Companies spend enormous amounts of time, energy and money trying to improve the customer experience. They invest in technology, redesign processes, create customer service standards, conduct employee training and measure everything from satisfaction scores and response times to reviews and customer retention. All of those things can certainly make a difference, but none of them address the most fundamental factor influencing the experience a customer ultimately receives: leadership.
The customer experience does not begin when someone walks through your door, visits your website, calls your company or interacts with one of your employees. It begins much earlier, inside the organization, with the culture leadership has created. That culture influences how people communicate, how they solve problems, how much authority they believe they have, how willing they are to take ownership and, ultimately, how they treat the people they serve.
This is why I have always believed that the culture inside an organization eventually becomes visible to the customer. You may be able to hide a dysfunctional culture for a while, but sooner or later the customer is going to experience it.
Your Customers Experience Your Culture
Think about what happens inside an organization where employees feel unappreciated, disconnected or uninspired. Eventually, customers feel that lack of enthusiasm. When departments operate in silos and fail to communicate effectively with one another, customers experience the confusion and inconsistency. When employees are afraid to make decisions without getting permission from several levels above them, customers experience the delays and frustration. When protecting company policy becomes more important than solving a customer’s problem, the customer gets a very clear picture of what that organization truly values.
The opposite is also true. When people feel valued, trusted and connected to a meaningful purpose, they tend to approach their work differently. They communicate better, take greater ownership, look for solutions and become more willing to do what is necessary to create the right outcome. They are no longer simply completing tasks because the job requires it. They understand how what they do affects other people and why it matters.
That distinction is important because customer service and customer experience are not the same thing. Customer service is the process. Customer experience is the emotion created by that process. Leadership and culture have an enormous influence on whether employees are simply following the process or genuinely trying to create an experience.
Culture Is Not What You Put on the Wall
Nearly every organization has a set of values, and they usually sound very similar: integrity, respect, excellence, innovation, teamwork and customer focus. There is nothing wrong with any of those values, but putting them on a wall, printing them in an employee handbook or adding them to the company website does not create a culture.
Culture is what people actually experience every day. It is reflected in the behaviors that are rewarded and the behaviors that are tolerated. It is found in the way people communicate with one another, how disagreements are handled, what happens when someone makes a mistake and whether employees are trusted to make decisions. It is evident in whether leadership truly listens, whether people feel comfortable offering a different point of view and whether the standards expected of employees are also demonstrated by the people at the top.
People pay far more attention to what their leaders do than to what their leaders say. If an organization claims that customers come first but employees are discouraged from spending the time necessary to solve a customer’s problem, the real priority becomes obvious. If leadership talks about innovation but punishes people when a new idea does not work, employees quickly learn that playing it safe is the smarter career decision. When there is a conflict between the stated values of the organization and the behavior of its leadership, behavior wins.
Leadership Sets the Standard
One of the most important responsibilities of leadership is establishing the standard for how people inside the organization treat one another and the people they serve. A leader who communicates a clear sense of purpose helps employees understand that their work has meaning beyond completing a task. A leader who demonstrates trust encourages people to take ownership. A leader who listens encourages open communication, and a leader who demonstrates empathy makes it far more likely that empathy will become part of the organization’s culture.
None of this means creating an environment where everyone is constantly happy or where poor performance is overlooked. Strong leadership requires accountability, difficult conversations, high expectations and, at times, difficult decisions. However, there is a tremendous difference between accountability and control. Great cultures are not created by eliminating standards. They are created by combining high standards with trust, clarity and a shared understanding of what the organization is trying to accomplish.
When people understand what is expected of them, why it matters and how their role contributes to something larger, accountability becomes much more meaningful. Instead of simply being told what to do, people begin to understand what they are responsible for creating.
You Cannot Mandate an Exceptional Customer Experience
This is where many customer experience initiatives fall short. Organizations attempt to standardize exceptional service by creating scripts, procedures and behavioral requirements. Employees are told how to answer the telephone, which words to use, when to smile, how to greet a customer and what steps to follow during an interaction. Standards and processes absolutely have value because they create consistency and provide employees with a framework for delivering good service. The problem occurs when the organization begins to believe the process itself is the experience.
You can teach someone how to greet a customer, but you cannot script genuine caring. You can require employees to use a customer’s name, but you cannot mandate empathy. You can create procedures for handling complaints, but a procedure alone will never create the emotional connection that turns a frustrated customer into a loyal one.
More importantly, you cannot continually demand that employees make customers feel valued if the employees themselves do not feel valued. Eventually that contradiction shows up in the customer experience.
