We must ‘change the culture’ are buzzwords that are used frequently in a variety of situations where organisational performance has fallen below the reasonable expectations of stakeholders particularly customers. Although enhancing a firm’s culture to deliver a better customer experience is a worthwhile goal that will provide benefits to all key stakeholders including employees, customers and shareholders. However, recognising the importance of aligning the culture of a firm with the expectations of customers is the easy part. The difficultly is addressing any existing barriers in a firm in order to embed the desired customer service culture. Some of the existing barriers to a better customer service culture are as follows:
1. Leadership Commitment
In firms where meeting the needs of customers is not considered a top priority, there tends to be a lack of leadership commitment to delivering a better customer experience. Insufficient resources to invest in the delivery of a better customer experience usually demonstrate the lack of leadership commitment.
2. Customer Understanding
A dominant industry culture where the delivery of average customer service is the norm tends to influence the degree to which the participating firms invest in the development of a deeper understanding of customers.
Another common barrier is the lack of clarity and a shared understanding of the desired customer experience (including the appropriate employee behaviours) that fosters futures revenues and customer loyalty.
An approach to regulatory and/or legislative compliance that is focused on the barest minimum will foster a culture, which fails to look at regulatory requirements through the lens of the customers’ experience.
3. Collective Responsibility
A lack of collective responsibility for the delivery of consistent and predictable customer experience can be a significant barrier.
In firms where adopting a silo mentality with regard to customers is the norm, there would be no shared view of customers. Each department/business unit takes ownership only for its own customers and therefore focuses only on improving the experience of its own customers.
Competing and conflicting objectives within a firm can hinder collaboration between the departments, which invariably affects the delivery of a consistent customer experience.
4. Capability
Firms may lack the capability to execute corporate priorities effectively or an ad hoc approach is adopted to the delivery of a positive customer experience.
5. Complacency
Firms that have a strong leadership position in a market are more likely to allow complacency to inadvertently become a barrier to enhancing the customer service culture.
6. Service Design
Organisational structure is primarily focused on supporting the way a firm operates internally rather than facilitating the delivery of a better customer experience. Surprisingly it appears that in such firms that any customer dissatisfaction arising may have been inadvertently built into the service delivery processes.
Lack of understanding of the interdependent elements that underpin a better customer experience e.g. assumption that throwing more training on customer service alone will significantly result in a better customer experience.
7. Blame Culture
In firms where there is a strong blame culture there is a preference to avoid conflict rather than challenge the status quo in order to identify opportunities to improve the customer experience. In addition, such cultures breed excessive fear of failure, which results in disempowered employees that are either unable or unwilling to use their initiative to solve customers’ problems.
8. Policies and Procedures
Disproportionate rules to control the behaviour of employees may result in policies and procedures that are inflexible to respond to the unique needs of customers. Such policies tend to arise because there is a lack of shared understanding of why employees do what they do with regard to customer service.
Are any of these barriers hindering your firm’s progress?