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Your service culture (and your organization’s success) depends on you. As the leader of your organization, you are responsible for making service a top priority. You must declare it, and you must mean it.
That is because your team members look to you to understand where your organization’s priorities lie. And then they will act accordingly. If it’s money, they will focus on getting more money. If it’s higher scores, they will focus their energies on higher scores. Even at the cost of customer service.
But when you declare service to be a top priority, you put a stake in the ground. You indicate to everyone – your team, your industry, and your customers – that your organization will drive continuous service improvement.
The beauty is, your other priorities follow from your service improvements. As you build a shining service culture, your organization will naturally start to achieve other key goals: more revenue, higher service scores, repeat customers, and an improved market position.
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Below is an Autogenerated Transcript
Declare..Declare service a top priority. Cost, big priority. Speed, big priority. Profit, big priority. But it takes somebody in your position to declare that service is a top priority.
Now, what is a declaration? So you talk to your partner for a second. What does it mean when a human being declares something? You know, it’s not a casual opinion. Like, “I don’t like the food.” That’s not a declaration. Or somebody saying, “It’s hot today.” That’s not a declaration. What is a declaration? The country where I was born was created out of a Declaration of Independence from the United Kingdom. The King of England disagreed, they had a war, it was won. Boom! New country existed.
In the West. I know Indian weddings are long. Indian weddings are wonderful. They’re great, incredible experiences. But I’m not sure at what point the person is actually married. Right in the West, we don’t have that problem because there’s a celebrant who says, “By the authority vested in me, I now declare you husband and wife.” One moment before that, you were not married. One moment after that you’re married. It was the declaration that made that difference. When the judge says, “Hmm, I declare you guilty as charged or innocent, free to go.” The world changes based on the power of a declaration.
Lou Gerstner came from American Express to IBM, and turned the whole organization around. Back in the days when they thought it was, you know, dumb terminals and big, big iron and mainframes, he said, “No, we’ve got to become a services company. It’s our complaining customers that we’re going to learn from most.” Rajiv Suri, now the CEO of Nokia. When I started working with him, he was at Nokia Siemens Networks, and they had a phrase that they were using, “Know how.” They were so proud. “Know how.”
I said, “Rajiv, people don’t really care so much what you know. They care about what you do with what you know for them. So we changed it. It became “Know How. Act now.” We knew something was still missing. What is the purpose of the action? Go back to the definition with me. Action to create value. If you create a lot of value, you “Create Wow”.
These six simple words. Know How. Know the customer, know their problem, know their concern, know the competition. Act now. Make the call, set the meeting, give them the proposals, get their feedback. Create wow. Find out are they happy, or are they not? What else can we do?
60,000 people around the world now use this as they’re engaging in declaration of service.
