium-sized contact center category.
Like other organizations profiled in this book, employees at Cars.com
are obsessed with serving their customers. Cars.com’s parent company,
TEGNA, Inc., defines its customer service vision this way: Empowering the
people we serve to act with conviction and navigate their world successfully.
That's exactly what its employees try to do for people who are purchasing
a new vehicle. They try to take a complicated and important purchasing
decision and give people the information and tools they need to act with
confidence.

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There’s one aspect of building a customer-focused culture where Cars.

com particularly excels: getting employees to buy into its culture by using
goals and metrics to drive behavior.

How Cars.com Usss Goats To Drive Its Currure

Cars.com measures customer satisfaction, or CSAT, via customer surveys. Like
many companies, Cars.com’s leaders set CSAT goals in an effort to motivate
employees to go the extra mile to help improve service quality. What makes
Cars.com different from most organizations is how they connect CSAT goals
and other metrics to their customer service vision.
Heather Rattin, the company’s Vice President of Operations, runs the
customer care team. She and her team use their survey data to continu-
ously refine the customer experience and make it easier for car buyers to
use their site. Rattin is careful to avoid fixating on a target CSAT score.
Instead, her goal is to make it as easy as possible for consumers to use the
company’s site, so Cars.com becomes their preferred source for car-buying
information.
CSAT survey data alone doesn’t always provide all the answers. Rattin
and her team create a story by combining this data with other information,
such as the volume of customer service inquiries, the specific reasons people
contact customer care, and comments on individual surveys. “We use this
data to catch trends with individual employees, but also with our products,”
she explains. For instance, her team was able to use customer comments from
surveys with low scores to identify and fix a user interface issue on its website
that hadn’t been discovered in testing.
Rattin also looks to her employees to help improve the product and cus-
tomer support processes by sharing their feedback. For instance, “We look
at what confuses new hires in training, because they're coming at it from a
fresh perspective,” Rattin says. At the end of each week of training, the trainer
conducts a roundtable discussion with new hires to discuss things they think
could be improved. Their suggestions and ideas are then shared with the com-
pany’s training team and senior management for consideration.

Ty}
 Jeff Toister

The customer care team at Cars.com also uses an internal communica-

tion platform, called Chatter, to share ideas for improving service. Employees
are asked to answer two questions when contributing their ideas. First, why is
this better for the customer? And second, why is it better for the customer care
agent? Rattin believes that understanding why things are done a certain way
helps employees become more committed to a process, even if it requires a lit-
tle extra effort. It’s easier for them to suggest actionable ideas for improvement
because they understand how a process or procedure fits into the big picture.
The company has also encouraged employee feedback by helping its man-
agers get better at listening. According to Rattin, “A lot of our focus has been
on training managers and team leads to listen carefully to their employees and
get to the heart of issues.”
As an example, managers discuss customer service survey data with their
employees on a daily basis. Rattin believes this dialogue between managers
and their employees is necessary so they can work together to investigate why
metrics like CSAT are trending in a certain way. The collaboration helps em-
ployees feel invested in finding ways to improve service and then take pride in
knowing they helped create the solutions.
Combining CSAT data with other metrics has also helped Rattin make a
business case for investing more in the company’s customer care team. When
the team needed an upgraded knowledge management system, Rattin com-
bined CSAT data with productivity figures to pitch the investment to the
company’s CFO. A knowledge management system is a database of company
information that makes it easier for employees and customers to answer ques-
tions, and Rattin was able to show how a new system would make customers
happier and also save Cars.com money, since employees would use the up-
graded tool to serve customers faster.
The way Cars.com approaches customer service goals echoes a common
theme at many companies with customer-focused cultures. Like many orga-
nizations, these companies typically have goals for key metrics like CSAT,
customer loyalty, and cost savings. However, customer-focused companies are
careful not to get too focused on meeting any one metric without considering
the overall impact. Leaders at these companies combine data from multiple

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sources, share this information with employees, and involve employees in

finding ways to continuously improve. The ultimate goal is to drive behavior
that’s aligned with their customer service vision.
Fidelity’s Workplace Solutions division provides employers with retire-
ment and benefits solutions for their employees. Its customer service vision
is providing better outcomes, with the ultimate goal of providing the best cus-
tomer service in the financial services industry. Like Cars.com, Fidelity’s
Workplace Solutions division sets goals for key customer service metrics, but
those goals are only part of the story.
The division has something called a Voice of the Customer Ambassador
program that’s a cross-functional team of employees tasked with finding ways
to continuously improve service and inspiring other employees to do the same.
Ambassadors are nominated by senior managers and serve on the committee
for 18 months. They’re expected to spend eight to 12 hours each month work-
ing on customer service improvement projects.
One of the things the team is most known for is “busting rocks.” A “rock”
is the internal term used for issues that contribute to poor customer service or
experiences. Voice of the Customer Ambassadors combine data from multiple
sources to identify rocks, prioritize the biggest rocks, and then work with
other employees across the division’s seven locations to find solutions.
Bill Schimikowski, the Vice President of Customer Experience for
Workplace Solutions, explains that the Ambassadors are deliberately cho-
sen from multiple functions so they represent all aspects of the operation.
According to Schimikowski, this helps the team reach across corporate silos
that might otherwise prevent progress. “It’s easy to blame legal when we can’t
do something that would benefit our customer,” he says, “but when you have
a lawyer on the Customer Ambassador team, that person can see both sides of
the issue and propose a workable solution.”
Organizations like Cars.com and Fidelity Investments aren’t satisfied with
simply achieving a certain customer satisfaction score. These organizations get
their employees obsessed with customer service by setting lofty expectations
for customer service, and then use data to find ways to continuously improve.
Leaders in these companies also understand the danger in focusing too much

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on making metrics look good without understanding that the ultimate goal is
to serve customers in a way that aligns with the customer service vision.

Wuat Can Happen WHEN Goats DONT ALIGN WITH

YOUR VISION
Companies almost always create goals around customer service metrics. They
set targets for average survey scores, speed of service, and even how closely
employees adhere to their work schedule. The underlying management phi-
losophy is that goals provide clarity and motivation: clarity by defining the
outcomes they're expected to achieve, and motivation because people are gen-
erally motivated to put in extra effort when they have goals in front of them.
The trick lies in getting those goals to align with the customer service vi-
sion. Otherwise, goals can influence employee behavior in undesirable ways:
employees may do something to achieve the goal that’s not aligned with their
company’s customer service vision.
Employees in one company are expected to achieve a 95 percent average
on a satisfaction survey sent to customers after they finished an interaction via
phone, email, or chat. They're paid a monthly bonus when they achieve the
goal, which is intended to be a healthy incentive for them to provide great ser-
vice. Unfortunately, it also incentivizes these individuals to game the system
to their advantage.
Here’s what sometimes happens when a member of the frontline team
assists a customer who seems upset. The customer service rep knows that if
he continues helping her, she might give him an “unsatisfied” ranking on the
survey, which could jeopardize his monthly bonus. He also knows he has the
option of transferring the customer to an escalations team that handles upset
customers and tricky situations. Transferring the customer means he avoids
getting a bad survey, while his coworker on another team gets stuck cleaning
up the mess.
The manager of the escalations team explained to me how the 95 percent
customer satisfaction goal was actually demotivating to her team. She said
achieving the goal was easy for the frontline team that primarily handled

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customer inquiries. A customer would contact the company, ask the customer
service rep a simple question, and get a survey to ask if they were satisfied with
the response. Achieving the 95 percent goal was almost a foregone conclusion.
The escalations team had it much harder because they worked with
customers who were unsatisfied with the initial response they received and
wanted to talk to someone with more technical knowledge or more authority.
These customers were upset to begin with, which makes them predisposed to
giving lower survey scores. Plus, members of the frontline team would often
transfer upset callers unnecessarily to avoid lowering their own scores, which
meant the escalations team had it even tougher.
This structure all but ensured the escalations team would never achieve
the 95 percent target. Meanwhile, their counterparts on the frontline team
received their bonuses every month. It seems unfair to judge the escalations
team by the same goal as the other teams, but that’s exactly what that com-
pany did.
Some organizations set customer service goals without a clear understand-
ing of how the goals could drive behavior. One customer service leader I in-
terviewed told me that her company surveys its customers and then reports
the average score to senior management on a monthly basis. That was the
extent of how the business used that data. Senior management might make
a comment or two about the way the scores were trending compared to the
previous month, but absolutely nothing would be done. Apparently this isn’t
unusual—an industry analyst I know estimates that just 10 percent of compa-
nies use their customer service survey data to actually improve service.
That’s the inherent problem with relying solely on metrics without con-
necting them to the customer service vision. Heather Rattin and her team
at Cars.com understand this challenge, so they combine metrics with other
sources of data, such as the specific reasons customers need support, to tell a
more complete story. Her goal is always to fulfill the customer service vision
of empowering the people we serve to act with conviction and navigate their world
successfully. This approach is unusual, as the vast majority of customer service
leaders I speak to just look at data points without digging deeper to under-
stand what can be done to improve.

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Survey begging is another type of bad behavior that can happen when
employees get too focused on the goal and lose sight of the customer service
vision. This term describes a situation in which an employee asks a customer
to give a positive score on a survey by explaining how it will directly benefit
the customer, the employee, or both. Some employees offer discounts or even
free merchandise in exchange for a good score. Other employees try to pull on
their customers’ heartstrings by explaining that they'll get in trouble if they
don’t maintain a high average.
Many employees who beg for survey scores have admitted to me that
they're selective about the customers they ask to rate them. Unsurprisingly,
they focus on the ones they perceive will give them a good rating. Retail em-
ployees might use a pen to circle the survey invitation on bottom of acustom-
er’s receipt and write their name next to it while encouraging the customer to
fill it out. On the other hand, if customer appears to be upset or grumpy, the
employee might tear the survey invitation off the bottom of that customer’s
receipt so they don’t risk getting a bad score.
There are plenty of other poor behaviors that come from employees who
are overly goal focused. For instance, technical support teams often have tar-
gets for how quickly they can close out support tickets. Employees on these
teams make their numbers look good by cherry-picking issues they know can
be resolved faster. If they encounter a difficult issue, they'll close the ticket
and mark it as resolved without verifying that the issue is actually fixed. This
forces customers to open a new support ticket to get their issue handled. It’s
an annoying extra step for the customer, but it starts the clock anew for the
employees with a support ticket closing speed goal.
In some cases, employees have even falsified data to achieve their customer
service goals. For instance, employees at one business submitted fake surveys
in an effort to inflate their overall customer satisfaction rating. Another com-
pany caught employees creating loyalty program accounts for fake customers
to help them achieve their goals for loyalty program registrations. At Wells
Fargo, a company we'll learn more about in Chapter 10, employees created
over two million phony bank and credit card accounts in an effort to meet
ageressive sales targets.

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All these problems happen when customer service leaders set goals that
cause employees to lose sight of the company’s customer service vision. They’re
bad goals because they encourage bad behavior.
Bad goals have three distinct characteristics:

1. They divert attention away from the customer service vision.

2. They reward individualism.
3. They rely on extrinsic motivation.

Let’s look back at the company that paid a bonus for maintaining a 95 per-
cent survey average. Customer service leaders inadvertently encouraged poor
behavior because they created a bad goal: Customer Service Representatives who
earn a satisfied rating on 95 percent or more of their customer service surveys each
month will receive a $100 bonus.
The cash bonus for achieving the 95 percent average focuses employees on
achieving the score, but not necessarily delighting customers in the process.
Since the bonus is paid individually, employees are encouraged to fend for
themselves by transferring angry customers to someone else, even if it might
hurt the team and the customer. And the cash bonus is an extrinsic, or exter-
nal, motivator, which means employees are serving customers to earn cash,
rather than because they’re passionate about helping people.
Companies with strong customer service cultures still set goals for their
employees. The difference is that they never lose sight of the customer service
vision. Metrics such as survey score averages are helpful performance indicators,
but only if the data are primarily used to find ways to continuously improve.

How To Set Goop CUSTOMER SERVICE GOALS

This section of the chapter will provide you with step-by-step guidance for
setting good customer service goals. We'll look at the criteria that make a
goal good, the SMART model for setting clear goals, and important consid-
erations when communicating goals to your team. You can also download a
goal-setting worksheet here: www.serviceculturebook.com/tools.

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Goop Goat CRITERIA

Good goals have three distinct characteristics that are the opposite of bad
goals:

1. They focus attention on the customer service vision.

2. They reward teamwork.
3. They rely on intrinsic motivation.

Remember the bad goal example from earlier in the chapter? Customer Service
Representatives who earn a satisfied rating on 95 percent or more oftheir customer
service surveys each month with receive a $100 bonus.
Here’s an example of what that 95 percent goal might look like if we re-
wrote it using the good goal characteristics: We will earn a satisfied rating on
95 percent of our customer service surveys this month.
The first element of a good goal, focusing attention on the customer ser-
vice vision, is admittedly tricky. A customer service team could easily fall into
the trap of focusing on getting a good score, rather than using the survey as
a tool for continuous improvement. This is where a strong leader can set the
tone.
Heather Rattin and her customer service team at Cars.com review survey
comments on a daily basis. They've made a habit of looking beyond the score
to find out what their customers are really thinking. This daily communica-
tion focuses them on finding ways to serve their customers better, rather than
on getting a better score. The score is just one indicator of how well they’re
doing; the focus is on continuous improvement that really has an impact.
The second element of a good goal is rewarding teamwork. Multiple em-
ployees often need to work together to deliver outstanding customer service.
For example, in a typical restaurant, the host, server, busser, and chef all have
an impact on customer satisfaction. Team-oriented goals encourage everyone
to work together and help each other out.
In one organization I worked with, the escalations team shared the same
customer service goal as the first tier team. This caused the first tier team
and the escalations team to work together to prevent customers from getting

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transferred. For example, they made a list of the top 10 problems that caused
calls to be transferred to escalations and identified several which could be
handled by the first tier team if they only had a little more information. This
allowed the first tier team to solve more problems quickly. It also freed up
the escalations team to spend more time on the truly challenging issues. The
result for the entire group was improved customer satisfaction.
The third element of a good goal is relying on intrinsic motivation. This
means that employees are internally motivated to achieve the goal. They be-
lieve in the goal and what it stands for, and they’re willing to do what it takes
to get there.
There’s a fundamental truth here that many business leaders fail to realize:
most customer service professionals genuinely want to help their customers.
I’ve spoken with thousands of customer service employees and have seen this
common theme: setting a customer service goal and then working together as
a team to achieve it causes motivation to soar.
Of course, surveys are just one example of a way to measure customer ser-
vice. There are many other metrics that can be used. Here are a few examples:

* Customer retention
* Word-of-mouth referrals
* Ratings on external review sites
® First contact resolution
+ Average response time (emails, chat, social media, etc.)

I liken these metrics to the gauges on a car’s dashboard. Achieving a certain

speed, holding the engine at a specific rate of revolutions per minute, or main-
taining a particular fuel level isn’t the objective. Instead, these gauges all tell
you part of the story about how the car is performing and provide an early
warning signal if something goes wrong. The real goal, of course, is reaching
your destination. In customer service, the destination that customei-focused
companies are constantly heading toward is their customer service vision.
Involving employees in the goal-setting process is one additional element
of agood goal that’s not an absolute requirement, but it is a best practice. This

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gives people a greater sense of ownership for the goal since they helped set
it. Getting employee feedback up front can also help you identify situations
when a goal might not be achievable.

Toe SMART Goats MopDEL

Those three elements of a good goal are a great starting point, but customer
service goals should also follow the SMART model. There are a few different
versions of the SMART model for setting goals, but here’s my preferred version:

ts «Si=sSpeciiic
* M = Measurable
* A =Attainable
* R= Relevant
* T = Time-Bound

You can find a SMART goals worksheet at www.serviceculturebook.com/

tools.
Companies often set vague customer service goals that are difficult to
define and measure. For example, I’ve seen more than one company set this
goal as part of their strategic plan: /mprove customer service.
The challenge with a goal like this is it’s hard to know what exactly needs
to be improved. Nobody can say for sure how we're doing now, what needs to
change, nor whether the goal has been achieved.
A SMART goal provides a much clearer blueprint to follow. We will
achieve a satisfied rating on 95 percent of our customer service surveys this month.
Let’s take a look at how this fits the SMART model.
We know it fits three of the criteria right away. It’s specific because it fo-
cuses on the customer service survey. The goal can be measured by counting
the percentage of surveys with a satisfied rating. It’s also time-bound because
we've set the end of the month as the deadline for achieving this goal.
Some context is required to know if the goal fits the other two criteria.
You don’t know if it’s attainable without knowing the current survey results

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and what needs to be done to achieve the 95 percent result. You might be on
track if last month’s result was 94 percent; you might be wildly off base if your
previous score was 72 percent.
It’s also hard to know if the goal is relevant without comparing it to the
customer service vision. Goals for customer satisfaction scores are typically
relevant, but many companies also set goals that aren’t directly relevant to
outstanding service. Examples include productivity goals, goals for complying
with company policy, and even attendance goals.

