What gets measured may get managed, but what gets celebrated gets repeated.

Improving your customer experience requires you to use every tool at your disposal.  Voice of the Customer research is obviously critical.  Understanding your existing Customer Satisfaction Survey or Net Promoter Scores is also important.  But while they monitor your status, these alone will not create change.  You need to find those bright spots in your organization where your customer is being well-served and promote them as much as possible.  You need to create customer experience heroes.

Heroes define a company, showing what is important.  When a company celebrates sales, they sell more – but perhaps at the expense of delivery issues.  When it celebrates product management, new products come out quickly – including those without customer demand.  But companies with great customer satisfaction use the Voice of the Customer data to understand their level of customer satisfaction, and then celebrates those who engage customers at a superior level.

The Well Baby Program

#115 in the Green Goldfish Project – AOL

This tech giant helps take the stress out of being a working parent by offering fringe family benefits to employees.

To start, new moms receive prenatal instruction on everything from childbirth to newborn care through the company’s Well Baby program. New moms get eight fully paid weeks off for maternity leave.

The Green Goldfish Project is a quest to find 1,001 examples of marketing lagniappe for employees.  Green goldfish are the little signature extras given to employees. They help differentiate a company, increase employee retention and drive positive WoM.

Charisma is a necessary if not sufficient ingredient for success in public life.  When present it is often touted as the reason for success often obscuring the gross harm wrought by innumerable political leaders with an abundance of the quality. A recent column in Australia's Melbourne Age newspaper even notes how it is an "over-rated leadership attribute".

But emerging as a relatively new trend is a move that seeks to foster the trait among corporate executives for more effective leadership. While there have been countless charismatic CEOs ranging from the spectacularly successful to abysmal failures, the idea of infusing the attribute as a human resources developmental tool is something that has remained largely untried thusfar.

The UK's Financial TImes has an insightful story headlined "The subtle secrets of charisma". The FT notes how some corporations "are working on practising a personal charisma regime" and cites one developed by Indian IT giant, Infosys. The charisma training regime is based, in part, on work by academics at the University of Lausanne.

Customer service experiences either generate or diminish company revenue. In other words, customer service is not a neutral factor in your business.  It either makes you money or costs you money.

Several years ago, Wendy’s devised one of the most memorable commercials of all time.  It featured several old ladies in a hamburger shop examining the hamburgers they had just purchased.  When they opened the bun, the burger was so minuscule that they cried out, “Where’s the beef?”

In essence, they were saying there was nothing to be found in the hamburgers sold by Wendy’s competitors.  And in a similar sense, there are some people who say there’s nothing to be found in the hoopla surrounding customer service.

In other words, customer service is nice in theory, but it doesn’t pay off.  And if it doesn’t pay off, why bother?

The Financial Payoff In Great Service

A short time ago, Petouhoff, Leaver, and Magarie answered that very question when they released their research findings in “The Economic Necessity of Customer Service.”  They concluded, “Customer service experiences EITHER generate or diminish company revenue.”  In other words, customer service is not a neutral factor in your business.  It either makes you money or costs you money.

They went on to say, “Customer service has a profound effect on a corporation’s bottom line.”  How can that be?