Improving your organization’s service culture is a multi-faceted and long-term undertaking. One proven place to start is in building a shared vocabulary for service to focus the attention and actions of your team.

Left to their own devices, no two departments will use the same language to express their vision of excellent service. Each function may have a different understanding of what the customer experience should be. And each department may use a different language to express how they intend to improve it.

For example, operations managers may evaluate quality service by tracking how carefully procedures are followed, while front line salespeople will care more about the ratio of compliments vs. complaints they receive. Or your finance team might seek to improve on-time collections, while your sales team targets flexibility to match their customers’ budget cycles.

As each group works to improve service—as they see it—they may follow different paths or even work at cross purposes to each other.

Creating a Common Service Language can help align everyone on your service team, making it easier for them to keep them going and growing in the same direction. Communication, collaboration, and cooperation all improve when people share a common language.