COMMUNICATING GOALS TO THE TEAM

SMART goals that meet the good goal criteria can help motivate customer-
obsessed employees. The key is that employees need to be aware of the goals
and understand how close they are to achieving them. It’s the responsibility of
customer service leaders to ensure this happens.
First, you'll need a scoreboard. This is something that allows employees to
easily access customer service objectives and results. It could be an electronic
display, a physical bulletin board, or something employees can access on their
computers.
One manager I know used a bulletin board to inform employees about
the score for secret shopper reports. The team’s goal was to average an 85 per-
cent score on secret shopper reports each month, so the manager attached a
string horizontally across the middle of the board and put a sign on the string
that read “85%.” As secret shopper reports came in, the manager would either
pin a copy of the report above or below the line, depending on the score.
Employees could quickly see how they were doing in comparison to the goal
and review any report that fell short of the target.
The next thing you'll need is a regular announcement. This is a formal re-
minder to employees about the goal and the results they’ve achieved. It could
be shared in an email update, a monthly newsletter, or in a presentation from
a customer service leader.
The rule of thumb is to share this information as often as you would any
other vital business information. So if you update the company on financial

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performance once per month, it’s a good idea to do the same for customer
service. Providing regular, formal updates helps establish customer service as
an important aspect of business performance.
The third part of your goal communication strategy is regular informal
communication from customer service leaders. Think of this as a coach shar-
ing updates with an athletic team and helping the athletes adjust according-
ly. This includes one-on-one meetings, informal emails, and informal team
meetings.
Let’s go back to Cars.com. Rattin and her managers share customer ser-
vice survey results with their teams on a daily basis. That means employees
are receiving constant, consistent updates about what’s going well and what
needs some extra attention.
I have one last reminder about customer service goals. Whatever metric or
metrics you choose to measure customer service, make sure employees don’t
get so fixated on achieving a score that they lose sight of the customer service
vision. The metrics are meant to help you measure progress rather than being
the definition of success.
Goals help customer service leaders and employees alike assess what’s
working well and where there are opportunities for improvement. That’s be-
cause customer-focused organizations never settle for good enough. These
companies are constantly trying to find ways to make their customer service
even better.

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NOTEs:
36 Jeanette Cooper, “Digital Air Strike Releases 2015 Social Media Trends Study for the
Automotive Industry,” Digital Air Strike, November 3, 2015. http://digitalairstrike.com/
digital-air-strike-releases-2015-social-media-trends-study-for-the-automotive-industry/.

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 ClHeASR TER 7

Hiring Employees Who Will Embrace Your Culture

AT FIRST GLANCE, PUBLIX SEEMS like an ordinary supermarket. There’s a pro-

duce section, a bakery, and aisles filled with packaged food. The checkout
stands are near the front.
Yet everything feels just a little different. There’s a large, welcoming
customer service desk near the front entrance. The aisles are wider than a
typical supermarket. The restrooms are clean. The produce section even
has signs describing how to select, store, and prepare various fruits and
vegetables.
You might also notice the employees. They're outgoing, friendly, and
helpful—and there are lots of them. It seems like there’s someone ready to
help everywhere you turn in the store.
The supermarket industry as a whole enjoys high customer service
rankings on sites like the Temkin Ratings and the American Customer
Satisfaction Index. Publix is at the very top. In 2016, it was the top-rated
supermarket chain in the Temkin Customer Service Ratings (#2 among
all businesses) and the top-rated company in any industry in the Temkin
Customer Experience Ratings.” Publix also earned the #3 ranking among
supermarket chains on the American Customer Satisfaction Index for
2016. That same year, MSN named the company “America’s Favorite
Supermarket.”*®
Publix has developed a strong, customer-focused culture by following
many of the same steps as other organizations profiled in this book. The
company has a clear customer service vision, Where Shopping is a Pleasure,

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that guides all aspects of the business including strategic decisions, store lay-
outs, and employee training. Its leaders work hard to engage employees with
the customer-focused culture by providing ongoing training and recognizing
them for emulating company values.
Above all, Publix does exceptionally well in hiring the right people. The
company builds and sustains a customer service culture by consistently hir-
ing employees who have a passion for delivering the type of service for which
Publix is known.

How Pusuix Hires FoR CuLture Fit

Customer service isn’t a job that’s right for everyone. The qualities we expect
in a customer service professional, such as friendliness, helpfulness, and em-
pathy, don’t come naturally for many people. That’s why companies need to
be picky about who they hire for customer-facing roles.
Imagine hiring an employee for Publix, a company offering world-class
customer service. An average employee won't do. You need someone with ex-
traordinary people skills—someone who enthusiastically embraces the Where
Shopping is a Pleasure customer service vision.
Hiring managers at Publix don’t need to find just one extraordinary em-
ployee. The chain has more than 1,000 stores spread across six states in the
Southeastern United States. This means it must employ thousands of out-
standing customer service professionals who fit in with the company’s cus-
tomer-focused culture. To address this challenge, Publix created a selection
process that helps it recruit the right employees.
This selection process begins with a culture page on the company’s web-
site that provides job candidates with extensive details about what it’s like
to work at Publix. The page includes information about the company’s mis-
sion and values, testimonials from happy employees, job descriptions for open
positions, career paths highlighting advancement opportunities, and tips for
applying for a job. This makes it easy for prospective job applicants to see if
Publix is an organization they'd enjoy working for. (See for yourself at hetp://
corporate.publix.com/careers.)

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 Jeff Toister

Internally, the company defines the qualities of an ideal employee to

make the selection process easier for hiring managers to make consistent hir-
ing decisions. Marcy Hamrick, its Manager of Talent Acquisition, lists the
top three”:

1. Driven by a need to serve others

2. Passionate about working together as a team
3. Capable of great attention to detail

The company’s carefully-designed employee selection process helps hiring

managers evaluate applicants for these qualities. For example, job applicants
who are granted an interview are asked to prepare a short statement describing
how they can help Publix deliver outstanding customer service. Candidates
are asked to deliver their statement at the start of the interview. The inter-
viewer uses the content of the statement to help assess whether the applicant
is driven by a need to serve others.
Publix has another unusual twist in its selection process. In an age of on-
line job applications, people who wish to work in a Publix store (versus in a cor-
porate role) must apply in person. Each store has a kiosk near the front where
people can browse through open positions and complete a job application.
Instructions on the Publix website make it clear that job applicants for in-
store positions are encouraged to seek out employees with questions about the
working environment or the application process when they come into a store
to apply for a job. Whether or not a candidate uses this opportunity to engage
with potential coworkers is a way of testing whether the person is passionate
about working together as a team.
Yet another element in the selection process is how the candidate prepares
for an interview. The company’s career page offers a list of interviewing tips
to help job seekers put their best foot forward. One tip advises candidates to
thank the hiring manager at the end of the interview, and then to ask when
a decision will be made. Another tip advises candidates to bring appropriate
work samples, so a person applying for a cake decorator position might bring
pictures of cakes they’ve decorated. Observing whether candidates follow

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these interviewing tips is a good way for hiring managers to determine if the
candidate is capable ofgreat attention to detail.
Publix also uses behavioral interviews as part of its selection process. A
behavioral interview consists ofaset of questions that focus on an applicant's
prior experience. For example, an interviewer might ask a prospective employ-
ee to describe a situation when he or she served an angry customer. Asking
for specifics requires the candidate to look beyond hypothetical examples and
share a real story. The interviewer can use the response to assess whether the
candidate could easily recall a relevant example, and if the candidate described
an appropriate course of action.
Another essential aspect of hiring for culture fit is the company’s promote-
from-within philosophy. Publix tries to hire internal candidates for leader-
ship positions whenever possible, because these employees tend to have a firm
grasp of the company culture and have demonstrated their ability to model it
for the people on their team. For instance, Todd Jones, the company’s CEO,
joined Publix in 1980 as a bagger; he spent the next 36 years working his way
up, and became CEO in early 2016.
This focus on hiring people who embrace the company culture is a key
trait shared by many customer-focused companies. Rackspace hires people
who come from professions like hospitality that require a lot of empathy,
based on the company’s belief that technical skills can easily be taught, but
empathy is much harder to develop. Shake Shack recognizes that its promote-
from-within philosophy is an essential part of maintaining the chain’s Stand
For Something Good culture as the company grows.
Clio, a company you'll meet in Chapter 8, gives job applicants a sample
customer email and asks them to write a response. This simple test gauges
several qualities that are part of Clio’s company culture.

1. Applicants must be resourceful enough to find the answer to the cus-

tomer’s question (the answers can be found on its website).
2. They must be able to write a response that’s easy to understand.
3. They must demonstrate the ability to use their personality to connect
with the customer via a brief email.

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 Jeff Teister

It’s a tall order, and not everyone can do it, but that’s what makes this test
an effective way to screen for candidates who will fit in with the company’s
customer-focused culture.
Many organizations use product advocacy as a way of screening job can-
didates for culture fit. The idea is to hire employees who are already passion-
ate about the company’s products or services. For example, many people who
work at REI are outdoor enthusiasts who view the job as an opportunity to
support their passion through discounts on equipment and clothing, the op-
portunity to lead classes, or the chance to share their enthusiasm with others.
Just one good hire can make a big difference in a company’s or team’s cul-
ture. One client I worked with sold accessories for boats, RVs, and golf carts.
The company had a small team of support professionals who answered phone
calls and emails from customers. None of the support team members were
particularly enthusiastic about boating, RVing, or golfing, so they sometimes
had a challenge connecting with their customers. This changed, however,
when the company hired a new employee who was an avid boater. The new
employee shared her personal knowledge with her coworkers, which helped
them understand their products better. This, in turn, led to an increase in
sales as everyone on the team was more able to enthusiastically help customers
to confidently make a purchasing decision.

WaT Happens WHEN You Hire EMPLOYEES WHO

DonT Fir Your Company’s CULTURE
Customer-focused companies like Publix build and sustain a customer-fo-
cused culture by hiring people who are already obsessed with providing their
unique brand of customer service. But what can happen if a company hires
people who don’t fit the company’s culture?
One small company hired a customer service representative named
Brandon, a recent high school graduate who had no previous work experience
and no real ambition. This wasn’t the typical profile for a successful employee,
but he was hired anyway at the owner’s insistence. Brandon happened to be
dating the owner's daughter, and he wanted to give Brandon an opportunity,
(Or perhaps he wanted to keep a close eye on his daughter’s boyfriend!)

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Brandon immediately clashed with the customer service team’s culture.

The rest of the team had a great deal of enthusiasm for helping customers and
enjoyed learning the intricacies of each new product line. Brandon, on the
other hand, had no enthusiasm for serving others and little interest in learning
about the company’s products.
Brandon’s coworkers began to bristle at how his laziness created extra
work for them. For instance, he frequently promised customers that he would
fix a problem, but then neglected to follow through and resolve the issue. The
customer would inevitably call back angry at the lack of a resolution, and an-
other customer service rep would have to bear the brunt of it.
The rest of the customer service team was relieved when Brandon quit af-
ter just a few months on the job. The customer service manager was relieved,
too, since the owner had vetoed any corrective action the manager had sug-
gested to address Brandon’s poor performance.
Unfortunately, the customer service team now had a lingering mistrust
toward management for allowing someone who was so obviously not a fit to
remain part of the team.
This case may be a little extreme, but it illustrates three of the problems
caused by poor hiring decisions:

1. Poor customer service

2. Reduced morale
3. Increased turnover

It’s difficult to provide outstanding customer service when employees lack

enthusiasm for helping others or have no affinity for their company’s products
or services. The sporting goods retailer Sports Authority went out of busi-
ness in 2016 after being plagued by a variety of problems, including poor
customer service and disengaged employees. If you visited Sports Authority to
buy camping gear, you'd likely be greeted by an employee whose helpfulness
consisted of pointing to the camping section from across the store. Contrast
this with the same shopping trip at REI, where you'd more likely be served
by an associate who was an avid camper and genuinely enjoyed helping others
gear up for a successful camping trip of their own.

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 Jeff Toister

Morale also suffers when poor hiring decisions are made. New employees
disturb team unity when they don’t embrace the culture. Their inability or
unwillingness to serve customers creates extra work for other employees, who
usually resent having to go out of their way to clean up a co-worker’s mess.
Stress levels rise, too: a 2016 study of contact center agents found that 36
percent of agents who faced a high risk of burnout felt they could not rely on
their co-workers to deliver outstanding customer service.*°
Turnover is perhaps the easiest-to-measure problem caused by poor hir-
ing. A study by the Center for American Progress estimated that replacing an
employee can cost an average of 20 percent of an employee’s annual salary for
employees who make $50,000 or less per year.*! To put that in perspective,
the average annual wage for a customer service employee in the United States
is approximately $27,000.* Replacing that employee costs $5,400, assuming
the 20 percent replacement cost average.
What goes into that $5,400 figure? It includes increased wages and over-
time needed to cover shifts for the lost employee, recruiting expenses (ad-
vertising, interviewing, background checks, drug screening, etc.), training
costs, new equipment (tools, uniforms, etc.), and administrative costs. You
can calculate the cost of turnover for employees in your organization or on
your customer service team using the turnover calculator found here: www.
serviceculturebook.com/tools.
High turnover plagues many industries employing lots of customer ser-
vice workers. Contact centers regularly experience annual turnover rates of 20
percent or higher. Retail stores often face turnover rates of 50 percent or more.
Hospitality industries, such as restaurants, can see as many as 70 percent of
their employees leave each year.
It's incredibly difficult to sustain company culture in a business where
there’s a revolving door of employees.
So why do some companies consistently hire the wrong employees? Some
managers grow tired of the extra work caused by being short-staffed and
simply rush to hire someone without thoroughly vetting their qualifications.
Other managers don’t know how to select the right employees. In many cases,
there’s no company-wide consensus on what qualities make a job applicant a
good fit with the culture.

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Some organizations try to address these issues by creating a structured

process to recruit and select new hires. Unfortunately, a hiring process won't
guarantee that you'll hire stellar employees. There’s often one of three flaws
standing in the way.
The first flaw is emphasizing experience when recruiting job candidates.
Recruiters look for people who have previously worked in jobs similar to the
one for which they're hiring. The theory is that people with similar experience
will have developed easily-transferrable skills.
The problem with this approach is that not all experience is necessarily
good experience. An employee may have learned bad habits from a previous
employer, especially if that company wasn’t customer-focused. Or the job can-
didate might be leaving a previous job because he or she wasn’t a very good
employee; if so, they'll likely struggle in the new job too.
The second flaw in many hiring processes is focusing too much on skills.
Skills are necessary in almost every job, whether it’s an interpersonal skill like
empathizing with customers, or a technical skill like the ability to trouble-
shoot a software program. However, having the right skills doesn’t mean an
employee will be a fit with the company culture. For instance, many people
know how to work as a cashier and ring up customer transactions, but there
are many dour, surly cashiers who would immediately clash with the custom-
er-focused culture at a company like Publix.
The third flaw is trying to hire for culture fit without clearly defining what
that means, Leaders often make the mistake of using their gut feeling in an inter-
view to determine if a prospective employee has the proper attitude and will fit in
well with the team. What these leaders end up doing is hiring people like them-
selves. A 2012 study by three researchers at the University of Pennsylvania—Jason
Dana, Robyn M. Dawes, and Nathanial R. Peterson—revealed that just asking
random questions to assess a candidate’s future performance actually results in
worse hiring decisions than if the candidate hadn’t been interviewed at all!**
Rene was an area director for a company with locations throughout the
country. Her company had a well-defined process for hiring customer service
employees, but she also had the autonomy to make the ultimate hiring deci-
sion for employees in her area. Although Rene had a bubbly personality, she
tended to be disorganized and unfocused. When it came to hiring employees,

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 Jeff Toister

she routinely hired individuals who had bubbly personalities but were disor-
ganized and unfocused, just like her. These hires clashed with the company’s
hiring profile that called for organized, conscientious employees who could
anticipate customer needs and resolve issues before they happened. Hiring
employees who didn’t fit with the company culture ultimately cost Rene her
job when her area’s performance couldn't keep up with the high standards
expected throughout the company.
Adam Grant, author of Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World,
told Forbes Magazine, “Emphasizing cultural fit leads you to bring in a bunch
of people who think in similar ways to your existing employees.™* His point
was that hiring people based on an arbitrary assessment of fit can lead to
stagnation. Instead, Grant suggested that companies should hire based on
what a potential employee can contribute to the culture. Healthy teams have a
diversity of perspectives, personalities, and skills that complement each other.
Hiring without regard for culture fit is dangerous — but going by gut in-
stinct to hire for fit can be just as dangerous. So what should organizational
leaders do to hire the right employees to serve their customers? The answer lies
in having a well-designed hiring process.

How To Hire FoR CULTure FIT

Publix and other organizations with strong, customer-focused cultures have a
process in place to screen job applicants for both skills and culture fit. The actual
process varies from organization to organization, but there are three general steps:

1. Create an Ideal Candidate Profile

2. Design test to find Ideal Candidates
3. Commit to the process

STEP I: CREATE AN IDEAL CANDIDATE PROFILE

It’s helpful to think of an Ideal Candidate Profile as an enhanced job
description.

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Job descriptions typically outline the key responsibilities, as well as the

skills and qualifications required to be successful in a given position. Many
companies use job descriptions as a guide when hiring employees.
An Ideal Candidate Profile takes this a step further by highlighting the
characteristics an employee should possess that would make him or her a good
fit with the company culture. It also separates the qualities a job applicant
must have to be hired from those that would be mice for the applicant to have,
but which they could also develop through training.
The reason for separating the Must-Haves from the Nice-to-Haves is what
recruiters call the Purple Squirrel Problem. There are a lot of things that are
purple and there are a lot of squirrels. But it’s very difficult to find a purple
squirrel! In recruiting, this means it’s difficult to find the perfect employee
with every desirable quality. The more Must-Haves that are listed on your
Ideal Candidate Profile, the harder it is to find that person. Prioritizing your
Must-Haves will help you focus on what you really need.
You can create an Ideal Candidate Profile by separating job qualifications
into these categories:

* Organizational Must-Haves
* Organizational Nice-to-Haves
* Job-Specific Must-Haves
* Job-Specific Nice-to-Haves

The Organizational Must-Haves category includes qualities that describe an

employee who is a good fit with your company’s organizational culture. An
employee needs to possess these qualities regardless of their role within the
organization. At Publix, for example, all new hires are required to be “driven
by a need to serve others,” no matter whether they work in the bakery depart-
ment, the produce department, or in a corporate role.
The Organizational Nice-to-Haves category consists of qualities that
would be nice for a new employee to possess, but aren’t required. These quali-
ties might be used to make a final hiring decision if one qualified candidate
has a few more Nice-to-Haves than another, but the company is also willing

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to hire a new employee who doesn’t have them. For instance, Publix looks for
job applicants who are current or former employees because it has a hire-from-
within strategy, but external candidates are also considered.
The Job-Specific Must-Haves category is composed of qualifications a
person needs to be considered for a specific job. For example, an applicant
must have prior experience as a Meat Cutter or Meat Cutter Apprentice to
apply for a Meat Cutter position at a Publix store. A person who lacks the ex-
perience of being a Meat Cutter but is still interested in working as one would
be encouraged to apply for a Meat Cutter Apprentice role, since that position
doesn’t require prior experience.
Finally, the Job-Specific Nice-to-Haves category is, like the organiza-
tional Nice-to-Haves, composed of qualifications that might break a tie be-
tween two qualified candidates, but are not absolutely required. For instance,
a Meat Cutter Apprentice working at Publix might have a leg up on a job
applicant with meat cutting experience at another grocery chain, but working
as a Publix Meat Cutter Apprentice isn’t a Must-Have qualification to become
a Publix Meat Cutter.
In my experience helping clients create Ideal Candidate Profiles, the big-
gest challenge is separating the Must-Have qualities from Nice-to-Haves. A
good test to see if something is truly a Must-Have is to compare your exist-
ing employees to your Ideal Candidate Profile. If a successful employee lacks
a Must-Have quality (or lacked it when he or she was first hired), then you
know that quality isn’t truly a Must-Have.
Figure 7.1 contains a sample Ideal Candidate Profile for a tasting room
host at a fictitious winery, Sunny Hills Vineyard. I’ve also created an Ideal
Candidate Profile worksheet you can download and use to create your own
profiles: www.serviceculturebook.com/tools.

