Leverage Team Masters for Customer Retention

Everyone has team Masters within their organizations. You know a few yourself.

These Masters are valuable components of customer experience, customer success and customer retention.

They are the equivalent of a Yoda®.

These folks understand everything there is to know about how your equipment operates, how software interfaces become more interoperable and how to increase quality and efficiency while reducing waste.

Customers do business with your organization because of your team Masters.

Do you know who they are?

Team Masters include the incredibly knowledgeable folks who fix what is broken and train internal and external customers on all of the “how to’s” about your products, platforms, services and equipment. These Masters are sprinkled liberally across business and operations departments, including finance, customer service, quality and logistics. Some of my favorite Masters include departmental administrators. 😉

These internal experts know how to make things “happen” within the enterprise. They unlock doors for you. They gain you a seat at the big boys’ and big girls’ tables. They understand where to find the resources to execute strategy and create outstanding project outcomes.

These gurus allow you to gain greater visibility across the enterprise.

Do you include team Masters within your customer retention strategy?

Identifying critical-to-outcome team Masters are the secret sauce of a solid customer retention strategy.

Most importantly, these individuals make great mentors for new, especially younger, employees.  These Masters increase levels of collaboration, engagement and consequently impact internal customer retention.

Considering the changing of the guard in workplace composition, isn’t it time for your organization to identify team Masters?

Why? Masters are best positioned to translate stated and unstated customer requirements in the creation of best-in-class outcomes. They are innovation Masters who bring out the best in your internal teams when they interface with customers.

The result? Your internal teams create deliverables which not only solve short term issues. Instead, project outcomes enhance line of business value due to product and service innovation.

Like Yoda, team Masters are strategic instead of tactical.

These internal gurus keep your organization focused on “What’s Next?” rather than reacting to “What just happened?”

Team Masters are enigmatic.

Like the original Yoda®, team Masters initially are difficult to understand. They are braniacs. They tend to speak technically, holistically and with vision. They also assume everyone understands what they are talking about!

Employees on the other side of the table, the business side of the table, are lost. Worse, business colleagues become intimidated in their attempts to communicate with team Masters.

Also, these internal authorities tend to be marginalized within your organization. Additionally, they are marginalized in your clients’ enterprises as well.

This scenario is just plain status quo, Us versus Them mindset. It reinforces the legacy disconnect across the sales-engineering interface® and apparent inability to create technical / non-technical collaboration. Instead of collaborating with each other, each discipline remains in its respective corner. It doesn’t have to be this way.

This classic workplace scenario is the root cause of why the value of most team Masters remains confined to the departments in which they work their magic, rather than being shared across the enterprise.

To gain greater visibility for the business value of your offerings, leverage team Masters for customer retention.

You cannot move your organization forward if you do not understand what is holding you back. To get started leveraging the value of team Masters, start simply. Then build momentum by creating a continuum of simple successes.

1. Identify your team Masters.
2. Create beta teams built around a willingness to collaborate.
3. Make it OK to “not understand” each other. (This step works wonders for cross-functional communication.)
4. Include sales people on the team to hurdle over their reluctance to cross sales-engineering interface®.
5. Identify a target project.
6. Go!

Have I catalyzed your team thinking? Already identifying team Masters in your organization? Well, what are you waiting for?

Babette Ten Haken is a writes, speaks and coaches about customer success for customer retention. She traverses the interface between human capital strategy for hiring and developing collaborative technical and non-technical teams. She serves manufacturing, IT and engineering intensive companies. Babette’s playbook of technical / non-technical collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon. Image author: Ion Chiosea. Image source: Fotolia.