How Leadership Creates a Profitable Customer-Centric Company Culture

In today's business world, it takes more than just an effective customer service department to create strong customer loyalty and engagement — especially when consumers have many more choices about where to spend their money. To truly succeed, it takes a customer-centric corporate culture that begins at its highest levels and is supported everywhere from the boardroom to the mailroom. Unfortunately, it's easier said than done.

In many companies, ownership and senior management often get to their positions because they have tremendous technical knowledge, are experts within their industry, or show impeccable leadership skills. They aren't necessarily experts about delivering quality customer service or creating a healthy and sustaining service culture. Too often, this results in strategies to improve service relegated to being a frontline issue. This is a big mistake.

Building a service culture needs great service leaders and leadership teams. Senior leadership's power to set the vision, focus the entire organization, reward success, remove roadblocks, and demonstrate the correct behavior cannot be left to others.

Corporate leadership must embrace the company's following critical roles to guarantee an influential service culture gets created:

1. Be the leader your organization needs  

Why build a customer service culture? Why is it so critical now? Because leadership must create an engaging service vision that gives employees a sense of purpose, value, and meaning.

This vision needs to apply to external customers and internal ones when it comes to co-workers and departments. Organizations that deliver world-class service through their frontline workers have to build excellent service throughout the company.

But the change has to align itself around a strategic goal. A robust service vision stimulates employees' motivation, enthusiasm, and commitment. It provides direction and a crystal-clear idea of what management wants — and what isn't wanted.

2. Engage your entire company

The entire company is responsible for building a service culture, but many organizations mistakenly delegate it to the customer service or HR departments. But it MUST begin at the very top … the CEO and his or her upper management team.

When management is actively and VISIBLY involved, it gives your service culture the best chance to take root and grow. Otherwise, your employees will believe it's another gimmick cooked up by management to improve customer service and engage employees. To borrow an old saying, leadership needs to walk the walk, as well as talk the talk.

3. Commit enough resources to be successful

While building a culture of service excellence has commonalities for most companies, each organization has unique values, composition, and goals. Therefore, leadership must regularly review progress, set up priorities, and distribute the resources needed to ensure the process works. Because generally, only senior leadership can literally and figuratively remove the roadblocks to creating the culture.

4. Be patient, encouraging, and forgiving 

Building a service culture only works when management actively proves that they understand why this process is essential. Also, it's just as crucial that they recognize and encourage employees who are modeling the right actions and behaviors.

However, they must also remember that mistakes will happen even with the best of employees. So, management must create a psychologically safe environment that allows employees to take calculated risks and that errors are golden opportunities to learn, improve, and grow.

Talking about service culture is easy, but doing it can be challenging at times. Is your leadership team ready to walk the walk?