Are competing customer retention cultures crippling your organization or association?
Often, businesses remain blissfully unaware that employees perform at cross-purposes to one another. Professionally, functionally, emotionally and purposefully.
First, competing customer retention cultures are sustained within traditional departmental silos and business models.
Here we go again. Sequestering employees in well-entrenched departmental silos reinforces specific professional mindset, habits, skills and tools. Far too often, employees in one departmental silo have no idea about the breadth and depth of what the folks in other silos “do.”
And while organizations talk the talk about being customer-focused, walking the walk falls short. Employees remain comfortable and very busy. Working full-time within their own, functional silos. Maybe even collaborating, too. However, busily-focused on completing the tactical assignments they equate to being customer-focused. Making short-sighted output. Rather than creating strategically-positioned contributions to customer experience.
What is the profitability of maintaining business models which keep organizations and associations producing at half the capacity of what they are capable of?
Then, competing customer retention cultures are sustained by traditional workforce hiring practices.
When employees produce functionally-specific output, each department becomes either a cost-center or a revenue generator. Typically, folks on the manufacturing and operations side of the business and workforce hiring model are perceived as cost-centers. And typically, the business side of the organization functions as revenue generators. Yet everyone will tell you they are working on behalf of the customer.
While both sides of the organization say they are customer-focused, the customers they serve are variable. As a result, both sides of the organization fail to fully capture the value and profitability of what each other “does.”
- Are you sticking close to the customer or association member, but find they are drifting further and further away?
- Is your current business model positioned to create the type of workforce to best serve Today’s and Tomorrow’s evolving customer expectations?
Have I provoked you to think about the same things, differently? Break out and break away from what is comfortable. Move one millimeter beyond where you are Today, to discover where you need to be, Tomorrow and in the Future to best serve your customers, and each other.
- Hire me to speak or conduct a workshop at your next corporate or association event to catalyze your mindset and skill sets.
- Book an appointment with me to better serve your customers.
- Subscribe to my blog. Share your email address in the red box in the right column. Never miss another insightful post.
Babette Ten Haken catalyzes organizations and associations, like yours, who want to leverage a more profitable workforce to retain the customers you work so hard to win. One Millimeter Mindset™ speaking and storytelling programs are dedicated to: Leveraging Collaborative Business Models and Profitable Workforces to Retain Customers. Babette is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association. Babette’s Playbook of collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Her professional speaker profile appears on the espeakers platform.
Image source: Fotolia
Leave a Reply