Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

When you think about the volume of customers that an organization has, and how all of them are going to be uniquely different in some way, it’s a complex picture. Let’s take a B2B example, business to business. Even within that customer company, you’ve got people in so many different positions that are responsible for different things. There’s a finance department, the purchasing department, there are the people who are actually going to use the product, the ones that you’d be trained on, and so on.

Over here, you are, as the providing company in that B2B interaction, and you’ve got so many different people, and they’re all interacting with each other. You’ve got to build a culture where the experience that the client organization has, all those different people at different points in time, in different situations, says, “You know what? Everybody from that company seems to get it. Everybody in that company seems to understand that their job is to create a better experience for me and my colleagues.” And when I ask them about something, I get the sense that the culture inside their company is that they’re always doing that with each other as well.

Now that’s rare because so often you see the silo behavior. “This is just my department, right?” When you build a culture of continuously uplifting service, then what you’ve done is you’ve reached the point where everybody understands that my job is to take action. But the purpose of the action is to create value. And the culture of this company is all is looking for: “What’s the next action that I can take, or what’s the next action that we could take, that would create more value for the person or the people or the department or the company that we serve?” When everybody in an organization understands what I just said, which is my definition of uplifting service—taking the next action to create more value for someone you care about—well, that’s powerful.

Now you asked how do you achieve that? You’ve got to provide the fundamental, what we call actionable service education. Bring those tools, those principles, those worksheets, those workshops to your people, so you build up what’s called a common service language because every department has a language. HR—hiring, recruitment, compensation, benefits, appraisal. Finance—bottom line, top line, budget report, cash flow. You know, everybody’s got theirs, but they don’t have a common service language. And you’ve got to bring it to them because our schools are not teaching them.

Then, when they have that understanding together, give them the practical tools to improve—The Six Levels of Service, Four Categories of Value. Mapping out your process points and your perception points. Blame. Shame. Excuses. TPR, which stands for what? Take personal responsibility. Where did you learn that? That’s what we call actionable service education.

Now that’s foundational, but it’s not enough to build a culture. The leadership team has got to be aligned and in agreement and understand what the behaviors are that they need to demonstrate. And then there’s something that we created, which, as you mentioned, is in the book called The 12 Building Blocks of Service Culture. So for example, what’s your recruitment process like? Are you getting the right people? Is it giving the new recruit the kind of experience, even at the point of interview or seeing the offer, where they’re going, “I like this company the way they treat me. I’m not even in the company yet.”

And then if you hire them, what’s that onboarding experience like? Is it a boring HR administrative paperwork thing, or is it another experience of the culture of the organization? And then the way you communicate and recognize and reward, and how you capture voice of customer and what you do with it. There are 12 building blocks, and all of those can be connected to each other in a way that consistently reinforces, strengthens the culture with reminders, with education, with encouragement, with recognition. That’s how you build the culture. That’s what we do, as you know. And whether people look in the book or on the website or on YouTube or on LinkedIn, they can find out a lot more about it.