Figure 7.1: Ideal Candidate Profile

Organization: Sunny Hills Vineyard

Position: Tasting Room Host

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Customer Service Vision: We make it fun to discover great wine.

Organizational Must-Haves

* Enthusiasm for wine

* Continuous learner
® Team player

Organizational Nice-to-Haves

* Understanding of the wine industry

* General knowledge of common wine varietals
* Familiarity with the unique characteristics of our winery’s growing
region

Job-Specific Must-Haves

* A passion for teaching others about wine

* Ability to develop rapport with guests
* Capable of clear and confident communication

Job-Specific Nice-to-Haves

* Introductory Sommelier certification (or similar)

* Current TIPS certification card
* Previous winery experience

Here’s another tip that can help you save some time. Once you create your
first Ideal Candidate Profile, you can use it as a template to create profiles
for other positions. The first two categories, Organizational Must-Haves and
Organizational Nice-to-Haves, should stay the same for each position, so half
the work is already done.

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Step Two: Design Tests To Finp IDEAL CANDIDATES

Once you create an Ideal Candidate Profile for a position, you need to design
a screening process that tests for each quality in the profile, indicating wheth-
er job applicants fit those particular qualifications. To do this, take each item
in your Ideal Candidate Profile and determine how you'll tell whether or not
a job applicant possesses that quality.
These tests are the basis of your candidate screening process.
As an example, think about what you might see on a candidate’s resume
or job application that could indicate a good fit with your organization. A
nonprofit that runs music programs for children has applicants list hobbies
and interests on their job application. The recruiter looks for applicants who
play an instrument, sing, or have an avid interest in music, because people
who have a strong connection to music are much more likely to relate to the
music program participants than people who don’t share that passion.
The interview is another important opportunity to test job applicants for
culture fit. The key is to use what’s called a structured interview, where every
applicant for the same position is asked the same standard set of questions.
Each question should connect to at least one quality on your Ideal Candidate
Profile for that role.
Let’s say you manage a tasting room at a winery and want to hire tasting
room hosts who are passionate about teaching guests about wine. You might
test job applicants for this quality by asking each person to share an experi-
ence they had where they learned something about wine that most consumers
don’t know. A good response would be a story where the job applicant spent
time learning about wine and could relate what they learned in a clear and
easily-understood manner.
Many recruiters limit themselves to looking at just three sources of in-
formation: the candidate’s job application, their resume, and their responses
to interview questions. These are all helpful, but there’s no reason to limit
yourself to just these three! A well-structured selection process can test a can-
didate’s qualifications in a wide variety of ways.
One of my clients created an Ideal Candidate Profile for employees work-
ing in the parking department on a college campus. They wanted people who

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could anticipate potential problems and plan ahead to avoid them. The way
they tested job applicants for this quality was subtle, but effective.
When a recruiter scheduled an interview with a job applicant, the re-
cruiter did not volunteer to give the applicant directions to the parking of
fice. (Like many college campuses, finding parking and then navigating to
a specific office was difficult.) Successful applicants did one of two things.
Some would ask the recruiter for directions, in which case the recruiter readily
provided the requested information. Others went on the school’s website to
research transportation options, parking locations, and estimate the amount
of travel time required.
Unsuccessful applicants arrived late for the interview. They would tell the
recruiter they couldn’t find parking or got lost trying to find the office. No
matter the excuse, it was a good test to show the applicant didn’t naturally
anticipate a problem that plagued many visitors to the college campus.
I want to offer one word of caution about the candidate screening process.
Successful candidates will generally be delighted to receive a job offer. But
what about the people who aren’t offered a job? In many cases, these people far
outnumber the people who are hired. It’s important to design a selection pro-
cess that treats all candidates with dignity and respect. Companies frequently
waste candidates’ time with multiple steps that don’t add value to the selection
process. Some fail to notify rejected applicants of their status.
Keep in mind that all job applicants are potential customers. They might
choose whether or not to do business with your company in the future based
on their experience with the selection process. They may encourage or dis-
courage friends and family members to apply for an open position based on
their impression of your organizational culture. If at all possible, you want job
applicants to love your organization even if they don’t get to join it.

STEP THREE: COMMIT TO THE PROCESS

Impatience may be the biggest reason why companies fail to hire employ-
ees who fit their organizational culture. It takes time to create an Ideal
Candidate Profile for each position. It takes more time to design a screening

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process that tests for each quality in the profile. And it takes guts to stick
to the process.
Yet many businesses find themselves suddenly faced with an urgent need
to hire customer service employees. A company might be opening a new loca-
tion that needs to be staffed. A busy season might be approaching and extra
employees will soon be needed. Or a key person may have left and must be
urgently replaced.
All these circumstances create pressure on hiring managers to fill posi-
tions quickly. In doing so, they might be tempted to skip steps in the process
and hire someone less qualified than would normally be considered for a posi-
tion. The danger here is in hiring the wrong employee. Poor hiring decisions
tend to have a cumulative effect on a manager’s time. The employee needs
more training. The manager has to fix the employee’s mistakes. The rest of
the team develops morale issues caused by an employee who doesn’t fit in.
Plus, the manager will soon need to hire and train yet another employee when
the poor hire doesn’t work out.
Companies with strong customer service cultures stay committed to their
hiring process. Hiring great employees creates a self-reinforcing cycle for cus-
tomer-focused companies. Your employees will deliver outstanding service,
which makes a strong positive impression on your customers. Customers see
your company as a great place to work, so more people apply who already
love your brand. With more applicants, you can be even more selective about
whom you hire.

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Notes:
37 The Temkin Group, “2016 Temkin Customer Service Ratings,” Zemkin Ratings, 2016.
http://temkinratings.com/temkin-ratings/temkin-customer-service-ratings-2016/.
38 Janna Herron, “America’s favorite supermarkets, ranked,” MSN, July 18, 2016.
hetp://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/americas-favorite-supermarkets-ranked/
ss-BBu4jPa?liz BBnb7Kz#image=1.
39 Deena Shanker, “They’re hiring! These great employers have 108,622 openings,” Fortune,
March 12, 2015. hetp://fortune.com/2015/03/05/best-companies-open-positions/.
40 Jeff Toister, “How to Battle Agent Burnout.” Toister Performance Solutions, 2016: www.
toistersolutions.com/burnout.
4] Heather Boushey and Sarah Jane Glynn, “There Are Significant Business
Costs to Replacing Employees,” Center for American Progress, November 16, 2012. https://
www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Costof Turnover.pdf.
42 PayScale estimates the average hourly wage for a customer service employee in the U.S.
is $13.01 per hour. This works out to $27,060.80 for an employee who averages 40 hours
per week.
43 Jason Danaand Robyn M. Dawes, “Beliefinthe Unstructured Interview: The Persistence
of an Illusion” (working paper) University ofPennsylvania, August 15, 2012. http://www.sas.
upenn.edu/-danajd/interview.pdf.
44 Dan Schwabel, “Adam Grant: Why You Shouldn't Hire For Cultural Fit,” Forbes,
February 2, 2016. http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2016/02/02/adam-grant-why-
you-shouldnt-hire-for-cultural-fit/#2£71777c56f5.

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Training Employees to Embody Your Culture

A CUSTOMER CALLED CLIO’s SUPPORT team with a unique billing request. She
wanted to pay by check even though the company’s software is only set up to
accept credit card payments.
Clio provides legal practice management software that helps lawyers run
their law practices. The software is provided on a subscription basis, and cus-
tomers are billed monthly or yearly to access it via the internet. The caller was
a busy lawyer who didn’t want to spend a lot of time dealing with support to
get her issue resolved.
Support calls like this are a common challenge for many software com-
panies. Customers often want special features or options that aren’t available,
and there’s always a risk they'll take their business to a competitor if they can’t
get what they want.
Here’s where support agents at a typical company simply tell their cus-
tomer, “Sorry, but that option isn’t available.” Then it’s up to the customer
to decide if they want to keep their account anyway or take their business
elsewhere.
Not at Clio. While the support agent was aware that paying by check
wasn't an option, he didn’t want to lose the customer’s business. He knew that
preventing churn (i.e., retaining customers) was a key part of the company’s
customer service vision: Our goal is to help our customers succeed and realize the
full value of our Product. This results in Evangelists and less Churn.
The agent listened patiently to the lawyer’s concerns, hoping to find a way
to make her happy and convince her to keep her account. She explained she

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was used to paying for services by check and believed this was the simplest
way for her to keep track of her expenses. This insight helped the support
agent understand that the customer’s real need was to keep things easy and
spend as little time as possible managing her Clio account.
So he explained to her how automatic credit card billing was actually
easier than paying by check. It would save her time since the payments were
made automatically, and it would prevent any service disruptions since she
wouldn't have to remember to mail a check each time her payment was due.
The customer was delighted by the end of the call. She felt like the sup-
port agent had listened to her concerns and understood her needs. Best of all,
she kept her Clio account.
Daily customer interactions like this have helped Clio grow at a 40 per-
cent rate annually. Most of that growth is driven by word-of-mouth referrals
from happy customers who tell other lawyers about the company’s excellent
software and helpful service.
This outstanding service generates incredible customer loyalty. Clio’s
churn rate is just one percent, meaning that 99 out of 100 customers renew
their subscriptions. The company’s customer satisfaction ratings are consis-
tently in the mid-90 percent range.
This isn’t an accident. Clio’s executives made a strategic choice to use ser-
vice as a way to differentiate the company from the competition. A big part of
this strategy is training all Clio employees to embody its service culture when
assisting Customers.

How C110 Trans Its EMpLoyees TO EMBopy ITs

CULTURE
It’s not enough to know what the vision says at Clio. Employees are expected
to know what it means and be able to explain how it applies to them. To this
end, they’re given extensive and ongoing training to help them embody Clio’s
culture when serving customers.
Chapter 4 explained how to engage employees with your organization's
customer service culture. In many ways, this process overlaps with training.

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However, there’s one key difference. Engagement is a process of cultivating

employee attitudes so they believe in their company’s customer service vision
and want to use it as a guide in their daily work. Training provides employees
with the specific knowledge, skills, and abilities to turn that desire into action.
Let’s look at the example of Clio’s customer support rep from the begin-
ning of this chapter. He was engaged because he had a desire to apply the
customer service vision of helping customers succeed in using Clio’s software
so they'd remain loyal. His training helped him in this quest. The customer
support rep knew what payment methods were available and which were not.
His rapport-building, active listening, and empathy skills allowed him to have
a constructive dialogue with the customer about her reasons for wanting to
pay by check. Finally, his ability to partner with this individual and propose
an acceptable solution ultimately saved the account and created a happy and
loyal customer.
Clio’s customer support team receives a lot of training to reinforce the
company’s vision and develop their ability to embody it in the service they
provide. New hires are introduced to the vision during their initial train-
ing. It’s augmented with training videos from the online education company
Lynda.com to help agents develop specific customer service skills like rapport
building, active listening, and empathizing.
In addition, support agents receive ongoing training on how to actually
execute the customer service vision. This includes one-on-one coaching from
their supervisor to help develop their skills, regular team meetings to reinforce
the vision, and performance feedback based on guidelines reflecting the vi-
sion. This constant training and reinforcement ensures that support agents
never forget the role they play in Clio’s customer service culture.
Training isn’t limited to Clio’s customer-facing support team. Employees
in other departments receive training to ensure they understand the com-
pany’s customer service philosophy. Rian Gauvreau, Clio’s cofounder and
Chief Operating Officer, wants all of the company’s employees to see their
job through the eyes of their customers.
“The way to solve for customer pain is to put your customer first,”
Gauvreau said. One of the ways employees learn to put the customer first is

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through what's called “support ride-alongs.” This is where people from other
parts of the company spend time working alongside support agents to solve
customer issues. “It motivates the staff to know they're helping customers,”
Gauvreau explained.
The ride-alongs help employees better understand the issues customers
face. For instance, if a product designer is working on a new feature, she can
reflect on the time she spent doing a support ride-along to envision how that
feature will look from a customer’s perspective.
In addition, Clio hosts an annual user conference, giving employees the
Opportunity to meet customers face-to-face. User conferences are common
for software companies. They gather existing and prospective clients for a
few days of product training, best practice sharing, and user feedback ses-
sions. These conferences are generally marketing initiatives aimed at increas-
ing customer loyalty or enticing new clients. What makes Clio different is
how they use this opportunity to help employees strengthen their customer
focus.
For instance, each year, developers spend the first day of the conference
gathering feedback and suggestions from customers in attendance. By day
two, the company implements changes to the online software based on the
feedback they received on day one! Making changes so quickly demonstrates
the company’s commitment to helping its customers succeed.
Another example of a culture training initiative at Clio was an exercise
called “Know Our Customer.” Every employee in the company participated
(about 200 employees), with each person interviewing at least one customer.
The goal was to create an opportunity for all employees to develop their em-
pathy skills by spending time learning from a customer. As a result of this
exercise, people in all departments were able to adopt a customer perspective
when doing their jobs.
Training doesn’t always have to be a formal process. In fact, most of
the learning that occurs in the workplace happens through informal experi-
ences. At Clio, this includes discussing and reinforcing customer focus in
all-hands meetings and one-on-one conversations with a supervisor. The
company also has a peer-recognition program where employees give each

lil
 Jeff Toister

other kudos for a job well done. The only requirement is that the recogni-
tion must include a description of how the employee’s actions aligned with
being customer-focused.
Comprehensive and ongoing customer service training is a common char-
acteristic among companies with strong service cultures. Zendesk (a company
youll meet in Chapter 12) has something similar to Clio’s ride-along pro-
gram, where employees who don’t normally work in customer support spend
time responding to customer issues. Shake Shack trains all its leaders to em-
body their Stand For Something Good philosophy and reinforce those values
with their employees. JetBlue has all newly hired crewmembers (employees)
attend a two-day orientation to learn about the company culture.
Leaders at customer-focused companies understand that employees can
get lost without the right training and guidance.

Wuat Can Happen Ir You Don PRoviDE CULTURE

‘TRAINING
Many companies fail to provide employees with specific training on how to
embody the culture. This happens for a variety of reasons. In some organiza-
tions, leaders fail to recognize the need to give employees specific instructions
on how to use the culture as a guide to serving customers. In other companies,
leaders prefer to spend time on other work and don’t make developing the
culture a priority.
In one example, a customer service representative was asked to describe
his company’s customer service philosophy. He knew the company had a set
of five core values, but he struggled to come up with an answer.
The rep knew the five core values were supposed to represent how people
should interact with customers, coworkers, and other important stakehold-
ers. There was a sign displaying these values in front of the building where
he worked, and another sign hung within sight of his cubicle. He even had a
mug on his desk with the five values written on it, which he’d been given at a
meeting where the values were announced.

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What this employee didn’t know was what the values meant, or how they
applied to his daily work. He'd never received any training on this, and his
boss never discussed the values with the team.
The five values were crafted by the company’s corporate communications
team after months of deliberation, focus groups, and word-smithing sessions
with senior leaders. They sounded good, but they did nothing to guide em-
ployees’ actions.
When employees aren’t trained on their company’s customer service
culture, employees can’t consciously use the culture to guide their actions.
Furthermore, individual employees, different departments, and various com-
pany locations are likely to develop their own interpretations of the customer
service philosophy that might or might not complement one another.
Some companies attempt to train employees on the customer service cul-
ture, but there isn’t full commitment. Many organizations rely on a single
learning event such as a big kick-off party or a one-time training session. The
initial excitement quickly fades as these companies fail to constantly and con-
sistently reinforce the culture through multiple training programs and ongo-
ing informal learning opportunities.
The challenge with training through just a single event is that most infor-
mation is stored in our brains on a “use it or lose it” basis. For example, you
probably had a combination locker in high school. Most of us could open that
locker in just a few seconds back when we used it on a daily basis. But what
would happen if you stood in front of that same locker today? Even assuming
the combination hadn’t changed, most people wouldn't be able to open it. The
combination you used to recall instantly has long been forgotten because you
stopped using it.
When I worked for a parking management company, all new employees
learned about the company’s customer service vision in a new hire orienta-
tion session organized by my corporate training department. My team was
also responsible for conducting site audits at our various locations to evaluate
customer service. One of the items on the audit was spot-checking employees
to see if they could describe the customer service vision.

