Anne Morriss is the best-selling co-author of Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business and in a past podcast, I asked her, “ If you had to choose just one take away from your book, what would it be?” This led to the following excerpt.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Thinking Differently in Service Design
Anne: I would say that great service isn’t this mysterious and elusive goal. It’s a product of careful design and delivered tradeoffs. It’s possible for any organization with the stomach to make hard choices.
Joe: In my summary of this conversation, I go back to my water well analogy. You don’t find water by digging sideways; you find it by digging deeper. It’s all about knowing your customers better, and providing better service.
Anne: I would absolutely agree with that. There’s no path to excellence that doesn’t go through a very deep understanding of your customers, absolutely.
The only piece, I would say, is figuring out very strategically what kind of environment you want to create from an organizational, from a culture standpoint, is also an important part of the game. Customers are wild and wonderfully unpredictable, and no handbook or policy can anticipate all of our disruptive behavior. Culture tells you want to do in those moments. Culture tells us what to do when the CEO isn’t in the room, which is, of course, most of the time.
Joe: I think that’s a great point, Anne, because I think that people just have to have a clear vision of who you are, stealing from Simon Sinek; why you do something, and it will make your reaction so much easier.
Anne: One way to think about culture is the assumptions that guide decision making. As an organization, you have enormous amount of leverage over the assumptions that your employees are making. As human beings, we’re looking for signals. We just consume the signals of culture all the time. One of the most important cultural leverages you have is your Blackberry, in the sense that you are the guy in charge. When do you put down these tools of destruction and actually pay attention to what people say?
As human animals, we are very sensitive to signs of status. That’s a huge one, organizational culture today, with all of these very distracting tools. You can be very deliberate, as a leader, in signaling status, and that’s what your employees are paying attention to.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Thinking Differently in Service Design
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