Is the Customer Really First?

Cesar Ritz, a renowned hotelier of the twentieth century, is noted with saying “the customer is never wrong.” This philosophy created the mindset that the customer is the first priority. However, the level of service provided to consumers today has drastically deteriorated since his time…to the extent that many front line employees in hotels, banks, auto dealerships, grocery stores and health care organizations view their customers as a second-class citizen who is rarely right, especially when a problem arises.

With this in mind, here are five points to contemplate in determining whether the customer is really viewed as the first priority within your organization or a distant second or third place.

1. Employee Selection Process - If the customer is truly first, establish a process ensuring only the brightest, most talented and skilled employees are selected to serve your customers. The “warm body” syndrome cannot exist within your organization.
   
2. Ease of Business Interaction with the Customer- If the customer is truly first, implement new technology, systems or processes to make it easier for customers to conduct business with you. Person-to-person interaction would always trump the impersonal, mechanical and endless voicemail prompts typically used today as a substitute for service. Customers want choices but they also want to be a priority.


3. Customer First Service Philosophy - If the customer is truly first, your service philosophy (vision statement, mission statement and service standards) would clearly reflect it. Your service philosophy must be woven into the fabric of the organization; employees wouldn’t know it any other way.
   
4. Senior Leadership Engaged in Service Excellence - If the customer is truly first, then the CEO and senior leaders must be champions of the service philosophy. They must be role models who reflect the characteristics of service excellence within your organization. As a result, they would hold everyone within the organization accountable for living and upholding the highest levels of service possible.
   
5. Empowered Employees - If the customer is truly first, the main focus of every employee must be to deliver a service experience that is guaranteed to create high customer loyalty. This means when a problem or challenge arises, employees are properly trained, empowered and comfortable making decisions to immediately resolve any issue. Employees must be able to satisfy the customer without the approval of a manager. Employees must be the first point of contact for handling the majority of customer issues.
   

Bottom-line, you eat an elephant one bite at a time. Work on those barriers that are standing in the way of service excellence, one thing at a time. If you try to do too much at one time, you will quickly burn out and quit.

I’d love to hear from you. What do you believe stands in the way of a “customer first” mentality in most organizations? Is it the lack of employee empowerment, leadership engagement, or that they just flatly don’t care?