1S}
 Jeff Toister

The results varied widely. At high-performing locations, employees typi-

cally had the customer service vision memorized. They could describe what it
meant and explain how they used it as a guide when serving customers. These
employees remembered the vision not just from their new hire orientation,
but also from frequent discussions with their boss and signs displaying the
vision that hung at their parking facility. They also attended the company’s
annual customer service refresher training where they were reminded about
the vision.
The audit results were very different at our locations with poor customer
service performance. Here, most employees had forgotten what they learned
about the customer service vision in their new hire orientation by the time
their location was audited. Their manager didn’t discuss it with them, the
vision wasn’t displayed anywhere at their location, and they didn’t attend the
annual refresher training.
Other companies do a great job of training and reinforcing their customer
service vision among customer-facing employees, but they don’t do the same
thing for employees working in other departments. This creates a disconnect
between employees who view themselves in customer service and those who
don’t.
All employees are ultimately connected to customer service in some way,
whether directly or indirectly. A restaurant server is obviously in customer
service because he or she has direct and frequent contact with guests. But
what about the chef? A guest’s satisfaction will be affected by whether the
chef cooks the meal properly or honors special requests. How about the dish-
washer? This person may never interact directly with a guest, but a guests’
experience will certainly be impacted by whether or not the dishes are clean.
The IT support manager for a major retail chain described the danger of
not viewing certain departments as essential to customer service. “Our stores
get it. We do lots of training and continuously support our culture. But it’s
been a slow process in IT. Before I got here, culture just wasn’t something peo-
ple talked about it. All the training focused on the technical aspects of the job.”
Let’s say one of the stores experienced an issue with its point of sale soft-
ware, the software used to ring up customer transactions, track sales, and

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control inventory. It’s critical to that store’s operations. If the company’s IT

department lacks a customer-focused culture, the IT employees might not
prioritize helping a store manager work through the problem while trying to
minimize the impact it has on customers.
Some companies inadvertently train their employees to actually work
against their desired culture. Remember the Comcast Retention Specialists
we profiled in Chapter 2? The focus of their job was to talk customers out of
canceling their accounts. These Retention Specialists received extensive train-
ing on overcoming customer objections while making it difficult for custom-
ers to get what they wanted.

How To Train Empioyees To EmBopy Your CuLTurRE

A basic training program should contain three elements: objectives, instruc-
tion, and reinforcement.
Objectives represent what you want employees to know or be able to do
as a result of the training. /mstruction consists of the training activities you
use to make sure employees can accomplish the objectives. And reinforce-
ment is what you offer to ensure that employees don’t forget what they have
learned.
Here’s a step-by-step guide you can use to develop a training program in
your company, department, or team.

STEP ONE: CREATE OBJECTIVES

The first step in developing a basic training program is to create objectives.
Good training begins with clear objectives that spell out what knowledge,
skills, or abilities an employee should possess by the end of the program. This
allows you to measure whether that employee has met the objectives.
Training without objectives is vague, non-specific, and difficult to mea-
sure. A company might design a training program to “help employees under-
stand our culture.” But what does that mean? How will you know whether or
not employees actually understand the culture?

IBS
 Jeff Toister

A training program to prepare your employees to embody your customer

service culture training program should start with this objective:

Employees will be able to correctly answer these questions about our

customer service
Vision:

* What is our customer service vision?

* What does it mean?
* How do I personally contribute?

Objectives like this influence how you design your training program. At a min-
imum, your training will need to help employees memorize your company’s
customer service vision, understand it well enough to explain it clearly, and link
the vision to their own job duties. Employees should also be able to give specific
examples of how they can embody the customer service vision on the job.
Of course, you'll need to answer these questions yourself before trying to
train employees to answer them. Otherwise, it would be like giving students a
test without having an answer key to grade their work.
Let’s go back to Clio for a moment. The example I shared at the begin-
ning of this chapter provided evidence that the company’s support agent could
answer all three questions about the customer service vision: Our goal is to
help our customers succeed and realize the full value of our Product. This results
in Evangelists and less Churn.
First, the support agent had a card on his desk with Clio’s customer ser-
vice vision on it, which he referenced while serving his customer. This indi-
cated he knew the company’s vision.
Second, the agent showed that he understood what the service vision
meant when he told the customer he didn’t want her to cancel her account
and was committed to finding a solution that would work for her. This made
the customer happy because she felt that he had listened to her concerns.
And finally, the support agent showed that he knew how he could person-
ally contribute when he took the time to listen to the customer and let her

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know he understood her real needs. After the call, he pointed to the interac-
tion and explained that it was his job to help customers so they remained
happy and loyal Clio customers.
The last question—How do I personally contribute?—is sometimes dif-
ficult for employees to answer if they don’t have direct contact with their
customers. For example, a software developer at Clio might be tempted to
think there’s little she can do to provide outstanding service. However, after
receiving training, that developer should realize there are actually many ways
she can contribute. She can develop new features that solve pressing customer
needs. She can tap into her empathy for customers to design software that’s
intuitive and easy for them to use. And she can be responsive to the support
team when they have questions about a new feature or point out a bug that
needs to be fixed.
All these actions enable Clio to deliver the kind of outstanding service
that makes customers loyal to Clio and enthusiastic about recommending the
software to other lawyers.
You can add other objectives to your customer service culture train-
ing program, as long as they help employees understand and embody the
culture. For instance, this could be an ideal time to introduce employees
to customer service standards or procedures. You might also develop dif
ferent objectives for new hires than those for your experienced employees.
New hires truly need an introduction to your company’s culture, while
experienced employees should already have an understanding of the culture
and may just need to polish their skills or acquire some more advanced
techniques.

Step Iwo: DESIGN AN INSTRUCTIONAL PLAN

The second step to developing a training program is to design an instructional
plan. This plan helps your employees achieve the objectives you've written for
your culture training. You'll want to create a plan that ensures every employee
can provide examples of ways they personally fulfill the company’s customer
service vision in their daily jobs.

ILI.
 Jeff Toister

In their book Telling Ain’t Training, workplace learning and perfor-

mance experts Harold D. Stolovitch and Erica J. Keeps outline a simple
five-step model that can easily be used to design your culture training
program.”

I. Rationale: Discuss why the training is needed.

2. Objectives: Share the training objectives.
3. Activities: Conduct activities to help participants learn.
4. Evaluation: Determine whether the objectives have been met.
5. Feedback: Confirm that objectives have been met and/or coach em-
ployees to improve.

Figure 8.1 illustrates a sample customer service vision training plan for Clio’s
support team. You can also download a training plan worksheet at www.ser-
viceculturebook.com/tools.

Figure 8.1: Customer Service Vision Training Plan

Company: Clio
Department: Customer Support
Rationale: The purpose of this training is to help Customer Support team mem-
bers understand the customer service vision and apply it to their daily work.
Objectives: Employees will be able to correctly answer these questions about
our customer service vision:

& What is our customer service vision?

* What does it mean?
* How do Ipersonally contribute?

Activities:

* Self-study: Ask participants to identify places where they see the cus-
tomer service vision written and bring a list with them to the work-
shop. (Example: signs hung at workstations.)

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* In class: Have participants take turns describing the customer service

vision in their own words.
* Follow-up: Ask each participant to write a Thank You letter to them-
selves from an imaginary customer, thanking them for service that
aligned with the vision. Encourage participants to attempt to earn
similar feedback from a real customer.

Evaluation:

* Self-study: Verify each participant identifies at least one written ex-

ample of the vision.
* In-class: Verify each participant describes the vision from their own
perspective.
* Follow-up: Verify each participant writes a Thank You letter that
aligns with the vision.

Feedback:

* Provide each participant with feedback on the outcome of their activi-

ties evaluations.

Activities, the third step, is where many people get stuck. Here’s what I’ve
learned in over 25 years as a corporate trainer: keep it simple. Many novice
trainers get so excited about adding engaging or creative elements that they
lose sight of the end goal, which is to make sure employees can accomplish
the learning objectives.
The definition of a good training program is one that accomplishes its ob-
jectives on time and on budget. With that in mind, I prefer to follow a straight-
forward, three-step model for creating training activities: tell, show, and do.

@ Tell the participants what you want them to know.

* Show them an example.
* Have the participants do something that demonstrates their new
knowledge, skill, or ability.

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 Jeff Toister

There are many simple, creative activities you can develop following this
model. Here are three examples:
This simple activity is ideal for one-on-one or on-the-job training:

* Tell: Explain the customer service vision.

* Show: Give the participant(s) a visual aid with the vision written on it.
* Do: Ask the employee(s) to describe how they see the vision guiding
their work.

Another activity involves exploring an internal or external web page your

company has that describes your organizational culture:

* Tell: Walk participants through the web page.

* Show: Point out the customer service vision and anything else that
helps explain the culture (video, employee testimonials, etc.).
* Do: Give participants some time to explore the web page, and then
follow up by asking each one to describe how he or she thinks the
customer service vision relates to his or her job.

Yet another activity is a photo scavenger hunt; this works well in environments
where there’s ample visual evidence of the customer service vision:

* Tell: Discuss the company’s customer service vision with participants.

Then explain that youre going to send them on a scavenger hunt; their
goal is to use their smart phones to take pictures related to the vision.
Give them a short but workable time frame in which to do this.
* Show: Provide an example, such as a picture of a poster with the cus-
tomer service vision printed on it, so participants know what to look
for.
* Do: Have participants complete the scavenger hunt. As a bonus, di-
vide them into teams and have each team give a short presentation on
what they found, using their pictures as visuals. (Optional: Provide a
list of items for participants to photograph.)

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The activities you create are only limited by your budget, allotted time, and
imagination. Just remember to keep it simple. Your training is effective as long
as it accomplishes your objectives.

STEP THREE: PROVIDE REINFORCEMENT

This third and final step in developing a basic training program is perhaps the
most overlooked part ofthe training process. You must continuously reinforce
the concepts taught if you want the participants to remember them and regu-
larly apply them to their work.
Customer-focused organizations have made reinforcement part of their op-
erating DNA. As we discussed in Chapter 5, companies with strong customer
service cultures align key components of their operations (goals, hiring, train-
ing, empowerment, and management) with their customer service vision. Each
of these components naturally reinforces employees’ knowledge and under-
standing of the company’s service vision on a daily basis. Nevertheless, it’s still
a good idea to have a specific plan in place to reinforce your culture training
and ensure employees are constantly reminded of the concepts they've learned.
One way to construct your plan is to use the 70-20-10 Rule, originally
created by the Center for Creative Leadership.*°
Over time, leadership development experts at the Center noticed that
leaders developed their skills from three primary sources:

* 70 percent came from challenging assignments

* 20 percent came from mentors (usually the boss)
* 10 percent came from formal learning

While there’s little evidence to support 70-20-10 as a hard and fast rule for
leadership development, it’s proven to be a useful guide for structuring train-
ing programs. Let's see how we can use it to reinforce culture training.

» Challenging Assignments (70%). Clio’s “Know Our Customer” ini-

tiative is an excellent example. Employees had to make time to get

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to know at least one customer, so they could better understand how

customers used their software. Another example comes from Cars.
com, where Heather Rattin and her team spend time each day solving
problems that cause customer dissatisfaction.
* Mentors (20%). Organizational leaders should be the first people to
attend customer service culture training. They need to know exactly
what their employees are being taught, so they can reinforce those les-
sons through daily informal interactions, team meetings, department
announcements (emails, etc.), and formal one-on-one feedback ses-
sions. (We'll discuss more ways for leaders to reinforce the customer
service vision in Chapter 10.)
* Formal Learning (10%). This might include a training class, e-learn-
ing program, one-on-one session, or other learning event used to ini-
tially train employees on how to embody the customer service culture.
Customer-focused organizations like Clio and JetBlue make sure all
new employees receive extensive training on the company culture.
They also provide periodic refresher training to ensure employees
don’t stagnate.

Providing employees with constant training on the culture may seem like a lot
of work—and it is. The effort is well worth it.
Let’s go back to the Clio support agent whose story we shared at the start
of this chapter. What would have happened if he had not been trained to em-
body Clio’s customer service vision? The customer might have grown frustrat-
ed and asked to speak to a supervisor, which would take up valuable time that
the supervisor could otherwise have spent coaching and training employees.
And in the end, the client might have cancelled her account since she couldn’t
get what she wanted, which would cost Clio years of reliable revenue and any
potential referrals she would have made to other law firms.
Now, multiply that by the dozens of interactions that single support rep
has with customers each day. Multiply that number again by the 20 agents
on the team. In just one day, there could be hundreds of customers who are
impacted, for better or worse, by employees’ ability to embody the culture.

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Fortunately, the support agent was well trained. He was enthusiastic

about Clio’s culture and demonstrated a genuine desire to help his customer
succeed. She ended the call happy with her service and determined to keep her
account. And that made all that training worthwhile.

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Notes:
45 Harold D. Stolovitch and Erica J. Keeps, Zelling Ain’t Training, (Alexandria, VA: ASTD
Press, 2002).
46 Ron Rabin, “Blended Learning for Leadership: The CCL Approach,” Center for Creative
Leadership, 2014. http://insights.ccl.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/BlendedLearning
Leadership.pdf

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 CHAPTER 9

Empowering Employees to Support Your Culture

KANYON HILLAIRE UNDERSTANDS THAT MAKING customers feel confi-

dent goes a long way toward their having a good experience. He’s a Safelite
AutoGlass technician who fixes and replaces broken glass—cracked windows,
dinged windshields—on cars.
It's annoying for a customer to experience a broken car window. On top
of that, it can be unsettling to have a stranger arrive at your home or business
and ask for the keys to your car.
Hillatre understands he needs to quickly build rapport with his custom-
ers. “Trust is a very big thing,” explained Hillaire. “It takes years and years to
trust somebody, and we have minutes.”
On a normal service call, Hillaire builds trust by carefully explaining the
procedure before he starts working. However, one day he went to call a customer
to confirm his arrival time and discovered that this customer was deaf. This
meant it would be much harder to provide his normal trust-building explanation.
Hillaire decided to visit his friend Amanda, who knows American
Sign Language. He recorded a video on his cell phone of Amanda signing
Hillaire’s explanation of the service process. The video began with, “My name
is Amanda. My friend, Kanyon, asked me to help him explain how today’s
appointment will go.” When Hillaire went on his service call, he showed his
customer the video, and it immediately broke the ice.
This simple gesture wasn’t in a Safelite AutoGlass employee training man-
ual. It was something Hillaire did on his own initiative. He didn’t ask for
permission to record the video or to spend the extra time. He just did it.

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I asked Hillaire why he didn’t write down the instructions, instead of tak-
ing all that time to meet his friend and create the video. Hillaire explained
that his goal was bigger than just providing information.
“Customer service for me is allowing that person to feel comfortable and
safe. Then they can trust me, and when I am working on their car or truck,
they want to trust me. So yes, I could have written it down, but I would have
missed out on the joy I saw in my customer’s face as he was watching that
video. I would have missed out on watching the walls drop and watching the
trust begin to grow.”
Stories like this have helped Safelite AutoGlass develop a reputation for
outstanding customer service. The company’s service has been profiled in
books, blogs, and podcasts. In 2016, Safelite won two awards from the in-
surer USAA for innovation and supplier excellence in contributing to USAA’s
own outstanding service reputation. This is a big deal, especially when you
consider that USAA is regularly ranked as the number one customer service
company in the United States.“
Like the other companies profiled in this book, Safelite has worked hard
to develop a customer-focused culture. Safelite calls it People powered, custom-
er driven. One ofthe keys to its success is empowering employees like Hillaire
to deliver exceptional service.

How SAFELITE EMPOWERS EMPLOYEES TO DELIVER

OUTSTANDING CUSTOMER SERVICE
Some people think of empowerment as the ability to go above and beyond the
call of duty. Hillaire’s choice—to go out of his way to make a connection and
build trust with a deaf customer—is a perfect example of this.
But empowerment means much more. Empowerment is putting employ-
ees in a position where it’s easy for them to provide outstanding customer
service,
Many customer service leaders have told me that the number-one ob-
stacle to empowerment is getting employees to realize how much they’re re-
ally able to do for their customers. Employees must possess a strong desire to

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proactively look for opportunities to deliver outstanding customer service. So

empowerment starts with employees having a service mindset.
Safelite’s customer service vision provides employees with clear guidance
on what they’re expected to do:

Achieve extraordinary results by looking at our business through the eyes

of our customers and making it easy for them to do business with us and
ensuring their experience is memorable.

Hillaire used the vision as a guide when serving his customer. He started with
a desire to make the customer feel comfortable, so he tried to imagine the ser-
vice call from the customer’s perspective—i.e., through the eyes of the customer.
Hillaire knew the video of his friend Amanda signing his explanation of the
procedure would make it easier for the customer to understand the process. By
taking the time to create a personal video, he ensured the customer's experi-
ence was memorable.
This service mindset starts at the top. Tom Feeney, the company’s CEO,
described the empathy technicians are expected to display for customers who
need glass repaired on their vehicles. “There’s a lot of emotion going through
your mind. What we try to do is bring a peace of mind to that experience.”
But this service mindset is just the starting point for empowerment because
empowering employees means providing them with the resources, tools, and
authority to serve customers at a high level. Safelite uses its customer service
vision to guide the development of processes that enable employees to succeed.
Consider a typical service appointment. A customer connects with Safelite
either directly or through their insurance company. When they call, the cus-
tomer is immediately connected to a live person rather than being routed
through an annoying phone menu. Within a few minutes, the Safelite cus-
tomer service rep is able to diagnose the problem, identify the part needed
to fix it, check inventory to make sure the part is in stock, confirm what’s
covered under the customer’s auto insurance policy, and schedule a technician
to come do the repair. Customers can also choose a self-service option on the
Safelite website that guides them through this process.

