10 strategies to get everybody in your company to focus on the customer

If you want to install a powerful customer culture in your company – that really works – you’ll need everyone on board, not just those departments that are officially dedicated to the customer. This is probably one of the biggest stumbling blocks for companies who have great intentions in CX, but somehow seem unable to really execute that intention. So I wrote a piece with 10 strategies to help you deeply embed a customer vision across your entire company:
1. Hire and train for CX culture
If you want everyone in your company to put the customer first, you need to hire them accordingly. That’s the very first step. Trader Joe’s, for instance, has an excellent CX reputation and they are very careful about who they hire. The question ‘Do you like to make people smile?’, is for instance included in their job applications.
When you find those people, you should provide regular training sessions and workshops on understanding customer needs, empathy, effective communication, and problem-solving. That’s important to keep them on their toes, stimulate their natural propensity towards customer friendliness and keep them aware of all the latest evolutions. Atlantis the Palm, for instance, hires people with the right attitude, starts them off with an in-depth five-day orientation program and then keeps training them on the job and through all sorts of permanent training updates. Like online courses, Forbes travel guide training, collaborations with universities, cross-exposures to other departments, working at sister hotels like the One&Only, etc. When it comes to CX, they have a lifelong learning attitude.
2. Repeat the story
It’s also crucial to keep communicating about your obsession with the customer to everyone within the company. Every meeting – especially in those departments that are not officially in charge of CX – should start and end with the customer. Yes, process, revenue, sales tactics, the competion, etc. are important, but “How does this decision affect the customer?” should always be top of mind in every department’s endeavors.
You may need some storytelling to make sure that everyone is on board. That is for instance what Amazon did, when they put an empty chair in the meeting to symbolize the vote of the customer.
3. Reward AND Support
Companies that offer great CX, tend to reward that great CX internally. Adobe, for instance, structurally celebrates employee achievements through peer-to-peer recognition, manager appreciation, and company-wide recognition events. This not only allows its employees to feel involved and valued, it also underlines how important CX is.
But it’s not just about reacting when things went great, it’s also about responding right when things went wrong. When an employee makes a mistake towards a customer, they should also feel heard and appreciated by their leaders. There is an emotional cost when someone makes a customer misstep and leaders should tell them that these things happen and that’s ok. This helps to install a psychologically safe environment where people feel supported to experiment and go the extra mile for the customer.
4. Treat every customer idea as a great idea
When enthusiastic employees come up with ideas for creating better CX, a lot of these ideas are greeted with skepticism. We have all been confronted with idea killers like “But what if every customer wants that?”, “That won’t work” or “That will cost too much?”. Maybe we’ve even spoken those very words ourselves.
You don’t need to implement every idea your employees come up with, obviously, but treat every customer idea like a great idea. Don’t just dismiss it, but think about it from the customer point of view and try to see what the impact could be. Congratulate your employees on their creativity and proactivity. Show them how appreciative you are of what they think. If you don’t, they just won’t come up with any ideas anymore, because they’ll just think “no one listens to me anyway”. It’s about making them feel valued and creating a safe space to share ideas.
Even better is to allow dedicated time to new ideas, like 3M’s unique 15% Culture which encourages employees to set aside a portion of their work time to proactively cultivate and pursue innovative ideas that excite them.
5. Lead by example
There is often a big difference between what company leaders say – like “we put the customer at the heart of everything we do” – and what they do. For instance, if an employee was able to turn a frustrated customer into a happy one with a service call that was longer than usual, and the leader’s reaction is “That’s fantastic, but try to keep the call shorter next time to keep the cost per customer down”, that is not the way to convey that the customer is king. It only shows that revenue is king.
Also, I love those examples from leaders who keep close contact with customers in the field every now and then. Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, spent six months living on the premises that he’s been renting out through his own platform. Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan works one half-day a month as a barista, to become immersed in the Starbucks customer culture. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi got behind the wheel as a driver and went through the entire process himself, from signing up as a driver to driving customers and dealing with app glitches and traffic. Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, spends time every week in the contact center working through customer support calls. This is how you convey that CX is important. By acting on it.
6. Break down silos
If you want to install “customer ownership” across the entire company, not just in the CX departments, you need to encourage cross-departmental communication. And the concept of “boundary spanning” could be really useful here. The term is used to describe any situation where an individual crosses the boundaries of a social group to enable knowledge exchange, translate language, and share values among various groups.
