December 24, 2009

Customerize your Language

If you are like most organizations, you have your own language. Whether you are in the communications business, the law profession, or medicine, over time a vocabulary specific to you is developed and understood by all. The problem is that your unique language is reflective of looking inward to your technology, systems, and operating procedures rather than outward focused on your customers.

If you don’t customerize your language you can hardly say that you are addicted to serving customers in every way possible. The words and music don’t match. In addition behavior can’t change to be outwardly directed to the customer if the internally focused language implies the opposite.

Let me give you a couple of examples to explain what I mean.

Calls Processed. Most organizations have call center operations which typically handle sales and service responsibilities. The productivity objective of most call centers is to process as many calls with as few resources allocated as possible. Other metrics include call speed of answer and average call holding time. The common denominator of this operation is the word CALL. You process CALLS. You answer incoming CALLS as fast as you can. You try and minimize the length of the CALL. Help me understand where the CUSTOMER is in all of this. If a CALL is the focus, with implied productivity measures it is hardly a wonder that taking care of what the customer wants gets lost. Employees are more interested in CALL productivity than dazzling customers. The solution? Get rid of the call processing mentality and get on to the serving customers one. Start talking about the number of customers served; customer wait time and customer serving time.

Customer Commitment. At least the customer is in this expression, but it lacks the personal dimension that is so important in dazzling customers. I like the word promise.Companies make commitments; people make promises. There is much more serving power in Customer Promises than Customer Commitments. The productivity metrics become much more meaningful and visceral under the promises notion. What % of customer promises did you keep? How many promises did you break? Who in the organization is the best at keeping customer promises? WOW! Much more powerful and easy for employees to relate to than the company commitment paradigm.

There are other examples in Chapter Forty-Seven of my book. Check them out.

BE DiFFERENT action plan:
- develop a dictionary of your current language
- identify the word/expressions that you understand but which lack the punch of passionately serving customers
- create customerized words to replace the internal focused ones
- change internal success metrics to reflect your customerized language
- tell employees what you have done and why (to align all systems including language to serve customers)

Cheers, Roy

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Posted 12.24.09 at 04:13 pm by Roy Osing | Read Comments (0) | Leave a Comment