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 Jeff Toister

Most customers don’t realize how much planning and how many resourc-
es are required to deliver this kind of service. Safelite has to staff its con-
tact center with enough people to answer each phone call with a live person.
Employees need to be trained to ask the right questions to determine what
work needs to be done. The company has to have a robust computer system
capable of checking inventory, connecting with various insurance companies,
and managing technician schedules.
This customer-focused approach continues on to the service call itself. On
the day of their appointment, customers receive an email with a picture of the
technician who will be visiting them, including a brief biography. Technicians
also call or text customers directly to let them know they’re on their way to the
appointment. Once they arrive, technicians must have the skills to develop
rapport with customers and then expertly complete the repair.
The entire repair process is designed to make it easy for technicians
to serve their customers and fulfill the customer service vision. Emailing
customers a picture and biography of their technician ahead of time to
make them feel more confident is an example of looking at our business
through the eyes of our customers. Allowing customers to quickly schedule
an appointment and have the technician come to them (versus driving to a
service center) is part of making it easy for them to do business with us. Anda
unique part of the Safelite process means that the technician will vacuum
the customer’s car and clean all the windows (not just the new one) as
part of the service—which is a powerful way of ensuring their experience
is memorable.
All this combines to help Safelite achieve extraordinary results.
Having a good product or service backed by the appropriate resources,
tools, and processes can empower employees to deliver excellent customer ser-
vice most of the time. However, there are still occasions when something
unusual happens, and an employee needs to be able to depart from the normal
routine. A procedure can't be created for every possible situation, but employ-
ees can be encouraged to use the customer service vision as a compass to point
them in the right direction.
Let’s go back to Kanyon Hillaire. Safelite technicians like Hillaire are
trained to look for ways to connect with their customers and develop rapport.

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Shooting a video of his friend explaining the service procedure in American

Sign Language is an example of using that training (and Hillaire’s own natu-
ral instincts) to find a way to connect with a deaf customer.
Customer-focused companies like Safelite also empower their employees
to help the company continuously improve. After his service call, Hillaire
emailed Renee Cacchillo, the Vice President for Customer Experience and
Brand Strategy, to share his story and suggest that a video like his be created
for all technicians to use.
That in itself is extraordinary. Safelite has over 11,000 employees, yet
Hillaire felt comfortable reaching out to a senior leader. That would be un-
thinkable in many large companies, where frontline employees jokingly refer
to the corporate office as “the ivory tower” and often don’t even know the
names of key executives.
It was also extraordinary that Cacchillo listened to Hillaire’s feedback.
Like many effective leaders, she knows that great ideas can come from people
doing the daily work. Hillaire’s suggestion made so much sense that Safelite
now equips its technicians with videos explaining the service procedure in
both American Sign Language and Spanish.
Trusting employees to do the right thing is another essential element of
empowerment. Each service appointment involves a one-on-one connection
between a customer and a Safelite employee. That requires the company to
trust people like Hillaire to follow company procedures and use good judg-
ment with limited supervision.
Like other customer-focused companies, Safelite emphasizes hiring the
right people and then giving them adequate training to understand and em-
body the company culture. They also understand that employees naturally
tend to be trustworthy if they’ve bought into the culture and are empowered
to serve their customers.
Another terrific example came from Bright House Networks. It provided
cable, internet, telephone, and home security service to approximately 2.5 mil-
lion customers spread out over five states, before the company was purchased
by Charter Communications in 2016. Bright House Networks’ customer ser-
vice agents were empowered to issue a customer account credit of up to $1,000
without seeking permission from a supervisor.

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The company had a process where any credit of $250 or higher was re-
viewed by a supervisor. The credit had already been issued by the time of the
review, so it was purely intended to ensure that customer service agents were
making good decisions. If an agent made a questionable call, their supervisor
could coach them on how to make a better choice in the future.
During the first year the policy was in place, managers didn’t find a single
credit that was issued inappropriately. The lesson here is that the customer
service agents saved their customers and their company time and aggravation
by issuing credits that supervisors would have eventually issued anyway.
Empowerment is a major reason for the success of many customer-focused
companies. Clio avoids scripts and encourages customer service agents to use
their own personalities when interacting with customers. REI has a gener-
ous returns policy that enables associates to accept most returns without any
hassle. And you'll recall that Shake Shack’s CEO, Randy Garutti, challenged
employees at a new store to “put us out of business because you are so damn
generous with what you give the people who walk in this door.”

Wat Can Happen Ir You Dont Empower Your

EMPLOYEES
Employees who aren’t empowered often find themselves in situations where
pleasing customers seems impossible. They might miss opportunities to go
above and beyond because the company culture doesn’t encourage them to
think outside of standard procedures. Or they might feel victimized by a poor
product, a broken process, or an overly restrictive policy that makes it hard for
them to do their job.
One such occasion happened when a winter storm tested employee em-
powerment at a hotel in a small town in West Texas. The storm had shut
down the highway east of town. This meant that guests who were scheduled
to check out and drive east extended their stay for another night. Still other
travelers heading east stopped their trip short, since this was the last town
before the roads were closed. The hotel quickly sold out at what was normally
a quiet time of year.

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The lone hotel clerk working the front desk was overwhelmed. Guest after
guest arrived without a reservation, but she had to turn them away because
the hotel was out of rooms. To make matters worse, the hotel’s computer sys-
tem went down, which meant the clerk had to manage the check-in process
manually.
This caused a problem when a couple with a reservation tried to check in,
only to find their room was already occupied. The hotel clerk panicked. She
had miscounted the rooms where guests had extended their stay, and now she
wasn't sure which rooms were occupied and which ones were not. She tried to
assign them to another room, but that one, too, was occupied.
It was late and the tired couple was getting frustrated. Meanwhile, there
was a growing line of arriving guests forming in the lobby, waiting to find out
if they would have a place to stay that night. It was so overwhelming that the
clerk burst into tears.
The front desk clerk struggled because she wasn’t empowered. She hadn’t
been taught what to do when an unexpected event dramatically changed the
hotel’s occupancy. The computer, a tool she normally relied upon to keep
track of room assignments, was down. She repeatedly called her boss for help,
but her boss wasn’t answering his cell phone. And the front desk clerk lacked a
customer-focused mindset that would have enabled her to improvise and find
a way to make the best of a bad situation.
Fortunately, a guest with hotel experience intervened. She suggested that
the front desk associate look for reserved rooms where guests hadn't yet ar-
rived. It was nearly 11pm, and some guests with reservations simply weren’t
going to arrive because they couldn’t get past the road closures. The associate
found one room that matched the criteria and was able to check the couple in
after walking to the room herself to verify it was indeed unoccupied.
Operational problems like this make it hard to empower employees.
As of 2016, McDonald’s has spent seven straight years ranked last on the
American Customer Satisfaction Index for limited service restaurants.” Part
of the company’s challenge is that its menu expanded 365 percent from
1980 to 2014. Each new menu item adds additional processes, equipment,
and employee training requirements, making it challenging for thousands of

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 Jeff Toister

company-owned and franchised McDonald’s to implement updates consis-

tently. This increases the likelihood for errors, which in turn aggravates cus-
tomers. For example, a study by QSR Magazine found that a whopping 12
percent of McDonald’s drive-through orders contain an error.”
A lack of empowerment also contributed to the demise of the once-popular
Borders bookstore chain. The company’s inventory management was so poor
that sales associates would often be unable to find a product for a customer,
even if that product was physically located somewhere in the store. Research
conducted by Zeynep Ton from the MIT Sloan School of Management and
Ananth Raman the Harvard Business School revealed that this happened in
approximately one out of six customer interactions when a customer asked for
helping finding an item.” These sales associates wanted to help the customer
and make the sale, but they didn’t have the ability. Remember, a key aspect
of empowerment is that the employee has all the right resources available to
do their job.
Contact centers also provide an excellent example of how empowerment
impacts service quality. A 2015 study by Mattersight discovered that 66 per-
cent of customers who call customer service are already frustrated by the time
they get a customer service rep on the phone.*’ That’s because, unlike Safelite,
the typical contact center requires customers to wade through a frustrating
maze of phone menus and then wait on hold before someone answers the call.
This puts the customer service rep at a disadvantage since their custom-
er is already upset, but it often gets worse. A 2015 research report from the
International Customer Management Institute revealed that 74 percent of
contact centers don’t fully empower their employees to deliver outstanding
customer service.”
And that feeling of disempowerment can cause employees to give up and
stop even trying to serve their customers. Technical support agents at a busi-
ness-to-business software company experienced this when the company re-
leased an update to its software. The new software was confusing to the small
business owners who used it, and it had several bugs that made it malfunc-
tion. This caused such a barrage of customer calls that wait times sometimes
extended up to an hour.

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The technical support reps felt victimized. After all, they didn’t create the
confusing software update that didn’t work properly. They weren’t responsible
for staffing decisions that left the support team unable to handle the influx
of calls. It felt fundamentally unfair to the support reps that they had to face
the brunt of customers’ anger for a problem they didn’t cause and couldn’t
fully fix. Many members of the team started feeling hopeless and resentful
and stopped providing the empathetic and thorough service they normally
provided.

How To Empower YOUR EMPLOYEES

Customer-focused companies do two things to empower their employees.
First, the company develops a culture that instills a customer-focused
mindset in employees. Second, the company provides employees with the
tools, resources, and authority to serve their customers at the highest level.
Previous chapters in this book helped you lay the foundation for creating
a customer-focused mindset, where employees are obsessed with customer ser-
vice. It starts with having a clear customer service vision, and then using that
vision to point the entire company in the same direction. Employees must
know the vision and understand how it relates to their work. Goals should be
set in alignment with the vision, and employees should be hired and trained
to deliver the type of service that the vision describes.
The second part of empowerment involves putting employees in a posi-
tion to succeed. There are a few things you can do to ensure this happens:

1. Invest in resources, tools, and equipment.

2. Define standard operating procedures.
3. Give employees the right authority.

Invest in Resources, Tools, and Equipment

Safelite customers get peace of mind, in part because customer service reps
have the ability to quickly schedule a service call while identifying the right

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 Jeff Toister

part, checking for an available technician, and reviewing the customer's insur-
ance coverage. The company had to make some big investments in systems
and staffing to make this happen, but customers are more loyal because of
their experience. They're more likely to tell a friend about Safelite, which leads
to more business. And Safelite can serve its customers more efficiently, which
saves money.
In October 2014, Bright House Networks answered just 50 percent of
customer calls within 30 seconds. Recognizing that this was a problem, the
company invested heavily in a new unified system enabling it to route cus-
tomer calls more efficiently between its multiple contact centers, so employees
could provide faster service. One year later, more than 90 percent of calls were
answered within 30 seconds.
Making these sorts of investments isn’t cheap; you'll need to weigh the
cost of the investment against the potential gain to justify the expense. Areas
to explore include revenue gain (increased customer loyalty, fewer lost sales,
higher average order value, etc.), reduced servicing costs (fewer discounts for
poor service), improved service efficiency (reduced cost per contact, improved
first contact resolution, etc.), and improved reputation (increased word-of-
mouth referrals, better ratings on review sites, etc.).
Let’s say you invest $100,000 in a new computer system for your cus-
tomer service team. You calculate that the new system will help your team
serve customers faster and more accurately, which will result in an additional
$40,000 in repeat business per year. If you divide the $100,000 expense by
the $40,000 gain, you can see how long it will take for your investment to
pay off:

$100,000 + $40,000 = 2.5 years

It’s ultimately up to you (and your CFO, CEO, etc.) to decide if an investment
is worthwhile, but this is a helpful exercise.
And you can't expect your employees to consistently deliver outstanding
service if they're using outdated or non-functioning systems and tools.

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Define Standard Operating Procedures

Having a standard way of doing things may seem counter to empowering
employees, but it’s an essential step. Remember that empowerment means en-
abling employees to provide outstanding customer service. Standard operating
procedures help employees serve their customers consistently across the whole
team. These procedures should reflect the best known way of doing things
while still giving employees the flexibility to adjust to unusual circumstances.
At Safelite, it’s standard procedure to email a customer a picture and bio
of their technician to help build trust and confidence. The technician is then
expected to personally contact the customer to confirm their arrival time.
And the standard procedure calls for the technician to spend a few minutes
building rapport with the customer while he or she explains the repair process.
All these standards combine to create a consistent experience, regardless
of who the service technician may be. When a customer has a good experience
with Safelite, they’lllikely call the company a couple of years later when a rock
dings their windshield again. It’s important that the customer has the same
great experience, even though it’s likely to be a different technician who does
the work. Standard operating procedures help ensure that’s what happens.
It’s also easier to manage employees when there’s a set way of doing things.
New hires can learn from clearly-documented practices that are proven to be
successful. Managers can supervise their employees in a consistent manner.
Companies like Safelite have also discovered that standards can’t always
be created from the top down. Best practices in customer-focused companies
are often identified by frontline employees. For instance, Kanyon Hillaire
took the initiative to create a video for a deaf customer, but he went even
further to share his idea with senior leadership. As a result, the company cre-
ated videos in American Sign Language and Spanish that are now part of the
standard procedure for interacting with customers whose preference is one of
those languages.
One customer service leader shared a common-sense approach to setting
standards and best practices. Before putting a procedure in place, he has em-
ployees test the procedure to make sure it actually works as well as intended.

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 Jeff Toister

Getting employee input improves employee buy-in, but it also prevents broken
processes or unrealistic expectations from being implemented.

Give Employees the Right Authority

A process or procedure can’t be designed for every eventuality. There are many
customer service situations that are unique, unusual, or unprecedented. In
other situations, it’s simply more efficient to give employees the discretion
to make decisions that a supervisor would make anyway. Requiring an em-
ployee to seek approval before taking a common-sense action only wastes the
customer’s and employee’s time, and can make the employee feel inept or
untrusted.
There are three keys to empowering employees with the appropriate au-
thority to serve their customers.
The first is to develop clear red lines that cannot be crossed. The $1,000
limit for customer account credits at Bright House Networks is a good ex-
ample. This means a $975 credit is up to the customer service rep’s discretion,
but a $1,005 credit is not allowed without permission. These red lines make it
clear what employees are and are not allowed to do.
The second key is to allow employees to operate in the gray area between a
standard operating procedure and a red line without fear of punishment. This
is where employees must be able to use their own discretion.
Let’s say a manager discovers an employee issued a $500 account credit
that he disagrees with. That credit is well below the $1,000 red line, so the
manager should not discipline the employee in any way for using what the
employee believed to be appropriate judgment. The fastest way to disempower
an employee is to give them grief for doing exactly what you previously told
them they could, and even should, do.
That leads us to the third key to empowerment: coaching. If a manager
disagrees with an employee’s decision to issue a $500 credit, he shouldn’t punish
her for exercising her own judgment, but he should still engage the employee in
a conversation. The goal is to understand why the employee made that decision
and help the employee understand how to make a better decision in the future.

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Figure 9.1 shows a sample empowerment procedure for valet parking at-
tendants working at a hotel. You can download an empowerment procedure
worksheet at www.serviceculturebook.com/tools.

Figure 9.1: Sample Empowerment Procedure

Title: Courtesy Discount Procedure

Purpose: Our motto is “Clean, fast, and friendly service.” Valet parking at-
tendants may use this procedure to offer hotel guests a discount anytime our
service falls short of our motto.
Procedure:

1. Identify a guest service issue. It’s better to notice something before

a guest does (ex: a dirty car windshield), so you can fix it quickly. You
can also use this procedure if the guest complains about our service.
2. Resolve the issue. You may offer the guest a courtesy discount up to
the full value of the parking charge. Keep in mind that there may be
other ways to resolve the issue to the guest’s satisfaction. For example,
a dirty windshield can be quickly cleaned.
3. Record the discount. After serving the guest, note the courtesy dis-
count in the Courtesy Discount Log. Be sure to indicate the reason a
discount was given.

Step number three is critical. Your manager will review all discounts and may
have some follow-up questions for you. The purpose is to identify any service
trends that need to be addressed. For example, five discounts for dirty wind-
shields in two days may signal that we need to find a better way to keep our
guests’ windshields clean!
One big concern with empowering employees is that they'll give away too
much. The opposite is frequently true. Managers often have to spend time
encouraging employees to do more for customers, not less.
Another big concern is making sure employees make consistent decisions.
That’s where coaching comes into play. A manager who frequently discusses

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 Jeff Toister

empowerment with employees in both an individual and team setting will

help calibrate the team so they all have a similar understanding of the best way
to handle certain situations.
Recall that empowering employees means putting them in a position to
succeed. It’s a combination of the right resources, clear standards to follow,
and the authority to use their discretion. It’s also imperative that leaders moni-
tor their operations to ensure that empowerment is working.
Here’s an example. A hotel advertised that its airport shuttle arrived every
20 minutes. Unfortunately, shuttles actually took closer to 30 minutes to ar-
rive. This meant that shuttle drivers weren’t empowered to meet the 20-min-
ute promise.
Measuring how the shuttle’s performance stacked up against what guests
expected was a key first step, so hotel managers talked to shuttle drivers to get
their input. They rode the shuttle and timed each leg of the journey to un-
derstand where time was spent. Then, through a collaborative effort between
managers and shuttle drivers, new procedures were implemented. The shuttle
route was adjusted to be more efficient, and additional shuttles were added
during peak times. All these steps finally empowered shuttle drivers to meet
the 20-minute standard.
You can do the same thing with your customer service operation. Look for
opportunities to improve. Collaborate with frontline employees from various
teams to identify problems and get everyone on the same page. Fix problems
that prevent employees from helping their customers.
There’s one last step in the empowerment process.
It’s essential that customer service leaders share empowerment stories with
their team. These stories spark imagination by reminding employees what can
be done and help them maintain an empowerment mindset.
Safelite does an excellent job of this. Let’s go back to Kanyon Hillaire,
who took the initiative to create a video explaining a repair process to a deaf
customer. Safelite posted a short video on YouTube and the company website
detailing Hillaire’s story as an example of a creative way to connect with a
customer.

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Examples like this inspire other employees. They reinforce the concept
of employee empowerment by showing how someone used their resources,
tools, and authority in a creative way. Celebrating examples such as Hillaire’s
also makes it safe for other employees to overcome obstacles and find a way to
achieve the company’s customer service vision.