An unintentional but structural way to install boundary spanning for CX topics is to follow Dinsey’s philosophy “everyone is the right person to talk to”. It’s not just a great way to keep customers happy (everyone hates it when they have a question and then hear “I’m not the right person to talk to), but it’s a great way for employees of all departments and functions to grab a customer problem by the hands, look at it with fresh outsider (but also still insider) eyes and then talk to people from other departments about what their experience was.
7. Install a Customer Council
Another way to break silos, but on a leadership level, is to set up a Customer Council like Neuhaus, the Belgium Premier Chocolate brand, did. Their council includes all of the organization’s top leaders and is chaired by the CEO. Every six weeks the council comes together to discuss the progress of three customer projects. The goal is that by the next meeting, one of these is successfully implemented. If there’s a roadblock, they discuss it and try to find out how to remove it together. And in those cases where it’s hard to find a consensus, the CEO steps in and makes the final decision.
Now, this is not just a great way to deeply embed the importance of CX across the entire company and prove its value, it also functions like some type of boundary spanning as described above. Because it allows leaders with several types of background – who might not always get together so frequently otherwise – to get together on a regular basis to discuss all things customer.
8. Everyone should have direct customer contact
I’ve already touched upon this earlier – discussing that CEOs like Brian Chesky of Airbnb, Laxman Narasimhan of Starbucks and Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber often spend time in the field with customers – but this is so important that it deserves a point of its own. If you want everyone in your company to be deeply committed to your customers and understand them, then they have to meet those customers – current AND even past – especially those employees who are not in customer facing positions.
At the Belgian subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch (AB InBev), for instance, all top-tier executives had to engage directly with three past customers. Their mission was to have a heart-to-heart on why they parted ways with AB InBev. This fresh approach led to management strategies brimming with genuine empathy and a deeper understanding of core issues. Microsoft does something very similar, where – at the beginning of each executive committee meeting – they like to hold a 1,5 hour conversation with two prospects whom they had been unable to turn into customers.
And at DoorDash, all salaried employees are required to make deliveries through its WeDash program, including CEO Tony Xu. You cannot expect all of your employees, across the entire company, to put customer needs above anything else, if they know nothing about that customer.
9. All metrics are CX metrics
If you want everyone in your company to put the customer first, then you should integrate CX into your Performance Metrics and Incentives, and not just those of the customer departments. It’s important to include customer experience metrics like the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), or Customer Effort Score (CES), as key performance indicators (KPIs) for all employees, across all departments.
You could tie incentives, bonuses, or performance reviews to CX metrics in order to reinforce the importance of prioritizing customer satisfaction and loyalty across all departments. What is absolutely crucial here, though, is that these KPIs are used to manage the customer culture but NOT the customer score itself. Like when you put “low product returns” as a KPI as a proxy to high satisfaction (as in “if they love the product, they won’t return it”), but the result is not better products but a process that makes it very difficult for a customer to return a product. That is always the danger of KPIs. But if you have a customer-oriented culture (following one or more of the above strategies), that won’t happen.
10. Think ‘structure’, not ‘project’
There are 2 important patterns running through all of the above approaches:
- The importance of silo-breaking: contact and communication across all the different departments, not just marketing and CX
- Make it structural: CX cannot be an afterthought. You need to structurally embed it across all of these departments.
And you’ll see that many of the examples above are of the structural kind. Neuhaus Customer Council structurally embeds customer time into their company, across all departments. Adobe structurally celebrates employee achievements. Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, spends time every week in the contact center working through customer support calls. 3M’s 15% culture allows employees to structurally dedicate their work time to pursue innovative ideas for customers. Each day – 7 days a week – the entire team of the Antlantis the Palm hotel in Dubai gathers for a morning briefing in order to measure how they are performing. They review their services to “get better every day” and they adapt. Sometimes it’s small things, like adapting the offering in the breakfast room. But other times it’s about introducing completely new procedures.
The common denominator is that all of these strategies are very deliberate, and they occur on a regular basis. That’s the only way that you’ll make your customer culture really work.
So what are your tips and tricks for putting the customer on everyone’s mind in your company? Let me know over the socials!