Building Teams who are Loyal to Customers

What is Loyalty to Customer?

The importance of being customer-focused is not something new. It has been the foundation of all successful businesses for centuries. However, more often than not, customer focus either remains a marketing strategy or resides within the silo of sales and customer support teams.

For customer focus to be a truly organization-wide behavior, it has to develop inside-out where every team member feels a strong sense of responsibility towards the customer. They personally care about customer success, and even single negative feedback puts them on a personal mission to find a resolution. This state represents “Loyalty to Customer”.

Benefits of being Loyal to the Customer

Tremendous value is generated for the organization when team members are loyal to the customers. Here are the top four benefits:

• Normalization of organizational hierarchy - When loyalty is pledged to the customer, the focus on internal hierarchy and politics is automatically diminished. This transforms the company’s culture and creates a level playing field for everyone.
• Self Empowerment - Team members can speak their minds for the greater good of the customer without worrying about authority.
• Work Fulfillment - It instantly connects team members to the customer through everyday work resulting in satisfaction and fulfillment.
• Positive Feedback Loop - When customers become the central focus of internal conversations and stories, the sentiment spreads across the organization and reaches team members who are not in direct customer contact. And in turn, they start unlocking channels to understand the customer deeper and automatically align their work to customer outcomes.
  

Building Teams Loyal to Customers

Here are a few ways how organizations can build teams who are loyal to customers:

• Shared vision - The company’s vision should explain where the organization is taking its customers. If it is clearly outlined, team members can apply the values to their day-to-day work.
• Business transparency - There should be 100% transparency in the organization on customer needs, pain points, and feedback. This information should permeate and soak the entire fabric of the organization. And insights derived from this information should be available to every team member so it can be acted upon from various angles.
• Safe space - The organization should be a safe place for team members to freely voice opinions, experiment and provide constructive criticism without repercussion. This is critical for team members to be able to trust each other, create novel solutions, and effectively stand up for the customer.
• Empowering leadership - It is imperative, especially for individual contributors, to perform tasks that directly benefit the customer in order to be in touch with customer reality. Leaders should therefore consciously maximize and prioritize activities that are in direct alignment with customers needs, so team members can focus their energy on developing exceptional products and experiences to transform customer lives.
  

Ultimately the Customer becomes the King only if there is a kingdom that loyally stands behind him.