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NotTEs:
47 You can see more of Hillaire’s perspective in this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=lbsyEMtUGEk.
48 Bradley Lehman, “USAA Awards Companies for Innovation, Veteran Support and
More,” USAA, June 9, 2016. https://communities.usaa.com/t5/Press-Releases/ USA A-Awards-
Companies-for-Innovation-Veteran-Support-and-More/ba-p/93517.
49 Tom Feeney interview with Rob Markey, “Net Promoter at the heart ofa cultural trans-
formation: How Safelite turns hassles into smiles,” Net Promoter System Podcast, March 2015.
http://www.netpromotersystemblog.com/2015/03/10/net-promoter-at-the-heart-of-a-cultur-
al-transformation-how-safelite-turns-hassles-into-smiles/.
50 The American Customer Satisfaction Index publishes these ratings on its website: http://
theacsi.org.
51 “The Drive-Thru Performance Study: Order Accuracy,” QSR, accessed December 21, 2016.
https://www.qsrmagazine.com/content/drive-thru-performance-study-average-service-time.
52 Zeynep Ton and Ananth Raman, “The Effect of Product Variety and Inventory Levels
on Misplaced Products at Retail Stores: A Longitudinal Study” (working paper), Harvard
Business School, June 2004. http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/-gjanakir/Ton_and_Raman6-10-04.
pdf.
53 “Please Hold for a Reality Check: The Real Reasons Consumers are Fed Up with Call
Centers,” Martersight, 2015. http://www.mattersight.com/resource/please-hold-for-a-reality-
check-real-reasons-consumers-are-fed-up-with-call-centers/.
54 “Own the Moments! Understanding the Customer Journey,” JCMI Research, 2015. http://
www.icmi.com/Resources/ Webinars/Own-the-Moments-2015-ICMI-Research-Findings.

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Ey EARN 2e0

How Leadership Can Make or Break Your Culture

IN OCTOBER 2012, HURRICANE SANDy descended on New York City. Governor

Andrew Cuomo ordered evacuations and declared a state of emergency.
While most New Yorkers worried about their safety or the damage caused
by the storm, Anthony Casalena worried about websites.
Casalena is the CEO and founder of Squarespace, a company that makes
it easy for people without programming experience to build a website. Artists,
bloggers, entrepreneurs, celebrities, and many others use Squarespace because
of its intuitive features, beautifully designed templates, and outstanding cus-
tomer support.
The data center housing Squarespace’s servers was in New York City.
The hurricane knocked out the power, which normally wouldn’t interrupt
Squarespace’s service because the building had a backup generator that could
keep things going for three or four days. But then the building’s basement
flooded, shutting down the fuel pump that sent fuel from the basement tank
to the generator on the 17th floor.
Casalena received a message from the data center telling him the genera-
tor only had 12 hours of fuel left. This meant Squarespace, and all the web-
sites it powered, would soon go offline. Jesse Hertzberg, the company’s Chief
Operating Officer at the time, posted an update on Squarespace’s website tell-
ing customers to expect the site to go down soon. “We will do everything in
our power to get Squarespace running as soon as possible, and we will remain
online for as long as it is safe.”

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Casalena knew he had to do something, so he hurriedly left his SoHo

apartment and walked to the data center. He later explained his thought
process in an interview with The Observer. “I am really, really proud of
Squarespace’s uptime and everything we accomplished. So, sitting there in
an apartment where there’s no electricity or anything else—I mean, I would
have to be, like, so lame not to walk down to the data center and just try
and help. What am I going to do, sit at home in my apartment? That’s just
absurd.””
When Casalena arrived, he realized that the generator on the 17th floor
was working fine. The problem was getting fuel there to keep it running. So
Casalena organized a bucket brigade to manually haul fuel to the generator.
Employees from Squarespace, Peerl (the company that hosted Squarespace’s
servers), and Fog Creek (Peerl’s parent company) worked through the night to
maintain the generator’s fuel supply.
Miraculously, Squarespace managed to keep its service running, which
meant that thousands of customer websites stayed online. Casalena reflected
on the team’s herculean efforts. “It’s okay to care about things, you know?
Even things as silly as websites.””°
This was an extraordinary situation, but it was also a reflection of
Squarespace’s customer-focused culture. The enterprising spirit that Casalena
displayed that night permeates throughout the entire company.

How SQUARESPACE LEADERS REINFORCE THE CULTURE

Casalena wasn't working alone to keep the data center running during
Hurricane Sandy. He pushed the initiative and modeled the necessary com-
mitment, but other employees were needed, too. Employees found fuel drums
on craigslist that were used to haul the fuel. They manually carried the
drums up to the 17th floor, which was a challenging physical task. Still more
Squarespace employees were required to run normal operations. Others kept
customers informed by posting frequent updates on the Squarespace status
page and Twitter, and answering customer emails. A few more brought food
to those working nonstop to keep the data center running.

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Leadership is an essential element of creating a customer-focused culture.

Leaders provide employees with direction, guidance, and inspiration, which means
leaders must model the customer-focused culture. It’s unlikely that Squarespace’s
employees would have shown this extraordinary level of commitment and dedica-
tion during a natural disaster if their CEO wasn’t leading the way.
Casalena and his senior leaders consciously help employees connect with
the company’s customer service vision. The vision consists of Squarespace’s
mission statement framed by six core values. The mission is Squarespace makes
beautiful products to help people with creative ideas succeed, and the six core
values are:

* Be Your Own Customer

* Empower Individuals
* Design Is Not a Luxury
* Good Work Takes Time
* Optimize Towards Ideals
* Simplify

Casalena’s hiring philosophy is a great example of how to hire people who are
aligned with the mission and values. Casalena explained to the venture capital
blog First Round Review that when you hire for culture fit, “You have people
you can trust to make the best decisions without you while remaining aligned
with your vision.””’ We learned about the importance of hiring for culture fit
in Chapter 7, but it’s Casalena’s insistence that ensures Squarespace includes
culture fit as a key part of its employee screening process.
A tangible example of how hiring for culture fit impacts service is the
support team’s ability to understand and empathize with customers. Jesse
Hertzberg, Squarespace’s former COO, told me, “Everyone who works here
is a customer.” They all have Squarespace websites of their own, whether it’s a
personal blog, a side business, or some other online presence, thereby fulfilling
the Be Your Own Customer core value.
This empowers technical support agents to quickly respond to customer
issues with helpful and thorough suggestions. Support agents can create a

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personal connection with their customers because they know what it’s like to
use the product.
Casalena himself models the value that every employee is a Squarespace
user. He started the company in 2004, when he wanted to find an easier way
to build a website. He built the original software and spent the next several
years personally supporting customers who needed assistance. As the com-
pany grew and he had to build a customer support team, Casalena was careful
to ensure that support employees could serve customers with the same level of
empathy that he did.
Casalena and the rest of the Squarespace leadership team have made sev-
eral strategic decisions that reflect the company’s customer focus. In 2012,
the company decided to streamline its pricing plans (part of the Simplify core
value). The new pricing scheme meant that some existing customers who had
pre-paid for a year of service were now paying more for their service than new
customers. To address this inequity, Squarespace generously offered existing
customers a credit for the price difference when they switched to one of the
new plans.
Most companies wouldn’t forego all that revenue in the name of customer
goodwill, but Squarespace’s leaders understood that the credits helped engen-
der long-term customer loyalty. It also prevented the company’s support team
from having to field a barrage of complaints from existing users who were
angry about paying more than new customers.
Another customer-focused strategic decision came when Squarespace up-
graded its product from version 5 to version 6. Squarespace 6 was such a
radical product redesign that Squarespace 5 customers who wanted to use it
would have to completely rebuild their websites. Most software companies
who upgrade their products like this give customers a grace period to make
the change before they pull the plug on the old version. Squarespace decided
to do things differently.
First, the company announced that they'd continue supporting
Squarespace 5 indefinitely. Customers running the old version could con-
tinue to do so without having to completely rebuild their websites using
Squarespace 6.

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Second, the company gave every Squarespace 5 user the ability to build a
new website on Squarespace 6 for no additional charge. This meant customers
could experiment with the new product and rebuild their site on Squarespace
6 at their own pace. Then they could choose to make the switch, or they could
stick with their existing Squarespace 5 site.
The decision to run two versions of Squarespace simultaneously reflected
a strong customer focus. Leaders like Casalena had an intimate understanding
of what it’s like to build and run a website, and how much hassle it is to have
to re-build an existing site. They wanted to give their customers all the upside
of the new product without the downside of being forced to make the switch.
Throughout this book, we've seen other leaders reinforce the customer-
focused culture in their organizations.
Rob La Gesse at Rackspace reinforced the ideal of being available to cus-
tomers by publishing his personal contact information in a blog post, so per-
haps it was no surprise when support reps tweeted their personal numbers to
customers when the phone system was down. (Taking a page out of La Gesse’s
book, my phone number is 619-955-7946 and my email is jeff@toistersolu-
tions.com.)
Jerry Stritzke, REI’s CEO, decided to close all REI stores on Black Friday
in 2015, the busiest retail shopping day of the year. Instead, REI created a
marketing campaign called #OptOutside to encourage REI employees and
customers to spend time outdoors. This might have hurt short-term profits,
but it was squarely aligned with REI’s mission of helping people enjoy the
outdoors. It sent a clear message that Stritzke truly believed in the company’s
customer focus.
Recall Kanyon Hillaire, the Safelite AutoGlass technician introduced in
Chapter 9, who took the initiative to make a video that explained the wind-
shield replacement procedure in American Sign Language for a deaf cus-
tomer. He shared his idea with Renee Cacchillo, Safelite AutoGlass’s Vice
President for Customer Experience and Brand Strategy, who made a similar
video available to all Safelite technicians. Cacchillo reinforced Hillaire’s de-
cision-making, so it felt safe for Hillaire and other technicians to take similar
customer-focused initiatives in the future.

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Leaders in customer-focused companies realize that employees look to

them to set a positive example. They model the culture in their daily activities,
so people understand that any executive pronouncements about culture are
more than just lip service. They make strategic decisions using the culture as a
guide, even when it means sacrificing short-term profits in favor of long-term
customer relationships.

Wuat Can Happen IF LEADERS DONT REINFORCE THE

CULTURE
Many companies would have you believe that they’re customer-focused even
when they’re not. Senior leaders extol the virtues of their unique and special
culture in corporate communications and create lofty slogans to inspire em-
ployees. Meanwhile, these leaders often undermine attempts at true customer
focus.
Wells Fargo, one of the largest banks in the U.S., provides a cautionary
tale. In 2016, the bank was fined $185 million after it was discovered that
employees had opened more than two million phony bank and credit card
accounts over a five-year period. The accounts were opened in the names of
existing customers—by bank employees struggling to achieve aggressive sales
targets—without the knowledge or consent of those customers.
John Stumpf, the bank’s CEO, had publicly championed the notion of
Wells Fargo’s customer-focused culture. He was quoted on the Wells Fargo
website as saying, “Everything we do is built on trust. It doesn’t happen with
one transaction, in one day on the job or in one quarter. It’s earned relation-
ship by relationship.” Even his message to employees announcing the fines
for the widespread fraud maintained that the company was still customer-
focused. “Our entire culture is centered around doing what is right for our
customers.””®
The reality was very different. Employees were encouraged by bank lead-
ers to ignore the needs of their customers and do anything they could to open
new accounts, even if it meant committing fraud. “I had managers in my face
yelling at me,” said Sabrina Bertrand, a former Wells Fargo banker. “They

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wanted you to open up dual checking accounts for people who couldn’t even
manage their original checking account.”
Wells Fargo’s example proves that executive pronouncements about cul-
ture are meaningless if they don’t match what leaders and employees are ac-
tually doing. The intense pressure to open unauthorized customer accounts
overrode any notion of “doing what’s right for our customers.” The company’s
real culture was pressure-driven and deceitful.
Even seemingly small decisions can send a symbolic message to employ-
ees. One vice president at another company undermined her organization’s
customer-focused culture initiative when she refused to let a manager disci-
pline or fire an employee who consistently provided poor customer service.
The employee’s productivity numbers were so good that they elevated the rest
of the team’s, and the vice president was scared that letting the employee go
would reflect poorly on her business unit’s results. Allowing an employee to
be misaligned with the culture, and preventing the employee’s manager from
addressing it, sent a clear message that this senior leader favored short-term
productivity over long-term customer relationships.
Some leaders are afraid to publicly demonstrate their commitment to the
culture. One company president was so uncomfortable interacting with front-
line employees and customers that he went to great lengths to avoid both groups.
When he made site visits to the company’s various locations, he quickly seques-
tered himself in an office with that location’s general manager while completely
ignoring other employees. This president’s aloofness sent the message that he
considered himself too important to speak to frontline employees, which under-
mined his desire for employees to provide warm and friendly service.
Another challenge faced by executive leaders is relying too much on data
to manage the business without having a firm grasp of what’s really happen-
ing. For example, a retail store received its weekly stock shipment on Saturday
mornings. Corporate leaders scheduled the stock truck to optimize the truck’s
routing without considering how the timing of a shipment affected the store’s
operations. This was the busiest sales time of the week, but the store manager
wasn't allowed to add extra staff to handle stock duties plus the heavy sales-
floor activity.

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Corporate leaders had set a strict limit on the number of employees who
could work the Saturday shift, based on historical sales data—but without tak-
ing into account increased sales that could be gained by adding sales staff during
the Saturday morning rush. The store manager shared these insights with his
boss, the chain’s area manager, and explained how a few changes could dra-
matically improve sales. But the company’s senior leaders stuck to their plan,
despite the store manager’s request because they trusted their data more than
they trusted the manager who had intimate knowledge of the store’s operations.
It’s helpful to acknowledge that leaders face enormous pressure to drive
business results. They’re human, like everyone else, which means that leader-
ship decisions are often guided by the same swirl of emotions—like optimism,
fear, and a longing for acceptance—that drive frontline employee behaviors.
The big difference is that all eyes are on the leadership team.
Leaders can quickly undermine the customer-focused culture they hope
to create if they make the wrong decision or model the wrong behavior. That’s
why it’s critical for organizational leaders to recognize their role in reinforcing
the culture, and for them to have a clear plan to fulfill that role.

How TO REINFORCE YOUR CULTURE WITH EMPLOYEES

Employees look to their boss, company executives, and other “higher-ups” in
an organization for leadership on the culture. In organizations with a customer-
focused culture, leaders consistently act as culture champions.
There are three primary ways they do this: they model the culture them-
selves, they use the customer service vision to guide strategic decisions, and
they consistently communicate the culture to employees.
Here’s how you can incorporate each of these practices into your own
leadership activities.

Model the Culture

Anthony Casalena, Squarespace’s CEO, modeled the customer service vi-
sion by helping keep the data center open during Hurricane Sandy. He didn’t

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merely dispatch a group of employees to take care of it; Casalena was there
personally. His leadership demonstrated the caring and passion for customers
that he expects of his employees.
As a leader, you have to show employees what customer focus looks like.
Your behavior sends a strong signal to people that you're either committed to
the culture (like Casalena at Squarespace), or youre not (like John Stumpf at
Wells Fargo).
One of the best ways to do this is to be visible. Spend time connecting
with employees, so they see your commitment to the culture. This is espe-
cially important in large organizations with many locations spread across a
wide geographical area.
Shake Shack’s CEO, Randy Garutti, provides an excellent example by
frequently visiting Shake Shack locations to review the operation and encour-
age employees. Unlike the company president 1 mentioned earlier, he doesn’t
hide in a back office. When employees observe Garutti (and other executives)
interacting with employees and customers in a positive way, they understand
that these leaders are truly committed to the culture.
In some organizations, leaders periodically spend time directly serving
customers. They might answer customer questions in the contact center, ring
up purchases in a retail store, or greet guests in a hotel lobby. Employees are
inspired to use the organization’s customer service vision as a guide to serve
customers when they see their leaders doing the same thing.

Let Your Culture Guide Strategy

Your strategic decisions must be aligned with the culture and the customer
service vision if you want a customer-focused organization. All too often, lead-
ers unconsciously undermine the culture they’re trying to create by making a
decision that doesn’t fit the culture. This is almost always done to chase some
sort of short-term financial advantage.
Wells Fargo’s fake account scandal happened in part because the com-
pany’s executives pushed something called the “Gr-eight” initiative. The goal
was to get customers to hold an average of eight financial products at the

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bank. The initiative led to unrealistic sales goals and unrelenting pressure
from Wells Fargo managers that encouraged employees to open fraudulent ac-
counts. The strategic decision to push the “Gr-eight” program created a direct
conflict with the “do what’s right for our customers” culture that CEO John
Stumpf promoted.
Customer-focused leaders frequently forgo short-term profits to reinforce
the company’s culture in the long term. These enlightened leaders realize that
the continued business and positive word-of-mouth from loyal, happy cus-
tomers more than makes up for any temporary set-backs.
You've seen a few examples so far in this book. JetBlue leaders made the
strategic decision to provide all crewmembers (employees) with training on
the airline’s culture and business operations, since the resulting crewmember
engagement far outweighs the cost of the training. Executives at Clio know
the annual software user conference is more than just a marketing boon-
doggle; they use the event to actively seek client feedback, so they can make
improvements to the product. Safelite AutoGlass’s leaders made the strategic
decision to have a live person answer customer calls, even though it requires
extra staffing in their contact center.
One of my clients devised an ingenious tactic to get her CEO to look
past short-term cost savings in favor of supporting the company culture. My
client was the Vice President of Human Resources for a rapidly-growing
company. She was convinced that she needed to add additional office space
to accommodate the training needs of the company’s expanding employee
base (her internal customers), so she put together a business case for the
company’s CEO.
The CEO rejected the plan because she felt the cost of leasing additional
office space was too high, but the vice president was undaunted. She invited
the CEO to attend a new hire orientation session and say a few words to
the company’s new employees. When the CEO arrived, she was horrified to
see the small conference room uncomfortably crowded with people, some of
whom were sitting on the credenza in the back or leaning against the wall
because there was nowhere for them to sit. Many of these employees had
specialized skills and training and had been heavily recruited with generous

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compensation packages. The CEO was dismayed to see that their first impres-
sion as employees of the company was to be packed like sardines into a tiny
conference room.
The CEO approved the new office space lease shortly after attending the
new hire orientation. The business case wasn’t nearly as compelling as seeing
a situation that was clearly misaligned with the way the company wanted to
treat its employees.