The ultimate customer experience is created when people understand the purpose behind the standards and are given enough trust and authority to respond appropriately when the situation does not fit neatly into a policy manual. That requires leadership to move beyond telling people exactly what to do and instead create an environment where people understand the outcome they are expected to create.
Customer Experience Belongs to Everyone
Another common mistake is treating customer experience as the responsibility of the customer service department, sales team or frontline employees. In reality, everyone in the organization has the ability to influence the customer experience, including people who may never speak directly with a customer.
Sales certainly affects the experience, but so do operations, accounting, shipping, marketing, IT and senior leadership. An inaccurate invoice creates a customer experience. A delayed shipment creates a customer experience. A difficult online process creates a customer experience. An internal communication breakdown that forces a customer to repeat the same information to three different people creates a customer experience.
Every internal handoff, decision, process and communication has the potential to eventually reach the customer. This is why creating a customer focused culture requires the entire organization to understand one fundamental question: How does what I do affect the experience we create for the people we serve?
When people can answer that question, customer experience stops being an initiative owned by one department and becomes part of the way the organization operates.
Leadership Creates Permission to Do the Right Thing
Some of the most powerful customer experiences I have encountered were not the result of an elaborate corporate program. They happened because an employee recognized an opportunity and decided to act. Perhaps they solved a problem before it became a bigger one, made a reasonable exception to a policy, anticipated something the customer needed or simply did something thoughtful and unexpected.
Those moments are incredibly powerful because they feel human. They also create stories, and stories are one of the ways customers develop emotional connections to brands.
However, employees will only create those moments consistently if leadership has created an environment where they believe they have permission to think, make decisions and occasionally take a reasonable risk. If every decision is second guessed, people eventually stop making decisions. If every unusual situation requires several levels of approval, employees stop looking for creative solutions. If someone makes a reasonable decision with the customer’s best interest in mind and is punished because it did not follow the exact procedure, the lesson travels quickly throughout the organization.
People learn what is truly expected of them by watching what happens to other people.
Leadership therefore determines whether employees feel empowered to create experiences or simply obligated to complete transactions.
The Employee Experience and Customer Experience Are Connected
Companies often treat employee experience and customer experience as separate initiatives, but they are deeply connected. The way an organization treats its people influences the way those people treat one another, and the way employees treat one another eventually influences the way they treat customers.
Think about some of the best customer experiences you have personally had. In most cases, the person serving you probably did more than simply complete the transaction correctly. They were present. They listened to you. They took ownership of what you needed. They demonstrated that they genuinely cared about the outcome.
Those behaviors are much more likely to occur in an organization where employees themselves experience trust, respect, communication and purpose. This does not mean every employee interaction has to be perfect, nor does it mean that great cultures eliminate workplace challenges. It means the organization has intentionally created an environment that supports the same human qualities it expects employees to demonstrate to customers.
If you want employees to care about customers, leadership has to demonstrate that caring matters.
Consistency Is What Builds Loyalty
Creating one exceptional customer experience is relatively easy. Creating exceptional experiences consistently is much more difficult. The real test of a customer focused culture is whether customers receive the same level of care across different employees, departments, locations and channels, regardless of whether the organization is having a good day or dealing with unexpected challenges.
Consistency creates trust, and trust is one of the foundations of customer loyalty. Customers should not have to wonder which version of your company they are going to get today. They should have confidence that the organization they trusted yesterday will be the same organization they experience tomorrow.
That kind of consistency does not happen by accident. It comes from leadership creating clarity around the organization’s purpose, reinforcing the behaviors that support that purpose and helping people throughout the company understand the experience the brand intends to create.
The objective is not to turn employees into robots who all behave exactly the same way. In fact, doing so can destroy the authenticity that makes great customer experiences memorable. The objective is to create enough cultural consistency that the organization’s values are recognizable regardless of which employee the customer happens to encounter.
The Ultimate Customer Experience Begins With Leadership
If an organization truly wants to improve its customer experience, it needs to look beyond the customer journey and examine what is happening inside the business. Look at the culture. Look at communication. Look at trust and accountability. Look at the way decisions are made, the amount of authority employees have and the way people throughout the organization treat one another. Most importantly, look at leadership.
Leadership creates the environment in which people work. That environment shapes the culture, and the culture influences behavior. Those behaviors eventually become experiences, and those experiences determine how customers feel about the company and the brand.
That is why the ultimate customer experience will never be created through a customer service initiative alone. Training, technology, processes and standards are important, but they are tools. Leadership determines how effectively those tools are used and whether the people using them understand the greater purpose behind them.
When leadership creates a passionate, purposeful and customer focused culture, exceptional service no longer feels like something employees have been instructed to deliver. It becomes part of the way people think, communicate and behave.
And when that happens consistently, it becomes part of the brand itself.