Having a passion for customers and customer experience is the secret sauce in all successful CX strategies. Passion is the key driver to achieve goals and more importantly, it is what keeps us going when we encounter barriers or difficulties. As Palit states in his article, “Passion is the fuel that propels us forward on the path to success.”
What is Customer Passion?
In The CX Academy we define customer passion as, “a shared emotional commitment to do the right thing for customers, always”.
In customer service, this means that you should remain enthusiastic and committed to helping your customers and providing excellent customer experience even when you reach your targets.
If you are passionate about something, you make an emotional commitment to it. Passion gives us purpose. It gives us energy and excitement and helps to overcome any difficulties or obstacles we may face.
Having shared passions connects us to others and gives us a sense of belonging. Ultimately, passion gives us confidence, positivity and the motivation to succeed.
As Glide describes, “Passion is an effective sales tool because it isn’t artificial and can’t be faked for a long period of time. It is displayed in people who genuinely care and are willing to take the time to serve their clients in whatever manner is necessary.”.
As a Team Lead, Manager or CEO you need to recognise that customer passion drives and enables employees to go the extra mile and exceed their expectations.
If you do the right thing for the customer and make them happy, they will form an emotional bond with your organisation. If you have passion for your customers, they will reciprocate by having passion for your brand. This leads to long-term relationships that deliver business growth.
Examples of companies demonstrating a passion for their customers
Apple
Steve Jobs is a great example of a leader who was passionate not about technology but about building tools that would help people unleash their personal creativity. As he said, “ Apple is not about making boxes for people to get their jobs done, although we do that well. Apple is about something more. Its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.”
The company never used low prices as a differentiator – instead, they grew the trust of the customer base so much that customers became incredibly loyal advocates. Of course, all of it was done through very well-planned marketing and experience strategies however what has to be noted is that it was all a result of Steve Jobs’s “maniacal attention to detail” and passion for their customers.
Through his passion as a leader, he was also able to inspire and lead his employees to do the same and, “do each of their tasks with sincerity and focus on keeping the customers’ priority as their ultimate goal.”
USAA
US Armed Forces demonstrate their passion for customers through the ability to see their customers as people.
They have loyal customers because they treat them like people notpeople, not just numbers. They have a culture of welcoming customers into the family where each customer can expect to be supported just as they would by their family and friends. As USAA says, “When you join USAA, you become part of a family who stands by you during every stage of your life.”
Employees are encouraged to take time to get to know customers so they can provide them with the best advice and give them the right recommendations. Through the USAA ‘family’ culture, employees understand that each customer has their own individual needs and financial goals, therefore they don’t up-sell new products.
As well as this they take employee feedback and listen to their ideas that could improve customer experience.
The whole company is based on a passion for the customers – starting with passionate leaders, a company culture encouraging innovation and feedback, and recruiting the right employees who will treat each customer as an individual instead of just a number.
Slack
From it’sits beginning Slack has been open to customer feedback at even the highest level of the organisation. Customer service and engineering employees work together to track customer concerns and feedback and make the necessary changes to the products to best meet customer needs.
They use key customer metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES) to measure their success rather than sales or usage figures. For this company it has never been about the profit – it is about improving the lives of customers, it was created to make their live’slives easier and improve their workflow communication cuttingcommunication by cutting down on emails and various possible mistakes associated with them.
At its core, it’s Salck’sSlack’s passion for customers and dedication to providing excellent customer experience was what made it so successful.
Recruiting for Passion
Recruiting for passion is one thing that can make the most difference in the delivery of your Customer Experience strategy.
Good communication skills and listening skills, can be learned. If you want your employees to deliver great customer experience for your customer you can train them how to do it and what to have in mind to make it happen – we can help you with this: CX Team Training.
However, you can’t train passion. This is why it’s so important to recruit people who have passion. They will become your most valuable asset and after they get specific CX Training, they will be key for your CX strategies to be successful.
There are six key characteristics of employees who demonstrate a passion for customers:
- Empathy,
- Commitment,
- Curiosity,
- Attention to Detail,
- Connection,
- Courage
During your recruitment process, these are the things you should be focused on – everything else can be learned or trained.
5 Tips for Passionate Employee Recruitment
- Passion attracts passion so ask the passionate people you already have in your organisation to refer friends or people they know
- Create a ‘Passion Test’ as part of the application process
- Ask interview questions based on the core values of your organisation to see how aligned they are to each candidate’s own personal values
- Focus less on asking the candidate about what they have done in their personal and professional life and more on why they have done something
- Invite them to meet other people in the team and observe how they interact with others
If you would like to learn more about what you need to deliver great CX and get the tools and templates that will help you create strong CX Strategies enrol in our Professional Diploma in CX today.
