First put in place a sound foundation
If you want to make through in being customer-centric in 2012 then forget strategy, forget process redesign, forget technology, forget voice of the customer, forget customer experience design, forget social media – forget everything! Why? How much sense does it make to spend time, money and effort on the walls, floors, windows, roof, plumbing, electrics etc if you have not taken care to put in place a sound foundation in place to make sure that the house doesn’t collapse on you – sooner or later?
What is this foundation? ‘Integrity’
What do I mean by ‘Integrity’? First and foremost ‘Integrity’ in the sense that I am using this word has nothing to do with morality – good, bad, being an upright member of the tribe (whatever the tribe is). By ‘Integrity’ I mean the state of being whole and complete and in particular I am pointing towards the state where words and actions are in complete alignment. For example, if you say you will give me a call tomorrow at 09:00 and you do that then your words and your actions are in agreement. The foundational practice of ‘Integrity’ is ‘honouring your word‘.
What do I mean by ‘honouring your word’? I do not mean keeping your word – doing what you said you would do when you said you would do it to the standard that we agreed (or the standard we can reasonably expect to have been agreed). Are you thinking “How can one honour his word and yet not keep it?” You honour your word by going full out to keep it. And if you know that you are not going to keep your word then right there and then you tell the person/s who are counting on you (and your word) that you will not be keeping your word. And you clean up the mess that you have made. This could involve:
- getting someone else to do what you promised to do;
- renegotiating what you have agreed so that the other person is happy with the end result (of the renegotiation) and the state of the relationship does not deteriorate;
- apologising and making restitution such that the other person is happy with the end result and the relationship is intact.
Why is ‘Integrity’ so important?
You might remember that I wrote about three amazing experiences before Christmas. The third experience was at the Chemist (the pharmacy) where the dispensing Chemist issued me medicines even though I did not have a prescription signed off by my doctor. Furthermore, the staff at the Chemists offered to get the repeat prescription signed off by my doctor and have my medicine ready this morning. Whilst I was initially reluctant, I accepted when the Chemist told me that they provide this service, regularly, for many of their customers – it saves customers the inconvenience of first going to their doctor to get a repeat prescription and then going to the Chemists.
Well I turned up at the Chemists to pick up my medicine – which is incredibly important to my health and well-being. How did things turn out? I walked up to the counter and told the assistant that I had been promised that my Levothyroxine Sodium tables (56 of them) would be ready for pick up today. The assistant could not find my medicine nor my repeat prescription. She asked the dispensing Chemist (not the one that was there last time) and he could not find my stuff on the computer system. To cut a long story short the Chemist (as a business unit) failed to honour their word to me: the medicine was not ready to be picked up. Instead I made my way to the doctors surgery, picked up my repeat prescription, walked back to the Chemists, handed in the prescription and then waited ten minutes for it to be dispensed.
I get that sometimes there are ‘breakdowns’ – I am totally ok with that as it is simply an integral part of this world that we live in even if you get to six sigma. What stunned me was the attitude of the staff at the Chemists. Let me be specific:
- they were totally oblivious to the importance of the medicine to me;
- no-one (four staff members) got that they had made a promise to me – no apologies, no effort to make right what had not gone right;
- they side stepped any responsiblity and accountability by pointing the finger at my doctor – the doctor’s practice had failed to issue the prescription to them even though they had taken my repeat prescription to the doctor’s surgery to be signed by the doctor;
- they acted as if it is totally OK to make a promise and then not keep it because a part of the system outside of their control had failed to function properly;
- knowing that they would not keep their promise no-one at the Chemist had contacted – proactively – to let me know of the issue even though I live only two minutes walk away from them.
In most people, most teams, most departments, most organisations ‘Integrity is out’ – it has gone walkabout
Take a good look and you will find that we as individuals, teams, departments, organisations, communities and society have a feeble relationship to our word. We simply do not keep our word. Because everyone accepts that it is OK to not keep our word then we give away our word willy nilly without real consideration. Taken together I assert that our word is cheap and not worth the paper that it is written on.
That is an issue because when I, the customer, buy from you a set of promises (explicit and implicit) have been made. And now you and your organisation have to deliver on those promises. How the heck are you going to do that if your relationship to your word is feeble just like the Chemist in the story that I told earlier. Great leaders, teams and organisations have a fanatical, obsessive, relationship to their word – playing full out to honour their word as individuals, as team members and as an organisation. Amazon is a great example: I have ordered many items and every time the items arrive on time, in the perfect condition and I am billed only what I expected to be billed. Things went wrong only twice. Once I did not get the travel books when I expected them (and by the promised date) and upon ringing Amazon they fixed it without any questions or hassle: replacement books were desptached that day and arrived the next morning as agreed. The second time I bought a book from a reseller and it had a page missing the reseller did not quibble – he apologised and refunded my money.
Integrity being out compromises workability and performance
If you remember nothing else then remember this Integrity being out compromises the workability (the performance) of the system that is out of integrity. It is not a moral issue. It is a performance issue. And that is why you should start with Integrity – the performance of the system can never surpass the level of integrity especially across the system (the various players, processes, departments, organisations….). Any compromise in integrity will impact the customer in terms of misleading advertising, misleading selling, products that do not do what it says on the tin, failed deliveries, inaccurate billing and so forth.
Investing in voice of the customer, in process redesign, in implementing complected CRM systems etc is simply putting lipstick on a pig or putting icing on a mud pie. You are simply fooling yourself. Incidentally, lack of integrity will impact the value you get out of any VoC program, process redesign or CRM technologies. You can never escape the performance impact of the endemic lack of integrity – lack of integrity flows from the very top, the leaders of the organisation. An organisation can never have more integrity than that of the leadership team. What do you think?