Communicate the Culture

Leaders in customer-focused organizations spend a lot of time communicat-
ing the culture to employees. They remind people of the customer service
vision, emphasize its importance, and share inspirational stories of employees
using the vision as a guide to deliver outstanding service.
Employees understand something’s importance based on how often lead-
ers talk about it. In customer-focused companies, leaders constantly talk about
service. Here are just a few opportunities where you can do the same thing:

* Company-wide newsletters
* Town hall meetings
* Posters and signage
# — Site visits to individual locations, departments, or teams
* Your direct reports

Repetition and alignment are key. Senior leaders should use a variety of ways
to repeatedly reinforce the customer service vision and company culture. This
sends a clear signal that the culture is important.
Middle managers and frontline supervisors must also align their employee
communication around a similar message. Employees will remember and un-
derstand the customer service vision when it’s reinforced by multipie leaders
and in multiple ways. They'll quickly discard it as irrelevant to them if the
CEO makes an occasional announcement about customer focus, but their
direct supervisor never mentions it.

Dl
 Jeff Toister

Leadership teams must have a shared understanding of the company cul-

ture so they can reinforce the culture in a consistent way with employees.
I’ve worked with many companies where culture initiatives struggled because
senior leaders all had very different ideas about what the culture entailed and
never shared those ideas with each other to make sure they were all on the
same page.
I recommend that company leaders quiz each other on the same three
questions all employees should be able to answer about the customer service
vision (from Chapter 4):

1. What is the customer service vision?

2. What does the customer service vision mean?
3. How do I personally contribute to the customer service vision?

The answers to these questions need to be consistent among your organiza-

tional leaders if you expect your employees to answer them consistently. This
also means that senior leaders, like all employees, must either embrace the
culture or be asked to leave. Squarespace’s Anthony Casalena told First Round
Review that leaders don’t have to be in 100 percent agreement, but they do
need to be closely aligned. Senior leaders who consistently disagree with the
customer service vision, or who act counter to the company culture, do more
harm than good. “If you think you'd have 80% disagreement with some lead-
ers, then some people probably shouldn’t be at the company.”

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NotEs:
55 Kelly Faircloth, “Why Did SquareSpace’s CEO Haul Diesel Up 17 Flights of Stairs?
Anything Less Would be ‘Lame’,” Odserver, November 5, 2012. http://observer.com/2012/11/
squarespace-diesel-peerl -wall-street-hurricane-sandy-data-center.
56 Ibid.
57 “How Squarespace’s CEO Pivoted to Scale for Millions,” First Round Review (blog).
http://firstround.com/review/ How-Squarespaces-CEO-Pivoted-to-Scale-for-Millions.
58 John Stumpf, “Perspective on Sept. 8 settlement announcement,” Wells Fargo,
September 2016. https://stories.wellsfargobank.com/perspective-todays-settlement-
announcement/?cid=adv_prsrls_1609_102495.
59 Matt Egan, “Workers tell Wells Fargo horror stories,” CNNMoney, September 9, 20106.

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 GrHPATReIeE Ry eat

A Customer-Focused Example

NONE OF THE CUSTOMER-FOCUSED COMPANIES profiled in The Service Culture

Handbook wanted to be in Chapter 11. It’s understandable, given the connec-
tion in the United States between “Chapter 11” and bankruptcy or going out
of business.
These companies are my customers because they’ve helped me highlight
the steps necessary to develop a customer service culture. So, we'll just skip
this chapter and go straight to Chapter 12.

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 CoHVATP TER] F182

Making the Commitment to a Customer-Focused Culture

MosT COMPANIES FEEL PRESSURED TO provide outstanding customer service.

Keeping customers happy is an important part of earning repeat business and
maintaining the company’s brand reputation.
But serving customers isn’t always easy. Products break, processes don’t
always work as intended, and getting every employee on the same page is an
enormous challenge.
Now imagine the pressure your company would face if your business was
developing customer support software.
That’s Zendesk. Its software is used by thousands of companies to serve
their own customers. All the back-end stuff most of us don’t think about runs
through Zendesk: keeping records of customer contacts, capturing notes from
customer service agents, and routing contacts from multiple channels (phone,
email, chat, etc.) to the correct person. Zendesk can even send out customer
service surveys to help companies generate Voice of the Customer feedback.
The company has developed a reputation for providing outstanding cus-
tomer service to the companies using its software. Its customer satisfaction
rating hovers around an astounding 95 percent. It’s not uncommon for cus-
tomer service leaders to get excited when they talk about Zendesk and gush
about how the software makes it easier for their company to deliver service.
More of my clients use Zendesk than any other customer support software
platform.
Customer focus initially came easily for Zendesk. The company was
founded in 2007 by Mikkel Svane, Morten Primdahl, and Alexander

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Aghassipour. They wanted to make customer support software that was

easy to use, so customer focus was a driving principle behind the company’s
creation. In the beginning, the three founders were closely involved with all
aspects of the operation and had direct contact with their clients.
Like many startups, the real challenge was maintaining the culture as the
company grew. In just seven years, Zendesk expanded from a three-person
startup run out of Mikkel Svane’s kitchen into a global, publicly-traded orga-
nization with customers in 150 countries and territories and more than 1,500
employees.
Zendesk executives realized the company needed a more formal approach.
Accordingly, in 2014, Zendesk made a commitment to formalizing and grow-
ing its customer-focused culture.

How ZENDESK MADE THE COMMITMENT TO CUSTOMER

Focus
The initiative started with the customer support team, which Zendesk calls
the Customer Advocate team. Greg Collins was hired as the Vice President
of Global Customer Advocacy in 2014, just a few months after Zendesk had
its initial public stock offering. The company already had a great product,
passionate customers and employees, and a proven track record. Collins was
brought in to help sustain and grow the culture of customer advocacy as the
company grew.
“The challenge was we were growing so fast,” says Collins. “It was tough
to keep everyone rowing in the same direction.”
The first step in making a formal commitment to customer focus was
ensuring that senior leaders supported it. The initiative would start in the
Customer Advocate team, but Collins wanted it to permeate throughout the
entire company.
Fortunately for Collins, the idea of formalizing the company’s customer
service culture resonated with executives because many critical elements were
already in place. Customer focus was a core reason the three founders had
started the company, and Zendesk leaders were already careful about how

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customer service was positioned to employees. For instance, the term advocacy
was used for customer support, meaning that support employees—known as
Customer Advocates—understood that they were there to be advocates for the
customers they served.
The next step was creating a customer service vision that would serve as a
shared definition of outstanding service for all Customer Advocates. As we've
seen throughout this book, a customer service vision is the cornerstone of a
customer-focused culture. It acts as a compass to get every employee pointed
in the same direction, which was exactly what Collins had been hired to do.
Collins solicited input from every member of the nearly 200-person
Customer Advocate team, encouraging Customer Advocates from around the
world to share and discuss ideas with each other via an online portal. The
team ultimately created a set of four values unified by a vision statement, all
of which were directly aligned with Zendesk’s corporate mission: to help orga-
nizations and their customers build better relationships.

* — Serve: Putting Service in ‘Customer Service’

* Lead: Lead by Example
* Innovate: Don’t Fear the Banana
* Have Fun: Smile, Dammit

The vision: to be the benchmark of a people-first Support Experience

Some clarification is in order to avoid confusion.
L use the term “customer service vision” to describe a shared definition of
outstanding customer service. Zendesk’s customer service vision includes four
values and a vision statement. For the rest of this chapter, V'Il use the term
“customer service vision” to reflect the overall definition and “vision” to refer
to the Customer Advocate team’s vision statement.
Second, “Don’t Fear the Banana” references a parable about a group of
monkeys placed in a cage. The story is often passed off by keynote speakers as
a real scientific experiment; it’s not.
Five monkeys are placed in a cage with a ladder in the middle. On top of
the ladder is a banana. Whenever a monkey tries to get the banana, the other

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monkeys are sprayed with cold water. The monkeys quickly learn to attack
any monkey that tries to get the banana.
Next, one by one, the monkeys are replaced in the cage with new mon-
keys—who are promptly attacked by the group as soon as they go for the
banana. This behavior persists in the cage even when there are no monkeys
left that had been sprayed with cold water when another monkey went after
the banana. The lesson is that it’s easy to accept the status quo without under-
standing why things are done a certain way.
“Don’t Fear the Banana” was already part of the Zendesk culture when
the Customer Advocate team created its customer service vision. Mikkel
Svane, the company’s CEO, was fond of saying it when he wanted to encour-
age people to challenge the status quo. As part of the newly-created value
statement, “Don’t Fear the Banana” incorporated the existing culture into a
codified value system.
A customer service vision, whether it’s a set of values, a mission statement,
or another type of cultural artifact, is much more powerful when it clearly
reflects an organization’s already-existing culture.
The third clarification has to do with the vision: to be the benchmark ofa peo-
ple-first Support Experience. This means that Advocates and customers are equal-
ly important to Zendesk. It’s common for customer support teams in software
companies to become overly focused on process or technology where support
agents feel unempowered to serve their customers because they’re constrained by
tightly-scripted procedures that don’t provide enough flexibility to address each
customer's unique needs. The result is that customers may feel like the support
agent is talking down to them and not truly empathizing with their frustration,
or even worse, customers suspect the company is using automated technology to
save money by preventing them from connecting with a live person. Zendesk’s
Customer Advocate team emphasizes a people-first philosophy to instill the idea
that serving the person is more important than focusing on the technology.
“Process and technology are very valuable,” says Collins. “Yet these strate-
gies serve people.”
Collins emphasizes that the values are listed in priority order and are col-
lectively unified by the vision. This is an important point because employees

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can easily get confused if there are too many cultural artifacts (like values, a
vision statement, a mission statement, etc.) to memorize and follow. Zendesk
Customer Advocates know their number-one priority is Putting Service in
‘Customer Service,’ which means developing healthy relationships with cus-
tomers by providing clear, concise, and helpful support.
Once the values and vision were created, Collins hung them on signs in ey-
ery Customer Advocate office. He spent time discussing them with Customer
Advocates to ensure that every person knew what they were, what they meant,
and how the customer service vision should guide their daily work.
The entire process took just a few months, from gaining executive sup-
port for the culture initiative, to working with Customer Advocates to create
the values and vision, to rolling out the final customer service vision to the
team. Many leaders would check the project off their to-do list at this point
and move on to another initiative. For Collins, the work was just beginning.
He set about incorporating the values and vision into every aspect of the
Customer Advocate team’s daily work. They were incorporated into new-
hire training, and every new Customer Advocate gets a personal email from
Collins explaining the values and vision and their importance. The values and
vision are mentioned in every all-hands meeting and in one-on-one conversa-
tions with employees.
The team is also encouraged to use the values when interacting with their
coworkers. For instance, Customer Advocates can recognize each other for
outstanding service. The only catch is they have to mention which one of the
four values they're recognizing their colleague for emulating.
Collins implemented a quarterly Advocate Satisfaction survey to help
provide a barometer of how well Zendesk is creating a people-first Support
Experience for its support agents. The survey asks, “How much do you like or
dislike your current job at Zendesk?” The results are boldly shared on a web-
site where the current Agent Satisfaction Score is 91.5 percent. “I believe that
motivated, happy, and engaged Advocates is how you get motivated, happy,
and engaged Customers,” says Collins.
Customer Advocates now review feedback from customer satisfaction sur-
veys on a daily basis. Positive surveys are celebrated, while negative feedback is

IY)
 Jeff Toister

dissected to identify opportunities for the team to improve. All this feedback
is shared with the rest of the company to help other departments understand
where they can contribute to increasing customer satisfaction.
Collins has invited people from other parts of the company to share in
the Customer Advocate team’s vision. The company has a Support Experience
Program, where people from other departments can spend time working with
Customer Advocates to resolve customer issues. The intent is to help em-
ployees develop customer empathy, so they can understand how their work
impacts Zendesk’s customers.
Irina Blok, a Zendesk product designer, described her participation in the
Support Experience Program as a new employee. “Before this experience, |
thought it would be easy to be an advocate. But it’s a very hard job. Not only
do you have to know the product completely, you have to be a people-person.”
Blok continued, “Not only did I get to learn about the Zendesk product, I
developed hands-on knowledge of what Zendesk is built on: helping custom-
ers solve problems.”®
Two things really stand out about Zendesk’s story. The first is that this
wasn't a one-time project. Collins makes it clear that aligning all Customer
Advocates around a shared customer service vision is a way of doing business.
This is a true long-term commitment to building, growing, and sustaining a
customer-focused culture.
The second thing that stands out is that the steps Collins took to for-
malize the Customer Advocate team’s culture are remarkably similar to what
other companies profiled in this book have done. I didn’t ask Collins a set
of predetermined interview questions designed to elicit responses that fit my
model. We just talked. And the more he talked, the more I heard similarities
with other customer-focused companies.
Collins started by getting support from his executive leadership team.
Senior leaders champion the company culture in every customer-focused
company profiled in this book. You can’t get employees to commit to some-
thing that senior leaders won’t commit to themselves.
The next step was developing a customer service vision. Every customer-
focused company profiled in this book has one. They all look different, but

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 The Service Culture Handbook

every one of them provides a clear definition of outstanding customer service

for employees to follow.
The third piece is aligning daily work around that vision. Goals, hiring,
training, processes, and leadership are all focused on delivering outstanding
customer service. Progress is reviewed relentlessly, and employees soon come
to realize that this is the most important aspect of their jobs. This is when
they become obsessed with service.
Making a commitment like this isn’t a short-term project. Collins continues
to work on culture two years after he joined Zendesk. Clio, the software com-
pany you met in Chapter 8, started its culture initiative in 2013 and continues
to diligently work on it today. In 2015, REI started its #OptOutside campaign
to close its stores on Black Friday and has now turned it into an annual event.
Culture requires senior leaders and their employees to be in it for the long
term. It’s incredibly difficult to maintain a customer-focused culture without
this true commitment.

Wuat Can Happen if You Don’t ComMIT To

CUSTOMER Focus
Many leaders follow what employees jokingly refer to as a “flavor of the
month” plan. A new initiative is introduced, project teams are formed, every-
one spends a lot of time on it, and then it just goes away. Soon, another new
initiative takes its place. People are always working on something new, but
nothing seems to stick.
One company wanted to develop a customer-focused culture, but senior
leaders weren't willing to make a full commitment. The first year, the com-
pany president approved an initiative to create a customer service vision, but
then quickly stopped the initiative in order to refocus her leadership team on
cost-cutting in an effort to improve year-end profits. A few months later, the
president was fired by the company’s ownership group, in part because the
company was delivering poor service.
A new president was hired and expressed his commitment to restarting the
culture initiative. First, though, he wanted to focus the company on employee

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 Jeff Toister

engagement, not realizing that culture and engagement go hand-in-hand. The

company ran through the same process that many companies use: conducting
an employee satisfaction survey, forming committees to review the results,
and then ultimately doing very little to make improvements.
The next year, the president expressed interest in the culture initiative, but
held off to focus on customer experience. He took the same approach as the
employee engagement initiative: a one-time survey was conducted, commit-
tees were formed, and nothing really happened.
Once again, the president missed the connection between culture, em-
ployee engagement, and customer experience. He could have been doing all
three at the same time! Unfortunately, these flavor of the month initiatives
gained very little traction, and very little changed because there was no real
commitment. By now, the original culture ideas had been forgotten.
A major reason this company struggled was because neither president
fully committed to any initiative that would fundamentally change how the
organization operated. They wasted inordinate amounts of employee time
and spent large sums of money on consultants to start new projects, but the
promised benefits never materialized because they didn’t stick with it.
Some leaders try to make customer focus an initiative just for frontline
employees. As we learned in Chapter 10, this approach doesn’t work either.
Employees follow the example set by their leaders. This means leaders need
to model the culture themselves, use the culture to guide strategic decision-
making, and consistently communicate the culture to employees.
One customer service executive lamented that she wanted to build a custom-
er-focused culture, but her company’s CEO “didn’t go for that touchy-feely stuff.”
The harsh reality is that a culture initiative can only go as high as the most senior
person supporting it. She realized that she wouldn’t be able to get the entire com-
pany to focus on service until the CEO made it a priority, but she also understood
that she could have a positive impact on areas she controlled directly. So she set
out to develop a customer-focused culture among the people who reported to her.
Impatience can also sink a customer-focus initiative, because executives
often severely underestimate the time and effort required to change a com-
pany culture. It seems like every year a research firm produces a survey that

162
 The Service Culture Handbook

shows customer focus is a top priority for corporate executives, only to replace
that prediction with a similar one the next year.
For instance, a 2013 study by the research arm of the computer network-
ing firm Oracle revealed that 93 percent of senior executives felt improving
customer experience was a top priority for 2014.° A study released in February
2015 by Oracle and Forbes Insights, the research group for Forbes magazine,
showed that 88 percent of customer service executives felt their organizations
were making good progress toward meeting the needs of their customers.™
Meanwhile, the American Customer Satisfaction Index declined for eight
straight quarters during this same time period, from Q1 2014 to Q4 2015.
One organization wanted to develop its culture and began by following
the steps outlined in this book. The organization’s leaders developed a cus-
tomer service vision, and employees in individual departments received train-
ing on what the vision meant and how they could contribute. Unfortunately,
executives soon became impatient and lost focus on the initiative.
The first sign of trouble came when leaders didn’t make time to support
the initial implementation. Senior executives were scheduled to attend vision
rollout training programs to express their support for the customer service
vision, but each one found an excuse to cancel their participation. Some de-
partments were allowed to skip the rollout training altogether because the
department leader was under pressure from a senior leader to focus on other
tasks. Make-up classes were promised but never materialized.
A budget freeze halted the vision rollout entirely just a few months into
the initiative. The organization wanted to reallocate spending to focus on
other projects that were considered higher priority than building a custom-
er-focused culture. Meanwhile, employee morale worsened and customer
satisfaction survey scores declined as employees perceived that yet another
program had been started and then quickly abandoned.
Many leaders struggle to grasp the concept of true commitment. It’s not
something you can change with an executive announcement, a few train-
ing classes, or by hiring a team of consultants. Companies like Zendesk suc-
ceed in developing customer-focused cultures because their leaders worked
for many years to include customer focus as a part of the culture. The culture

163
 Jeff Toister

initiative that Greg Collins and his team at Zendesk led simply codified and
grew what was already there.

