You want to adopt a customer first strategy, right? Does every department know? If not, it’s unlikely to happen. You need to inspire and motivate employees with customer-centric mission and vision statements.
Everyone in an organisation needs to be behind such an initiative for it to work. A customer first strategy involved everyone. Because every employee has a role to play in not only satisfying your customers, but also in surprising and delighting them too.
Many organisations think that keeping their customers satisfied is the responsibility of customer services or perhaps marketing. But in fact, every single person in an organisation will impact what your customers think and ultimately buy.
So how do you get everyone to understand and more importantly to meet the objective of a customer first strategy? By making it one of the top three objectives of the organisation.
But even more importantly, by including the customer in your mission statement. Let me share a few good and bad ones with you, so you can see what it takes to have a customer-driven mission.
Amazon is one of the first companies that comes to mind when thinking about customer service excellence. Their mission is “To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”
Amazon mentions the customer not once, but twice in their mission! How’s that for customer centricity?
Now a bad mission statement:
“We want to satisfy our customers’ financial needs and help them succeed financially.”
Why do I say it’s bad? Firstly, it doesn’t say how it will satisfy their customers. It is clearly for a financial services company; do you know which? No? That’s normal, as it could be for any of them. It’s for Wells Fargo.
And finally, a terrible mission statement:
“Guided by our Kyosei culture and values, our vision is focused on strengthening our products and improving the way we deliver innovation.”
It’s clearly from an Asian company, but it speaks about its products not its customers. And we don’t even know what its products do! This is the mission statement of Canon.
A customer centric mission statement should mention the customers, its contribution to their lives and be credible. If it meets these three criteria it will inspire employees to think customer first.