How to ComMIT To A CUSTOMER-FOCUSED CULTURE

Take a moment to answer the following questions. These are gut-check ques-
tions, so answer them honestly. Involve other leaders if necessary, or start by
taking an introspective look at your part of the organization.
Question #1: Can you identify how outstanding customer service is
valuable to your business? It’s not enough to say “Yes” to this question be-
cause you have a general idea of how service is important. Commitment to
customer focus almost always wavers unless there’s a clear understanding of
how customer service directly drives business outcomes. A “Yes” to this ques-
tion means you have a specific answer connecting service to financial results.
Here are just a few examples:

* Can you sell more products at a higher price point, like REI?
* Can you earn loyalty from a specific customer base, like JetBlue does
with leisure travelers?
* Can you generate amazing revenue per location, like Shake Shack?
* Can you become a leader in a competitive market, like Cars.com?
* Can you improve efficiency through incredible employee retention,
like Publix?
* Can you decrease customer churn, like Clio?
* Can you save time and money by empowering employees, like Safelite
AutoGlass?
* Can customer-focus make your products more appealing to custom-
ers, like Squarespace?

Zendesk was ready to make this change because the company needed a way to
maintain its culture as it continued to grow. The market for customer service
software is incredibly competitive, so the company would either gain or lose
market share based on how well it served its customers.

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 The Service Culture Handbook

Question #2: Are you willing to be a different leader? Shaping a cul-

ture, whether at an organizational or team level, is an incredible leadership
challenge. It takes grit to stay the course when others might question you.
Discipline is required to prioritize culture when it seems like a million other
tasks need your attention. Humility is another important trait, since we're all
human and sometimes make mistakes.
Zendesk’s Greg Collins shared an impressive example about accountabil-
ity. He told me that every employee is expected to speak up and say something
if they see someone who isn’t living the values or vision. That rule even applies
to him: employees are encouraged to let him know if they think he’s making
a decision that’s not aligned with the culture—and they do!
Question #3: Are you willing to fundamentally change the way your
business operates? This is a tough test for many leaders who want to achieve
customer focus but aren’t ready to put in the work to make it happen. The
customer-focused companies profiled in this book succeed because they do
things differently than most organizations.
Some of the steps outlined in this book may represent significant chang-
es. You'll need to use metrics differently, hire differently, train differently,
give employees more empowerment than ever before, and change how leaders
work with their teams. Even your strategies, tactics, and policies may need to
change as you align everything around a customer service vision.
Zendesk has made core changes as its culture continues to evolve. In 2011,
the company relocated its headquarters to San Francisco’s Tenderloin District,
a redeveloping neighborhood where companies receive tax breaks from the
city in exchange for investing in the community. Mikkel Svane saw this as an
opportunity to develop the company culture. “I think [moving] has helped
us create a richer, more well-rounded company, where people think not just
about the code, or the product we built, or the customers we serve, but also
about our part in the neighborhood. I think it makes our employees smarter
and better employees, and gives a meaning for their life and job.”
You're probably ready to make a commitment to a customer-focused cul-
ture if you can truthfully answer “Yes” to all three questions.
There’s still some work to do if any of the questions is a “No” for you.

165
 Jeff Toister

Perhaps you're not the CEO or company president. You might be wonder-
ing how to get your senior leadership on board with a culture initiative.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer. I, too, am still searching for a se-
cret technique that will get executives to suddenly make a full commitment
to developing the right culture. But the reality is that your executives need
to be able to answer “Yes” to those same three questions if you want to effect
organization-wide culture change.
All is not lost if you can’t make that happen. What you can do is focus
on the area within your control. If you manage a contact center, then make it
the most customer-focused contact center you possibly can. If you manage one
location in a company that has many, then help your location develop a repu-
tation for outstanding service. If you lead a department that provides internal
service (like Human Resources, Finance, IT, Logistics, etc.), then make your
department everyone’s favorite go-to department in the company.
There are two things to keep in mind if you truly believe you can make
the commitment to a customer-focused culture.
The first is that the process laid out in chapters 3 - 10 is a step-by-step
guide. Being committed involves sticking to that process and not skipping
steps.
The second thing to remember is that developing your culture takes time,
and there will be bumps in the road along the way. You'll need a plan to keep
everyone energized and focused.
I recommend creating an annual calendar of activities promoting the
customer-focused culture to help you, your employees, and the entire orga-
nization remain focused. It’s good to break this calendar down into yearly,
quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily activities. Here are some suggestions:

Yearly Activities

* Review the customer service vision to make sure it still resonates.

* Use the customer service vision as a guide during strategic planning.
* Engage employees in recommitment activities such as refresher
training.

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 The Service Culture Handbook

Quarterly Activities

Hold an all-hands meeting (including your senior leadership!) to dis-

cuss the state of the business and reinforce the vision.
Recognize employees for their contributions to the culture.
Conduct training activities to build new customer service skills.

Monthly Activities

Review customer-focused metrics and generate insight for

improvement.
Identify the biggest issues that hurt customer service and then solve them.
Meet one-on-one with employees to give feedback and reinforce the
customer service vision.

Weekly Activities

Review customer feedback and generate insight for improvement.

Hold team-level meetings to discuss top customer service priorities,
resolve challenges, and reinforce the customer service vision.
Conduct micro-trainings to reinforce one specific customer service
skill. (You can use my free Customer Service Tip of the Week email
for ideas. Sign-up at www.serviceculturebook.com/tools.)

Daily Activities

Use ad hoc employee feedback opportunities to reinforce the custom-

er service vision.
Put out fires, and then identify and fix whatever caused the problem.
Model the customer service vision to set an example for employees.

You can find a template to create your own customer-focused activity plan at
serviceculturebook.com/tools.

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 Jeff Toister

Customer service leaders often ask me whether these never-ending cus-

tomer-focus activities ever get stale. The answer to that is no ... and sometimes.
On an organizational level, the commitment should never waver. That's
because organizations must constantly evolve to address new opportunities in
the market and solve complex challenges to improve the business and serve
customers even better. There’s always some sort of change going on, which
keeps things from getting stale.
On a team, location, or department level, customer focus shouldn’t get
stale, either. That’s because each part of the organization must also continu-
ously change and adapt as the organization itself evolves. New employees will
join the team, and it takes work to help them learn about the culture and
understand how they, too, can help promote it.
On an employee level, the relentless customer focus can get stale in cer-
tain situations. Some employees will consider their job a career and relish the
opportunity to grow, so feeling stuck in the same role for years on end can
feel dreary. Others will enjoy the time they spend in your organization, but
it won't be part of their long-term plan, no matter how exciting you make it.
The important job for a customer service leader is to ensure that all employees
are committed to the culture for as long as they’re there.
The companies profiled in this book maintain a customer-focused culture
in part because their employees are obsessed with solving problems. They
want to serve each customer better than the last one. It’s a constant challenge
that always presents some new wrinkle or obstacle. Employees are energized
because they know the entire organization is focused on driving business re-
sults through outstanding customer service.
It’s an amazing feeling to be a part of something like that. My hope is that
you can use this book as a guide to create that magic in your organization.

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 The Service Culture Handbook

NotEs:
60 The score is periodically updated. You can view the latest results here: https://www.
zendesk.com/customer-experience/customer-service/#customer-service.
61 Irina Blok, “A day in the life of a Zendesk advocate,” Zendesk (blog), February 2016.
https://www.zendesk.com/blog/day-life-zendesk-advocate.
62 Oracle, “Global Insights on Succeeding in the Customer Experience Era,” 2013.
63 Jake Sorofman and Laura McLellan, “Gartner Survey Finds Importance of Customer
Experience on the Rise - Marketing is on the Hook,” Gartner, 2014.
64 The American Customer Satisfaction Index is updated quarterly. http://theacsi.org/
nationa!-economic-indicator/us-overall-customer-satisfaction.
65 Heather Somerville, “Four years after Mid-Market tax break, Zendesk wins over com-
munity,” The Mercury News, February 20, 2015.

169
 Index

70-20-10 Rule, 121-122 Casalena, Anthony, 141-145, 148-

ACSI (see American Customer 149, 152
Satisfaction Index) Center for Creative Leadership, 121
Aghassipour, Alexander, 155-156 Center for Sustainable Energy, 36,
alignment 40, 51
corporate culture, 27 customer service vision, 36
customer service vision, 68-71, Charter Communications, 129
74-76, 133, 151 Chicago Fire, 51-52,,6]
American Customer Satisfaction customer service vision, 51
Index, 11, 21, 28,°48,.92,.131, 163 Clean Vehicle Rebate Project (see
Apple Store, 17-22, 24 Center for Sustainable Energy)
AT&T, 28 Clio, 95, 108-112, 116-119
Back Off! Your Kick-Ass Guide to customer service vision, 108
Ending Bulling at Work, 7 Collins, Greg, 156-161, 164-165
Be Your Customer's Hero, 5 Comeast, 11-13;3,72-73,15
BlessingWhite, 49 Corporate culture, definition of, 7-8
Block, Ryan, 11-12, 72 CSAT (customer satisfaction), 79-80
Blok, Irina, 160 customer service vision, 24, 35-36,
Borders book stores, 132 37-46, 53-58, 60-62
Bright House Networks, 71, 129, alignment, 71-74, 75-76
134, 136 Cars.com, 78-82, 83
Cacchillo, Renee, 129, 145 Center for Sustainable Energy, 36
Cars.com, 78-81, 83, 86, 90, 164 Chicago Fire, 51
customer service vision, 78 Clio, 108, 110

Tal
 Jeff Toister

commitment, 161-167 Fanatical Support, 4, 10-11, 35, 71

empowerment, 133, 139 Fanatical Support Promise, 10
goals, 82-90 Fog Creek, 142
hiring, 103 Gallup, 53
JetBlue, 49-50 Garutti, Randy, 70, 130, 149
leadership, 148-152 Genius Bar, 19-20
Publix;35, 92-93 Hamrick, Marcy, 94
REI, 35, 43 Harvard Business Review, 19, 25
Safelite AutoGlass, 35, 127-128 Harvard Business School, 132
Shake Shack, 35, 68-71 Hayes, Robin, 48-49
Squarespace, 142 hero moments, 3-6
TEGNA, Inc., 78 Hertzberg, Jesse, 141, 143
training, 113-114, 116-122 Hesse, Dan, 28
Zendesk, 157-161 Hillaire, Kanyon, 125-129, 135, 138,
CVRP (see Center for Sustainable 145
Energy) hiring, 10, 75, 96-106, 121
D/Aiuto, Tony, ix-xi Publix, 93-95
Deloitte, 54 Safelite AutoGlass, 129
Digital Roots, 25 Shake Shack, 68-69
employee engagement, 24-25, 48-55, Squarespace, 143
60-62, 68, 93-94, 109, 162 Zendesk, 161, 163
empowerment, 75, 121, 132, Hurricane Sandy, 141-142, 148
133-139 International Customer
Safelite AutoGlass, 126-130 Management Institute, 78, 132
Shake Shack, 68, 70 J.C. Penney, 19-22, 24
Entrepreneur.com, 68 J.D. Power, 19, 48
Execs in the Know, 25, 74 JetBlue Airways, 48-50, 52, 59, 112,
Feeney, Tom, 127 122, 150, 164
Fidelity Workplace Solutions, 81 customer service vision, 49
customer service vision, 81 Jobs, Steve, 19
First Round Review, 143, 152 Johnson, Ron, 19-21
Forbes Magazine, 48, 100, 163 Jones, Todd, 95

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 The Service Culture Handbook

Karinshak, Tom, 12 REI, xi, 33-35, 42-43, 51, 96-97,

Keeps, Erica, 118 130; 145; 161, 164
La Gesse, Rob, 9-11, 145 customer service vision, 34
leadership, 37-38, 60, 121, 146-152 recruitment (see hiring)
JetBlue, 50 Retention Specialists, 72, 115
Rackspace, 10, 145 Rey, Jennifer, 36
REI, 145 Safelite AutoGlass, 35, 42, 125-129,
Safelite AutoGlass, 135, 145 132-135, 138, 145,150; 164
Shake Shack, 68, 70-71 customer service vision, 35, 127
Squarespace, 141-145 Service Failure, 13
Lopano, Joe, xi service standards, 37-38, 41, 52, 117
Major League Soccer, 51 Shake Shack) 35, 42, 67-71, 95, 112;
Mattersight, 132 130, 149, 164
Mattice, Catherine, 7-11 customer service vision, 35, 68
McDonald’s, 121-132 SMART goals, 85, 88-89
Meacham, Laurie, 50-51, 59 SoftBank, 28
Meyers, Danny, 67 Southwest Airlines, 22, 48
mission statement, 35-36, 37-38, 40, Sprint, 28
43, 49, 143, 158-159 Squarespace, 141-145, 148-149, 152
MSN, 92 customer service vision, 143
MIT Sloan School of Management, Stolovitch, Harold, 118
132 Strayed, Cheryl, 33-34
Peerl, 142 Stritzke, Jerry, 145
Primdahl, Morten, 155 Stumpf, John, 146, 149-150
Publix, 35, 42, 92-96, 99-102, 164 surveys
customer service vision, 35, 93 customer service, 17, 52, 73, 79-
QSR Magazine, 132 80, 82-85, 86, 90, 163
Rackers, 4, 8, 9-10, 51 employee engagement, 53-54,
Rackspace, 3-4, 8-11, 14, 35, 51, 57, 60-62, 159, 162
(AGS oes) survey begging, 84
Raman, Ananth, 132 Survey Monkey, 40
Rattin, Heather, 79-80, 83, 86, 90, Svane, Mikkel, 155-156, 158, 165
122 Tampa International Airport, ix-xi

173
 Jeff Toister

technical support, 3, 9, 84, 133, 143 Publix, 93

TEGNA, Inc., 78 Shake Shack, 69, 112
customer service vision, 78 Sprint, 28
Telling Aint Training, 118 Squarespace, 143
Temkin Customer Service Ratings, Zendesk, 71, 157-159, 165
ES 8 Verizon, 28
The Observer, 142 Wells Fargo, 84, 146-150
T-Mobile, 28 Wild, 33-34
Toister Performance Solutions, 75 word cloud, 40-42
Ton, Zeynep, 132 Wordle, 40
training, 4, 10, 18, 22, 26, 57-60, Zendesk, 71, 112, 155-161, 163-165
75, LI2=115; 15051163,0166-167 customer service vision, 157
Cars.com, 79-80
Center for Sustainable Energy,
36
Chicago Fire, 52
Clio, 109-112;150
(omcast, 12572
culture training, 115-123
JetBlue, 50, 150
McDonald’s, 131
new hire, 101, 106, 159
Publix, 93, 98
Safelite AutoGlass, 125, 128-129
Shake Shack, 68-70
Zendesk, 159, 161
Trobaugh, Nicolette, 51-52, 61
Toporek, Adam, 5
Towers Watson, 28-29
Twitter, 3, 9, 74, 142
Union Square Hospitality Group, 67
values, 27, 35, 37-38, 39-41, 112-113
Rackspace, 10-11
JetBlue Airways, 49-50, 59

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HNN
404611R001
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San Bernardino, CA
01 March 2018
 provides thepoignant eorena and
practical instruction for the difficult work of transforming a service culture
into one that is distinctive, successful, and permanent.”
-—Chip R. Bell, author of Kaleidoscope:
Delivering Innovative Service That Sparkles

“Though research continues to uncover the astonishing impact of customer-

focused cultures on customer loyalty and business results, few organizations —
know how to get there. Jeff Toister unlocks that mystery through this practical
(and fun to read!) guide to developing a culture that really works.”
— Brad Cleveland, founding partner and former CEO,
International Customer Management Institute.

IMAGINE YOU COULD DEVELOP A CUSTOMER-FOCUSED CULTURE

so powerful that your employees always seem to do the right thing.
They encourage each other, proactively solve problems, and constantly
look for ways to go the extra mile. In short, imagine a workplace culture
where employees were absolutely obsessed with customer service.
The Service Culture Handbook is a step-by-step guide to help you
develop a customer-focused culture in your cornpany, department, or
location. Whether you're just beginning your journey, or have’ been
working on culture for years, this handbook will prepare you to take the
next step. You’ll receive actionable advice, straightforward exercises, JEFF TOISTER is a
and proven tools you can utilize immediately. customer service author,

Learn the one thing that forms the foundation of every great trainer, and consultant.
He is featured in ten
culture. Discover what customer-focused companies do differently to
customer service
engage their employees. And explore ways to strategically align every
training videos on
facet of your organization with outstanding service.
LinkedIn Learning
Creating and sustaining a customer-focused culture is a never- and was named one
ending journey that takes hard work, dedication, and commitment. of the Top 50 Thought
The Service Culture Handbook is an indispensable resource to help Leaders to Foliow on
you and your employees get headed in the right direction. Twitter by ICMI.

» Tit
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WWW. SERVICECULTUREBOOK.COM
Cover design: Anne C. Kerns, Anne Likes Red, Inc.